Then I revised it. Next, I read and reread a few chunks to my extremely patient partner, and I let my mother and my sister read and critique the manuscript. Then I revised it. Soon after, I found a wonderful, generous, kind-but-appropriately-demanding, adverb-hating critique partner through an online message board and she read and responded to the manuscript. Then I revised it. I started submitting to agents and eventually one fantastic agent offered representation, along with excellent notes for revision of the novel. So I revised it. The agent started submitting to publishers and quickly sold the novel to a wonderful house. Shortly thereafter, the delightfully insightful editor sent me notes for revision of the novel. So I revised it. Then the brilliant and hawk-eyed copy editor read the manuscript and pointed out a few inconsistencies contained therein. So I revised it. Next, the extremely thorough proofreader and managing editor read it, and they, along with my editor, made more great notes for revision in the margins. So I revised it. After all this revising, I have just three questions left to answer. Number one. As the creator of all these characters who are running around not knowing when they were born or which houses in their town are for sale or whether or not their feet hurt, shouldn't I be a little more well-informed about the answers to the questions said inconsistencies raise?
More...Letter B. Inconsistent w/ above. Change to "Number two." How is it possible that eight other people read the novel before the proofreader, but none of them pointed out my bizarre infatuation with the word “briskly”?And, fourth, "Number three." Wwhat did I do to deserve being a part of this wonderful business? Whatever it was, I'm glad! This is so much fun!
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Revision Bliss
In November 2008, I bashed out a 50,000-word middle grade novel for NaNoWriMo. It took me 17 days to finish, and afterwards, I let it sit for two weeks to gain a little distance from it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
(More or less) home for the holidays
So I'm walking back from Sunoco in a just-after-dusk winter-is-coming see-your-breath sort of cold, with Christmas lights twinkling on the rooftops of probably a third of the houses directly in my field of vision. Big lights, small lights, blue lights, white lights, bulbs and wreaths and icicles in merry loops and patterns. But there's no question which one is best.
More...
There's a sweet little house just in the bend of the road, a cottage of stone with a neatly-fenced lawn and about two hundred thousand twinkling bulbs in every color of the rainbow. They 're stapled to every inch of the house that could possibly hold a staple. The roof is not only outlined, but colored in. The bushes are shimmering. The walkway is glowing.
My leanings on winter holidays are scattered like the lights. Like a good semi-non-practicing Pagan-ish type, I dutifully light a Solstice fire on the longest night and burn the things I want to do away with for the coming year. But that holiday is a little more stern than I like, because, to take part, I have to admit which things I might still want that I definitely don't need anymore, and I'm a Taurus -- read, a pack rat -- mentally and emotionally as well as physically. I don't just collect trinkets and knick-knacks and about a million useless papers. I collect acquaintances and habits and emotional states that perhaps don't serve my best interests anymore, and I find it very hard to let go of them.
So Solstice, though I practice it, is not my most beloved of holidays.
And here are these Christmas lights.
I'm not a Christian, but I love me some Christmas. Sparkling lights on see-your-breath nights, people singing, bells ringing, that special sound scissors make when they cut through wrapping paper, the smell of Scotch tape and the way kids (and teachers, truth be told) squint at streetlights and headlights to try to discern if the misty rain working its way down out of the sky on a forty-degree night might possibly -- possibly -- possibly be snow, falling on a school night -- I love me some Christmas. Which is why I'm staring at this precious little cottage with its Christmas lights twinkling in the night.
Then my gaze roams from the house. Down its walk. Past its fence. Across the highway.
To the other house.
This one is white, not stone. It's still sweet, in its own way -- or at least you can tell it would be sweet if somebody would just clean it up. Right now, the brown lawn rolls listlessly up to the edge of a pile of trash that's been sitting there for over a month. Past that is the picture window, in which there is a slight green smudge along the bottom of the curtain -- then a slight blue smudge -- and then yellow -- which is the Christmas lights that have fallen from the window frame and are now lying in a heap on the sill, out of sight.
