What Now?

Making stuff up is hard!

My novel-writing labor continues ... and it's is hard! Shocking, I know.

Here's what I'm finding so difficult: apparently I have to MAKE UP stuff! And yet, my career heretofore has frowned on the making up of stuff, and I am having trouble shifting my mindset.

Case in point: This morning I was working on the backstory for the murderer (as recommended by the helpful James N. Frey in How To Write a Damn Good Mystery), and one of the many things I needed to decide was his physiology. But how do I know what his physiology is? Beyond a certain point, it's not necessary for the plot -- for the murder itself, he only needs to be an average-sized man -- but how he looks is entirely necessary for characterization, to make him a character whom readers can see in their mind's eye. So do I make him large or average, balding or with a full-set of hair, bearded or no, with a limp or athletic, distinctive scars or none?

Ack, how can I decide when there's no right or wrong answer?! How I decide doesn't matter, but the decision itself matters a lot. I sat there paralyzed with indecision, unable to decide on any of these questions. He is a white American, but I know that because it fits the historical scenario the best. So it's not that I'm not willing to make decisions, just that I find it hard to make decisions for which historical fact and narrative necessity don't make the decision a clear one.

A friend suggested that I just leave these decisions aside for now and come back to them later, and that may be what I wind up doing, but Frey and others strongly recommend fleshing out the characters as much as possible as early as possible, recognizing that I can change my mind later on. The hope is that the characters will start seeming real to me, will take on a life of their own, and for that it's a good idea to have some idea of what the characters look like.

So these are my current struggles. And then I start thinking that, if I can't decide what color hair a character has, how on earth can I do the even harder work of deciding what the characters think and do and say? I'm trying to avoid this negative self-talk, however, recognizing that if I can bring myself to make these early decisions, the bigger decisions (what they think, say, do, etc.) should flow from that characterization. That, anyway, is the mark of a good novel.

I've been thinking of my years and years of academic writing as an apprenticeship of sorts, but in some ways introducing the element of fiction, of make-believe, has put me squarely into beginner status, which is never my favorite place to be. But I shall perservere.

Mystery fiction and ... OMG!!

I've been incommunicado for a few days because summer school got started on Thursday, and I'm teaching my first middle-schoolers! I've got two sections of a writing course (21 students total), one of which is fun and one of which is more of a dud thus far. But hey -- we're talking 16 days here, which means both that I have very limited goals for the course and that tomorrow I'll be one quarter done with the class. And I get paid very well, and I'm done before noon each day. So no complaints here.

In the meantime, I've been doing some work on the mystery novel -- a little writing, a little reading of "how to write a mystery" books, and a little reading of mysteries themselves; how fun is it that reading mysteries is now "work"! It has been interesting to read mystery novels with an eye toward their construction, narration, authorial decisions, etc., and I'll blog about some of what I've been thinking, but first the OMG stuff:

Anne Perry is one of the queens of historical mysteries, specializing in Victorian fiction, and yet I'd never read any of her work, so over the weekend I read her first novel, The Cater Street Hangman. I mostly enjoyed it and found the psychological portraits interesting, and after I finished it yesterday D. and I had an interesting conversation about shifting 3rd-person limited narration. Indeed, characterization and narration were going to be the subject of my blog post, until ...

There was a gratuitous homophobic moment at the end of the novel, which annoyed me, but I figured that it was a 1979 novel and perhaps Anne Perry had grown in the 30 years since then. I thought I'd do a quick Google search to see if she has a reputation as a homophobe -- I really knew nothing about her -- so I typed in "anne perry" and "lesbian" ... and OMG!!

Some of you will already know what I'm about to say, but it was a complete shock to me: Anne Perry, born as Juliet Hulme, is a murderer, having killed a woman when she was 15! She and her best friend killed the friend's mother; this is the true story behind Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, a movie that I've never seen but that D. immediately leapt to as soon as I started describing the crime to her. Only when the film was released in 1994, 50 years after the crime, did a journalist track down what had happened to the two girls since they were released from jail and discover that Hulme had become the famous crime novelist Anne Perry. (Hulme/Perry was played by Kate Winslett in the film.) According to the film and to the trial at a time, the two friends were in love and killed the mother because they were about to be separated; once "outed," as it were, as a murderer, Perry was apparently most upset at the accusations of lesbianism, and this is the piece of the revealed history that she disputes, which maybe has something to say about the gratuitous homophobia at the end of The Cater Street Hangman. (See the New Zealand Herald News article title, "We were not lesbians.") It was a brutal killing; they hit the woman on the head with a brick and expected her to die right away, but when she didn't, they hit her 45 times to kill her. All of this is notably missing in the "About Anne Perry" section on the author's own website! (There's an interesting discussion of this authorial history and the usefulness or lack thereof of biographical criticism here, although be warned that it includes spoilers for her 1997 novel Breach of Promise.)

