Crumpled · Pages

Sorry for the hiatus, guys.

So I've now finished one year of teaching in the south. Whoopie!

For those of you crazy enough to consider teaching, here's a few nuggets of advice for ya:

1) Be prepared to be ridiculed, humiliated, teased and laughed at like the acne-ridden 13-year-old nerd in the back of the bus. It will happen, either to your face or behind your back. Personally I prefer it to my face, because I can usually turn their jibes into some sort of backhanded insult.

2) Kids today (gosh, I sound so old) do NOT understand sarcasm. Period. Whatever you say, they will take you seriously. If you tell them that monkeys fly out of your butt on Fridays at 4pm when their a full moon, they will believe you. Or at least they'll wonder.

 

3) You are not "cool". You will never be "cool". At best you'll be "cute". I thought cute was reserved for little kids, but apparently teachers fall into the category as well. I have a social life? That's cute. I carry around a horribly out-of-style purse? That's cute. It's their nice way of saying I'm a loser, but they appreciate my loserishness. Kind of like the teacher in Freedom Writers who tried so hard to be "hip".

 
4) Every single day you will be asked the following question: "Is today a free day?"

 
5) After you get done with your lengthy and ingenious explanation of an assignment you ask if anyone has questions. Inevitably a student will raise their hand and ask, "So, what are we supposed to do?", effectively crushing your ego to the size of a gnat.

 

6) Half of the mornings you will go into school with absolutely ZERO idea of what you are going to do that day. Improv, it turns out, is a talent learned quickly.

 
7) If you are impatient or lack a sense of humor, you may need to hire a counselor now. Or just quit and save yourself the trouble.

 
8) Stealing, copying and plagiarism are NOT okay for your students.

 
9) Stealing, copying and plagiarism are NECESSARY for you. Seriously, teachers are the biggest thieves in the world.

 10) You will be asked questions which astound you. The top two of the year for me: 1) What's a margin? and 2) Is Michigan a city or a state? ...let's remember that these are 11th graders here.

11) If you think all is lost, just count down the days until your next break and remember that most people don't get them. :)

NaNoWriMo has left this journal in a relative position of abandonment, and for that I apologize. HOWEVER, it was for the greater good (as Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald would say). In the time I have been absent I decided to, for the very first time, participate in NaNoWriMo.

The result? The Adapters is now roughly 50,000 words of crap instead of 10,000. Which is great! For all intents and purposes I finished the storyline, which led me to the decision that Adapters would be a series rather than a single installment. Now I need to go back and tend to the PILES of revision that needs to be done to turn this pile of crap into a work of art.

Eventually. For now, I am taking a break, shoving Adapters under the proverbial rug, and thinking about other things for awhile. Namely fanfiction, rping, school, and the joy which will be Christmas break.

In the meantime I will continue trying to find a way to make it feel like Christmas when it is over 80 degrees outside...

The South is weird.

It seems as if my writing muse has left the building. I find this fact highly frustrating. I was going strong, and now it's like I hit a wall made out of brick, steel, titanium, or anything else that would knock my writing unconscious. Honestly, I feel as if my inspiration went into a coma. This doesn't make me happy for several reasons. They would be:

1) I just hit the 10,000 word mark in The Adapters. This is the second story that has run dry on me at the 10,000 mark. I don't know what it is with that number, but its killing me.

2) There are 10+ fanfiction challenges currently posted on the forum I frequent, for both Harry Potter and Animorphs. Typically I could spout off an at least commendable fanfic in about half an hour. Now? I got nothing. The challenges do not set up a single spark of inspiration. Not to mention the non-challenge fics I should be working on.

3) I have been so bogged down in reading my students completely UNoriginal and UNcreative writing that I am desperate to create SOMETHING worthwhile. The fact that I can't is like twisting the knife.