Two crotchety cats guard the door like stone lions, angry and disgruntled, and beyond the corner of the house, you can glimpse the half-a-shed, which is a building that used to be a whole shed before somebody took a sledgehammer to it -- then an axe -- then a car with a tow chain -- and finally gave up and let the crooked thing stand. Its parallelogram frame is marred by broken bits of siding and a scattering of a million bent nails, shining like drops of ice.
That one's mine.
I've got homework to grade tonight, and lessons to plan, and those crotchety cats look ready to move on and find another home if I don't pay them a little attention sometime soon. Just looking at the half-a-shed and the trash pile makes me tired.
But I love this season, with its scattering of holidays, its sparkles and its jingles and its hope. I think maybe I can find it in me to at least re-hang my single strand of holiday lights before I turn in for the night.
More...
There's a sweet little house just in the bend of the road, a cottage of stone with a neatly-fenced lawn and about two hundred thousand twinkling bulbs in every color of the rainbow. They 're stapled to every inch of the house that could possibly hold a staple. The roof is not only outlined, but colored in. The bushes are shimmering. The walkway is glowing.
My leanings on winter holidays are scattered like the lights. Like a good semi-non-practicing Pagan-ish type, I dutifully light a Solstice fire on the longest night and burn the things I want to do away with for the coming year. But that holiday is a little more stern than I like, because, to take part, I have to admit which things I might still want that I definitely don't need anymore, and I'm a Taurus -- read, a pack rat -- mentally and emotionally as well as physically. I don't just collect trinkets and knick-knacks and about a million useless papers. I collect acquaintances and habits and emotional states that perhaps don't serve my best interests anymore, and I find it very hard to let go of them.
So Solstice, though I practice it, is not my most beloved of holidays.
And here are these Christmas lights.
I'm not a Christian, but I love me some Christmas. Sparkling lights on see-your-breath nights, people singing, bells ringing, that special sound scissors make when they cut through wrapping paper, the smell of Scotch tape and the way kids (and teachers, truth be told) squint at streetlights and headlights to try to discern if the misty rain working its way down out of the sky on a forty-degree night might possibly -- possibly -- possibly be snow, falling on a school night -- I love me some Christmas. Which is why I'm staring at this precious little cottage with its Christmas lights twinkling in the night.
Then my gaze roams from the house. Down its walk. Past its fence. Across the highway.
To the other house.
This one is white, not stone. It's still sweet, in its own way -- or at least you can tell it would be sweet if somebody would just clean it up. Right now, the brown lawn rolls listlessly up to the edge of a pile of trash that's been sitting there for over a month. Past that is the picture window, in which there is a slight green smudge along the bottom of the curtain -- then a slight blue smudge -- and then yellow -- which is the Christmas lights that have fallen from the window frame and are now lying in a heap on the sill, out of sight.
Two crotchety cats guard the door like stone lions, angry and disgruntled, and beyond the corner of the house, you can glimpse the half-a-shed, which is a building that used to be a whole shed before somebody took a sledgehammer to it -- then an axe -- then a car with a tow chain -- and finally gave up and let the crooked thing stand. Its parallelogram frame is marred by broken bits of siding and a scattering of a million bent nails, shining like drops of ice.
That one's mine.
I've got homework to grade tonight, and lessons to plan, and those crotchety cats look ready to move on and find another home if I don't pay them a little attention sometime soon. Just looking at the half-a-shed and the trash pile makes me tired.
But I love this season, with its scattering of holidays, its sparkles and its jingles and its hope. I think maybe I can find it in me to at least re-hang my single strand of holiday lights before I turn in for the night.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
NaNoWriMo!
I love November. November means NaNoWriMo, and thus, it is my favorite month.
More...
Last November, I wrote the first 10,000 words of LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE on November 1. This year, it's November 4 and I expect to pass 10,000 today. I'm taking it a little slower, but enjoying it no less. Of course my students are NaNoing with me, which makes it twelve times more fun (since I have six of them this year and they each count twice).