All of this information totally, totally freaked me out, following as it did within an hour of my finishing reading Perry's first novel. I had trouble sleeping last night, I'm sure in part because of being weirded out the whole afternoon and evening. In a move I recognize as irrational, I feel guilty for having enjoyed a novel written by a murderer. I had been going to read some more of her work, but now I'm not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, she paid her debt to society, serving 5 1/2 years in prison (and not a juvenile detention either, but an adult prison); plus she had tuberculosis and was taking medicine that has since been shown to be mood-altering; plus she's become a devout Mormon and believes in repentance and forgiveness. On the other hand ... OMG!!

And you know, I'm supposed to believe in repentance and forgiveness also, so I've been thinking about why I'm so freaked out about this information about Perry's past. And I think the key point for me is that it blurs my careful boundaries between actual crime and fictional crime. I used to worry about what it said about me that I loved to read murder mysteries; why would I read enjoy fictional accounts of something I'd condemn in real life. But I came to understand that what I love about mystery fiction is that it's about re-establishing morality, decency, and the rule of law after these have been assaulted by evil. It's no coincidence that I don't like noir fiction, which highlights one further depravity in an already depraved world; no, I like orderly crime fiction, in which the world is brought around right -- or at least closer to right -- by the end. It's actually very moral fiction, really, and thus far from actual murder.

... unless one is Anne Perry, I guess, and that breakdown of my nice solid wall between real crime and fictional crime is, I think, what has me so freaked out. I also find it very strange, given her past, that she has spent most of her adult life dwelling in the world of murder. But maybe writing mystery fiction, with its morality and its punishment of crime, has been a form of redemption for her? I'm tempted to read another of her novels and test myself for my own reactions as I read; and I'm also tempted never to pick up another of her novels at all! We shall see what happens.

The trials of pursuing mental health

The Summer of Health is going well but is rather exhausting thus far, with today the hardest of all. Wednesday afternoons are my weekly appointment with Dr. Avuncular, my new therapist. I like him so far, in part because he's avuncular (hence the name) and because he's conversational; indeed, I think he'd like to be more conversational, but I've been talking, talking, talking for our four sessions thus far.

Today we had the big Family-of-Origin talk, which means I talked a lot about my mother. Always hard, and for some reason particularly hard today. We talked about that internalized voice, the one that makes everything a moral test that I've failed, the one that says I'm never good enough, the one that says I'm an ongoing disappointment. As I said to Dr. Avuncular, I'm actually not even sure that my mom really thinks these things; in fact, I'm pretty sure she doesn't think them as often as I think them in her voice. It's really that I've so internalized her disapproval over the years that my inner voice is probably far more critical and negative than she is. Dr. Avuncular asked me how long I anticipated feeling responsible for trying to please her and live up to her impossible standards, and I said, "Until she dies. No, maybe longer than that." And then I burst into tears. All very draining.

I've certainly talked all about this in therapy before, back in Grad School City, 9 years or so ago. But since then, a few things have changed, especially the fact that my brother and I seem to have switched places in my mom's eyes; he's now the Good Kid, and I'm the Bad Kid, since apparently my mom always needs one of each. Mostly this happened because he produced grandkids for her and I didn't. It's totally his turn to be appreciated in the family (if one accepts that there can only be one of each, which of course I reject), but I think I haven't properly grieved the loss of that Good Kid status, and I keep trying to get it back and of course failing. Hence my pathological need for more and more "gold stars" in life.

So now I have homework for next week (although he's very cool about not imposing things and says I should consider doing this homework if I think it's helpful and that next week we can talk about how it felt, whether or not I did it); every morning and every night I'm supposed to look into the mirror and say something to the effect of, "I hear your voice loud and clear, Mother, and I appreciate everything you've tried to do for me, but I'm an adult now and can make my own decisions about my way forward." I'm not looking forward to this homework, but I do think that letting go of the need for more and more gold stars would be a major step forward for me, so I will do it.

