Dear Alison, E is for Escape, and that's what books provide me--a means to escape. My life shifted into hyper-warp speed back in March. I've managed to keep up with it, but it seems with every hat I wear ($10 baseball caps and visors, not those fancy $800 hats from that shop you mentioned where you're not even permitted to touch the feathers) everything's taking thirty to sixty minutes longer than it should, Caffeine and I are having a not-so-secret love affair. My only escape is reading books. When I slip into the pages of a book, I lose myself. I forget the time, my To Do list, tomorrow. I escape, and Alison, in this crazy world called life, everyone needs an escape. E is for Edits. My edits for Starr Fall, Book One came in the day after I submitted Book Two for review. The day after my body and my brain hit the wall. The idea of the dreaded editorial letter and the bruises I still suffered from my crash made me reluctant to click on the email. In fact, I only pe...
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Dear Alison, Last weekend, we lost an hour to Daylight Savings. An hour doesn't seem like that big of a deal. After all, it's only sixty minutes, but that hour doubled the sixty minutes I lost between Friday and Saturday when I decided I needed another hour of sleep. That hour I lost was time I usually spend working on SCBWI emails--and if I'm honest, most weekends I spend two to three hours on SCBWI stuff in addition to being a mom, a wife, and a writer. So I entered into Daylight Savings with an hour already lost. By Sunday morning I was already two hours behind. I tried to make that hour up Sunday night, but by Monday during our critique group meeting, I felt that 3rd lost hour of sleep, and I began to lose more and more time. Alison, the snowball effect is REAL. Bizarre circumstances sprouted each day--Tuesday after track practice (I'm a coach not a runner) I had to wait a half hour for two students to get picked up. Tuesday night, I discovered Girls on the ...
I am an artist at heart. I beat to my own drummer and find it very difficult to follow the same routine everyday. After high school, I didn't have a 7am-5pm day like most people. Between college, grad school, and my life as a surveyor, I had a pretty flexible schedule. If it was sunny, I went outside. If it rained, I stayed in, but when I became a teacher, that all changed. Following my second week of teaching, I asked my mentor how she dealt with being at the same place every day at the same time. Her answer, "You get used to it." Three years later, I got used to it, more or less, but my creative process lacked. I spent so much time grading papers and developing lesson plans, I didn't read or write anything on my own. Sure, I read Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Into the Wild, The Outsiders, Julius Caesar, and a handful of others, dozens of times, but I didn't read much on my own. By the end of the day, my bra...