Does It Count As Writing If It's Not On My Novel?

Life gets a little hectic sometimes.  I'm sure we can all say that.  But something that has really cleared up some writing time for me is, and I know this isn't news to anyone, not watching so much TV.  I know intellectually that this is true, but the lure of coming home from a job where I'm paid to think all day, putting on my pajamas, and vegetating in front of the telly is so attractive sometimes that I just give in.  The irony is that, when I do this, I both get less accomplished and also get less sleep.  I can't go to bed until this show ends.  Oops, got interested in the next one.  Well, if I get to bed by 10pm, that's still okay.  Darn, I really like the show coming on next.  Eh, I can take a nap when I get home from work.  How do I nap best?  In front of the tube.  And the cycle continues.  

What's the answer?  Pretty simple, really.  I don't turn on the stupid thing when I get home.  I fool myself.  I know that by saying it out loud I should be able to catch me at it, but I just keep slipping it past me.  I say to myself that if I get the work done that I have set aside for the evening, then I can go watch for a bit.  It's like the old do-your-homework-before-you-may-watch-TV trick that parents have been using for decades, except I'm doing it to myself and I'm happy to report that I fall for it every time.  And the best part is that I almost never end up going down to the basement at all because I invariably find something better to do when my work is done, like a good book or even just going to bed early.  So, aside from keeping the dishwasher emptied and the cat litter cleaner and the laundry kept up and all the other domestic chores that I never seemed to have time for before, I'm not continually behind on grading, and, best of all, I actually am finding time to write.

That brings up the question referenced in the title.  Because I do have to grade quite a few papers, I only have an hour or so to write on most days--if I'm lucky--and, frankly, I'm not always feeling the novel.  I have nothing compelling to say about Harry and Dee tonight, but I might have a poem in me, and I really wanted to get this blog off my mind before it burned a hole in the back of my head and ruined my best sweater.  So, my fellow writers, is writing writing?  I know of a lot of authors who say that they have a goal of so many words or pages a day or per week.  Does that only mean on their primary project at the time and anything else is gravy?  Or is writing a well-crafted blog post or a heartfelt poem about my salad days just as noble and worthy of being counted as my writing for the day?  

I know there aren't any rules on this except those we impose on ourselves.  I'm just curious how some other folks feel and what you do.  I love to write.  I just don't always love to write the novel I'm currently working on.  Many nights I do, but sometimes, like tonight, I want to do something else.  And I'm okay with that.      

Tribute To a Man Who Died Too Young

Ralph Board was only 58 years old when he died suddenly.  All of his friends, former students, and colleagues share in a stunned, wide-eyed horror at how he could just be here one day and gone the next. His loss reminds us all of the importance of valuing every second, for not one more is guaranteed. And it also cautions so many of us who have been less than diligent about keeping in touch with loved ones just how vital it is that we not be so derelict because we never know when the last thing we say to someone will indeed be the last thing we say to him or her.  

I worked for and with Ralph for his entire tenure at PHS. In fact, I was on the committee that hired him. Frankly, there were some who didn't like him or appreciate his leadership style.  Even more frankly, I was sometimes among the people who questioned his decisions. But that is hardly an indictment of the man. No principal, or leader of any kind, will please all of the people any of the time. Sometimes he made decisions with which I didn't agree. But those were policies, not matters of morals or ethics, something about which he and I definitely agreed.

I learned early on in my time with him that he was on my side. I had been accused of something I didn't do by a student with an axe to grind. He could have thrown me under the bus, but he believed me. I was fortunate in that the student's story was a weak one and involved another student who was as puzzled by the accusation as I was, but the point is that Ralph advocated for me to the board office and the situation, one that could have turned ugly had it gone further, was dealt with quietly and without any damage to my reputation. Sadly, I'm not sure I ever told him how much I appreciated that.

Another thing that no one ever questioned was that Ralph Board was a Big Red through and through. To have been hired as the principal of his alma mater was, he regularly made clear, one of the proudest moments of his life. Every student who went through the doors of our school knew what Ralph's favorite saying was.   That slogan was more than just a group of words to him. To him, PHS was a close-knit community made up of everyone who had ever attended or worked there, and the members of that community should take care of each other. He lived those beliefs daily.

I didn't realize how much Ralph's death had affected me until I tried to talk about it this morning with my first period class and struggled to choke back tears. Though I rarely saw him since he changed jobs, when we did run into each other, his greeting was always genuine and warm; it saddens me to think I'll never shake his hand again, or hear him say those immortal words:

ONCE A BIG RED, ALWAYS A BIG RED.