What's irritating about all of this is that I totally understand the entire situation intellectually -- I can talk about generational patterns, I can explain my own behavior in light of family dynamics, etc. -- but that isn't the same as being able to let go of these destructive patterns. And that space between what I know intellectually and what I feel emotionally is totally annoying to me!

As you can imagine, it was a very difficult conversation with Dr. Avuncular. I left feeling kind of shaky and indulged in some retail therapy -- I bought a hose-winder and lightbulbs at the hardware store, so not exactly out-of-control retail therapy -- and then I ate french fries, and then I went to the library, and then I bought myself Oreos (although only the smaller box of 12 cookies, because I didn't want to be too self-destructive), and still I spent most of the evening feeling kind of upset. It was only when one of our cats hopped up on my lap and started doing that kneeding thing on my stomach that I relaxed and felt comforted.

So now I'm going to go do my therapy homework and then recover by taking myself off to bed at 9:30 to read a little; maye the cats will curl up with me as well, which will be comforting. And D. will be home from work pretty soon and will give me a smooch. And by next week, I should be fortified enough by the goodness of my life to be able to wade into these mental health waters once again.

In which I suck so far but have hope for the future

Okay, it's been ten days since I announced publicly (if pseudonymously) that I was writing a mystery and buckled down to work. Based on this vast experience, I can now make several pronouncements:

(1) I'm not an instantaneous literary genius. It sucks, but there it is. I've spent a lot of time sitting around thinking, "I don't know what to write; I have nothing to say; I have no ideas." This has not been fun; indeed, there have been moments of downright discouragement.

(2) I may have made a mistake deciding to use a historical person about whom little is known as my main character, because I seem absolutely paralyzed thus far in giving her any particular characteristics at all. I can kind of see my sidekick character, who is entirely fictional, but the main character remains a big blank, and whenever I do try out a characteristic for her, she seems boring, which can't be a good thing for a protagonist. I don't know if the problem is that (a) I can't yet wrap my head around just making stuff up, or (b) I chose a boring person as my main character, or (c) both of the above. It's not clear to me what to do about this; if I abandon this main character, then there's really no point to my having chosen this particular historical period and this particular setting. I like my secondary character better, but I'm afraid if I unmoor her from the main character, then she'll go in a direction that will make her far too much like the protagonist of a mystery series I've read and liked (one set a good 40 years later, but in the same city), and that clearly will not do at all. No, these people must be original creations, but maybe I'm no good at coming up with original creations, which is the sort of thing I've had no call to do in my years of academic writing.

(3) So I've been retreating back to the known quantity, in which I've done vast amounts of background reading and have gone back and forth endlessly about whether I want to set the novel in 1855 or 1858, a decision that will have no bearing at all on the plot or characterization. But since I'm stuck on both plot and characterization, whereas there's a good deal to be read about the years 1855 and 1858, I've been spending time on the latter. You may be interested to know that I'm leaning toward the earlier date, which is about all that I've accomplished in the past three days. Also, it turns out that there are almost no mystery series set in the 1850s -- Miriam Grace Monfredo's series beginning in the late 1840s is the only one I've found, and I have just been re-reading the first book, Seneca Falls Inheritance, and remembering that I didn't like it very much, which is why I never went on to read the others -- so either everyone else knows something I don't and is wisely avoiding this historical moment like the plague, or I've actually had the good fortune to come up with something new. Hard to tell. (If I wanted to write a medieval mystery series, on the other hand, I'd be in plentiful company.)

(4) Making no progress at all on the writing front, I naturally decided that what I needed was to find blogs by mystery writers so as to properly immerse myself in the writing world. First things first, right? How can I write a mystery properly if I'm not reading mystery-writer blogs? One interesting thing I've found is that there are all of these group blogs out there by handfuls (which I know should be "handsful," but that sounds weird) of mystery writers, clearly with an eye toward promotion of their work.

(5) Following a suggestion by someone or other -- perhaps one of the blogs or the books I'm reading about how to write a mystery -- I checked out Linda N. Edelstein's The Writer's Guide to Character Taits, hoping to decide on my characters' "types" so that I could start moving past problem #2 above. But I must be doing something wrong, or reading it in the wrong mood, or something, because all of the character types either seem absolutely bland or distinctly unpleasant, either of which is a problem in that my protagonists need to be likeable enough that readers care about them. I'll look again in the morning and will perhaps have a different view.

