Golden Opportunity

I’ve always been a writer. As a child I wrote little poems for my mother and left them on her pillow some nights. She worked and I didn’t see her much. It was a way to communicate. She was a single parent doing the best she could.
In high school I wrote a short story about something that happened over the summer. It was a tragedy. It was also an assignment for my Freshman English class. We all took turns reading our stories to the class. Fifty years later at a high school reunion, a classmate told me she remembered that story and how it had brought tears to her eyes when she heard it read.
I also had a poem published in the high school magazine. In college, when I finally got there, four years after my high school classmates, I continued to write little stories. English and the writing assignments were one of my favorite classes. I also worked at the ECU News Bureau, which was a work/study assignment through the Financial Aid Office. One of my jobs was to proofread the writers’ articles and doing that for four years was good training for how to write a tight article.
I graduated, married, and stayed at home. I found myself writing articles, short stories and poems. My husband, who as my boyfriend, encouraged me to submit some of my writings, had bought a Writer’s Market for me, and I used it. He was sure some of the poems in my notebook of poetry would sell. I was sure they wouldn’t, but I sent two of them to editors of magazines. Both sold. I was shocked.
I read Dennis Rogers’ column in the News and Observer and noticed he used letters from readers on Fridays in his Letters and Leftover column. One day he wrote something that struck a nerve. I sent him a letter and was astonished to see it in print in his Letters and Leftovers column that Friday. I wrote letters to the editor when an article affected me. Some of those got published. More letters to Dennis Rogers got published, and old friends and classmates wrote me to let me know they saw and liked them. Some would cut out the column and send it to me.
I had children. I had three children and would use their nap times to write. They gave me even more topics to write about as did the pets we had. An article appeared in Cats Magazine and The Morris Report. (You can resell an article as long as you let the second market know where it first appeared.) Poems sold. A short story won an award. An article on Teaching Children by letting them help you around the house won second place in Reader’s Digest Nonfiction category at a Writer’s Conference I attended in South Carolina.
Then the divorce came and I found myself subtitute teaching to help provide for me and my children. I had not kept my teacher certification renewed because I didn’t expect to go back to teaching. I had to do that before I could find a regular teaching job.
Over the years I continued to write. I published just a few things because my main focus was my children. Time was something I just did not have. I saved many of the things I’d written.
Now the children are grown and gone. I have several books I wrote over the twenty years I spent working and providing. All my children went to college. Parental duties did not stop with high school graduation, but continued. I did take two years to go to UNC at Wilmington to get a Masters Degree. My two oldest, who were in college, thought I had lost my mind. My youngest, who was a high school junior at the time, thought it was a cool idea. Wilmington NC is located close to beaches. It was a nice city. He and I both graduated the summer of 2007. He went off to college that fall and I found a job teaching.
I continued to teach and try to help each of my children as much as I could. I continued to write.
Now here I am in a quiet town in NC living in a peaceful setting with as much or as little interaction with the neighbors as I want. I have managed to self-publish a book of poetry. I self-published a Teachers’ Guide to Black History Month Activities, but titled it Black History Raps, which has not helped it sell well. It needs to be rewritten and retitled and that is on my “to do list”. I am currently editing a proof copy of memories from teaching in various public schools throughout my career. It’s titled More Than I Bargained For with a subtitle Memories of a Public School Teacher. The word schoolteacher is deliberately separated as the focus is on public schools as much as on teaching.
I have a few more books written that need tidying up. I am not going the usual route of submitting to publishers. I did that a little over the working years and got rejected. At my age, I want to see my work in print. Amazon’s self publishing site allows me to do that.
I haven’t submitted anything to magazines in a long time, but I should do that now too. I have time. That’s what was missing from my writing life.
I don’t regret my life. My children came first. They even continued to provide topics to write about. One came to me one night flapping his arms and unable to speak. I put down the book I was reading and asked What? WHAT? What was causing this behavior? He finally got out the word FIRE! and I jumped up and followed him to the kitchen. He had put a frozen pizza in the oven on the cardboard it came on. The cardboard was on fire. I grabbed a glove off the counter . . . one I used to remove things from the oven and reached in and pulled out the flaming mess. I threw it in the sink and ran water on it. “You’re supposed to take the frozen pizza off the cardboard”, I told him. “That’s not what the directions said,” he replied. I picked up the pizza box. Sure enough it read “Remove the pizza from the box and place it in the oven.” He said when he removed the pizza from the box the cardboard came with it. I wondered who wrote these directions on products? Could I get a job doing that? He never forgot to remove the cardboard again, and I think now the pizza boxes include that step. Must have been more fires and some letters from others?
But now I have a Golden Opportunity. I have the time that was missing from my former writing life. I have quiet. I have few obligations to interfere with publishing my work. I have so many finished books. I have a children’s book that needs illustrating. I have ideas for hi lo books. There’s an open market for those, and I think as a Reading Specialist who has studied language and teaching reading that I might be able to sell them. I have folders of ideas for writing. This is my time to pursue my love of writing and what I can do with it.

Setting

It’s cloudy here this morning and the wind is blowing. Rain is predicted today. Sixty percent chance the weather person told us.

I’ve put the windows up a bit. Letting some fresh air flow through the house. Anyone with a dog knows that’s a treat. The dog enjoys the air too and she can hear the noises outside so much better! So much to smell and bark at.

From time to time when the wind picks up, I find myself looking out the window in this room to see what is blowing around outside. I had an idea to take my kite out to the parking lot and fly it, but not sure I’m in the mood for that this morning.