Poem Inspired By Memories of Autumns Past

I've had this poem simmering in my brain for the entire Thanksgiving break.  I can't put a year on the event I recount, but I can guess it was between 1975 and 1979.  I can say for sure it was a Monday. Deer hunters will know why.

This is dedicated to my family, especially to those who've passed away: Uncle Mike, Uncle Pete, and cousin Bruce--Stick Stephens himself.  Oh, how I miss them and can't wait to see them again.

Deer Hunting on Uncle Mike’s Farm

Lounging comfortably on the cool earth,

My back resting against the perfectly curved trunk of a grand White Pine,

A pump 12-gauge shotgun sitting across my legs,

My seat a thick carpet of soft, fragrant needles.

The rich, fresh scent overwhelms my nose,

A sigh escapes, a smile plays across my face.

The sky, dark and foreboding this morning,

Has cleared to a brilliant, blinding blue,

Though my view is all but blocked by branches.

Lunch

(replete with coffee, sandwiches, homemade cookies, and laughter)

is over.

Time to sit until dark, quiet, unmoving,

Hoping for but dreading what I hope will and won’t happen.

In the distance to my left I hear the occasional lowing of contented cows.

Straight ahead, high on a hill across the valley,

Barely visible through the newly leafless trees,

Is my great uncle Mike piling up firewood

In preparation for the coming winter.

The rhythmic clicking of log against log is my lullaby;

I drowse in and out of sleep as the dappled sunlight warms my face and soul.

In the lovely woods all around me are my family

—dad, uncle, brother, cousins—

Waiting.

Alert for movement.

Hoping to slay the biggest buck.

The sun drops near the tree line.

Shadows lengthen.

A squirrel barks overhead.

The air, bereft of light, chills.

I fish my toboggan, 

Blaze orange, crocheted by the precious hands of my mom,

From my coat pocket and pull it down over my ears.

The damp, cold ground filters through the needles,

My bum has grown numb.

Almost time to call it a day.

Peanut butter and jelly on white bread,

Dunked into steaming bowls of spicy venison chili,

Wait at home, warm and welcoming.

I think but would never say aloud,

Please God, don’t let a deer come by. 

What the Hey is a Gwawdodyn?

I discovered a poetic form with which I was completely unfamiliar while reading my most recent edition of Writer's Digest.  It's called a gwawdodyn, which is a Welsh poem made up of as many quatrains as you want with an interesting meter and rhyme scheme.  The first, second, and fourth lines rhyme and contain nine syllables while the third line contains an internal rhyme and is ten syllables long.  In another version, the rhyme in the third line is not at the end of the line and rhymes with the end sounds in the other three lines.  I liked the form, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I think I cheated a little on mine.  The sample given in the magazine had the internal rhyme on the fifth and tenth syllables, whereas I just put it wherever I could get it to fit.  I also carried thoughts from one stanza to the next.  But it's a poem.  What fun is it if you don't break a rule now and then?

Here it goes:

Gwawdodyn About Poetry

Inspired by Billy Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry”

by Joe Stephens

“I’m bad at poetry,” they all say.

"Studying poems makes a bad day.

Must you make student life so full of strife,

By torturing us with rhymes this way?"

“But poems,” I say, “are like language

Concentrate.  And besides what damage

Can I do to your psyche? It’s likely

You’ll thank me someday when you manage

To read a poem and see the light.

The words will leap up and take such flight

In your mind’s eye if you will simply try

To let them soar—don’t hold them too tight.”

Once in while I see a wee glimmer,

But mostly their eyes remain dimmer.

I hope that someday they all find their way

To finding joy in each word’s shimmer.

The Obligatory Thanksgiving Post

To paraphrase the great philosopher Frank Burns, you can't swing a dead cat on the blogosphere without hitting a "What-I'm-Thankful-For" blog entry this time of year.  Since it might be required by law, I feel like I ought to write one myself.  The problem I've had lately, though, is an attitude of ingratitude.

People who really know me--I mean really know me, and I can count those people on one hand--know that I'm going through the darkest time of my life right now. For reasons I don't share with anyone but family and extremely close friends, my personal life is in complete upheaval.  Most of the time I'm able to put on a funny face and carry on like life is normal.  But it isn't.  I am relatively certain it will never be normal again in the way it has been since I was in college.  It may become a new normal, even a good normal, someday, but it I feel pretty strongly that the old normal is over.  And, on many levels, that breaks my heart.  