So mostly I suck at mystery-writing so far. But tonight I had a possible insight and have formulated a two-part plan for the morrow:

(6) On the one hand, trying to write something completely different from what I'm used to is causing me problems (see point #2 above), but on the other hand, I think that tackling writing in a different way may also be causing me problems. There are certainly some really good things about Karen Weisner's program (in First Draft in 30 Days) that I've been trying to follow, but I think her approach of planning and outlining everything before beginning to write may also be causing me some problems. I've never been able to outline my work before I start, and over the years I've worked out a method that is doubtless inefficient but seems to work for me -- I write before I'm ready (a la Robert Boice), and then do a partial outline, and then write some more, and then do another outline, and so on and so on.

So maybe I should try being as inefficient at writing a mystery as I am at academic writing, and just start writing before I'm ready. Maybe my characters will seem more interesting if I actually start writing about them instead of trying to decide before writing what they should be like. And maybe this work will all seem more interesting if I'm actually writing.

(7) Also, I've had it with spending my days fretting over this novel. "Apply butt to chair" is all very well, but one must also move around a little to keep the blood flowing to one's extremities. And I tend to write much better when I've got limited time for it, when I sit down and work really hard for an hour or two and am then done for the day and move on to other things. This issue will be taken out of my hands at the end of next week, when I'm beginning a three-week summer school stint that will have me busy every weekday morning, but why not adopt a schedule now in which I work hard for no more than a couple of hours?

So that's my new plan, starting tomorrow: Just dive in and start writing, allowing the planning to accompany rather than precede the composition, and work only a couple of hours a day.

I'll report back.

Day 0 and 1 -- sketching plot and character

And I'm off! The mystery is beginning to take shape!

I had decided this weekend that today would be my official Day 1 of the "30 days until completed outline" program, but that I'd give myself yesterday to get a little headstart -- hence the "Day 0."

The lovely thing about yesterday was that I knew I'd be stuck in a room with few distractions, including no computer and no internet, for two hours in the afternoon. Yesterday was the opening faculty meeting (tedious) and the open house for the three-week summer program I'm teaching in, starting next Thursday. I knew from last year's experience that "open house" meant I'd sit in my classroom (the same one as last year -- hurrah for a good room!) for a couple of hours and have just a handful of kids and their parents stop by and otherwise have plenty of time to kill.

So while I was sitting around from 4:00 to 6:00 yesterday, I sketched out my plot! I've been having a lot of problem figuring out the murder itself -- which, after all, is the centerpiece of a murder mystery -- since there really just aren't that many good reasons to kill someone when you get right down to it. So I finally broke down and did the sort of thing I tell my students to do (funny how these things work out) -- I got a big piece of paper and drew character maps of my sleuth and her sidekick and figured out all of the ways in which their lives might intersect. And pretty soon I was thinking of a third character they both might know, and then I was thinking of whom that character might know, and pretty soon I had a complicated relationship that could lead to murder, and I'd even figured out why the murder occurred. Then this morning I thought about the twist that keeps everyone involved from immediately knowing who the murderer is.

I'm finding this exciting! Once I had the crime in mind last night, all of this started seeming very real, as though I could at least write a terribly bad mystery, whereas last week I was afraid that I could write a description of the setting and characters but wouldn't be able to figure out anything for the characters to actually DO.

So today, Monday, was officially Day 1, which is the "Character Sketch Day" in the Wiesner system I'm following. So here's the character list thus far:

My sleuth -- needs some more characterization; she's not as real to me as many of the other characters (perhaps because she's a historical person and I thus feel more restrained in giving her characteristics?)

Her sidekick and fellow sleuth -- now has a name and motivation, and I'm feeling very excited about her! It even occurred to me today that she could become the main sleuth, with the historical person as the sidekick. This bears more thinking about.

The police detective -- Yep, I've got a police detective who's the love interest for the sidekick -- tried (trite?) but true for the good reason that it's a mechanism that works well; but this romantic tension is one reason to keep the sidekick in the secondary role, in part because having the lead sleuth in love with a policeman is a little too clichéd even for me.

The victim -- I'm feeling quite pleased about this character, who now has a name and motivation and personal goals and a little background (need to flesh that out some more).

The murderer -- Doesn't have a name, but does have internal and external conflicts

Two other historical characters -- I haven't quite decided how significant a role they'll play -- maybe only background color, really -- but I've done some research on them.

