A Different Kind of Writing

February has come and gone, and yet here I am with my first post of the month. It isn't because I have nothing to say; on the contrary, I almost always have an opinion ready, but this month has been different. Any unpublished or unestablished author has no choice but to have a supportive significant other or to work. I lack the former and am forced to do the latter. Yet as the economy is anything but grand at the moment, my career choice of teaching has become a burden. There are no teaching jobs and unlikely to be any in the near future. This leaves me working as a substitute teacher.

Being a substitute is unpredictable and energy draining; even with my fairly good classroom management skills, students seem to think it's fine and dandy to harass a guest teacher more than the regular teacher. It probably doesn't help that I have higher expectations of the students than most regular teachers. At the end of the day, this leaves me drained, with many students wanting me as their regular teacher. I love teaching, but unfortunately surviving comes first. I decided I must find another job and have been at it for months.

Over the last six weeks, I've been focusing not on fiction, but on another type of writing: cover letters. Some people use the same one for everything, but I learned that this approach rarely gets results, so in February I decided I would craft custom letters for each job I was applying to. The result? Me spending my evenings writing how good of an employee I'd make and not focusing on my fiction writing.

I didn't realize how much this affected me until this last week when I finally decided to start writing fiction again. Sitting at the keyboard, thinking about characters and impossible situations, I felt more like myself. I enjoyed doing it and realized that as much as I must focus on finding a job, I must also focus on writing for me.

I am exploring the challenges of writing a romance novel that is not cheesy, overdone or too dark and it's not easy. I haven't quite hit the mark yet, but I'm hopeful it will happen soon. In the meantime, I've at least learned my lessson: we must have money to survive, but we shouldn't sacrifice our very self for it.