So I Quit Grad School to Focus on My Writing

Long-time readers of this blog will not be that surprised-- I believe that I've announced that I was "going to get serious about my writing" at least twice, here-- but the decision did surprise me, as well as a few people who had not known me as long.

And since the same questions seem to come up over and over again, I decided that I would just answer them here and then link to Facebook, and then hopefully everyone will have theirs answered. Or, mostly answered. I hope. Here goes!

Q: What are you working on?
A: Four main projects: a biography of my dad; a middle school cookbook; this blog; and a young adult fantasy. The fantasy is my main project. I spend as much time on the biography, but since I am sort of still in the collecting-data phase for that project, it is much less towards the finished end of the spectrum.

Q: Cool! Young Adult Fantasy-- like Harry Potter!! Doesn't that mean you'll be rich?
A: Not... really. I mean, sure, I have ideas about what I would do with buckets of cash, but the truth is that "wildly successful" for me would mean I could, first, move out from living with my mom, and second, buy my own house. And, once I have enough years in my job to be able to carry my fabulous health insurance with me, to quit my job. Maybe. I actually really enjoy my job; I just don't love that I get paid so little that I have to live with my mother.

The issue of how much/little I get paid (about a third of a teacher salary) is a whole can of worms, but suffice it to say that I think the school system would be better served if it paid all the adults it emplyed a living wage. I know they can't afford it. They can't afford what their budget even now. And yet, I believe that if the pay went up, the candidate pool would suddenly and mysteriously grow both larger and more qualified, and the work that got done would be of much higher quality, thus saving money in the long run. *sigh* /end rant.

Oh, right, you wanted to know about my future income. Huge quantities of money would bring their own headaches, which I am not really interested in. Moderate quantities of money (and research backs me up here) would, given my current income level, have a significant positive impact on my happiness. So, that's what I'm aiming for, and luckily that is also what is much more realistic to aim for. Publishing books-- really, making entertainment of any kind-- is a bit of a gamble, but part of the reason I am taking extra time now (see below) is because I am focused on that goal of producing steadily high-quality work. Only time will tell if this was a good strategy for me in the end.

Q: Cool! Young Adult Fantasy-- I LOVE young adult fantasy!!! Can I read your stuff?
A: Not quite yet. Sorry. I am a painfully slow writer, though I believe/hope (but really, I do believe) that this will change as I become a more experienced writer. If you would like to be a beta reader, whenever that may happen, you are welcome to email me at corneliaphilosophene at the email service provided by Google, and I will put your name and email on my list of beta raders. And I even JUST NOW started a Google doc for this very purpose.

Q: How long do you think it will be until you have something for beta readers?
A: My best guess is that it will be a bare minimum of one year, but possibly two or even three. But I'm hoping for one.

Q: But you'll start in on grad school again in the summer, or whenever you find one that's right-- won't you?
A: You know, the first couple of times I got this question, I said "yes," but since then I've realized that the answer is "no."

This is the thing. I've known for-- mmm-- at least fifteen years that I wanted to be a writer, and for the last ten that I also should be a writer. I had always thought that I would get a "real" job, then in my spare time, write, and then my career would take off. But that isn't how things have worked out.

I remember once being at a wedding luncheon at a table with a woman who had a great job as a voice actor. Someone else at the table was congratulating her. She said thank you, because it really was a dream job for her, but she also pointed out that it was the only job she could find. Even the local university's custodial crew had rejected her before she finally, in desperation, applied for a job which she was afraid was too cool for her.

I have tried a number of different things-- things which have worked for other people. For pity's sake, the program I just quit was a librarianship program, and other people shift from being librarians to being writers all the time. But the realization I finally came to is that just because other people could do it doesn't mean that I can do it.

Thus: my second job is just. writing. And I must say, while I had thought I was "getting serious" about my writing before, there are few things to light a fire under one's tail like the prospect of spending one's forties, after one's thirties, living with mama. I mean, I love her. But there comes a point.

New York Trip, Part III

And this is the last.

I remembered my resolution as I was walking from the Natural History Museum to the temple not to be embarrassed about taking pictures. (I tend to be embarrassed no matter whether I'm on my home turf or not, if I'm in public.) So the next three are just cool iron gratings in front of buildings in streets which are quite close to the Manhattan LDS temple.

