Adrift.
It’s the word that keeps coming to mind. Adrift. Rudderless. Alone. Confused. Mired in the moment.
I’m struggling. And I knew I would be. And even though I tried to imagine what it would be like once both of my kids were off to college, I couldn’t quite capture it. And now I know why. This feeling is too unfamiliar.
Continue reading “Thoughts on that which is known as an “empty nest””
One of the decisions I made for 2017 was to do things that are difficult. One night I was thinking that it had been too long since I did something that was really hard for me, where I really challenged myself.
I felt this was especially important because I have finished one major writing project (my screenplay) and have not started another yet. Well, the screenplay is not “finished,” exactly. But I like the draft I have, and I am taking a break from continuously nitpicking at it. I figured I could use some distance from it while I wait to hear from people who are looking at funding it.
Any decisions in that regard have been put on hold for a few months to wait and see what this Trump presidency will do to investments in entertainment, if anything. That’s fine. I get it.
I’ve neglected this blog, but I am back! A large reason I have disappeared for a minute is because I teach part time at a local university, and the new semester began. I am teaching more classes than I usually do, and so I have been busy getting into a groove.
But as I grade papers, I have been thinking a lot about feedback and it’s importance. I tell a story at the beginning of each semester about a poetry class I took in graduate school. As I paged through the first essay returned to us, I noted periodic checkmarks, which I assumed meant that I was hitting a point the professor was looking for. On the last page, he wrote “Good” and gave me a B. Hmmmmm. That made no sense to me. I must have uttered my confusion out loud because a student next to me assured me that the problem was probably that I had a lot of grammar errors – hence the B.
I am sitting at Starbucks, fearful that I have not been productive enough last week. So I am using the day to alleviate that fear and to write. When I come here, my routine is always the same, even though I need to change it. I log on to the wifi, check MSN for headlines in case anything momentous happened over night, check email, and check Facebook. The last check is the one I need to discontinue, except for today!
The first post came from a friend, an actual friend, not a virtual friend: Kelly Raymer. And it was a link to his latest blog post, I am guessing, sitting in a coffee shop on the other side of town. I was going to comment on it, but I had too much to say. Here is his post: Fear.
The Writing Life 