A familiar twinge.
For a while now, I’ve been kicking around a small idea for a story.
I’ve been feeling the familiar pangs that I feel when it’s time to start writing again, and the guilt about not updating this blog and about not keeping up with a paper journal and about not writing at all is starting to reach a creshendo that nearly always signals a return to typing, writing, scribbling on scraps of paper at 2am while The Boy slumbers beside me.
Inspiration comes from strange and unexpected places. A girl walking down a residential street in St. Paul, a stack of books from the library, begging to be read. It comes from mediocre movies (how could I do that better? what were the real moments present?) and from dreams I have about people who used to be in my life.
I visited the NaNoWriMo website today for the first time in nearly a year. I joined up last July, so eager to begin and so positive I would be able to write a novel in the span of a month, sure that finishing up student teaching would have no impact on my ability to pound out the story.
It didn’t happen. I don’t think I wrote a single word. I’d like to do it again this year, to try, but I feel out of practice, slow, unsure of how to begin planning. I suppose I have to just dive in, but I’m hesistant, and what if I find that I need to start writing before November 1st? Then I have to choose something else.
Feck.
Where I’ve Been
I haven’t been writing because I’ve been so focused on surviving teaching summer school. It is, without a doubt, one of the worst situations I’ve had to endure in a long, long time. It makes my tutoring job from the previous two summers look like Valhalla.
I have a week and two more days. Seven days of school left. In all honesty, I wake up every morning oscillating between hating myself, hating the kids, and being unsure whether or not today will be the day I quit.