My favorite part of NaNo isn't the community, although I love that. It isn't the sense of accomplishment, or even the finished book I've got at the end of the month.
No, my favorite part of NaNoWriMo is the NaNoisms -- the typos and senseless phrases that occur when you type entirely too many words in entirely too few days.
My favorite NaNoism from last year involved an evil Twinkie in somebody's eye. I have yet to top that yet this year, but I'm still enjoying myself. Here are a few of my NaNoisms so far this November:
"The red and green lights reflected on the water, but the reflection was broken and choppy like my prose."
"Without paper, I had to jot my notes on the back of a something wrapper."
"As soon as they were out of earshot, I heard them giggling."
This morning's NaNoism is simple. Brief. But no less painful.
"... one hot June day in August ..."
That reminds me of my very first "NaNoism," long before NaNo, when I was seven and writing about a girl named Tina Telanium who wore elbow and knee pads to ride her horse past all the wild panthers in her suburban West Virginia neighborhood. I wrote that Tina had "straight brown curls." If only I'd known what a NaNoism was back then so I could embrace it!
I love November!
More...
Last November, I wrote the first 10,000 words of LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE on November 1. This year, it's November 4 and I expect to pass 10,000 today. I'm taking it a little slower, but enjoying it no less. Of course my students are NaNoing with me, which makes it twelve times more fun (since I have six of them this year and they each count twice).
My favorite part of NaNo isn't the community, although I love that. It isn't the sense of accomplishment, or even the finished book I've got at the end of the month.
No, my favorite part of NaNoWriMo is the NaNoisms -- the typos and senseless phrases that occur when you type entirely too many words in entirely too few days.
My favorite NaNoism from last year involved an evil Twinkie in somebody's eye. I have yet to top that yet this year, but I'm still enjoying myself. Here are a few of my NaNoisms so far this November:
"The red and green lights reflected on the water, but the reflection was broken and choppy like my prose."
"Without paper, I had to jot my notes on the back of a something wrapper."
"As soon as they were out of earshot, I heard them giggling."
This morning's NaNoism is simple. Brief. But no less painful.
"... one hot June day in August ..."
That reminds me of my very first "NaNoism," long before NaNo, when I was seven and writing about a girl named Tina Telanium who wore elbow and knee pads to ride her horse past all the wild panthers in her suburban West Virginia neighborhood. I wrote that Tina had "straight brown curls." If only I'd known what a NaNoism was back then so I could embrace it!
I love November!
Friday, October 23, 2009
Rounding to the Nearest Headache
My third-graders are learning how to round to the nearest hundred.
Wait. Let me rephrase that. My third-graders are supposed to be learning how to round to the nearest hundred.
More...Two Mondays ago, we studied rounding to the nearest 10. We used a variety of hands-on strategies to accomplish this goal, and it was mastered fairly quickly by all students. (That isn’t as impressive as it might be, by the way; I’ve only got three third-graders.)
This past Monday, we started rounding to the nearest hundred.
They did fine. For the first few lessons.
I swear. They knew how to round to the nearest hundred when they left on Monday. And they knew how to round to the nearest hundred when they left on Tuesday.
But when they came back on Wednesday? It was GONE. As if we had never studied rounding before.
Today, it was even worse than that. Today, it was as if they had never even been to school before. They didn’t know how to put their names on their papers. They didn’t know which desk belonged to who. And they DID NOT know how to round to the nearest hundred.
I kept my patience … for a while.
I showed them how to narrow their choices down to two possibilities – the two multiples of hundred that are nearest to the number in question. When they didn’t seem to remember this concept, I made it even easier.
“The two choices,” I said, “are 600 and 700.”
“I know!” shouted Student A. “5,000!”
Just as Student B shouted, “27!”
“Guys,” I said, bewildered, “the answer is either 600 or 700. Those are the only two choices. The number you say either needs to be 600 or 700. So no other answer has even a chance of being correct. So … which is it? 600 or 700?”
