About Me(always in process).

It's about time that I spend time on this(Thanks to Tess who asked).

I am working really hard on a young adult novel. It has everything it needs to make it work and now I just have to clean it up. Which sounds easier to me than all the creating stuff I have been doing for the last two years. But I don't know. I can feel that things are right as I wind it up. That is not to say that it is great, it's just to say that it's what is supposed to be and now I just have to find that rightness in the beginning.

I have two other novels that have begun to grow in Scrivener(you got to love Scrivener). These are coming to me very differently than the first. In bits of scenes, much more like reading a book than writing it. They feel as if they are being revealed by my subconscious in tiny little snatches. I'm not sure if that can carry itself the whole way through(My current novel has been draft after draft so I have always known what happens next. Now that the subtext is there, the book is way more interesting to me. But these new books seem to be complicated by subtext before they even start. Is that faith in the process? Is that a brain that has been through ten thousand hours of this stuff? Am I delusional?). Does anyone out there know about writing that way?

One of the new novels seems like Middle Grade. The other a dystopian, futuristic, post apocalyptic story. At least as far as I can tell.

I have a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. Where I learned how to write well(technically speaking). I had a teaching assistantship there and through trial by fire I learned to teach(teaching is like writing and I am still learning forever and ever). I also had an infant son during that time(who is now at sleepover camp, so big!). I'm surprised that I survived.

I am still for all practical purposes a stay at home mom. Although this provides me plenty of opportunity and flexibility to write, it also adds insult to the injury of writing. Not just because the stay at home mom thing is all-consuming and there's always something more to do, just like writing. Nor because neither earn me any money, or make me feel productive in any kind of way(can you say Sisyphus). It's because both those things require the push and pull of discipline and fun in order to make them/me work properly. And as this blog will tell you, if you look even a tiny bit into it, I am always trying to figure out that delicate push and pull. Makes me think of A River Runs Through It and fly fishing. Can you picture the line dancing out over the water trying to tease trout/whatever out of there? That's my life in a nutshell. Pretty, totally beautiful really, but always at attention, teasing and working whatever little bit I can pull from it.

As Always(feedback welcome),
Tina