A Virtue I Don't Possess

So here's the thing-- I have the patience of a gnat. 

No, really. I'm so bad that I tend to read the ends of books because I don't want to wait to see what happens. Sacrilege, I know.

I've never been much for waiting.  In HS I got tired of waiting to get to college, so I started taking courses at Akron U during my senior year. I graduated from Kent in only 3 1/2 years. And then I went straight to grad school and got through that fairly quickly, too.  Actually, I would have been done sooner, but the market tanked so I hung out for a while and pretended not to be done until J finished.

But the publishing industry is absolute torture for someone like me.  I'm all about the instant gratification of knowing.  I don't even care if it's bad news, as long as I know.

Right now I'm querying to agents, and let me tell you that as exciting as it is to still have 6 partials out there, the wait is k.i.l.l.i.n.g. me. 

So I'm trying to figure out what to write next. Mostly, though, I just think about what to do if all 6 of those partials turn out to be a bust.

Also I discovered Twitter, which is like crack for someone who likes to know things instantly. Thank goodness I don't have a smart phone.

So how do you keep waiting from killing you?

Upon Penalty of Death

I'd like to preface this post with a warning.  You really, really shouldn't tell me any of the following:

• Everything happens for a reason.
• It's all part of God/Yahweh/Ganesh/whomever's plan.
• You do have a job-- you're a mom.
• Everything happens for a reason. (seriously- I hate that one.)

So it's been a while, eh? And while you've all been up to whatever it is you've been up to, I've been having a little bit of an identity crisis.

But I think I've worked my way through it finally. (insert applause here)

So the whole being a professor thing didn't turn out. And I'm not really cut out to be a housewife, no matter what the lady at the bank seems to think. So I've decided to go with something really realistic.  That's right.  I'm a writer!

Or at least that's what I'm telling myself until we run out of money and I'm forced to get a full-time job.

But seriously, I wrote a book.  Okay, I wrote two books, but we're not going to count the first one since it was really just practice.  The second one, though, we're totally going to count.

It's out in the world right now looking for an agent.  I'm patiently (okay, not really patiently) waiting for it to send an email home to its mama and tell me it found a fabulous job.

(Did I mention I tend to go for careers that have little-to-no chance of taking off??)

But, hey, seven (out of you don't even want to know how many) people so far actually requested to see pages. 

So stick around and we'll see what happens next.

Riiiight.

Squeak: (out of the blue when we were driving home from preschool) God gave us things.

Me: Oh? Like what?

Squeak: Bushes.

Me: Bushes?

Squeak: And bridges.

The Bookshelf in Your Mind

In my past life, I taught literature. I was an Academic. I looked down my nose at the Nora Roberts and other Fluff that my mom read each summer. I read real Literature. I read the Greats. I forced my students to wade through the greats. And I loved it.

Then I hit a rough patch back in 2008 and I needed happily ever after instead of "Isn't it pretty to think so?" at the end of the books I read. Someone handed me Outlander. Outlander lead to Karen Marie Moning which led to Mary Balogh which led to me bringing home 10 or more romances a week from my local library and devouring them. Eventually, I had to turn to Nora Roberts. I didn't have much else left. And I fell in love with her, too.

At first I told myself (and my husband, who seemed kind of concerned with my sudden change in reading habits) that it was research. I was learning the genre so that I could understand how it worked.  Partially, I was still experiencing a residual academic shame for the scantily clad couples on the covers of the book I was checking out each week.  But I was also partially telling the truth. I really did want to figure out how those writers managed to take stories that seemed like the same plot over and over and make them fresh and engaging. I wanted to figure out what drew me to those stories.


Read the rest of this post HERE.

Winding Down

I have 11 more days in the classroom and just over a month until the big move.  Then we're off on a 2300 mile trek across the mid-west and southeastern parts of the country.  (400 miles of which will include the cat.)  Yesterday, I submitted the final paperwork for the dissertation.  Once I pay the $96 dollars to deposit, it will be officially done.  Finally.

It's different than I thought it would be.  I thought it would be a happy moment.  Instead, I'm fairly indifferent.  I have boxes of research that I don't know what to do with.  Part of me thinks I should keep it, but another part of me knows that I'm never going to touch it again and probably shouldn't pay to move it.  The thing is, I always thought that my dissertation would turn into the kind of book that people might read, that might be useful to students and other scholars.  But then again, I'm sure everyone thinks that.  Now, I know that isn't the case.  I'm leaving academia and leaving that behind as well.