“94!” shouted Student B.
“400!” shouted Student A.
Luckily the students left for lunch about that time, saving me from pulling out chunks of my own hair in frustration. They returned half an hour later, refreshed and ready to tackle rounding anew.
Yeah.
After fifteen minutes of rounding torture, I decided I’d better return to safer waters. I put a few two-digit numbers on the board and asked students to round them to the nearest 10. So imagine my surprise when the answers ranged in length from a single digit to six.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The Mean Green Thief
Buddy, I tell ya! What a week it's been!
Oh, sorry. That didn't sound like me. It's just that all stories in my classroom begin the same way. A six-year-old raises his hand in the middle of the spelling test, and when I call on him, he says, "Buddy, I tell ya! I studied, but I just don't know what to make of that one word!" -- or, better yet -- "Buddy, I tell ya! That dog I seen this weekend, he was somethin' else!" To which I say, "That's interesting, but what does it have to do with your spelling test?" To which he usually says something along the lines of, "What spelling test?"
But let me start again.
Buddy, I tell ya! It may only be Wednesday, but I'm just about ready for the weekend!
Before I explain why, let me ask you this: If you were a teacher and you had a child in your class who loved chocolate, would you leave Hershey's bars laying about all over the classroom?
What if you had a child who adored music? Would you play his music so loud he couldn't concentrate on working? In the background, sure, but so loud he couldn't focus?
No, right?
Okay. So I'm justified. I think.
Yesterday, I de-greened my classroom.
More...
All the green -- and I mean ALL the green -- has been taken. Green crayons out of their boxes. Green sentence strips off the word wall. Green icons off the picture schedules. Green stickers off the sticker charts. I swapped green pencil boxes for blue ones. Green computer tickets for red ones.
And all this green contraband, these confiscated green crayons and stickers and second-grade words, they're all locked in the top drawer of my filing cabinet with the other things too dangerous for the kids to touch. Medications, for example. And push pins.
What would possess a grown woman, and a teacher at that, to rob her students of the color green?
Buddy, I tell ya. I got this one kid, he just don't do his work if there's anything green around.
Oops. Sorry. I've been in class too long. Let me rephrase that.
I am entrusted with the education of a pupil who is so intensely interested in the color green, he is unable to focus on learning if there is anything of that particular hue in his field of vision.
There, that sounded a little bit more professional.
My little green-obsessed student has been having trouble this week. And I mean trouble in almost every area of classroom life. The skills it takes to exist in second grade, those are the very skills he seems to have lost over the weekend. Not flipping your chair over backwards, for instance. And not poking your neighbor in the eye with a pencil. Pretty much all the skills you need to practice if you want to be a successful second-grader and not spend every recess stuck against the brick wall beside the teacher.
Which is not my rule, by the way. The last thing I want is for my most energetic students to not run around in circles for fifteen minutes. But I don't have recess duty, so there isn't much I can do about that.
What I can do -- or at least what I try to do -- is motivate my students using what interests them. If it's chocolate, hey, as long as the parent doesn't mind, that's fine with me. If it's music, fantastic. If it's stickers, or computer time, or a coloring sheet, that's great. And if it's doing all of your work with a green colored pencil, well, does it really matter if your spelling words aren't gray like everybody else's?
I think it makes the place a little brighter, actually. A bright spot of green in my ordinarily dreary grade book.
Only sometimes, if there is green in the room, the child just can't concentrate. And this was one of those weeks. And the other kids were pulling their hair out. And, to be honest, so was I. It's difficult to teach -- and especially difficult to learn! -- your spelling words or expanded notation or your reading strategies if somebody is cantering around the room on all fours howling like a wolf, or squeezing his hands over his ears and singing "Slow Ride," or scooting your chair out from under you and laughing when you fall on the rug.
Not cool, green man. I don't like falling on the rug.