And that brokenness is manifesting itself in one very specific way.  I am normally the biggest of Christmas nuts.  I start playing Christmas music secretly in October and publicly the first week of November. And I have listened to some, but I find myself more and more opting for non-holiday music.  Or even silence. But I can't take the silence for too long because it starts my brain churning and makes my stomach hurt. The thought of Christmas just makes me feel a little ill. I want to just skip over it. I don't mind the time off of school, but even that has its drawbacks. Spare time leads to too much time to think.  To think about how my life isn't what it should be and I'm not the person I should be and how I'm disturbed by the thought that I'm coming to peace with those concepts. I guess I'm saying I suck and am learning to be okay with that. 

And yet, I am reminded, pretty much daily, through my devotions and my family and my friends from church and by God, that I have more to be thankful for than I could fit in a book or even a library, let alone a single blog entry. So I'll just talk about a few that come to mind right now.  Let me say that, though it won't be a category unto itself, my relationship with Christ is shot through all of them.  Without my faith, I have no idea where I would be now.

First is my family. When I say family, I mean biologically and those who choose to be. I can't stop thanking God that my parents, both nearly 80, are in great health. I can't adequately express how much that means to me.  I also have siblings I love so much, and I'm happy to say that they love me back. Finally, there are a couple people, and they know who they are, who are family because they've chosen to love me and be there for me. I'm truly thankful for these people who have been such a support in my time of need.

I am also thankful for my health. I'm trying to convince myself to stop taking this for granted and be more proactive about keeping myself healthy. I know I'm at that age when I can go one of two ways--toward staying young and vital or toward old age and sickness. I want the first one and, to a great extent, I'm in charge of which path I take. I think the height of thankfulness would be not to waste that for which I am grateful.

Finally, I am thankful for being one of those oddballs who has a job he absolutely loves.  Two jobs, actually, though I've only ever gotten paid for one of them. As a teacher, I'm so blessed to spend my working hours with people who make me so happy. And I get the privilege of being able to make a positive impact on their lives. May I never take that for granted. Beyond that, I've rediscovered a passion for writing that lay dormant for decades. Even if I never get published (Though it wouldn't be terrible if that headlines my thankful list next year at this time!), writing has helped me deal with life by temporarily escaping it while spending time in a world of my making, a world that makes a lot more sense than the real one does. 

I could go on for a few hundred more pages, but I fear this has gone on too long already. Thanks to those of you who've made it all the way to the end. I really do appreciate it. 

I Got a New Office

As I write this, I realize the title is kind of a lie.  It's not like I've relocated or anything like that; it's just that I never had a place in my house that I used as my office, my writing nook, my lair.  Lair.  I like that.  Makes it sound like I'm a superhero.

Be that as it may, I used to write wherever the mood struck me.  Sometimes it was the living room, but it felt like public space, not like a place to hunker down and write. Others, it was the basement, though my 73-inch television often talked me into watching it instead.  It's like having a movie theater in your house--how do you not watch it when it's right there?  Once in a while, I would try the dining room table, but the chairs were designed by the Marquis de Sade and made my cheeks go to sleep in about twelve seconds.

Much of the time where I ended up writing was nowhere in the house at all.  One of my favorite spots has always been the little back corner at Panera Bread.  But, though I've never tried it, I have to think they would prefer that people at least buy a drink before coming in and hogging their Wi-Fi.  Even if they didn't say anything, I don't think I could do it without feeling too guilty to work.  And being an as-yet unpaid writer, I can't really afford to pay for the privilege yet.  Sadly, I often don't stick to coffee there either.  Have you ever tried not to eat there?  One does not simply walk into Panera without gaining a pound or two.

Another favorite spot, where I didn't feel guilty about using free wireless without buying anything was the Wood County Library.  Problem with that place, though, is not only do they not sell good coffee (or any coffee for that matter), but they don't even let me bring in a bottle of water.  I'm a bit weird about drinking from a public fountain.  I'll do it, but I won't like it.  I'm friends with the director; maybe I could talk him into installing a coffee shop. Or maybe I could just check books out of the library like a normal person.

