Delia Marshall Turner's Blog, page 14

Paperback writer

I just spent a couple of days formatting The Stick Princess for paperback on Amazon, and after spending about two days reinserting all my italics and figuring out how to make a table of contents that isn’t automatic, I clicked publish. The book should be out within three days, but I’ll let you know when it’s live in case you want to buy a hard copy. It costs more, largely because of printing cost, but I know I’d rather read a physical book in bed at night than read on my phone. Also, a friend wanted to have a complete set for her bookshelf, and that makes sense to me too. Or it would make a great Christmas present.

As I re-read the manuscript, I found myself thinking, “Well, this is readable,” which was encouraging considering when I generally finish writing and press “publish” I immediately realize my latest book is the most appalling bucket of pablum ever to be put into words. Considering I taught sixth grade English for ten years, you may infer that I lack a certain sense of proportion. That, I gather, is normal for writers. One must be grandiose enough to think someone else might want to read what we write, and at the same time convinced of our inner despicability to the point where we want to go out back and make a bonfire of our books.

Here’s a question for you: What should I start working on next? I have three manuscripts drafted: A collection of short stories, a collection of 365 writing prompts/first lines that I plan to illustrate, and a novel about an English teacher who ends up foster-parenting an escaped guardian of the Underworld.

The Stick Princess is HERE.

A writer I follow on Twitter posted the question, “What’s the equivalent of ‘break a leg’ for an author? ‘Crack a spine’?”

I responded that the appropriate message is, “The pits of despair are not of infinite depth, don’t worry.”

To wit, yesterday, after months of revision and a ferocious last-minute scrubbing of the remaining typos that somehow clung on, I gathered my manuscript for The Stick Princess (Ways of Magic Book 3), inserted the chapter headings, formatted the whole thing, uploaded it as a Kindle book to Amazon, and promptly decided it is unreadable and has obvious flaws that I somehow missed. I have already reformatted and re-uploaded it once and will doubtless do it again at some point.

I remind myself I did not do it because the book was perfect. Instead, the book was finished, and I have proven to myself with my earlier books that the pits of despair post-publication are relatively shallow and evaporate quickly in the sun, especially if I move on to the next project fairly quickly.

I also published it because, despite it all, one purpose of telling stories is to tell them to other people. That has never been my first priority; I have always told my stories to myself, and I am my main audience.

And the last reason I published was that people kept asking me if I was ever going to write Book 3, because they liked the other books, so here you go. It’s a present.

I enjoyed reading it, so maybe you will too

You can buy my books.

Nameless Magery and Of Swords and Spells were published by Random House in the late 90s, and last year I got the rights back and published them on Kindle, just because I could. The Stick Princess, the third book, will be out soon.

Family care

In these pandemic times, I watch my adorable grandchild two days a week. That wasn’t actually the plan.

He was born five weeks early, just before everything went to COVID hell, which was good because everyone could hang out in the NICU with him. I read him all of A Child’s Garden of Verses and a few other classics while he lay there, his tiny chest heaving, a food tube up his nose and a CPAP machine pumping away at him. His other grandparents came up from North Carolina and visited with him. His parents spent long days in the hospital getting to know the nurses really well and trying not to worry.

The idea was that once he had been home a while and was doing better, and while his parents were on leave before he went off to infant day care, I was going to take him a couple of days a week. It was going to work out because my teaching semester would be over and I would have some time free in the summer before I went back to work. I painted my back room and put a second-hand crib in it.

Then the pandemic took over, and a temporary situation turned into a year and a half and is still going. Both of his parents have been working from home since the lockdown started, and luckily both of them can still do it. I ended up teaching on Zoom, which had its peculiar challenges since I was teaching student teachers in field-based site-specific practicum while the schools were closed down and there weren’t any students.