At the end of my rope, I finally reclaimed green. I took control of it. I confiscated an entire color. Kids in my classroom have to color leaves yellow. That's okay this time of year, right? But they also have to color pumpkin stems purple and they have to color green traffic lights blue.
It's just for a day or two.
I hope.
Meanwhile, the little green guy, he's working. He's trying to earn back his green. But in his free time, he's also got a project of his own. He's trying so hard to find his missing color. He's looking in every crayon box and under every marker lid. He's checking under the other word wall words. He's looking in the bottoms of the trash cans. In fact, I think the only place he hasn't checked is in the locked top drawer of my filing cabinet.
I'm almost tempted to give him the key -- and to remove the medications and the push pins, of course. I'm almost rooting for the little guy. If I were seven and some mean old teacher took away my green, I would hunt for it, too. I'm very proud of him for trying.
There is a chance that green will reappear tomorrow. I'm not sure. I haven't decided. I want the other kids to get a little peace so they can concentrate, and if it takes having the little green guy work in blue until he earns a green marker, well, that almost seems worth it. Green's not gone forever, after all.
On the other hand, I haven't stolen chocolate from this kid. I haven't taken away a song he likes. That's all I thought I was doing, but now I realize I've stolen his oxygen. I've moved the earth out from under him.
Not cool, Ms. Dooley. Even if it's not forever.
Buddy, I tell ya. I studied hard in college. But I just don't know what to make of this one kid. He sure brightens up my classroom, though.
As for me, I've got some homework to do. Some decisions to make.
I'll let you know what color they turn out.
Oh, sorry. That didn't sound like me. It's just that all stories in my classroom begin the same way. A six-year-old raises his hand in the middle of the spelling test, and when I call on him, he says, "Buddy, I tell ya! I studied, but I just don't know what to make of that one word!" -- or, better yet -- "Buddy, I tell ya! That dog I seen this weekend, he was somethin' else!" To which I say, "That's interesting, but what does it have to do with your spelling test?" To which he usually says something along the lines of, "What spelling test?"
But let me start again.
Buddy, I tell ya! It may only be Wednesday, but I'm just about ready for the weekend!
Before I explain why, let me ask you this: If you were a teacher and you had a child in your class who loved chocolate, would you leave Hershey's bars laying about all over the classroom?
What if you had a child who adored music? Would you play his music so loud he couldn't concentrate on working? In the background, sure, but so loud he couldn't focus?
No, right?
Okay. So I'm justified. I think.
Yesterday, I de-greened my classroom.
More...
All the green -- and I mean ALL the green -- has been taken. Green crayons out of their boxes. Green sentence strips off the word wall. Green icons off the picture schedules. Green stickers off the sticker charts. I swapped green pencil boxes for blue ones. Green computer tickets for red ones.
And all this green contraband, these confiscated green crayons and stickers and second-grade words, they're all locked in the top drawer of my filing cabinet with the other things too dangerous for the kids to touch. Medications, for example. And push pins.
What would possess a grown woman, and a teacher at that, to rob her students of the color green?
Buddy, I tell ya. I got this one kid, he just don't do his work if there's anything green around.
Oops. Sorry. I've been in class too long. Let me rephrase that.
I am entrusted with the education of a pupil who is so intensely interested in the color green, he is unable to focus on learning if there is anything of that particular hue in his field of vision.
There, that sounded a little bit more professional.
My little green-obsessed student has been having trouble this week. And I mean trouble in almost every area of classroom life. The skills it takes to exist in second grade, those are the very skills he seems to have lost over the weekend. Not flipping your chair over backwards, for instance. And not poking your neighbor in the eye with a pencil. Pretty much all the skills you need to practice if you want to be a successful second-grader and not spend every recess stuck against the brick wall beside the teacher.
Which is not my rule, by the way. The last thing I want is for my most energetic students to not run around in circles for fifteen minutes. But I don't have recess duty, so there isn't much I can do about that.
