2,779 words today… Um, except those words were for Empress of Dorsa rather than Soldier. (I would share it with you but it contains Soldier of Dorsa spoilers.) I’m doing that thing again where I procrastinate on my main project by working on another. But I suppose it’s okay… I wrote what became the Prologue of Soldier of Dorsa before I ever finished Princess of Dorsa.
Grad school term 2 of 3 is winding down…
Boy, what a long six months it has been — and incidentally, six months is also how far behind I am on my Soldier of Dorsa novel. But the end is finally in sight — both the end of the novel and the end of graduate school. My second term is finishing up the week after Thanksgiving, which means I only have one more term to go before I am a certified secondary English teacher! Woot!
LT warned me that doing what was essentially a two-year master’s degree program in a scant twelve months was a little insane and it would be more intense than I anticipated.
She was right. (She would probably remind me that she’s always right.) I couldn’t have guessed how overwhelming this year would be.
The future of my writing and teaching
It’s funny how life turns out. I remember when I was 21 and a senior in college some 20 years ago, a friend of mine asked me what I planned to do next — what was my vision for my life?
“All I know for sure,” I told her, “is that I want to teach and I want to write.”
At the time, I was thinking that meant I would wind up as a professor somewhere, maybe writing academic papers on obscure, ivory tower topics. I had no way of guessing what would actually unfold.
For nearly fifteen years, I was a teacher of mindfulness and meditation. On the side, I wrote cheap blog posts to supplement my income, until at last I realized I could probably earn more by pursuing my passion of writing fiction.
That led to writing fiction, which led to LT, which led to the midlife crisis that has consumed the past three years of my life.
And yet here I am, about to become a high school English teacher and writing novels that people actually seem to mostly like. All these years later, with all the unexpected twists and turns and iterations my life and has taken, I’m still a teacher and a writer.
I don’t know what to make of that, except that perhaps there’s something to be said for trusting that little voice that lives inside all of us and tells us what it is we are meant to be doing. Fight against that voice and be miserable, or listen and let life be as smooth as life ever manages to get.
0 Comments