Now he’s a sunny 18-month-old toddler, learning to talk and starting to run, who loves stuffed animals, books, trucks, flowers, and strollers. I love him with all my heart, just as I loved his mom before him. We go to (airy, spacious, sparsely attended) museums, the (open air) zoo, and city fountains (full of other toddlers wading and splashing outside). I feed him pretzels and cookies, chicken curry hand-pies, blueberries, spaghetti and meat sauce, and salad. We discuss whether something is a truck or a van, and some of his words are “hydrangea,” “marigold,” and “hosta.” (Also “No” and “Hot”) It’s wonderful.

My sister recently wrote me enviously that when she was raising her two boys, she never had a grandmother to take them off her hands for a day. She always felt nervous about dropping them off to child care. I take her point.

But I’ve been thinking about that since I got her letter. You know, about the perfect situation where grandmom helps out. The family that takes care of its own. Stepping up. Providing care. The good old days before we put our kids in day care and our parents in retirement homes or skilled nursing.

Good old days: My widowed paternal grandmother had one of my uncles living with her, her eldest son. I am not sure who was taking care of whom, though. Grandma was, let us say, extremely confused, and her son was what you might call neurodivergent. The rest of the family had to swing by sometimes and clean the house because the newspapers, dishes, and cat hair had piled up to the point where the smell was doing pushups and showing off its muscles. After she died, the brother ended up living in an RV on his sister’s property in Tennessee, along with my own father, who fell on weird hard times himself. When their sister died in turn, my father was kicked out of his RV and ended living near my sister, in senior housing and on Social Security. My sister is still taking care of him now that he’s in his 90s.

Good old days: When my own mother got divorced, she slipped into poverty, though her mother helped out. She put a good face on things and never said a negative word about my father. We ate a lot of greens and cheap tough meat. It took her a long time to dig out of the hole; despite women’s liberation and her Ph.D. in microbiology, it wasn’t easy for her to find good paying work. Then when my grandmother was failing, my mom went and lived with her until the end. When I had my own kid, Mom was in her early fifties and just starting to have her own life finally.

Good old days: Then my mother developed Parkinson’s Disease. As she grew more and more impaired, because I lived nearest of her three children, I had to step up. I paid her bills and took her out shopping and out to dinner once a week. At the time, I was also raising a child, going to graduate school, starting a demanding new teaching career, and helping my spouse deal with getting laid off and starting a business. For ten years, I was there every week for my increasingly incontinent, wheelchair-bound, uncoordinated, confused mother, until the week she made it clear she was going to stop eating and die, which she did within a week. It has been twelve years and I am still not quite recovered from it. I still grieve her, and I grieve that angry, exhausted, stoic decade. I hated it so much, all of it.

So what’s my point? Yeah, people in my family generally took care of one another, somehow, and we still do. But the good old days required that somebody (generally a woman) had to sacrifice a huge chunk of their life after their husbands divorced them or died. “Grandmom” wasn’t always that comfy little old lady you remember as a child. I have a photo of my maternal grandmother over my desk, and she’s a fifteen-year-old in a white dress with an expression that could knock a horse down, stubborn and pretty as a wolf. She was the best of all of us at taking care of other people, but I never asked myself why it was she was so angry.

Organized care has its advantages, and one of them is that the workers get paid and can go home at the end of the day. Another one is that they have to be at least minimally qualified to do the job. I’m not saying it’s wonderful. But it isn’t actually predicated on depriving its workers of their own lives.

We nice old ladies were young women with ambitions who wanted to do something grand, and then someone needed our help, so we folded our lips and pitched in, whether or not we were suited for it.

I’m lucky, though. I was older (nearly thirty) when I had my child, and my grandchild was born when his mom was even older than that, so I am ready to retire. I am happy to be a grandmother. The timing couldn’t have been better. I have some books I want to finish writing, and I have a nice back room with a crib in it. And I have achieved so many of the things I wanted to do when I was young. I didn’t know I would ever also have the ambition to be a grandmother, but here I am.