What I can do -- or at least what I try to do -- is motivate my students using what interests them. If it's chocolate, hey, as long as the parent doesn't mind, that's fine with me. If it's music, fantastic. If it's stickers, or computer time, or a coloring sheet, that's great. And if it's doing all of your work with a green colored pencil, well, does it really matter if your spelling words aren't gray like everybody else's?
I think it makes the place a little brighter, actually. A bright spot of green in my ordinarily dreary grade book.
Only sometimes, if there is green in the room, the child just can't concentrate. And this was one of those weeks. And the other kids were pulling their hair out. And, to be honest, so was I. It's difficult to teach -- and especially difficult to learn! -- your spelling words or expanded notation or your reading strategies if somebody is cantering around the room on all fours howling like a wolf, or squeezing his hands over his ears and singing "Slow Ride," or scooting your chair out from under you and laughing when you fall on the rug.
Not cool, green man. I don't like falling on the rug.
At the end of my rope, I finally reclaimed green. I took control of it. I confiscated an entire color. Kids in my classroom have to color leaves yellow. That's okay this time of year, right? But they also have to color pumpkin stems purple and they have to color green traffic lights blue.
It's just for a day or two.
I hope.
Meanwhile, the little green guy, he's working. He's trying to earn back his green. But in his free time, he's also got a project of his own. He's trying so hard to find his missing color. He's looking in every crayon box and under every marker lid. He's checking under the other word wall words. He's looking in the bottoms of the trash cans. In fact, I think the only place he hasn't checked is in the locked top drawer of my filing cabinet.
I'm almost tempted to give him the key -- and to remove the medications and the push pins, of course. I'm almost rooting for the little guy. If I were seven and some mean old teacher took away my green, I would hunt for it, too. I'm very proud of him for trying.
There is a chance that green will reappear tomorrow. I'm not sure. I haven't decided. I want the other kids to get a little peace so they can concentrate, and if it takes having the little green guy work in blue until he earns a green marker, well, that almost seems worth it. Green's not gone forever, after all.
On the other hand, I haven't stolen chocolate from this kid. I haven't taken away a song he likes. That's all I thought I was doing, but now I realize I've stolen his oxygen. I've moved the earth out from under him.
Not cool, Ms. Dooley. Even if it's not forever.
Buddy, I tell ya. I studied hard in college. But I just don't know what to make of this one kid. He sure brightens up my classroom, though.
As for me, I've got some homework to do. Some decisions to make.
I'll let you know what color they turn out.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
I'm home -- and almost home -- in a number of ways.
There is an odd sort of disconnect this week between the environment in which I've spent my days and the one in which I've spent my evenings. It stands to reason, since the two environments are more than an hour and a half's drive apart, but still, the dissonance is staggering.
More...
First things first. I am buying a house. This is especially significant if you refer to this post, in which I list the 42 (it's now 44, though) places I have lived. Owning a home will mean that number 45 (actually, 46, since I've got to find a place to stay next week) will likely stick. At least for a while. And my number might not change so quickly or so desperately as it has in the past.
This little house I'm buying from a family friend is precious. It's a small, sweet two-bedroom house with a quarter acre yard for the dogs to play in.
But once we started cleaning up the yard and hauling trash out of the living room, we learned that the people who used to live in this house lost it because of personal problems. And some of the neighbors aren't happy about the change.
Not that I'm happy about the change either -- at least, not the part where someone else lost a home. But my mother's earliest memory is of her mother sneaking her out the back door of their former home while the new tenants moved in the front. On my birth certificate, my address is simply listed as "General Delivery, Mt. Nebo, W.Va." I have been evicted from trailers without plumbing. I have pulled my panicked cat out of a gaping hole in a hotel wall on a school night. I have shampooed my hair in the Summersville lake. I have lived 44 places in my life and I want to go home now.
All of that is serving a double purpose -- simultaneously making me feel guilty and easing my guilt about someone else losing the home that has become mine.
So what does that mean for my house? It means I should be able to move in next week. It also means the house is surrounded by neighbors who may or may not accept me.
