Following Hope

Now that I truly have free time, no classwork, no papers, no lesson planning, no grading, if I truly want to be a writer, and make a living doing it--because, let's be honest, isn't that the goal--then I should probably take the advice that my friend, who works in the industry, gave me--especially since her opinion has been reinforced.  What's more significant is not that I have work to do to get it to a place where it is publishable, it is the fact that I do have something to work with, that is potentially publishable.  

I just need to overcome my stubbornness and get over myself and do what I need to do in order to get it to the place where it needs to be.  While it might take more of an overhaul than I have previously been willing to give it, if there are bigger possibilities on the other side of that then it is worth it to try. There is nothing definite, and it might not, in the end, work, but it has more a possibility of leading towards success than any other avenue that I can pursue right now as a writer.

At least I am nearly finished with grad school, where I will have the actual time to pursue it--even if I have to get a full time job.  I would rather work 40 hours a week some place and be able to come home and do whatever I want with my time than continue being a student where I have no free time.  I have my own studying to do, my own work to do, my own goals to pursue.  I find that it is easier working full time being a part time writer than going to school full time and being a part time writer.

That means I have to find a job.  That is the tricky part, actually.  On one hand, I will have a master's degree, on the other, I am in Ohio.  It could be worse, I suppose.  Ten years ago, I worked, and struggled, and had no degree, and no hope for the future, and now, my life is completely different.  That's something at least.  While I might not be as successful as I would like to be right now, the fact that I have progressed gives me hope.

One difference between successful people and unsuccessful people, besides luck, and connections, is persistence.  If I have an avenue towards success, even though it will take hard work, it is the way I must go.  I can either be stubborn and accept obscurity or I can follow that little glimmer of hope and see where it takes me.  Time to stop being stubborn and self-righteous.

Back to School

I am nearly finished with my first syllabus.  There are a couple of things that I need to add that I will find out about tomorrow, and then I will be ready to email it to my supervisor and get it okay'd.  I actually have more control over it than I had expected I would, but I stuck pretty closely with what he gave us -- I just added a little flair of my own, including a Kurt Vonnegut quote.

 My goal as a composition instructor is to be tough but fair and to help them become better, more confident writers.  The direction of the class will really depend on how they are as writers and where they need help.  I have a lot of freedom as far as the day-to-day structure of the classes, and what kinds of things I can do to teach the students.  If possible, I want to find ways to teach them that are fun for both them and me.  I don't know if I will do in in the fall, but in the Spring I might have my class do blogs and post their homework on them, or something.  I can help them set them up in class and then they will have the choice whether they will publish them for the mass public or just the class.  I have a lot of ideas and I am getting some good direction right now, and I am also working on the reading and getting myself into the right frame of mind.

 I am not going to use any of my own writing as examples -- I don't have that much of an ego.  The text book is adequate, and, if I want them to read a short story, I will find one online.  I will talk about my writing though -- mostly my essay writing, but I will bring up my fiction when it is pertinent.  I haven't decided whether I am going to tell them that I am self-publishing my own books or not -- although I do feel like it gives me more credibility.  I don't think I will tell them about this website, though.  If they find out about it on their own, it doesn't matter.  It's not a secret.

I should, however, be building my name as a writer around the department.  I will introduce myself in class as a writer who avidly advocates for self-publishing, as I believe it is the wave of the future, and so long as the publishers aren't censoring what is being written, the writers can prove how hard they are willing to work and learn as they go, and sell their own books, which are written the way the writer wishes them to be written, and fuck everybody else.

Even though the Internet has grown a little douche-y in recent years, I still believe it is the best hope yet for keeping the punk / DIY ideal alive, and, really, stronger than ever.  We are like entrepreneurs who are willing to work hard and do what is necessary to stay true to ourselves, and fuck what the status quo says.

Okay, so maybe I won't go into it like that, but that is what I believe.  Maybe my audience will never be huge, but at least I don't have to become someone I'm not just to turn into a monster.  I would rather earn a living as a professor or a teacher or a librarian or whatever the Hell I can find a job doing.