He hugs me, you know. He even pats me on the back when I pick him up. He cries if I forget to have him wave bye-bye when I drop him off. We’re all building some “good old days” he can remember when he grows up and when everyone else he knows is envious that he had a grandmom take care of him.

But it’s still only two days a week.

Remember me

I like the log-on windows that say “Remember me.” The idea that a website could memorialize our existence and archive our imprint on the world is pervasive on the Internet, but rarely that explicit.

I gave up expecting to be remembered on the Internet a while back, but I keep a daily journal (writing in fountain pen, an entry a day) and when I fill a book I go back, note the things I want to keep, and transcribe them into a Word document, one for each year. I’ve been doing it daily since the early 90s some time, and before that sporadically.

What is this impulse to write every day? There are many reasons, all tangled up. First, of course, to settle my mind and to clarify things. Yes, I did all these things in some kind of order, and this is what happened after that. It becomes a parade instead of a jumble. Second, and slightly different, to recognize that things happened. To pause and remark on my events, expeditions, and appreciations. To think about their significance (and insignificance) and process what happened, as they tell me dreaming does.

Another reason to diary is to make note of what might later be benchmarks or important events for later consideration. I want to be able to look back and say, oh, that’s when things changed. Those were the first signs. And, of course, to remember what I have forgotten, whether they are important events, repetitive thoughts, or tiny discoveries.

Though most of the things I write down turn out to be dull quotidian tasks unworthy of memorialization, often I find small gems. My last journal has a lot of mulling and processing in it, but it also has an odd pandemic Christmas and a family Zoom sing-along. I’m re-reading it now, having marked passages for transcription.

A year ago I began writing about the birth of my grandchild. I have transcribed that and can go back and think about how much has changed since then. There was a baby. He had tubes going into everything. He could barely breathe. What an astonishing thing to read when a couple of days ago the same gentleman was dragging me out into the back yard so he could squat and drop things into a watering can and watch them sink.

I think, process, recollect, pour out, select, and memorialize my past, and then move on. I get to write with my fountain pen and ink, watching the lines glitter and instantaneously dry on the page while downstairs the robot vacuum hums and chatters, erasing the signs of the past week, including the grandchild’s cookie crumbs, as if they never existed.

Possession

Ann Patchett wrote about getting rid of possessions in The New Yorker. It’s not about minimalism, but about a kind of cherishing of things.

I have been trying to do this for most of my life, but after I retired, I realized I had to get serious about it. I have one child and it would be horrible for them to have to get rid of everything in the house. Also, I wanted to be mobile. I want to be even more mobile as an older person than I was as a young one.

A lot of what I was carrying around was other people’s, because my brother is a Foreign Service nomad and my sister lives too far away. Somehow I ended up with my stepfather’s and my mother’s possessions as a result.

I felt I owed my mom and stepfather the dignity of going through what they saved, even if they are long gone. The summer I spent going through, organizing, and selectively scanning all my mother’s photos, her letters, and her typed sermons (organized by ecclesiastical year) was a process of mourning her all over again, especially since I gritted my teeth and shredded most of it once I had looked at it.

I shared all the digital files with my brother and my sister, and when my brother said he’d like my mother’s sermons, by god I put them in a cardboard box, wrapped it all over with packing tape so it was waterproof (at that point he was in Delhi and it was the rainy season) and shipped it off (I don’t know if he ever got it). I mailed my sister my mother’s tooth with the enormous gold filling, which my mom had saved because she thought she could extract the gold.

Getting rid of most of my own stuff was easier but took a long time. Some of it I kept in the form of digital files. Thirty years of handwritten journals have been distilled into typed selections stored on my hard drive and in Dropbox. I went through all of my books and donated anything I wasn’t actually really truly going to re-read or use.

My house is spare and clean. I have nothing I don’t want, no fearful just-in-case clutched symbols or backup possibilities. My mantra, which I copy into every new journal, is, “I have enough. Put away. Pack. Plan. One thing at a time.”