4) It isn't as if my muse is being replaced by something else. My work ethic, my grading, my reading, my cleaning, everything seems to be grinding to a halt and I don't know why. The only thing I can figure is that I'm overworked, because it isn't like I'm not being healthy. I eat breakfast every day, I work out almost daily, I get a decent amount of sleep (not as much as I should, but still). I dunno.

If I don't get back on track with The Adapters soon, I will be very angry.

Sometimes I worry that in sixty or seventy years, when I'm nearing the end of my life, I'll look back and berate myself for not stopping to enjoy my youth. I'm not the kind of person who wastes much time "stopping to smell the roses", so to speak. This is, primarily, because I do consider it somewhat a waste of time. I was talking on the phone with my friend from high school the other day and we both realized that we are very goal oriented people. To the point where if I do not have a specific goal in mind then I feel like a waste of life. This, of course, has both positives and negatives.

For one, it has allowed me to graduate from college in 2.5 years and become a secondary school teacher at just 21 years old. It has also allowed me to simply pick my life up and move thousands of miles from home while barely batting an eye. These are all, presumably, good things.

HOWEVER, the result of this is that I never really got to sit back and enjoy the "college experience", I am alone in a city where I know virtually no one and those I do know have their own lives to worry about, and I'm putting myself through yet another long-distance relationship with no tangible end in sight.

While I feel as if I am accomplishing something, putting myself through my first year as a teacher (which keeps me busy with a constant work load) and possibly starting on my masters in a few months, I wonder if I am perhaps overworking myself and, as a result, isolating myself.

Bollocks.

I find it impossibly ironic that I am such a determined person, yet with have little to offer in said determination. It is almost as if I live through the ebbs and flows of an ocean comprised of my imagination. Endlessly flowing, with many hidden depths and beautiful creations. Yet vastly unknown and incomplete. Occasionally a hurricane of inspiration will come upon me, and I will work with elated ferocity. But, as with any storm, it eventually passes and the powerful energy becomes languid and lazy. Or, in the bright array of images surrounding me I fail to sort out the more important, yet less beautiful necessities. The structure of an object. The reason for it. I am, of course, talking about my writing.

So many times I have begun what I promise will be my "ultimate creation". A bit of literature of which I am not only confident in, but the rest of the world can enjoy as well. My ultimate goal of becoming a credible author seems to be hanging on the threads of "almost", "soon", and "eventually".

It is not that I am procrastinating, although that is another weakness of mine. It is more that my ventures into the land of imagination are often incomplete. I think up a plot, but the characters surrounding it remain indistinct. Or else I create amazingly vivid characters, with whom I form an immediate emotional attachment, and the plot remains quite blasé. And if I attempt to combine the distinct plot of one story with the vivid characters of another it is very much like trying to force two pieces of a puzzle together when they clearly do not belong.

I suppose that my reason for being discouraged at the moment is two-fold. Firstly, I just finished reading the final installment of Harry Potter. Since JK Rowling is writing precisely for the age group I hope to effect, I tend to look at her writing as a sort of role model. Not only because she affectively reaches those who she has written for, but because in addition she manages to reach everyone else. Not many authors can boast that accomplishment. In the completion of the final book, however, my awe was not on her audience, but on her intricacy. Artifacts and characterizations that were important in the first book remain so in the seventh. Things which we took to mean one thing turned out to be completely different, or to have additional purposes and uses. JKR effectively leaves nothing to chance and weaves a web throughout seven books which is so intricate, so absolute, that it becomes almost impenetrable by those fans who wait to pick it apart like vultures.

The other event which keeps me a bit dispirited stems from the first. In response to the final book of a series being published the interest in fanfiction and fanart has, inevitably, gone up. In an attempt to find an old story which I enjoyed I came to discover that not only had the fanfiction author removed her stories. That in itself was disappointing, but not at all incomprehensible. Many people fear copyright infringement and remove their work. No, the reason behind this particular persons lack of internet fiction was due to the fact that she had finally achieved publishing her own original novel.

