Another Nanowrimo update....
**I'm well ahead of the recommended word count pace, and in a very good position to reach the 50,000 word goal by the end of this coming week even if the book itself will still require more. I plan on cracking 40,000 before Monday morning since I have arranged a weekend with few distractions. I'm reaching a point where I have to think a little harder about what scenes I want to construct for the story to play out the way it should, but the words are still coming fast and furious. My self-imposed Facebook banishment has turned out to be unnecessary, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea anyway. I might even pop on for a moment today and put up a link to this post.
**November is one of my favorite months at school, and this one is particularly nice. One month of school, sixteen days of lesson plans to write. The only full week that takes place in November starts on Monday, followed by our wonderful annual two-day week preceding Thanksgiving. It's come up in conversation a lot lately, probably with the whole Novel Writing Month going on, but as much as I love teaching, the actual teaching part of teaching, I'm pretty sure if I found myself in a position to leave it behind and write full time and be financially secure, I'd do it. Everything that called me to teaching is still there. The thrill of having a lesson go exactly the way you planned. The satisfaction of seeing an idea come together in someone who didn't understand it before and knowing you made it happen. The respect that you are occasionally paid by members of the community, and the place you have in the community that builds up around you when you teach in the same school for several years. The relationships you have with your students; the hard-nosed kids who will finally start cutting you breaks, the ones who draw pictures for you to hang up by your desk, the way their personalities are so defined and how they come together to establish a different classroom dynamic than any other class you had, and that small handful of students that you click with, those boys and girls you understand so well because they think so much like you do and they're so easy to teach. There are a couple of those every year, and they're always fun to have around.
There are a lot of things about teaching I love, but those things are static. They're always there, and they never change. Meanwhile, everything bad about teaching gets to be a little more every year. I figure there has to be a point when it will eventually becoming "going to work" instead of "going to school." And if that happens, I think I could walk pretty easily as long as there was an Option B waiting in the wings.
**Even though I said I was pulling away from Bookface completely, I will admit to sneaking on a couple of times, but only when there are reasons; I've had a few research questions I've had to talk to different people about, and BF has been the most convenient way to make sure I reach them. Having said that though, I'm happy to say that the time I've spent logged in has fallen off greatly, and it's really been a relief. I don't miss Blitz at all, and my life doesn't feel diminished by not knowing who is a fan of what or what's going on for so many people in Farmville and Mafia Wars, or whether or not someone is getting geared up for Saturday night. I think the relief is also coming from the time-management I've had to implement to make sure I have time to write. It sure makes life easier when you force yourself to get things done when you need to.
**During one of my brief Bookface excursions, I saw someone all keyed up about the new Bon Jovi album. I was on the fence about getting it because Bon Jovi has put out a decade's worth of mediocre and clichéd filler in the more recent years, but I was bored so I downloaded it. Eh. Maybe three good songs, and some of the filler is better than usual. I don't see this one having any staying power. Bon Jovi hasn't worked their way into my heavy rotation since 1995, so this isn't a big surprise. But there are a couple of songs I'm glad to have.
**I'm kind of swimming upstream through feelings of melancholy today, and I'm looking forward to finding my way out of it. I won't get all self-indulgent and describe the reasons behind it, but suffice it to say it has to do with a dream I woke from about an hour ago, and the idea of how people get older and grow apart and leave each other behind.
Okay, enough bellyaching. The 34,000 word mark awaits....
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