Setting is time and place in your story. I have often written about settings so that if I need or want a certain setting, I can recall details.

Weather and time can be two stress invoking aspects of your writing. Have you ever noticed the rain in some dramatic scenes? How about the time crunch? Both are useful in adding tension and excitement to what you write.

I mentioned the time of day in the scene above. I was thinking if I forget to close and lock a window, I might be inviting trouble later tonight. A closed, locked window does not really protect you, if the window is glass, but it does slow down someone trying to come in . The rain that is predicted would disturb footprints or evidence of a person who took advantage of an unlocked, open window in the dark of night.

Just sharing this morning. Now the sun is peeking out, but it doesn’t fool me. I know from those dark clouds above that rain will fall here sometime today. Then I’ll need to close the windows . . . all of them.

Educator

I am so glad I don’t have to be consumed by my career any more. I just saw a post on face book by a teacher. It’s Sunday.

On Sunday afternoons at one teaching job, I spent 3 to 4 hours writing lesson plans. It was a poor county and the administrators were trying to figure out why the kids weren’t on grade level. I knew why. They tied the teacher’s hands with so much micro-managing that no new good ideas were permitted. What is the definition of insanity? To continue doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That was this county’s problem.

The administrators decided the reason the children were not learning well was because the teachers didn’t write better lesson plans. They were not referring to the content, but to the format. We were given a chart called – I can’t even remember what it was called, but it had verbs on it and the verbs described the level of thinking skills. It was Bloom’s Taxonomy . . . Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills with Action Verb List – and teachers had to use the higher order verbs in their lesson plans. So I knew what the children needed to do but I had to put that chart beside me every Sunday afternoon and make sure I used the verbs from that chart that showed critical thinking skills. That was B.S.

But I wasted 3 to 4 hours of my life doing that every Sunday afternoon during the school year. The children did not improve from that time spent writing lesson plans to the administration’s demands. I could have better used that time researching creative ways to teach, but I wasted my time glancing at the chart to be sure every verb was from the right hand columns of the chart in my lesson plans.

This kind of stuff is why I began writing my book that is now in the proof stage. I had titled it Stories of a Public Schoolteacher, but retitled it More Than I Bargained For, with a subtitle Memories of a Public School Teacher. So many years of working far more than 40 hours a week. So much stress and unnecessary work. So much time spent doing useless things when I needed to find more creative ways to engage children. So much blame put on teachers when children did not learn, but teachers taught with their hands tied behind their backs, so to speak, as they tried to educate.

It is Sunday morning and I saw a post in a schoolteacher’s group on face book. It seems nothing has changed since I left the profession, excecpt my level of stress has gone down a lot.

In the school district with the verbs requirement, we had to turn our lesson plans in to the assistant principal every Monday morning by 8:00 am. He would read and grade them and give them back to us.

I mostly taught in Title One Schools, which are schools with a certain percentage of low income student families. These children had a lot of obstacles to learning. I watched teachers, who must not have known any better, browbeat children who showed up for class with no pencil. I watched children blamed for not doing their homework when family demands filled their evening time. I watched children wilt when they could have been thriving.

Teachers at one school could go to the office and get a box of pencils for free. I did this and sharpened the pencils and if a child showed up without one, I just gave him/her one, matter of factly, and carried on. It is not a child’s fault if he has no pencil. What is the big deal? I know some would say teaching the child responsibility, but if there is no pencil in the house, it is teaching the child shame.

I could go on and I do, although the book is more story like than complaining, I do go on about the trials and tribulations of a public school teacher. When I began teaching, things were different. Today’s schools . . . I’m just glad I’m done, although I do feel sympathy for teachers and students who still are involved.

More Than I Bargained For

The proof copy has been here for awhile and I continue to slowly read through it to check for typos or other problems. Yesterday I noticed the word “mimic” and after checking the definition, changed it to “imitate”. I’m about half done.

I’ve decided to work next on the Blindman book and the children’s picture book. The Blindman book is too close to home and I have to have breaks from it emotionally. The children’s book will provide that. Whichever one gets done first will be the next published, after the Schoolteacher Memories book. Schoolteacher Stories, I believe I’ve called it in the past, whose official title is now More Than I Bargained For. Subtitle is Memories of a Public School Teacher.

The Blindman book is about the Foster Care Blight in America and I’d love to hear any stories or experiences anyone would like to share. I have a follow up book called Blindman 2 and it is true stories about horrific events caused by America’s eagerness to rip families apart. Not at the border, oh, no, heaven forbid, but in the homes of Americans who have children.

I’ve moved in the last few months and am delighted to find that the community I’ve moved to is peaceful and quiet. I was living in Raleigh NC, and it was NOT peaceful or quiet.

All these books are not books I will write hastily, but books I have worked on for twenty or more years. They are mostly written. I’m just tidying them up and getting them ready for publication.

My self publishing site that I use on Amazon is working well and i plan to continue to publish that way. I was advised by one writing instructor to find an agent, but I grew tired of trying. I also submitted one book to a publisher (more than one), and it was not accepted, Yes, I’ve heard about Dr. Seuss and how many times he had to submit his books, but I will not live that much longer. I’m going to do this my way.

Life moves on and I’ve made peace with my aging process. My bucket list includes publishing as many of the things I’ve written, or will write, as I can, and traveling to places I’ve always wanted to see. I’ve done everything else I set out to do.