As I grow older and my life progresses and I eventually have children who live to be old enough to understand that life is all about how you perceive it, or should be, anyways.  So long as some major totalitarian shit doesn't take place between now and then.  It should be about how you perceive and can use your perceptions create your reality.  It's really the same thing as visualizing and achieving. And success should therefore be measured by how well your are able to perceive and realize.  The more closely your reality matches up to your perceptions, the more successful you are in life, that is if you let it be a positive thing and not a negative one.

That's why I believe I am successful, even though I am not rich.  I have found a way to do what I enjoy doing for a living, and it is only temporary if I don't take it seriously enough.  There are opportunities for me if I continue to work hard and take my work seriously.  It will only be a matter of time before I will actually be able to earn a decent living.  I just have to keep my head done, my brain focused, and put my senses to work, on high efficiency.

Penguin Rangers Unite!

Watching http://youtu.be/uQWxtLUsRYM as I pour myself into something I have not really done in a long time: writing.  I have forgotten what this feels like, but the sensory memory is still there. Anyways, this is why I love my profession, I may never make a lot of money, but I would rather be able to do this as often as possible.

Looking forward to school starting: this is my last week at my summer job! *does back flip*

Right now I am just working on some ideas and feelings I have been having, in story form, scene by scene.  My goal is to be able to leave the final product as much as it is originally written as possible, and to just work on it when I have opportunities to do so.  As a writer, I have been stuck in a rut, working and working and working on the same thing over and over again, and only getting marginally further than where I have been for six years.

Sometimes I will almost ruin a project before I finally get exasperated and want to give up, which is what is happening to my first novel, and I don't want that to keep happening, I just want to continue moving forward and working on my craft and applying what I learn as I am writing, and just try to get better with each project.

I am forcing myself to stick to one version of Out in the Garage, make minimal changes to it, and put it out, because, quite frankly, I have enough other things to worry about, I want to move on and begin writing a new rough draft, more or less in a stream of consciousness style, which I think will be very therapeutic when I am deep in the trenches of school and teaching and writing my thesis. Still, I do want to feel like Out in the Garage is actually finished when I publish it, so I am holding myself to reasonably high standards.

And, actually, what I said earlier isn't entire true, either, the changes I am making -- adding better descriptions and changing the text to the present tense (for the most part) -- aren't exactly minimal, they just aren't very complicated changes, they are building on what is already there and making it better.  I am trying to just keep in mind all of the advice that I have gotten, but follow my gut instinct, which is usually how I am most successful as a writer.

That's how I feel justified in it, that, and I am going to do another proof no matter how many changes I make -- and I am going to still publish it on October 18, 2013, no matter what.  My   schedule is as such: finish the last rewrite by September 11, finish proofreading by October 11, and have a smooth release on the 18th.

I really, really hope the next book doesn't take six years.  I am shooting for one year, but it will probably, realistically, be more like two, with the whole school and getting a job or going to get my PhD. thing, not to mention my marriage and family and friends and what not.  Still, writing fiction and recording music / playing guitar are good releases when I am stressed out and  have the time, and everybody needs that.  I am assuming the thesis is going to be stressful, especially as it approaches April-May.

Anyways, enjoy some RHCP!  Josh Klinghoffer impresses me -- it makes me want to see them in concert again, eventually.

School's Not Quite Out for the Summer, Yet (Sorry Alice)

Three more weeks of classes, then finals, but, the only thing I have to do on finals week is turn in papers, and I am honestly hoping to be done with them by that point.

I now have a thesis and an adviser.  I am searching for one more person for my panel, and I have to fill out the paperwork, but those are minor things compared to the research I am going to have to start doing over the summer.

My thesis is going to be on Melville's critique of American Exceptionalism in his novella, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile.  I am going to have to do a lot of historical research, but it is a good jumping off point to studying satire.  It is definitely Melville's most entertaining work, and it should be more widely read.

Except for class presentations on papers, I am through with my presentations for the semester.  I have learned a lot, and I am definitely glad that I took the opportunity to give a presentation at the University of Akron Student Innovation Symposium (UASIS).