In the meantime, school started Monday.
I am in heaven.
My kids are cantankerous little counry kids with attitudes taller than their diminutive statures. But my partner still works two hours from my school, so we've been staying in a motel and I've been commuting an hour and a half to work. Flood plains and country kids during the day. Hot tubs and 70 channels at night. Dissonance. Fortunately, I'm too sleepy to dwell on it.
Between driving and teaching, teaching and driving, I feel like I've spent much of the week in a fog. I haven't even really thought about the fact that by next week, I will be living in a home of my own.
Instead, I've spent the week having conversations like this:
ME (to second-grader pretending a ruler is a guitar): "If your guitar is going to distract you, I'm going to have to put it out of sight for a bit."
STUDENT (pointing to spelling test): "If my spelling test is going to distract me, can you put it out of sight for a bit?"
and like this:
ME (to six-year-old student): "I love how you came in and got right to work!"
STUDENT: "Lady, that's how I come into this world!"
So I haven't stopped to think about the pros and the cons of home ownership in a community that might not initially embrace me.
I'm not that worried about it, though. The house will be great, and I'm excited -- don't get me wrong. But every time I walk into my classroom, I know I've already come home.
More...
First things first. I am buying a house. This is especially significant if you refer to this post, in which I list the 42 (it's now 44, though) places I have lived. Owning a home will mean that number 45 (actually, 46, since I've got to find a place to stay next week) will likely stick. At least for a while. And my number might not change so quickly or so desperately as it has in the past.
This little house I'm buying from a family friend is precious. It's a small, sweet two-bedroom house with a quarter acre yard for the dogs to play in.
But once we started cleaning up the yard and hauling trash out of the living room, we learned that the people who used to live in this house lost it because of personal problems. And some of the neighbors aren't happy about the change.
Not that I'm happy about the change either -- at least, not the part where someone else lost a home. But my mother's earliest memory is of her mother sneaking her out the back door of their former home while the new tenants moved in the front. On my birth certificate, my address is simply listed as "General Delivery, Mt. Nebo, W.Va." I have been evicted from trailers without plumbing. I have pulled my panicked cat out of a gaping hole in a hotel wall on a school night. I have shampooed my hair in the Summersville lake. I have lived 44 places in my life and I want to go home now.
All of that is serving a double purpose -- simultaneously making me feel guilty and easing my guilt about someone else losing the home that has become mine.
So what does that mean for my house? It means I should be able to move in next week. It also means the house is surrounded by neighbors who may or may not accept me.
In the meantime, school started Monday.
I am in heaven.
My kids are cantankerous little counry kids with attitudes taller than their diminutive statures. But my partner still works two hours from my school, so we've been staying in a motel and I've been commuting an hour and a half to work. Flood plains and country kids during the day. Hot tubs and 70 channels at night. Dissonance. Fortunately, I'm too sleepy to dwell on it.
Between driving and teaching, teaching and driving, I feel like I've spent much of the week in a fog. I haven't even really thought about the fact that by next week, I will be living in a home of my own.
Instead, I've spent the week having conversations like this:
ME (to second-grader pretending a ruler is a guitar): "If your guitar is going to distract you, I'm going to have to put it out of sight for a bit."
STUDENT (pointing to spelling test): "If my spelling test is going to distract me, can you put it out of sight for a bit?"
and like this:
ME (to six-year-old student): "I love how you came in and got right to work!"
STUDENT: "Lady, that's how I come into this world!"
So I haven't stopped to think about the pros and the cons of home ownership in a community that might not initially embrace me.
I'm not that worried about it, though. The house will be great, and I'm excited -- don't get me wrong. But every time I walk into my classroom, I know I've already come home.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Pub Date Moved Up!
I've got great news! LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE is now set to be published in the fall of 2010! That's a whole year earlier than originally planned!
Wow, I'd better get cracking on that second book!
Wow, I'd better get cracking on that second book!
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