I still have several crates of my own kid’s possessions in the basement. I don’t know what to do with them because my kid doesn’t have room for them.

My husband still says from time to time, “What happened to those stainless steel mixing bowls?” and he can’t bring himself to throw out all the cables from when he did a lot of wiring for his clients, but he’s actually less of an accumulator than I was.

Do I still accumulate new things? You betcha. A lifetime can’t be tossed aside just like that. But there’s a place for them now. Did I save a few things of my mother’s? Yes. The Navajo blackware bowl is over to my left right now, and her careful needlepoint of a squirrel in a frame that used to hold a mirror is to my right. But now they are warm memories, not burdens.

And I could pick up and go pretty much any time now. I don’t know where I would go, mind you, because this is a pretty nice place to live now that I’m not dragging such a load around with me.

Reeeeevision

After going through the printed manuscript of the first draft of The Stick Princess scene by scene, marking it up viciously, making a detailed summary, and writing down all the notes for changes I needed to make, I sat down a couple of weeks ago and started re-typing the whole thing.

Of course, now I’m not looking at all at my detailed summary, my notes, or my marks on the manuscript. Though I’m keeping chunks of description and dialogue here and there, I’m basically composing a new book based on all the same scenes in the first draft. It’s a very similar book, mind you. But I have a much better idea of how the divided protagonist works and how all the subplots intertwine, and I have of course jettisoned most of the backstory, as one does.

I first learned to type on a great big manual typewriter whose carriage return had a huge lever on it and whose keys had to be pressed with equal emphasis. Words set down with something like that were like carved in stone. There were typewriter erasers, but they ravaged the paper. You had better know what you wanted to say before you set it down.

I discovered word processing in the late 70s, and immediately took to its volatile, interactive, fluid possibilities, to its ability to move from the inside to the outside of a story, to write backwards and forwards, to leap about and move the furniture of plot.

But there’s no substitute for retyping a draft completely, getting rid of the shadows of former ideas, erasing the trails that petered out., and dumping the wishful thinking and loose verbiage.

I try to get to a good stopping point where I can quit writing and go to bed thinking about the next problem. For instance: What are those pills she’s required to take, and why did I have her taking them all through the book? Why has she been put in the little hut in the clearing in the woods, and how does she get out? How can I show that she is indeed acting independently and at the same time being herded along by three different factions? Why is Chloe important to the story and when I can I reintroduce her? Am I saying “But this is not that story” too often? And how improbable is the scene with the tractor?

I go to bed with things like that revolving in my head, and then I decide to stop thinking about them.

In the morning, after the coffee and other waking-up routines, I sit down at my keyboard and suddenly the answer to the latest question is obvious, as if I had dreamed it.

And of course by the end of an hour of writing I’ve solved it in a different way than I thought I was going to.

I used to tell myself stories when I was a kid, all day long, when I was supposed to be paying attention in math or English or science, when I was walking or biking to school, when I was sitting at the dinner table itching to be away, or when I was in the car. I lived in those stories. I told myself certain scenes over and over in different ways, sometimes smiling into the air when I found a particularly compelling way to tell it. I wasn’t the protagonist in my stories. My protagonist was an elf, a young warrior, a winged servant, or a character from one of my favorite TV shows.

Revision is like that story-telling I did in those days. It’s sort of like being half in this world, and half in the story. The food in real life gets cooked, the walks are taken in an actual world, and work gets done for pay, but in the spaces between, I’m re-telling the story.

So. Revision. In progress. Once I’m done, I’ll print it out again. The weather will be a little warmer then, so I’ll take the manuscript outside and read it aloud to myself, which always catches the last slew of mistakes.

And then I’ll format it, and publish it. And turn to the next draft manuscript. My goal is finish them all, that entire drawer.

I don’t write for the money. That’s just a surprise present.

