In Which I Need to Eat My Words - Which Might Come in Handy Because I Can't Seem to Make Dinner and Write a Book at the Same Time

 Remember earlier this month when  I wrote  that I had stopped setting definite goals by which I absolutely must be agented or published. I was going to take the rest of the month off to read, and I had accepted the fact that I was not going to have a manuscript ready for PitMad in December and that that was okay.

Well, that lasted less than a week. I suddenly got an inspiration for my Nutcracker inspired contemporary fantasy. I knew approximately what would happen and I knew that one of the things driving the MC's desire to succeed in his quest was his desire to prove to himself that he could thrive despite his recent diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. It seems I have a penchant for creating main characters with some type of struggle. As the mother of a type 1 diabetic I am particularly appalled both by the lack of characters in children's books with T1D and by the fact that, on the rare occasion they occur, the condition is often portrayed inaccurately.

From that point on I wrote furiously. New characters appeared that I hadn't even imagined before I started writing, let alone fleshed out (when I'm brainstorming a new book my first step is always to write a background for all of the important characters). It turned out there was another important mouse, a best friend I didn't know existed, and a set of cousins from Germany.

It all went amazingly well. The book is out to beta readers as of yesterday, and, while it's not guaranteed, it's quite possible I will have a new book ready to pitch in December after all. All that contemporary and urban fantasy I was going to read? Yeah, it's still on my to be read pile, otherwise known as the end table beside the big, comfy chair I usually write in.

I'm pretty proud of myself for getting an idea and sticking with it even though it went against my original plan. You know what I'm not proud of, though? The fact that I am apparently incapable of cooking dinner while writing a book. Actually, I need to rewrite that sentence. It is really difficult for me to simultaneously work on a book I'm excited about, supervise remote learning for three kids (only two are mine, but my 4th grader has a podmate who comes to our house), and remember to do the things I need to do to cook dinner.

Monday was the prime example. Plan A for dinner was a pot roast in the crockpot. Well, as soon as I got back from my morning walk I fired up my computer so I could get to work. Between 8:30 and noon I only actually got about an hour of work time, due to a combination of interruptions from kids and my own ridiculous compulsion to check social media instead of actually accomplishing something. When I went into the kitchen to make lunch for the kids I saw the Crockpot on the counter. That had nothing in it. 

I then initiated plan B. I would put a lasagna together after lunch and stick it in the fridge. At 4pm all I had to do was heat up the oven and stick the lasagna in and it would be ready in an hour. At 4pm I dutifully went into the kitchen and turned on the oven. A little after 5 I was helping my high schooler with an assignment and went to check on the lasagna. The oven was working away - heating absolutely nothing. The lasagna, dear readers, was still in the fridge.

There was no time to both cook it and eat it before three of us had to leave for a Cub Scout meeting at 6pm. I stuck it in the oven anyway. My teenager, who was not going to the meeting, go to eat it when it was fresh. My 9 year old, who doesn't like lasagna, ate spaghetti before we had to leave, which she was going to do anyway. My poor husband and I had to wait until after the meeting and eat warmed up lasagna. 

I've been spending some time in the evenings narrating what I wrote that day to my 9 year old. Since I was done, yesterday she asked me about my ideas for my next book. My husband commented, "I'm glad that you're writing and excited about it, but could you figure out how to also make dinner when you're excited about a book?"

I will try mightily. I promise. However, I cannot guarantee that my family will not be eating cereal for dinner at some point.

In Which Writing and Supervising Remote Learning Don't Mix Very Well

 My kids are now on day 12 of remote learning. In Kentucky remote learning is known as nontraditional instruction, NTI for short. Some districts have been using a version of NTI for years on days that would otherwise have been cancelled for weather. Our district never chose to do that, but they did do "pandemic NTI" this spring after it became clear that we weren't returning to in person school. Educationally, it was kind of a disaster. My 3rd grader learned nothing and was not a fan. My 9th grader learned a little bit and didn't hate it as much, but neither kid had a good end to the school year.

The one good thing about the pretty light amount of responsibility for them was that it meant a light amount of responsibility for me as the parent supervising their learning. I started writing a new book about a week after they came home in mid March, and I had finished it by mid May.  By mid June I had gotten it beta read and revised and was ready to query. I did this by taking every single spare moment to write. I wrote while my daughter was doing her schoolwork. I sent her to watch Netflix and wrote. I brought a camp chair and my laptop and wrote while my daughter played in the creek at a local park and my son rode on the mountain bike trails. 

It was super helpful that I was passionate about my main character and felt like she was living inside my brain and demanding that I tell her story. I was able to get her story out on the page pretty quickly because it was constantly being built inside my head.