No one (beside my poor committee) will probably ever read the thing in its entirety, but there is one page that I do hope people get to read.  Because while I am currently without career prospects, I am not without graditude.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing may be a solitary activity, but this project did not happen without support.

This project could not have been completed without the help of numerous libraries and librarians.  I am grateful to the Special Collections Resource Center at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale for allowing me access to the Kay Bole and Caresse Crosby collections.  Librarian David Koch was particularly kind and helpful in sharing his stories and answering my questions about these two literary women and their works.  After his retirement, Melissa Hubbard made my work in the collections a pleasure.  Sandra Spanier, of Penn State, helped direct me to the Kay Boyle papers, and other members of the Kay Boyle Society, including Thomas Austenfeld and Marilyn Elkins, were instrumental in pointing me to other sources for this project.  Kay’s son, Ian Von Frackenstein, was generous enough to allow me to quote from his mother’s unpublished papers.  I am indebted to the staff at the JFK Library for facilitating my access to Hemingway’s papers and manuscripts.  Judith Baughman and Jeffery Makala at the University of South Carolina library helped me to access Matthew Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald collection remotely.  The staff of the University of Virginia Library helped me to locate correspondence between Faulkner and his publishers. 

I am also grateful to my committee for their assistance.  Michael Rothberg, John Marsh, and Naomi Reed all read portions of this project at various times and added their expertise.  Robert Dale Parker helped me formulate many of the ideas found in the Faulkner coda and Hemingway chapter.  His keen eye and extensive notes helped me polish my writing.  I am especially grateful for the guidance and support of Stephanie Foote.  She always seemed to know where this project was going far before I did, but her guidance was never prescriptive.  I’m grateful that she took a chance on a 20th century dissertation and allowed me the freedom to make this project my own.  Her guidance was astute and made the final product here infinitely better.  Any shards of brilliance contained within are directly the result of these scholars’ influence; any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Finally, I am grateful to those who had to live with me while this project was being completed.  Aerin Hyun helped keep me sane when I dreamed of throwing in the towel and going back to retail.  Mary Rose Cottingham’s excitement for completed chapters and publications was infectious.  Max and then Harry kept me grounded. By being perfection themselves, they let me know that there was more to life than obsessing over the perfection of this project.  Because they were my babies, this was always my work, and their presence in my life made the work here better.  And last, but never least, Jason— my biggest cheerleader, who has been with me since day one of this project—the economist who now knows more about Fitzgerald and Hemingway than anyone should.  I am grateful that he put up with trips to the deer-infested wilds of Southern Illinois and for holding down the fort while I flew off to Boston.  None of this would have meant anything without him.


Stick around....something new is coming.

A Farewell to Arms...er, uh...stuff.

There's a for sale sign in front of our house.

That was harder to take in than we thought it would be.  Our little house isn't really ours any more.  Starting Wednesday, people will parade through it to measure it up and decide if they want it. 

I'm not really ready for this.

In order to get the house ready, I've started to sell books.  Granted, they're books that I don't want to ever have to read again.  bu-bye to Jameson and Adorno, to Veblen and Butler.  They've been sitting on my shelf for the better part of 10 years now.  I don't really want them--they're stuffy and difficult.  They're not what you curl up with at night before bed. (At least they're not what I curl up with at night.)

I don't want them-- I just want what they represent.  Selling them was a bit similar to selling the Camaro.  I knew it had to go, but the idea of and then the sight of it driving away gave me a bit of a panic attack.  Selling them means that it's really over.  They were my reference books--the tools of my academic trade.  Now they're going to grace the shelves of some young grad student (I didn't recognize the names of any of the people buying them in my department) who hasn't figured out yet that things have shifted in major and important ways in our discipline.

They're going to be someone else's future.

I'm replacing them with a single book-  The Writer's Market.  Because it's time for a new trade.

But hell if I know how that's gonna work.



PS- Stay tuned-  The new blog is in the works.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Big changes are happening. Big changes are coming.

Once I figure out a new title, I'll start a new blog.

I think it should have the word Dixie in the title. Ideas?