Started novel writing for day and I’m restless, after one cup unfocused but evermore focused after seeing the house that could our house, yesterday. Have to get through the student papers– frustrated by all the typos I’m committing. And I write with a certain sharp indignant tongue about me. The novel, the novel!! Should have woken at FIVE as I did yesterday but I guess I needed the sleep, or my actual physical did so is that what I should be mad at? Can’t write here long.. can’t disregard what I want, and the 4/20 deadline of posting the novel, 60k words, either on some ebook host or on the blog, right here.. but how would I charge for it, then? Too many thoughts making my thoughts noxious and dreadfully disseminated. Okay.. PEACE, and I try to establish that Wellness that my friend Phoebe writes of.. need to write her another letter, one soliciting methods perhaps, but no.. that won’t help, I know who I am and any vice I have should be accepted and Self-studies as character evidence.
The adjunct thinks of anything, anything to put off grading. IF that’s been my practice and mentality for all these adjuncting years that should say something, right? Granted, over the last year and a half or so I’ve made it, the grading steps, more digestable, even enjoyable with my new rubrics. But still, I don’t see myself doing that, grading, reading forced efforts, for the rest of a theorized career. And that’s what being an adjunct is, theorization and a forced realization that it’s a job, or career, or anything dependable or steady.
Just injected a little more to the novel, fictionalizing what’s around me, in front of me.. the toys and the cartoons, the Easter basket Jack forcibly deconstructed. Ugh.. don’t want to grade later. All that time I spend on the movement of a red pen or whatever color I have on hand could be spent with these keys, with the novel..
Jack moves everything to my right, contributing tirelessly to a mounting pile of things, of makebelieves and stories he’s translating for me but I can’t quite understand his sentences but I listen intently anyway. This is the part of parenting I find most fascinating, his accumulation of toys, yes, but convictions and ideas. How he thinks and starts projects and ALWAYS finishes. He appears done in piling his toys and other objects; balls and blocks, buckets and those toys keys he’s had since six months old, when he’d put them in his mouth and move them around, laughing. So, in his spirit of completion habit I have to finish this novel– 3618 words every day till it’s done. And I have to edit along the way, too, as when that last page is finished, it goes up. So I end this entry.. off to novel.. no more wasting words and efforts.. not that this is a waste, I just have work to do….. Finish all.
Afternoon
Been dying to get to keys, and I’ve decided, reader, to contribute to the Massamen novel progressively but strip the deadline. As I have no money, no budget to print, and throw at blogs or other media ventures I neither have the time for a novel. I can’t write 3200+ words a day just for the book, a single book– rather, I’ll be with short fictive efforts, as my Mom has long said I should do. I’m on the floor now with the dishwasher running, sliding glass door slightly open so I can smell and hear and feel the rain, then coffee and two of the cookies from last night also left, on floor next to phone. I need collect Self, and realize that I have neither time nor money for anything extended. When I have my own office then I can dedicate 3200 words at a time to a book, but now, I’m like a songwriter, a musician, the poet needing to hustle through standalone pieces to read and perform. And I feel freer admitting such to mySelf.
Not grading done yet and who cares. It’s Easter, and I need a day. I need DAYS. Not at winery tomorrow but I will have certain tasks to accomplish around house. Not sure I’m running today, again I realize and admit to my own ears but tomorrow I will run and I’m thinking around 6.2, maybe 7, or maybe I’ll just go for an hour, hard as I can. Coffee now on right, cookies remain left, and only two. First bite, reminding me of Paris and what it was like to have such little treats there, walking with my family down Champs-Élysées, or Montparnasse, or around Île Saint-Louis, I know I have to get back to experience that weather; the rain there is different than what now falls on Yulupa–now interrupted by some sun–and how the wind pushes agains the windows and throws leaves to the ground like they’re inferior rival that won’t do what that wind wants.
Will write a short piece in a minute, but I need to capture what’s here. Yes there’s the dishwasher racket, but otherwise peace, and the prospect of this new home, and all I’m putting into this blog with content and visual, still very much keeping it writing and story-centered, but continuing, and continuing how I want, not how some department chair says I can or simply acting in the confines of some assignment I was given ‘cause that’s the last available.. but that’s my story as an adjunct, and I will after all apply for the Lecturer position at SSU.. and I’ll take what they give me, for material. Tried to log in on the website, but I have no bloody idea what my username nor password were, are. So I’ll call tomorrow, or maybe go by campus.
Rain stops, sun approaching all pieces of environmental makeup with gentle curvatures, and I still sip my coffee, thinking about this new house and the short fiction I’m to write today.. a piece of 100-115 words. The students submit yet more work on Tuesday, their Creative Writing pieces, so I have to get those Hemingway papers back to them. One thing I won’t miss about the adjunct racket, once gone: the grading. And the driving.
Dishwasher quiet. And I hear nothing from little Kerouac upstairs, asleep, in our bed this napping round. The weather starts to speak to my fingers and this session but it doesn’t want to interfere that much, more so looking over my shoulder like I do when I walk up and down isles during inclass writings, making sure they’re writing. I think about my eventual office, what it’ll look like, what I’ll write when there finally and what that will do for my family; how I’ll be read and, again, how Jack will read me once in college, if he reads me at all. But I think he will, as he always sees me writing and I’m sure that record will with him carry to early adulthood, if not further.
No wine tonight. None! I have to stay grounded and focused and wake early for writing, then when J’s at school come home to run; then errands, then MORE WRITING! And in short bursts.. look at old poems, prose pieces, narrations, pieces to be performed.. Beat, Beat.. BEAT! Think I hear Jackie upstairs I hope he’s asleep so I can record more thoughts, is that selfish of me I don’t know but it would be warranted I would think as I AM a writer, and only need the words, no big budget, no rules and certainly no box..
Cookies gone, as is the coffee. Goddamnit. Should I make another cup or have some sparkling water? Water I guess. Don’t want to become immune to my gothic puddles… Getting carried away by thoughts and I don’t know what to write and I stall and stop and frustrate with Self but then a little wind push that may indicate more rain finds way to my fingers, chilling me slightly, softly, and I start again with the types, the semester’s haunt– Wish I could get out of the adjunct cage, see the world, write about it in week-long trips, then come home, share with Ms. Alice and Jack, then go back out in a couple weeks.. stories and images, to hike around Mountains in Alaska like Kevin (my new friend at Arista), and write, scribble all I see and maybe take a still pic here and there, but document, and my theme, what I write “about”.. LIFE. Exploration. Discovery and self-education.. shunning the conventional classroom constraints and contexts.
Parents everywhere can see this, relate to it and smile as I write; the moment when you realize you have a healthy time block to yourself, to do whatever you want; you can sleep, watch a show, read a book, read some trashy pop culture magazine, do your nails, stretch, or just be; or be crazy like me and throw over a thousand words at your blog, your journal, writer writing write write write for your LIFE! I find Wellness, I mean I guess that’s what you’d call it. Forcing myself to 3200+ words a day for a novel I’m not really sure I can write at the moment does not magnetize or promulgate Wellness. I will write that novel, several of them to be sure. But not now. I need pieces rapidly finding their way to my screens. I want my office, I want the Road, I want Jackie to see me a certain way..