The good news about this fall is that remote learning, which our superintendent is calling NTI 2DL (the 2DL stands for differentiated distance learning) is infinitely better than the spring version of NTI. The teachers have actually received a little bit of training in remote teaching and the district has invested in technology that makes it easier to achieve. My kids are actually learning stuff. Another improvement is that we've expanded our Covid bubble to bring in a classmate for our 4th grader. The girls are both much happier this fall than they were in the spring, and, though they also sometimes distract each other, they most often spur each other on to do their best work. They can also help each other if one girl gets kicked out of zoom, which happens less than it did the first few days but still happens.

My 10th grader is also getting good content, though I don't feel like he's getting quite enough since for some unfathomable reason they've decided to do each class only twice a week. Overall, though, the kids have actually been learning new content and feeling engaged in school this fall, which is a good thing for them and for their educational futures.

It is, however, not a great thing for my writing. It turns out the average 4th grader has pretty pathetic typing skills. And, guess what, the classwork for remote learning often involves typing. This means that I basically serve as secretary for my daughter and her classmate whenever they have an assignment that involves a lot of typing. For short assignments I make them do it themselves, but, if they have to type a few sentences or more, it's so much less frustrating for all of us if I just step in and do the typing. Otherwise they're hunting and pecking for 20 minutes just to write three sentences. Oh, and this whole time they're asking me how to spell every third word, even more often if the words are in Spanish (they attend a Spanish immersion school and I used to be a Spanish teacher).

Add to this the fact that my 10th grader emerges from his "schoolroom" in the office downstairs several times a day to ask me to look over something or help him with something (because, surprise surprise, remote learning is pretty much the worst possible way to start learning a foreign language, just for instance) and I don't have very  few solid blocks of time during which I'm not interrupted. I also never know precisely when and how long those blocks will be. 

This makes writing just about impossible. I have a new work in progress started. It all began with a question that my daughter asked me last December when she was dancing as a mouse in The Nutcracker (between them, my kids have danced in 11 Nutcrackers, though, sadly, neither is currently taking dance so there would be no Nutcracker parenting this year even if not for the pandemic). She asked, "What if the mouse king won the battle?" I didn't have a great answer at the time, but the question stuck in my brain and, almost a year later, has emerged as a story that centers around a reimagining of the Nutcracker in which the roles of hero and villain are reversed.

I like the story I've come up with. I believe in it, but, since school started, I've made absolutely no progress on it. I started really well late this summer. I checked out every single book about mice (the story features a talking mouse) or The Nutcracker that our library had and I brought them with me on a visit to my parents' house in Michigan. I spent a lot of time reading on the 8 hour drive up. I also spent some time reading in the "mobile office" I set up in the back of our minivan while our son rode at one of the many mountain bike parks within a half hour of my parents's house (it turns out there's much better mountain biking in West Michigan than there is in Central Kentucky). I got an outline for the story down and even started the first two chapters.

I was so excited about how well it was going. I was hoping that, if I didn't get an agent through this round of querying my current book, I might have the new one ready to pitch during Pitch Madness in December. I figured December would be the perfect month to pitch a Nutcracker themed book. Given that we're 1/3 of the way through September and I'm on chapter 5, I think that it extremely unlikely that's going to happen. I'm crossing my fingers that the full manuscript I have out to an agent results in an offer of representation. If I have an agent there's no pressure to finish something else in time to get it ready to pitch to agents on a particular timetable. I'd still want to work on it, of course, and, if I do get an offer, I'm hoping my hypothetical agent will love my WIP as much as they love my current project. Maybe knowing there will be someone to rep it to publishers after it's done will motivate me. Only time will tell if this hypothetical situation comes to pass.

In the meantime, the one thing supervising remote schooling has allowed me to do is pursue activities that work better for me even with frequent interruptions. Starting this blog is an example of that. At least I'm writing, even if I'm not writing a story. Another activity I've been making more time for is reading. I've read some great recent middle grade books which, though they don't  related to directly to anything I plan to write, can help me become a better writer and also give me a picture of the current market. Because, like it or not, understanding what will actually sell is part and parcel of being a writer. I've also done some reading my own education (I'm slowly making my way through Stamped from the Beginning) and my own enjoyment (I just received a copy of my friend Allison's newest romance novel, Since September. 

I'm hoping this role of remote learning supervisor will just be a short blip in my life and I'll soon be back to having more time to write. Either that or I'm going to have to make my ADHD brain hyperfocus on my WIP so I actually get it done. It's definitely an interesting time in history to be a writer and a parent.