Well, in all honesty this was a bit of a slap in the face for me. I have been writing for just as long, yet I have nothing to show for it. Why shouldn't I be published? Why is it that I cannot even bring myself to finish a single manuscript? It's monumentally frustrating.

And so, without further ado, I need to kick myself in the rear end and shake the cobwebs off of my mind before life decides that I have wasted my opportunity and continues on without me. Or at least literary life.

I fly to Texas in ten days for a job fair where, I have been told, I will likely be offered a job or something which will lead into a job. This isn't so scary, except for the fact that my certification test is just ten days after that. The certification test which I need to pass, or else I'm stuck shelling out money to whichever university can gobble it up the fastest for yet another year. Besides that, there is the fact that if I do get a job that will pretty much set in stone the fact that I will be moving thousands of miles across the country in just two months. Which is more than a little scary.

In other, more cheerful news, I have officially finished The Traitor: Playing War, my Animorphs fanfic I began approximately seven years ago. No, I didn't work on it seven years straight. There were various on and off periods. I took almost a year hiatus at one point, and rewrote the beginning more times than I care to remember. All that work has finally paid off, however. I can finally say that I finished a story, cover to cover. I topped out at 63,460 words. Pretty good, if I do say so myself.

This means that I can finally take the time to focus more on Armageddon Heroes, which I have been neglecting. I really need to solidify the main conflict. I've got a kick-ass universe, and pretty great characters (although some need a bit of development). I have a general idea of the main conflict, but it keeps changing. I can't get anything concrete. Oh well, hopefully with more time to focus something will come to me.

It seems that I have fallen victim to one of an author's biggest enemies. The lack of motivation. I don't have writers block, per say. I know what it is that I want to write. It just seems like an insurmountable amount of work to actually write it. That, combined with substitute teaching and studying for my TExES teacher exam next month, not to mention the various trips I'm going on...well, it seems that working on my writing has dropped a few rungs on the ladder.

It's frustrating, because I know I should do it. I just don't want to. I guess I'll just wait for a stroke of motivation to hit me. Most likely at 3am when I have work the next morning, but hey. That's life. :)

Anytime you start something new you tend to get nervous. So it wasn't a surprise that I found myself mildly terrified standing at the head of a class of high schoolers. But, as with most things, my worry proved to be more of a figment of my imagination than anything grounded in reality. Since subbing is mostly following a written set of guidelines, there really isn't much to it.

The problem, however, lies in my age and appearance. Since I am only twenty-one, and since my students are at maximum eighteen, the line between student and teacher becomes very fine indeed. I'm not entirely sure how to make the difference between us more exaggerated. I am not the yelling sort, nor really the reprimanding sort. Certainly not when my students are the same age as some of my close friends.

Luckily this is a problem which will resolve itself with time. My students are never changing in age group, whereas I will (unfortunately) continually and gradually get older, and the gap between student and teacher will inevitably narrow. Until that time, however, it remains an uneasy edge.

One large consolation for my troubles is in the experience I am gaining being in front of a classroom. Being behind the desk is quite different from being a student and, even if I am not formally teaching, it is a good idea to become accustomed to the atmosphere. Since when I substitute for high school the students are normally given busy work, it is also a good time to catch up on my reading or my studying for the TExES exam this June. In fact, more than once I have forgotten that I am getting paid for this and it is not merely volunteer work, like I was so used to doing back at Ohio State.

It is always encouraging when you enjoy your job to the point that being paid is an extra bonus. But it is only my second time subbing, so we will see how long this opinion lasts.

Well, I came across this lj not too long ago, having completely forgotten it existed.

I already have a xanga, which I use as a daily log of sorts. I've decided to put this journal to a different use, though. While my xanga is written in for my friends and family, my lj will be written for myself. Therefore, if you become a frequent reader, be aware that I am going to be brutally honest and utterly opinionated in this spot. I will also use this journal as a progress log for some of my writing.

That being said, welcome to my journal and start looking for updates soon.