So that's my cast of characters at this point; I'm excited about them! They all need more physical description, mannerisms, etc., but this is the sort of thing that I'll keep adding as they (hopefully) take up residence in my head and become more real to me. And there will be minor characters of course -- one needs all of those false suspects so that the reader doesn't know who the murderer is -- but I feel good about my major list here.

Tomorrow's task is Setting Sketches and Research List, both of which I've already done some work on, and then the rest of the week is fleshing out the plot that I cooked up yesterday afternoon. Yippee!

Let's talk mystery

On Friday night, when I was feeling kind of glum anyway, I watched some bad television (so perhaps there's a chicken-and-egg thing going on here?) and suddenly panicked and thought that I shouldn't even try to write a mystery because it would be so awful to be the author of something that makes people roll their eyes and say, "Wow, that is badly written," which is what I was doing at the TV show. But D. has now promised me that she will faithfully tell me if what I write is dreadful, so I guess I can move forward after all.

Naturally -- or at least, "naturally" given my predispositions -- I'm starting this process by doing my research, both research into my historical setting and research about how to write a mystery in the first place. The two books that are thus far guiding my thinking about how to proceed are Kathy Lynn Emerson's How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and Karen S. Wiesner's First Draft in 30 Days.

Emerson's book includes a lot of material about how to do research, so I'm not learning anything new there, of course, but it's useful to read about what people who aren't scholars do with that research -- especially what they feel free to make up or not make up -- and I'm enjoying reading it.

But it's Wiesner's book that I'm treating as a guide for at least the next month. I should say that her claim of "first draft in 30 days" is predicated on a definition of "first draft" to mean an incredibly detailed outline that includes not only the plot but also characterization and setting. Fair enough, and if I had all of that by mid-July, I'd be a happy camper. She has a companion volume called From First Draft to Finished Novel, so if I find the first volume helpful as I work, I'll get the second as well.

I showed Wiesner's book to a couple of friends, who burst out laughing and said, "Wow, it's charts and schedules; no wonder you're happy. This is your kind of writing manual!" Indeed. And I had a lovely evening earlier this week, typing up all of the charts and schedules and making up a little mystery notebook for my draft. (It was like the first day of school, when assignments are full of promise and haven't yet been soured by my inabilities or ineffeciencies. I always love that day.)

Here's Wiesner's basic schedule:

Days 1-6        Stage 1: Preliminary Outline
Days 7-13      Stage 2: Research
Days 14-15    Stage 3: Story Evolution
Days 16-24    Stage 4: Formatted Outline
Days 25-28    Stage 5: Outline Evaluation
Days 29-30    Stage 6: Revise the Outilne

 

Within some of these stages, there are more detailed schedules. For the first stage, for example, the 6 days are broken down like this:

Day 1: Character sketches
Day 2: Setting sketches and research list
Day 3: Plot sketch
Days 4-5: Summary outline
Day 6: Miscellaneous scene notes and closing scene notes

For each of these days, she has various exercises to do and questions to answer to lead one toward one's characters, settings, etc.

Of course, much as I love being given a schedule, I've already been deviating from it or, more accurately, avoiding starting it. When D. looked at the book and the overall schedule, the first thing she said was, "Ah, limited time for research; that will be a good thing for you." And indeed, Wiesner's theory is that it's better to do research once one knows one's basic characters and plot so that one is researching with specific questions in mind. And certainly I see her point, but darn it, I'm writing a historical mystery with an actual historical person as my sleuth, and there are other actual historical people who will be supporting characters. Plus I need to decide at what point in this historical person's life I'm going to start my series -- and yes, I'm doing some planning for the entire series along with trying to write this first novel, so I need to decide on my starting place. So I've been doing some research this past week as background for the work that Wiesner would have me do in Stage 1.

But I do take the point about limiting research time. Wiesner limits it in part because she herself hates researching so much and assumes that other authors do as well, but of course I LOVE research and could happily spend many, many days reading books while convincing myself that I'm really writing. (One of the things that I like about Emerson's book, on the other hand, is that she clearly thinks that research is oodles of fun and that this is why one would enjoy writing a historical mystery. But she too thinks that one eventually needs to get down to business and start planning and writing.) And indeed, I'm sure that I've been doing so much research as background for the work of Day 1 (character sketches) and Day 2 (setting sketches) so that I can put off for as long as possible Day 3, the plot sketch, the thing I'm afraid I can't do at all. Plus, of course, I'm spending all of this energy on the historical actual people but have only the vaguest of ideas about the fictional people whom I also need for my novel. In other words, having decided to try my hand at fiction, I'm doing my best to avoid all of the ways in which fiction differs from my academic work!