Hoping to find out whether I have gotten an assistantship or not.  I am thinking it should be any time.  People who are currently graduate assistants have told me -- from the phone call I received last week asking me whether I was still interested or not -- that I am under consideration.  We'll see.

I need to find a job for the summer.  It would be nice to do something tutoring related, but I am not above working waiting tables or something like that.  Waiting tables might be my best bet, but that would ruin my nights and weekends, which I have grown pretty accustomed to.  Still, as the phrase goes, "beggars can't be choosers" -- unless you're that guy who begs by the alley outside of my old apartment building in Chicago.

A New Beginning

While it doesn't seem like it should be an easy decision to make, starting over on my first novel is the right way to go -- not because I am not proud of what I have written so far, it just has too many problems that no amount of rewrites will fix.  I have tried to morph it into something better than it can be, and now I have to stop fooling myself and do what I have, in times of frustration, wanted to do for years.

On the bright side, however, I am salvaging parts of the story -- in essence I am taking the best 30-40 pages and hyper-focusing on it for 60-70,000 words.  My goal is to paint a vast, complex picture of a young adult trying to deal with some traumas while spending the summer on a farm half a state away with distant relatives, where he meets somebody who might make it all worth it, if he is not too blind to notice.

I am confident that I can write a draft of this by the end of the summer.  I am taking it as a personal challenge to use the ideas that manifested in the first trial, and work them in a more plausible, more focused, highly detailed way.  The scope of my previous try was too large.  The details were too small, too brief, too disjointed.

In addition, now I know my genre -- at least for this book.  It is a YA novel, a coming of age story.  It has always been the latter, but I had never settled on the former.  It makes a whole lot of sense for me, and, although I have research to do, I feel like it should have been this all along.

It's good that I know this.  Even if it did come at the price of six years of work.  I feel like I could not have reached this point if I had not been through everything I have been through.

My goal is to write as good of a novel as I can, and if that means starting over, then I am perfectly willing to do it.  I have long know there are a lot of problems with my manuscript, and the same ones seem to surface in different ways, no matter what I have done.

To get a professional criticism and confirm all this -- but also that I have potential -- is a step in the right direction.  I wish I had sent it to her sooner, but, I can't live my life dwelling on something like that.  I must continue looking towards the future.

In the meantime I am going to put out this short story collection, Tales from the Fringes, and see what kind of audience I can build.  I will focus on school and settling into a career in education.

I don't really see it as a step back as much as a humbling.  Life is a learning experience and when I lose track of that I get discouraged.  I don't have time to get discouraged.  I can only move forward.

On the bright side, I already know this story inside and out.  It will take discipline, research, and planning, to write a new manuscript, but I anticipate the writing process going more smoothly this time around.  Everything that I lacked when I first started writing fictions I now have.  Looking back on my first writings, I have come an impossible long way.  Now it's time to take all that knowledge and the skills I have developed, and this world and these characters I have created, and put it all together.

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Tentative Title (since the focus of the book is shifting, the title has to change): Outside the Garden
Goal Length: 72,000 words
Genre: Young Adult Literature

Synopsis: Lance Adamson goes to stay for the summer on his uncle's farm near the small, central Ohio town, Babel, to escape the recent suicide of his best friend Art, as well as other ghosts.  There he meets Evie, his only ally.  With her help, Lance tries to begin the healing process and avoid being sucked into the Nimrod Evangelical Temple and the preachings of Pastor Lee Charles, who has virtually everyone else in town under his control.

--

Like I said, this is essentially a 30-40 page chunk of my book that I am hyper-focusing on.  I have written beginning two pages, and, I am really excited to continue.  I can tell even by the fact that I am able to write a synopsis of it that I am in much better shape that I ever have been.

Everything is coming together.  Not in the way I was imagining that it would, but, this way seems more plausible.  My gut instinct tells me I am making the right choice.  I am excited to be thrown back into the creative process, which, for me, is the best part of all of this.