Holly Via Gorski

Katherine is a teenager in Texas who has been my Twitter friend for almost three years. She is in the final stretch of her Senior year and wrote a fantastic “day in the life” blog post today that you should read if you, like me, are not a teenager. Especially if you (like me) peeled out from the driveway of your own teen years as quickly as possible.

There is a writers’ maxim that writing about the specific makes one’s story universal. I’m 20 years older than Katherine; when I graduated high school in 1991 a different (much shorter) war was ending (and if I had to see one more yellow ribbon anywhere I was sure I was going to puke). I was in Utah, not Texas, and the details of my life were different. The details don’t matter here, because it felt the same: suspended, waiting for this farce to end and “real life” to begin.

That last stretch of school took for – ev – er . . . until it was suddenly over.

Hang in the air with Katherine from tinytowntexas for a moment, and remember your own stagnant Spring:

A day in the life.
The substitute in my first period class reads aloud a Bible verse in an attempt to make sense of recent news. She apologizes afterward. The bell that marks the passing of class periods has been turned off for the sake of AP testing and the weather dips into the fifties, which would leave the student population off-kilter on any normal day. This isn’t any normal day . . . .

Last night I was complaining to my husband that my latest Women of HR post only had one comment while the post before it had 15.

“. . .Of course,” I continued, “the post before it was about authenticity in social media — being read by a bunch of people who participate in social media –and my post is about systems theory, using a dental practice as an example.”

He looked at me. “Uh-huh.”

In case you’d like to read it anyway (and I hope you do), here’s the link:

The Tale of Discount Dental

At work we offer two dental plans. The first one is the plan you hear jaunty radio ads for; the name-brand plan. Nearly all of our employees choose it. The second plan is the discount, HMO-type dental plan that yeah, we offer, but very few employees select. The second plan has a bad reputation . . .

I am proud to be among the contributing writers for the Women of HR blog. It’s a wonderful site run by some smart, funny women I first met two or three years ago on Twitter. (There are a ton of fabulous HR professionals on Twitter.) They’ve run two of my pieces so far and I expect another one to go up in about three weeks.

It’s been a change for me to write about Human Resources, because I usually write to escape Human Resources as a self-definition. I’ve heard that in Jane Austen’s time it was considered terribly rude to ask what one did for a living and that’s one of the few things I wish had survived from those days.

I’m not ashamed of the work I do, don’t get me wrong – HR is important and most of the time, I think I do it well – but inside of me is a teenager who insisted her high school keyboarding class was a complete waste of time because it wasn’t like she was going to work in an office. As if! I write to keep that girl quiet; to help her feel proud of herself once in a while.

Thanks to the Women of HR I’ve had a chance to write creatively about my profession. I enjoy it. Here are the two pieces I have up so far, if you’re interested:

The Female Version of John Wayne – On businesswomen who thrived before EEO laws were in place/enforced.

On Labor and Chocolate – How the story of Cadbury chocolate reminded me of the importance of the labor movement.

If you go, stick around! Don’t just read my stuff. Everything on the site is well-written and worth your time.

My two-year-old doesn’t talk much. One of the few words he says (besides “this,” he’ll “this” you till the cows come home) is “done.” “Are you done?” I’ll ask after dinner. He’ll smile from his high chair and with a firm, single nod, say, “Done.”

I could have used some of that decisiveness with my novel. I’ve spent the past nine months telling myself and others that it was almost done. Nearly done. So close to complete. Any day now, really. Every time I went back to it there would be one small thing to fix. A detail I’d left out, a rough spot to smooth. What color were that character’s eyes again? I would tweak the little things, maybe add a page or two more, and think, “Is it done?”

It’s not done. Last week I finally accepted it. (I’m working on “embracing the fact,” let’s not go that far.) Two early readers (Jim Butcher calls them “beta readers,” is that a common term?) gave me very similar feedback that convinced me I had a lot of work left to do. Some of what they told me could be classified as tweaking or smoothing, but there was one big thing: 

I’ve suspected that since September. It’s a short book. I considered adding some scenes in the middle to give it more action, or a subplot to make it longer, but when I started to do that it felt like padding. Everything that needed to be in the middle was already there. The problem is that the “middle” is closer to the end of the first act of a three act play. What I thought was a cliffhanger ending is (according to my beta readers) abrupt and dissatisfying. Let’s call it the end of Act 2.

I could have avoided a lot of wasted time and mental drama if I had known what “done” looked like in the first place. If I had sent the book to my beta readers back in October, or just been able to see the thing more clearly on my own, I wouldn’t have spent time fiddling with a manuscript that was half-finished. I wouldn’t have bought a domain name before I had anything to sell, for crying out loud.

The main reason I started this blog in January was that I thought I’d be shopping my manuscript to agents very soon and I needed some sort of presence on the web. A home base besides Twitter. I’m not trying to be a blogger — good thing, since I post about twice a month and have no apparent theme — I’m trying to be an Author. (Like Architect and Librarian, it must be capitalized.)

I am an author: I wrote something. I’ve written a lot of things, actually, I just haven’t finished any of them. Yet.

Today during a conversation with my boss about books we enjoyed, she told me about her experience re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

She first read it in the 1970s when she was in her mid-twenties, and at that time she thought it was all about gender roles, gender identity and the box it puts us in from the moment of our birth. She recently read it again, in her late fifties, and had a different experience. While she loved the book both times, the second time she realized it was clearly a book about diplomacy; about the politics involved as the citizens of Winter jockeyed for position in their dealings with the man from Earth.

I haven’t read The Left Hand of Darkness (I will now), but as a writer I immediately thought of what a rich and complex work it must be for my boss to have had such different experiences with it. Certainly we all do this with any work; as readers we focus on the areas that interest us and glean what we most desire or need from its pages, but not every novel lends itself to this as easily as Le Guin’s. Most of my own re-reading experiences have been disappointing: novels that spoke to me at 17 seem simple or didactic now.

I’m wondering, Gentle Readers: which books have changed meaning for you over time? If you write, how do you weave in multiple themes? Which other authors are particularly good at this?

Balance is a difficult thing. For me that is literally as well as figuratively true; I’ve always been a klutz. But I’m talking about life balance: time, priorities, attention. Beyond the bare minimum of caring for myself I can only focus on one thing at a time. Too often, the rest falls apart.

I can diet or exercise, not both. Take care of my children or clean the house. As my kids get older it becomes easier to multi-task while still caring for them, but let’s be honest — that’s because they need me less. It’s not that I’ve developed a new skill. (Surprisingly, I can walk – even drive – and chew gum at the same time.)

Finishing this novel is like anything else: I’m having a hard time finding the balance. I can write or live the rest of my life. I go to work. I bathe. I feed my boys breakfast in the morning and tuck them in at night. Twice a month I pretend to pay attention to the bills. These things fall under “the bare minimum.” Thankfully my husband picks up the rest (he’s wonderful). If I have a social life, or read, or watch a movie, or clean, or do any of the other million things weighing on me, it’s at the expense of my book. The 226 words I’ve written so far could have been words in my novel.

And when I feel like it’s too much or unfair in some way I think, “This is what professional writers do.”

So no, I haven’t seen that movie. My to-be-read pile is still at the library. (No sense checking them out.) I’ve needed crème rinse for about a month, but haven’t made it to the store yet.

Last night I made brownies. Today I shaved my legs. I could have written instead.