Disruptions & Discouragement

There are two main reasons I feel like I haven’t gotten a whole lot done in the last month. There have been so many disruptions across all fronts that have kept me from focusing on book related stuff and I hit a wall in revising Date Shark that was so discouraging that I have struggled to work on any of my projects.

When it comes to disruptions, I’ll give you the highlights.

The end of the school year is always super chaotic for teachers, but this year really was notable in that regard. On the same day, the school I teach was vandalized as part of a senior “prank” (please read that as incredibly idiotic and illegal stupidity) and one of my students nearly died right in front of me. I was not okay for several days trying to process that. Also, my principal and two assistant principals are leaving for other retirement or other opportunity, which causes a lot of anxiety not knowing what we’ll be coming back to next year. Admin decided to cut our 9th and 10th grade honors program, which I was very against, and has since led to me signing up to teach three sections of an AP class next year, which I will hopefully figure out how to do this summer. Our assessment (testing) system is getting completely revamped and rather than be surprised in August, I reluctantly submitted my name to help with the review so I know what the heck I’m getting into next school year. There’s been family stuff that has required our attention and focus, and one of my dog’s has developed a late-in-life allergy that keeps making his eyes and face swell up (see pictures above of his progress). Vet visits, so many pills, changes in food, eye goop, elbow pads, and fish oil have helped him improve, thankfully.

It’s been a lot.

Now for the discouragement.

I was about halfway through revising Date Shark, which I talked about last time and showed some examples of how that’s been changing the book. It was going well…until it wasn’t. I got stuck on an aspect of the book where the main female character Leila finally has to confront the fact that she’s been keeping her friendship with Eli secret from her boyfriend Luke. This was always a touchy part of the story because it had potential to put reader’s off if they thought Leila has being purposefully deceitful to Luke and unsympathetic to the harm she was causing.

Revising this section wasn’t feeling right and I couldn’t make it work with the changes I’d already made to the earlier half of the book. I understood the characters more now and my view of her behavior has changed as well. It no longer worked and I couldn’t really figure out how to justify her decisions, yet I still want Leila to be a flawed character who’s having to confront the reasons her past relationships have floundered.

I talked it over with my husband Chris at dinner a few weeks back and the discussion really discouraged me because I realized there wasn’t an easy way to fix what I felt like wasn’t working. In the moment, it felt like there wasn’t a way to fix it at all. Maybe a full rewrite and restructuring of the story, if I wanted to change what the story was and what the point was, which I didn’t. This realization sent me down one of those author spirals of maybe my older books can’t be fixed because they’re too misguided or poorly written or because I’m not nearly as good of a writer as I thought and I should just move on, but maybe my newer ideas aren’t good either if my old stuff has so many irreparable problems.

And so on.

Eventually, I emerged from the depths of that spiral, but I still wasn’t in a good headspace to write. Working on one of my new projects felt too daunting, looking at any of my old work was depressing. I got stuck in the overwhelm of having too many problems to fix and not enough time or mental energy to even figure out where to start. So, I read instead and focused on radio show stuff, which was also necessary because my prerecorded episodes list was getting scarily short.

Books I read over the last month-ish (and recommend you check out):

• Brynn and Sebastian Hate Each Other by Bethany Turner
• Twelve Months by Jim Butcher
• Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman
• Great Sand Dunes Massacre by Scott Graham
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
• North of Foothill by Orlando Davidson
• The Moth by Scott Archer Jones
• Maus by Art Spiegelman (currently reading)

Authors I interviewed (or will by the end of this week) over the last month-ish:

• Karen McCoy, author of The Etiquette of Voles (audiobook recently released)
• Laura Paskus, editor of Water Bodies (Torrey House Press)
• Scott Graham, author of the National Park Mystery series
• Douglas Joslin, debut author of A Sky Full of Color
• Mark Plets, author of Kelly: a tale of ould Ireland
• Scott Archer Jones, author of The Moth
• Kim Wuertz, teaching a workshop at Quill & Quest (local bookstore) in June
• Orlando Davidson, author of North of Foothill

Even though I didn’t get much writing done, I did stay busy. Now that school is out, book stuff is my priority. I, of course, have AP training next week and plenty of yard and housework on my summer to-do list, but I’m in a better headspace to write and work on rebranding and building new publishing avenues.

What does your summer look like?