So this morning I've made a decision: I'll give myself today to finish the preliminary research I've been doing this past week and to write up the character and setting sketches for the actual historical people and place. But then, as of Monday morning, I'm starting Wiesner's schedule and am getting down to business, tackling the fictional characters that I'm creating for this novel.

Which means that I've got until Wednesday night to come up with a rough plot. Yikes!

A season ends, another begins

A season ends:

I know I've declared the imminent end of school multiple times in the last couple of weeks, but it has now officially and finally arrived. Yesterday was the final day of end-of-year staff meetings, and last night was the totally rocking end-of-year party. When the students are gone, the adults really let their hair down! Best part -- lots and lots of dancing. I don't honestly know when was the last time I danced, and I had no intention of doing so last night -- I guess if one goes long enough without it, it stops seeming like a real option -- but a friend pulled me onto the dance floor, and once I was there, I had a blast. Honestly I haven't had that much fun in ages. Of course, I'm incredibly out of shape, so I mostly had to sit out every other dance and catch my breath and hang out talking with the non-dancing folks (i.e., men, whereas the dancers were almost entirely women -- of course, that's true of most things at FGS!). And then I'd go back out and dance again. Damn, it was fun.

You know, I used to be a person who would put on music and dance around my apartment by myself just for fun. When did I stop doing that?

Okay, it's true that I had to take Advil last night and that my knees were aching pretty badly when I went to bed, and then this morning I was so stiff from my five hours of eating and drinking and dancing. But by now I feel fine, and a few aches and pains are a small price to pay. Plus my colleagues are so much fun ... or at least the ones who stayed for the party -- kind of a self-selecting crowd, so no surprise that it was the really cool folks who hung out.

And a new season begins:

And then, as of today, summer officially began. So are you surprised at all to hear that my mood went steadily south over the course of the day until I had a short crying session in the bathroom a few minutes ago? Some of this is hormonal, and some of it is my typical response to the sudden loss of structure and externally imposed and validated purpose.

But some of it is also because an email I received today made it clear that I have, once again, offended one of my colleagues in the English department. And this is on top of apparently having (probably only momentarily) ruffled the feathers of another departmental colleague earlier this week. I think I'm no doubt being overly sensitive and getting upset about things that don't warrant it, and I'm sure this week's complications are due mostly to its being the end of the year when we're all tired and fed up with most everything. So I'm trying not to read too much into this latest kerfuffle.

But there are also broader relationships trends at work here. Today I realized that partly this all feels weird because I'm having such a different personnel experience from my last job. At St. Martyr's, my department all came to love me (although in some cases it took over two years, so I should be more patient), and the faculty at large mostly loved me, and only the administration wanted me gone. At FGS, the administration absolutely loves me -- as they've made quite clear, which is a very nice thing indeed in an administration -- and I seem to be pretty popular with the faculty at large (one of the reasons that last night's party was so much fun), and it's only in my own department that I'm considered difficult. Honestly, it's just so strange to be seen as a challenging or even problematic colleague, when I've always been thought of as the go-to gal, the hard-working and gifted person who throws her all into her work, who will help others out and be cheerful and a good friend as well as a good colleague. So it's strange to have some of my department not see me that way at all.

Since I was in a bit of a tailspin about all of this today, I sat myself down and listed out all of my departmental colleagues and my relationships with them and then categorized said relationships (which, yes, is a little anal, but useful). And really, when all is said and done, things aren't so bad. Here's the breakdown:

Good to great relationships: 4 colleagues, i.e., half the department

Complicated relationship that is actually mostly enjoyable and is getting better: my Dead Poets Society colleague, with whom I had the beginnings of a really productive argument on Wednesday in which we spoke our minds frankly about our differing writing pedagogies but did so within parameters of clear respect for each other -- very cool.

Complicated relationship that is sometimes bad and sometimes achieves an uneasy stasis: my department chair

Relationships that are sometimes fine but sometimes distinctly un-fine: 2 colleagues, i.e., a fourth of the department, who happen to be the two that I seem to have offended this week; the one who sent the email is a sweet guy who is SO sensitive that it's very easy to offend him (I've seen it happen with others as well, so it's not just me), and the other is a woman who does not suffer fools gladly and seems to think that most people are fools, so at least I'm in good company in being occasionally spoken to sharply by her.