Last month I made $17.02 selling my books on Kindle. My whole body tingled when I saw the entries in my bank account, and then my eyes misted over, and I kept thinking about it for hours, but that’s not why I write.

I write so I can retell the stories.

Never enough time

Though I am a person of a certain age, I often still toy with the idea of a new career in the same way that I consider buying other people’s houses when I’m walking around the city.

I already have advanced degrees and a career, mind you, and a perfectly lovely house, and I’m much more likely to retire from the career and move into an apartment than I am to suddenly become, say, a counseling psychologist. I’m not ruling anything out, mind you. It’s just a question of probabilities.

But being a person of a certain age, those probabilities become more of a motivation. Priorities become clearer.

There are things I can’t put off any more. I’ve done some of them in the last few years. I’ve digitized my collections of photos and my scores of handwritten journals, and I’ve shredded, donated, and given away all manner of possessions and records.

Because of that, I am much more mobile now. I’m not carrying a lifetime of possessions and memories on my back. In case I have to move, or be moved, I can move. In case I want to finish more of the things I’ve been putting off until I had more time.

But there is so little time. I was in the bookstore yesterday and as I often do, I went in search of a new book by an author I particularly like, and to my delight I found one and pulled it off the shelf. On the cover, it said it was the final in the series. The author had died.

I had thought she would be there forever, the way I keep assuming I’ll be here forever, contemplating new careers, considering whether to get my sofa reupholstered, watching my grandson grow up, putting off publishing.

Which is to say that after finally getting my first two published books up on Kindle last summer, I had high hopes of finishing the final book in that series and got off to an excellent start, but then the university semester began. Teaching a hands-on in-person practicum course in the midst of a pandemic meant I had to re-invent my curriculum entirely while taking care of panicked, lonely, stressed undergraduates for whom, it turned out, I was often the only teacher they met with in real time. That, in addition to family responsibilities, meant that I stopped being able to work on the book for two months.

Here I should make it clear that I never stopped being a writer. I have five manuscripts drafted, including a different series and a collection of short stories. I walk along the street revising my stories and my novels, and thinking up new ideas. I scribble notes to myself about what I want to do.

It’s just that because I was trying to write in between things, I ended up with tangles in my tales and would put the work aside until I had the time and the concentration to undo the snarls. And I ended up with piles of mare’s nests and rat-kings.

The Stick Princess is mostly drafted, for instance. But after I finally figured out the protagonist’s motivation (yes, I write my stories first and figure out the plot later), I lost track of my scenes and stopped to write an extended summary. That means my manuscript was only partly rewritten and the final chapter was only vaguely sketched, and the summary I stopped and wrote loses track of characters.

Well, I’m a person of a certain age, and I don’t have forever. So I informed my supervisor I would not be teaching my course again.

I don’t have all the time in the world any more, but because I quit teaching the course, I do finally have time for what matters, and what matters right now is finishing this book.

I printed out the manuscript just as it is, and went through it page by page writing myself notes, crossing things out, and occasionally writing REWRITE in block letters in red ink when I realized certain things just wouldn’t work. Now I’m re-doing the summary.

I love writing. But even more, I love being allowed to write.

I feel so selfish. It’s wonderful.

The magnetic attraction of social media

Last night I watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, which didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know though it was well presented. I’ve read the books of some of the people interviewed on the show, and I’m all too aware of how behavior reinforcement works in addiction (why I don’t drink or smoke any more). But the show reinforced something that I’ve been worrying about. First, that social media acts to polarize, not unite. And second, that for my mental well-being I need to back off once again.

I’ve been online and social since the late nineties. In the beginning, I had great hopes for the potential of the World Wide Web to unite human beings. Some of my enduring friends were made online before I ever met them, and that continues to this day. CompuServe and Usenet allowed me to connect with people who had the same interests I did, often people I never would have met otherwise. Google, with its empty search box and its lack of advertisements, was a transformative miracle, uniting all the scattered disparate particles of the Internet into a searchable treasure. I joined Facebook as soon as it was available to people other than college students, and it put me in touch with family members I rarely saw, fellow fencers, and fellow writers. I taught my students how to create wikis and how to make blog posts. I had a LiveJournal blog and friends who read it.