First, a couple more creatures-that-are-not-gargoyles:

Then, a cool piece of ironwork just below a window-- quite frankly, it reminded me of some of the cool ironwork in front of rowhouses that I see in Baltimore when I go up there:
 

In the afternoon, after I had gotten back to the hotel and Mom had finished her meetings for the day, we decided together to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral. This was beautiful and well-worth the visit, and also the light was dim enough that I'm going to have to send you off to the wide, wide internet again to find someone else's gorgeous pictures of the inside (or even the outside-- sorry).

We walked past the famous Rockefeller Center on the way back, with its skating rink. And then... as we passed a building... I saw a sign which I could not help taking a picture of, despite the deplorable lighting conditions. I squealed when I said, "MOM! LOOK!"
 
And I was a happy chica.

After I got back home, I told friends that I had heard that New York is awesome because it's big, but I came to the opposite conclusion: it's big because it's awesome. I actually found it to be, in a way, rather cozy. This is no doubt related to the fact that I took zero motorized transportation in the time I was there, and my own two feet carried me to enough cool places to make me rawther happy for one trip. I am super excited to go again, whenever that is. :)

New York Trip: Part II

With gargoyles. Well, one gargoyle-like creature, if it had served a different architectural purpose. You'll see. :)

I wasn't there very long; I couldn't take very long off of work. So, I got there on a Wednesday afternoon, then walked with Mom down to the main branch of New York Public Library-- which I didn't get any good pictures of, but happily for YOU it's famous, so you can just look some up online. (The outside has marble lions; the inside looks a lot like the Library of Congress, having been built in approximately the same era.)

The next morning, I walked ALL over Central Park-- well, over half of it anyway. I walked from Times Square, where the hotel was, up through the south end of the park and then up to approximately the middle (North-South wise). I had wanted to go to the Metropolitan Museum of New York, but it turned out that it didn't open until ten, and since I wanted to make it to the temple by ten thirty or so for an eleven o'clock session, well, all I ended up seeing was the outside of the museum. *sigh*

But that was not the end of the world. As I walked across the narrow side of Central Park to see if I could catch any of the Natural History Museum (of Night at the Museum fame), I happened to come across Belvedere Castle. This structure was originally-- and, to quote Dave Barry, I am not making this up-- called a "folly," which is a structure built mostly to look good, without having any other real purpose. (This is where I got that info: https://www.centralpark.com/things-to-do/attractions/belvedere-castle/) Anyway, it's still serving the purpose of looking decorative, while also serving as a weather station, having a tourist shop inside, and being a nature observatory, from which you can actually check out stuff like binoculars. (This last part I didn't know until just now-- more to do for my planned return this summer!) But none of that was open yet as I hiked my way through.

I did, however, get a picture of this lovely metal creature over the door:

I just looked up the definition of a gargoyle. This one doesn't count, because it's not part of a gutter. But you can't tell me it isn't cool!

Next, I walked to the Natural History Museum-- which, you guessed it, was still closed when I got there, though it was opening as I arrived. I decided to step inside, which meant letting a guard give my purse a glance, which I certainly didn't have a problem with. The great hall did have a dinosaur-bone replica, but other than that was empty of objects. It did, however, have a lovely quotes from T. Roosevelt on the walls, one of which I liked so much that I took a picture:

The part I most like says: IT IS HARD TO FAIL BUT IT IS WORSE TO HAVE NEVER TRIED TO SUCCEED. It felt quite relevant to my life as I looked at it. It feels quite relevant to my life, even now.

New York Trip: Part I

Mom had to be in New York for work, which meant that her work paid for a hotel for her, which meant that I could stay for a night in New York for free! Except for the time off I took. But it was TOTALLY worth it, and it turns out I love New York, and I plan on going again.

Living there would be a different matter.

I took a cheapo bus up, and it was a gray, cloudy day-- which is a kind of day I love very much, so it was kind of perfect. I felt that the couple of shots I got of the Sesquehenna River as we passed over it were quite pretty:

And that's all I'll post for now. I will get to the other pictures of the LoC later, I suppose.

Floor at the Library of Congress

My oldest niece came out for a visit in October, and when I asked what she most wanted to see in the area, she said (after mentioning the temple) the Library of Congress.