So really, that's not actually that bad, is it? If we were a college department and didn't actually meet very often, this would all be fairly rosy; I think part of the issue is that I'm still getting closely to working more closely with colleagues and thus experiencing more and more opportunities to rub people the wrong way or be irritated myself. But it's also true that I've worried for awhile that I'm much like a colleague whom I find very irritating, and in scrolling back through my blog posts about school for the year, there seem to be several in which I comment on having spoken up too vociferously in a meeting or having argued with a colleague about something. So maybe I've become a crank who really is unpleasant to work with? Certainly good questions to ask myself, but not tonight, not when I'm already distressed.

One of the reasons I'm upset, I realize, is that I tend to internalize other people's irritation at me and think that maybe I really am a bad, bad person whom no one actually likes and that everything good that's ever happened is undeserved and probably about to be stripped away. In other words, your classic fraud anxiety. So mostly I'm describing it here so that I can see it in black and white, realize it for what it is, and get on with my summer.

Maybe I'm just being very, very efficient and getting all of the emotional turmoil packed into one day so that I'll really enjoy the rest of the summer? And hey, when am I going to get one of those really easy transitions, the kind that cause no emotional repurcussions at all?

Announcing a New Adventure: The Summer of the Mystery

All right, grades and comments are posted, seniors are graduated, and nothing remains except a few faculty meetings this week and the official end-of-year party on Thursday. (I will have to go back a couple of times for the two students who missed finals week, one for a family emergency and one for a medical situation, but those will be minor interruptions.) So we can now officially declare it to be summer in my corner of the world.

That means that the Summer of Health has begun, and indeed I've just gone jogging for the second time this week (and when I say "jogging," I mean jogging for 60 seconds and walking for 90 seconds; I've decided to let the "Couch to 5K" program be my guide in this), have my second appointment later this morning with the Avuncular Dr. D. (my new therapist), and am meeting the appraiser tomorrow morning as part of our refinancing plans. So those Summer of Health plans are progressing nicely for the very first week of summer.

But there's more to this summer than health; there's also work and writing, which has been a source of some self-examination for me recently (as in my post on ambition and goals). And so I now unveil my exciting idea for this summer: I'm going to write a murder mystery.

There, I said it out loud! I've gone public with this crazy idea!

Actually, of course, I should clarify -- I'm going to attempt to write a murder mystery, having never written fiction before and perhaps being entirely unsuited to do so. But if, at the end of the summer, it's clear that I'm just absolutely no good at it, at least I'll know that and can stop fantasizing about doing so.

For years I've played around with ideas for mystery series, which is the one kind of fiction I ever imagined writing. My thought was that this was something I'd try after I was tenured, but then of course my post-tenure life took some unexpected turns. I kept thinking about the idea, and indeed came up with a new idea for a series a couple of years ago while on a museum trip at Rustication Summer School. But still, it was all something that I was going to do someday.

And then, a week and a half ago, as part of my meltdown over money, I was kvetching about spending the summer writing a book that few people would ever read and that would never make any money, and suddenly I thought "Or I could write something that would make money!" And with that, really in just a few minutes from beginning to end, I decided that I would abandon other writing plans for the summer and would instead devote myself to writing the first novel of one of the multiple mystery series I had planned over the years.

I may, of course, not make any money at this ever, because (a) I might totally suck at it, and (b) even if I'm good at it, that doesn't mean I'll get a publisher, and (c) even if by some miracle it got published, it might well not make any money. So I'm going into this with eyes open wide, but at the same time I'm finding it exciting to set about writing something that I hope will be popular, instead of hoping that it will make a contribution to the 10 people who read it, which is how my academic writing proceeded.

So last weekend, when I should have been grading, I was spending several hours in the local Research University library, deciding which of my various ideas to pursue and collecting background materials. Because, yes, all of my ideas are for Historical Mysteries Set in 19th-Century America ... so I'm really not leaving my academic roots all that far behind. I did make a decision last Saturday about which of my series ideas to pursue, and I now have a stack of materials to read, and I've also collected from various libraries and bookstores a stack of "How to Write a Mystery Novel" books, and I'm ready to get started!

All of my ideas are for "cozies," which is my favorite genre to read and the one I feel best suited to write. In the idea that I've decided to pursue, my sleuth is actually a real historical person who had an interesting role in mid-19th-century American culture but about who only the basic facts are known. So I feel a good bit of leeway to create her personality and some facts of her life as I see fit, but I also think that her being a real person will make the series more interesting and more marketable. (See how I've got one eye on marketing here?) And she was in a career path that makes it more reasonable (or at least I can frame it as more reasonable) that she would stumble across dead bodies on a regular basis. And some of the supporting cast of characters -- either the actual people themselves or the roles or categories that the characters would fill -- are essentially handed to me by history. And history also gives me a natural progression for the series.