The last couple of years I have been wrangling with how to use these wonderful resources without having them use me, and I tried several approaches. I downloaded all my blog posts on various platforms and got rid of those accounts. I cut down on Facebook use, unfriended anyone I wouldn’t actually talk to in real life, and began to delete all my old posts and photos. Eventually, I quit Facebook entirely and deleted my account, though I stayed on Twitter because I used lists to help me follow good journalism and stay on top of politics, and because it was supposed to be good for selling my writing. I dove into social media marketing with the idea of making my Facebook and Twitter feeds more purposeful. For a while, something like two years, I posted several “story starters” a day, thinking that I could turn Twitter into a creative discipline. I even toyed with posting a drawing a day while I was teaching myself to use painting software.

I thought I had a handle on things, and since I was re-publishing my novels on Kindle I opened a Facebook account again, using a different email.

in my new account, I followed a couple of writing groups, a fountain pen group or two (I collect fountain pens), a bullet journaling group, and the Facebook page of my political party in my state.

The first thing I found disturbing was that Facebook started suggesting “friends” to me who were not members of those groups I was following. No, some were people I had been friends with before, and some were people I am friends with in real life who have no connection whatsoever to my online life.

No connection. They are people I spend time with, but I have most deliberately never friended them, because in the community they belong to, I wanted to keep my boundaries well-defined.

Somehow, though, Facebook’s algorithms happily tried to connect us on the platform.

The second thing that bothered me was that in the groups I was following, the discourse was improbably feverish. I don’t mean the politics page. The bullet journaling people seemed to veer toward the intensely crafty and compulsive end of the practice. I keep a small notebook with a bullet list for each day’s tasks, but I don’t use washi tape, elaborate grids, or multiple-page layouts like some of the ones I saw online. Although I do live by lists because I find it important to focus on one thing at a time, I prefer getting things done to perfecting my lists. I finally left the bullet journal lists.

The fountain pen pages were populated by people who posted compulsively about acquiring fountain pens. Not a surprise. I have been to fountain pen shows and I own far too many fountain pens, and the community definitely tends to be a little obsessive, but I felt uneasy about the way I was convincing myself to need a pen that was outside my price range when I’m watching my money.

I noticed the same thing with Twitter, though I happily ignore Twitter’s suggestions of people to follow and it has a less pernicious algorithm for suggestions. I have a carefully curated list for political news, made only of journalists, attorneys, and verified officials and former officials. Anyone who posted in ALL CAPS too often, or used highly emotional language all the time, or obviously believed they were on the side of the angels, I deleted from the list. But even when I did that, I realized that the people on my list who were posting, even if they began as detached observers of the scene, tended to either fall into the pit of vehemence or else they stopped posting. The same went for my Twitter list of quirky and interesting people, though less intensely.

I got in the habit last year of deleting my old Twitter posts. There are a couple of apps that will do it for you, but I’ve got it down to a regular habit so I rarely have very many to remove. People don’t understand that because we’ve all gotten in the habit of thinking of social media as a record of our lives, but I’m here to tell you (a) no one is going to write my biography based on my old blog posts and social media feed (b) I have photo albums and my own records of my life and (c) I prefer to live in the present.

Yeah, I know, big surprise: Yes, social media does tend to polarize. But more importantly for me, it tends to feed addictive behavior and it doesn’t make me feel better. So I deleted Twitter once again from my phone, and haven’t read Facebook in weeks.

It would be nice to stay in touch with my family, I agree. But even in my extended family, the people who post the most often were more likely than not to be the ones who make me angry and remind me of why my childhood was difficult (or make me sad about the times I thought were good).