I've had a room in my house that's been called the study or, alternately, the office since my wife and I moved in.  It has a whole wall of shelves with cabinets on the bottom.  Truthfully, the room is what sold me on the house.  I always felt like it would be a perfect place to work.  We even kept our desktop computer in there on a pretty substantial computer desk back before desktop computers gave way to laptops and tablets.  Eventually, it seemed silly to have that big desk that took up so much space in what was really a small room, made smaller by one whole wall being bookshelves.  So I sold the desk for a song and the room basically became storage.

But now I feel like I've turned a corner.  I cleaned out the clutter and many of the books that were just taking up space, with no chance I would ever even look at them.   Now I have a chair and ottoman with a reading lamp where I read and do my devotions every morning.  And in the opposite corner, I converted one end of the bookshelves into a little desk by taking out one of the shelves and adding a bracket.  Unlike the hulking computer desk that used to take up half of the room, this place feels like it was always here.  It fits.  It's part of the space instead of taking up space.  It's the exact right size and exact right location.  It's Goldilocks.  I find myself coming here in the evenings instead of crashing on the couch in front of the idiot box.  I grade papers here.  And I'm writing my first blog entry here. I've read so much about writers making a place to write.  I thought it was hooey.  It's not hooey.  Because I have an often time-intensive job, I haven't had much chance to write lately, but I feel like now, I'll make an effort to work it in since I have this place.  This room is my retreat. My writing nook.  My lair.

Review for THE MARRIAGE PLOT

I thought it had only been a week or two since my last entry.  Imagine my surprise when I opened the site to find it has been in excess of a month. This is what happens in the life of a school teacher/writer.  In the summer, I'm a writer/school teacher, but come late August, those two occupations change seats, at least for a while until I get my sea legs under me, so to speak.

I've been so busy with school that it took me several weeks to work through a book I would polish off in a matter of a few days during the summer break.  Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot was worth the wait.

I actually received the book as a door prize at a teacher conference over the summer.  There were several titles from which to choose, but I was drawn to this for two reasons. First, I'd heard a rave review from a colleague of Middlesex, Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize winning earlier work. Second, according to the blurb on the back, it hearkened back to the thoughtful yet romantic plots of Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Upon reading, I found that assessment to be bordering on true.  I heard echoes of Austen, but faint ones. She's certainly invoked regularly enough, in that the protagonist of the book, Madeleine Hanna, is writing her senior thesis on the marriage plot as popularized by female novelists like Austen and George Eliot.

As in many of those novels of old, the plot circles around a love triangle between Madeleine and two of her schoolmates, Leonard Bankhead and Mitchell Grammaticus.  Both men are deep thinkers, though Leonard seems to have the greater appeal to women in that he's seen as dark and brooding.  Turns out he's struggling with powerful mental illness.  Mitchell, on the other hand, is more socially awkward, though equally brilliant.

Not surprisingly, she chooses the ruminative Leonard over the somewhat socially inept Mitchell.  Her choice, as seems obvious early on, is nothing short of disastrous.  While I had great sympathy for Leonard and his losing battle with a disease that was ravaging his mind, I never got to a point where I really liked him on any level.  But I may be bringing too much baggage to the story that makes it harder for me to be completely sympathetic to his plight.

It feels like Eugenides wants us to root for Mitchell and Madeleine.  Even their names are cutely alliterative. When the inevitable happens, we're expecting Maddie to turn to the much more well balanced if somewhat less romantic Mitchell, which she does, though, in keeping with 21st century sensibilities, it's not that simple. The ending might well be what Austen would have written if she were working today instead of in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

One word of warning.  Have your phone or a computer on hand to look stuff up.  The vocabulary is at times challenging, as are the seemingly endless references to philosophies, philosophers, and esoteric social movements.  Especially in the sections of the book that concentrate on Mitchell, a religion major with an extremely philosophical bent, who spends a lot of time contemplating the meaning of life, the world, and the relationship between humanity and the divine.   I'm pretty well read on a relatively broad array of subjects, but there were times I felt a little ignorant. I did learn some things, though.    

I recommend this book.  Set in the 1980s, a time in which I did a lot of growing up, it rang true to that time period.  The characters felt real, genuinely struggling to cope with a turbulent time in their lives as well as a time of great social change.  One thing it did have that Austen never did was a small amount of graphic sexual activity, though it was quite a small amount, along with some strong language.  It didn't keep me from enjoying the book, but it's nice to know going in for those of a more delicate nature than my own.

Enjoy, and if you do read it, get in touch so we can talk about it!