IF HE HAD BEEN WITH ME, thoughts continued

I came back to say another thing about this book. No, two things.

1. I wish it had ended three chapters earlier.

2. It squished my soul every time Autumn talked about not wanting to teach because she would only have "a few weeks in the summer to write." My job is highly demanding, yes. I don't work much outside the designated hours—the school day is 7:30 to 2:34, and I would estimate I usually work from 7 to 3. Two or three days a week I work my after school job, coaching color guard. The way teaching impacts my writing is not that teaching itself takes up too much time, but that it makes me quite exhausted sometimes, and there have been plenty of days I went home too tired to watch tv, let alone to write. This was much more common for the first four years I taught high school. Now in year six, I find it easier to make space in my life for other things. So I usually write in the mornings before school and on weekends. Occasionally I write after school. Slightly more often than that, I write with my students. I have a notebook dedicated to writing intended for publication, and once a week I put on a ten minute timer for my 12th graders, during which we write about anything at all, which is a great time for me to pull out my publication notebook and throw down ideas or rework a scene. So I would like to put it on record that teaching does not mean you can't write. And in fact I am writing this during my lunch period, so there.

2.20.2024