All this is to say that I’m getting closer to the end of the semester and if I get off social media entirely I may get more writing done once I stop being anxious about teaching.

Online and off kilter

In one of my many simultaneous lives, I teach a subject that can’t possibly be taught online. I am teaching it online this term, nonetheless, and I’m lucky.

My university opened up last week for in-person instruction, and by the end of the week they had identified 58 cases of the coronavirus, sending out a notification that the city had asked students to avoid social gatherings entirely.

I have no idea what any of these people are thinking. There is no reason for a student to be living on or near campus if they can’t go to social gatherings. An article I read recently suggested that the university reopening process is just a convenient way to blame students for the results, even though we know that people in their late teens and early twenties are going to behave in certain ways if the environment is structured for it. It’s the fault of the universities themselves, not the students. No, it’s a situation. We did not do what we needed to do in order to curb this disease in the beginning, so we are lurching ahead like people driving a car held together with wire and string, on fire, and missing integral parts of its engine, with a cat trapped under the hood.

Meanwhile, here I am teaching. And here my students are, learning. My course is a fieldwork practicum for would-be teachers. In normal times, they would spend one full day a week in a public elementary school interacting with children and learning from mentor teachers, but the public schools are trying to teach online and our students would just be in the way, so they aren’t there.

The newly revised guidelines for all the practicums our education students have to complete emphasize video, and so I have been industriously educating myself using all the various resources our university offers, learning better how to teach with Zoom and all the various and sundry wonderful tools out there, and I also met with a university consultant. The consultant was not terribly useful in some ways but she did send me a bunch of links that my students can use to help them learn how to make effective videos.

That’s because my practicum students are still supposed to write lesson plans this term. And then they are supposed to videotape themselves teaching their plans to nobody, with the idea that our Field Experience office is going to offer their videos to any school that wants them. So oh god I’m trying to teach my students to make educational videos.

I already make educational videos, mind you. I started last term when we went online and nobody was telling my students anything. I would post an announcement on the course management system for my far-flung students, and I would post a little video of myself telling them all the things that were in the announcement, so that they could feel like I was still there and still a human being. The main thing to remember is to keep it intensely short because after about 7 minutes students will be checking their email, playing solitaire, or trying to do their other work. That goes for university students and it goes for elementary students even more.

The second thing is to just DO it.

With that in mind, I assigned my students to make a short video introducing themselves by Wednesday’s class. They are so sweet. All my nice young students telling their iPhones all about themselves and sharing their dogs, roommates, or apartments.

(As always happens with Wonderful Technology, the first thing I had to do was figure a whole bunch of workarounds. The rule of thumb for Wonderful Technology is that it is indeed wonderful once you get it to work, but getting it to work often eats up all the time you save. And you better have a Plan B when it fails, as it always does, just when you need it most.)

I don’t believe that online learning is as good as in person learning (and the research bears me out). That’s from someone who, for thirty years, has been doing online learning of various sorts and leveraging technology to give me more contact with my students.

My sixth graders did their summer reading reports by posting to a blog on an ongoing basis over the summer; I presented my own research on using collaboration with Google Docs to improve writing; I had a subject-specific web site in the 90s until schools finally caught on and started having teacher pages in course management systems, and these days I ask my college students to send me a selfie so I have their phone numbers and pictures in my phone, and communicate with them by text a whole lot, something my colleagues will never do. I have been doing technology in education for a very very long time.

BUT it isn’t a substitute for face to face.

Yet here I am.

I also have three student teachers who are trying to do their student teaching and collaboration with their mentors online. While we rewrite the curriculum. Because the state department of education, the city board of education, and the university spent all summer trying to figure out how they could rewrite a certification process that depends on in-person learning.

Because we’re driving a car on an oiled road with flat tires and we have already started to spin out.

All of this is to say, my dog ate my homework and I am really going to try to do some work on my novel this week because otherwise I will lose my will to go on.