So that's my summer writing goal: a first draft before school starts! I'll be blogging the mystery this summer and am hoping to really enjoy the process, which is more than I can say about some of the writing I've done.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life

Grades are in -- woohoo! There were times in the last couple of days that I was fretting considerably over whether I was going to make it, but I did ... a full 20 minutes before the deadline, so there you go. Okay, granted I was at work at 6:15 this morning to finish up, but the important thing is the successful meeting of the deadline, not how short on sleep I was in doing so.

And we've had all but one of the formal end-of-year functions. So after graduation tomorrow, I'm mostly a free woman! Still a few faculty meetings next week, but the pressure is over as of this afternoon -- again with the woohoo!

The nice thing about today is that, after this afternoon's function with the seniors, I wound up having dinner with some colleagues and remembering once again how much I like the people I work with.

Speaking of nice things -- I had my formal evaluation meeting this week, and it turns out I'm fabulous! Well, I already knew that of course ;-)  but it's always nice to hear it from one's higher-ups. I was so nervous for a few days ahead of time, a psychological reaction I'd find unaccountable if I weren't fairly sure that it's a reaction from years of higher education evaluations in combination with my own ongoing angst about being good enough. Fortunately, it seems that I am more than good enough. My favorite part was when the head of the high school said that she really couldn't believe that I'd been there only two years, and that she meant that in the best possible way, that I was so much part of the community that it seemed like I'd been there much longer. And I must say I agree, in the best possible way. So life's all good on that front.

(A digression here to note that more than one academic friend has expressed worry about my one-year contract, a worry I myself felt until I realized that I essentially got tenure the first time my contract got renewed, and did so with almost no fuss.)

All of which is to say, in the most rambling of manners (must get to bed soon), that as far as I'm concerned, summer officially starts tomorrow, Sunday. Oh sure, there's the wrapping up of the school year yet to come, but little of that takes real concentration on my part. So that means my Summer of Health starts tomorrow as well. I'm actually looking forward to it, which is more than I was feeling earlier this week.

And with that, I must hie my weary body off to bed so that I can start said summer well-rested.

Summer of Health

Okay, I have all of these final exams to grade, which means of course that I'm in major procrastination mode. So here's one of my major summer projects: I'm proclaiming this the WN Summer of Health!

Here's the hope/plan/thought --

• Physical health: My eating spiraled out of control last October (the Halloween candy was not my friend!) and never came back under control, and my exercise habit has petered to a complete zero such that even my used-to-be-standard half-hour walks are no more. I don't want to be old before my time, which means that I need to start prioritizing my health. Unfortunately, this is much more of a goal that I think I should have than one to which I'm deeply committed, which worries me a little about its outcome.
• Mental health: I had a first appointment with a new therapist today; I'm calling him the Avuncular Dr. D., and I think it has a pretty good chance of working out. We shall see.
• Spiritual health: God and I need to get square, and I'm thinking this is the summer to start doing my part. I'm back to combing Adventure City to find a parish, and I'm also thinking of finding a spiritual director.
• Financial health: After last week's money meltdown, I decided that I need to get my act together and find an investment counselor (or whatever they call themselves) and that this was the summer to make that happen. I've also taken on a course overload in the fall (to cover a colleague's maternity leave), which is going to be absolutely exhausting but will bring in a nice chunk o' change, and I'll be making some extra cash this summer thanks to various irons I have in the fire. Plus D and I have a meeting tomorrow morning to do the paperwork for refinancing our mortgage to take advantage of the even lower interest rates right now. So this seems like a good time to do some long-term planning and put some systems into place so that I don't feel so anxious about money so much of the time. I know that financial health may seem out of place with physical, mental, and spiritual health, but I see the former as reducing my stress levels so that I have more energy for the latter three elements.

So that's the summer ahead. I have a clearer path for the mental and financial health components and feel fairly unmotivated about the physical health goal and sort of so-so about the spiritual health piece of this. There will be further reports as I start pursuing each of these.

There's one other summer goal, but writing about that will have have to wait until later this week, because the next order of business is to tackle those blue books. Summer can't start until grades and comments are posted.