Tag: #writing

  • Learning to Write

    So, day two of full online kindergarten classes didn’t go any better today as compared to yesterday. In fact it was a little worse.

    Our online teacher is making the best of a bad situation, and she is dedicated to the students and, as far as I have seen in the past five days, she is taking all of the kid’s mental well being very seriously. It has been a morning video chat, and then an assignment asking the kids to draw themselves. Then we had a second video chat about emotions and expressing how we feel. A lunch break with another assignment to watch a video of a person reading a book and asking the kids to draw their favorite part of the story. On the final chat of the day, the teacher wanted all the kids to show their drawing to the class, and then try writing a word or a sentence that can describe the picture each drew. The teacher was very clear that each kid should try writing a sentences, or word, or even a squiggle. She was clearly trying to see where each of the kids was at when it comes to writing words, language, and phonic sounds. That’s when we came off the wheels at our house.

    My daughter got very nervouse, then really embarassed that she couldn’t write out a sentence. Since we were down to the last 15 minutes of the day, and I could see that this was making her very upset, that I sent a text to the teacher that we had to leave, and I shut off the chat.

    This had been building all day.

    This is a big change for all of us, and making sure all the kids know and learn how to express themselves is very important, and our teacher is doing a very good job with that. My kid-o had a very clear expectation in her mind that as a kindergartener she thought that she would be learning, everyday. And with five days of drawing pictures, she was getting confused as to why she wasn’t learning. She kept saying that to me all day, “I want to learn. When will we learn?” Then when she was asked to do something, she ran right into the wall of not knowing how to do it.

    This is my fault, and I know it.

    I spent all Summer with her working on teaching her how to read. We worked throguh two different series of first reader books, and she is picking out words she recognizes in other books, newspapers, and even on tv. But as I learned today, learning to read is not the same as learning to write.

    We spent the next hour working on letters, and writing simple words, and just trying to make her feel confident in learning about writing.

    I’ve got a lot of learning to do myself.

  • Time to Write? What Was I Thinking?

    Oh, silly me. I thought that once school started, even with doing remote classes from home, that I would be able to get things accomplished. Yesterday just kicked my ass, and today was no better. And we haven’t even started the full day schedule yet.

    What I expected was that I would be able to get two hours to write, but it is looking more and more that I’m only going to get a hour during the day. This means that I will need to make some tough choices.

    I can’t do it all, but I have to find a way to do most of it.

    Now, I need to start prepping dinner…

  • New Thought: New Blog

    As I have been playing around with this blog, and thinking about earning an income from writing, I keep running into the same advice; write about what you are passionate about.

    Sometimes, easier said than done.

    But I don’t think the advice is inaccurate.

    I like writing, clearly as I am doing it as we speak, but writing about writing is not something I am passionate about. Writing is like breathing; I will be doing it no matter what, and rather involuntarily.

    But what to write about, say, in a blog form, that I can come back to day after day, if not at least once a week, that I could earn an income from?

    This blog serves the purpose of being limited in the number of words per post, and subject matter is open to just about anything. Confessional and Personal? Yes. Informative? Not so much. And following the rule of good marketing, the product has to be either the “best.,” or the definitively “only” source of said product. My personal blog is not the “best” blog, nor do I hope that it would be, but it is definitively the “only” source of me.

    What does that leave me with?

    An idea!

    As far back as March of this year, I was still working in the world of theatre, but being that the world has come to a crashing halt, that no longer is possible. Not only me, but a great number of other people. Also, because of the end of the world, a huge number of theatre artists have moved out of The City. And this is one of the few cities in this country where you can make a living in theatre. It stands to reason that at some point it will be safe to go back into a theatre, right? Theatre will begin again.

    My corner of the theatre world was puppetry and object movement theatre, and it will start up again. I know that to be true because a good number of people who do it, are still in New York, waiting for things to become safe. What if I were to blog about the puppetry and object movement community as it starts up again?

    An idea, that I don’t think anyone else is doing.

  • Personal Writing History; The Abbey Writers

    At least my life has been colorful, and has gone is some different directions. I say that because, at one point in my life, I thought it best at 19 to drop out of college and try my hand working low paying jobs, and become a professional writer. I was lucky enough at the time to have several friends around me that all worked equally low paying jobs, and also had artistic ambitions.

    One of my good friends, let’s call him John, was also an aspiring writer as well. We had been best friends since 9th grade, and since then we had read each other’s stories. One late night, over cigarettes and coffee at a 24-hour IHOP, one of us came up with the idea that we should professionally write together, like a band. So, like any good band, we had to come up with a good name. We thought “The Abbey Writers” was a great choice. It was based off our favorite album, Abbey Road, and it also made us seem like a group of monks. Right, that’s cool?

    It was a fun time, and we were able to put together a collection of short stories called, “Double-Jointed Mythology.” I have a copy of it locked in my storage space, and I haven’t looked at it in maybe 20 years. What I can remember of it was that we were trying to take a snap shot of life in the suburb we grew up in, and the disconnection between the world we were promised as kids, and the disappointment we found as adults in that artificial town. (Say, that sounds a lot better than what I think we wrote.) We even did a photo shoot with a photographer friend for what we thought would be needed on the dust jacket.

    What can I say? The publishing world didn’t have a need for us. We tried but never could get any of the short stories published, and this was back in the day when submissions required a self addressed stamped envelope. I think we tried for two years, but after awhile, rejection begins to weigh on us. I don’t think we ever “broke up” as a writing collective, but just drifted to other things, and worked on other projects.

    But I still think it was a good idea.

  • Small Town Research

    For Labor Day, I took the three days to not write. I only journaled on Saturday morning, but that was all of the physical act of writing that I did.

    We spent time out of New York City, and tried to honestly forget about being stuck in our apartment, and all the other things that are going wrong due to Covid.

    I was able to get the family to go with me upstate to look at some of the towns and the region that I am thinking about as the setting as the novel. I took pictures on my phone, and thought about how some places are just tourist traps, while other small towns fight hard not change what they have been for decades.

    Most ideas being thrown on the heap…