Which I had seen before, but I had ABSOLUTELY NO objection to seeing again. So we went, and I took a lovely picture of the tile pattern on the floor:

We'll see if any of the others turned out well enough to post. My phone's camera isn't great, but it does have that one must-have feature: I almost always have it with me. :)

from ancient times: #metoo

I was looking at this poem I wrote a while back, and it seemed relevant to our current state of affairs. My deepest apologies, though, for all the poetry. I like writing it, but not as much reading it, and if that isn't hypocritical, I don't know what is.

Sarah, to Pharoah

I used to pray

every day

(though I did not know it was a prayer)

that I would be beautiful.

Very beautiful.

I did not know

that beauty

sometimes

makes others wish they owned it

enough to suppose they did

O Pharoah

Did you really think

you had but to wish me

and I was yours?

That you had but to take me from my brother

--as you supposed

--and I would be yours?

(But of course you did.

Any man who would

declare himself a god

is delusional enough

to suppose anything.)

Becoming a Writer (getting to know myself)

There were a couple of summers, once I realized I wanted to be a professional writer, when I spent a significant chunk of time each day for a matter of weeks or months, working on writing projects. And, in this way, I got through a couple of drafts that didn't work, but became a bit discouraged that I didn't get any closer than I did to anything publishable. (But at least now I know that I CAN blitz my focus like that, which is indeed useful to know.)

The problem was, I became so discouraged that I stopped writing regularly, which was a problem. Finally towards the end of 2016 I decided to address it, so for 2017 my writing goal was to write for ten minutes a week-- and I made it! And I often wrote a lot more than ten minutes. It felt really good to be able to set an achievable goal and to feel the sense of accomplishment from meeting it over and over and over.

In December of 2017, a friend found out that I was trying to become a writer, and that I was writing for ten minutes a week, and she said what I had been thinking all along: that's not enough! You have to write more than that! Which wouldn't have been helpful in 2016, but in 2017 it hit me just right. Thus, a couple of weeks ago, I set a new, too-small-but-still-not-happening-regularly goal: I work for an hour a week on my writing.

Before I did that, though, I had to sit down and decide what I wanted to work on. In the past, remembering that in college I had done better during spring and summer terms (block classes) than fall or winter term (regular-length, and more of them) I had cut down the number of writing projects I was working on to one fiction and one nonfiction. And I don't regret this. I made real progress on both of these. But in late December (as in, last month), as I considered expanding my writing time, I realized that I really wanted to start something fresh, while not abandoning the old projects. And I remembered that there was that one term when I took 19 credit hours and got straight As-- so, sometimes it's a good idea for me to try a lot of things at once.

So here's the plan. I'm still working on my dad's biography; I have no idea what I'm doing, and therefore no idea when I will finish, but at the moment I'm still getting new information from interviewing him, his brothers, and his sisters-in-law, among others, so I figure I'll work on what to do with it once I have it all down. I'm also working on the fantasy novel I've been working on FOR.EV.ER. I've seriously wondered if I should abandon it, but again, even though I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing or when I will be able to finish, I'm still making progress at making it a better story, so I'm just plugging away (but not very fast).

I'm also blogging again (obvs.) and also starting a new non-fiction project, which I'm afraid to write about here because I've talked it up to so many people already, and I'm a little afraid that I won't get it done and that I will disappoint all the people. But the weird thing about it is, all that advice about "turn off your internal editor"? Yeah, it's actually relevant for this one. (I tried it for the fantasy novel last time I blitzed it and wrote 40,000 words of which I hated about 30,000 words, so it isn't always good advice.) In this case, my internal editor is saying kind of stupid things like, "you'll never finish," or "You're just blathering on and on; no one wants to hear what you have to say about this." THAT's the kind of internal voice you need to ignore.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't be deeply embarrassed if my first draft were to see the light of day. It's just that I know from experience that listening to stupid voices like that will lead to never getting said first draft finished, which is the absolute requirement for being able to get to the later, better drafts.

And here's the last thing. I'm a little extra-weirded-out by this, but it looks like having more projects to work on is motivating me work more on each one, which means that so far I'm not working an hour a week on writing; I'm working, like, four hours minimum. (It has helped that the weeks thus far have included vacation and/or snow days). Notwithstanding how very weird I find this, I'll TAKE it.

I'll let you know how it goes. :)