Watching Jim Write

Katherine today.

We've spent our lives as teachers and even though we left our classrooms eight years ago, we think of ourselves as teachers still.  It creeps me out a bit--you spend the heart of your life trying to define yourself and to get others to value that definition and then you discover you have to shed the definition and find another definition.   At least in terms of profession.  We were teaching professionals.  It really was life for us.   Now we aren't.  How about that?

Generally Jim and I share our definitions.  We both define ourselves as parents and outdoorsy types and literary types and foodies as well as defining ourselves as teachers.  It's only the professional definition sparking this today.

Without the teacher definition, we both have had to train ourselves to read books without making notes in the margins.  We both have had to realize that we'll never control any part of our world the way we controlled a classroom.  We both have had to learn that it's okay to have a snow storm and not pray for a snow day.  We both have had to learn that we don't need to check out new staplers in the hopes one will finally not jam when faced with teenagers.    I have had to learn new reasons to buy shoes.  At least that part was easy.

Because I am still involved with teachers and schools with my Job at Metro, learning a new definition has obvious stumbling blocks for me.  I do look for other jobs--I need to fund my desires somehow.  I check the Ritz Carlton and the Four Seasons every month or so to see if they are looking for somebody to take care of guest services here in town.  No luck so far, but I'm having a hard time looking for jobs when I'm not at all sure what I'd like to do.   Travel writer appeals to me, but my stuff just seems too personal.  I'm betting the description I posted about me drinking tamarind juice and vodka in Belize is not what SUNSET MAGAZINE has in mind.   I think that's true for a lot of what Jim and I write.  We aren't what the mainstream has in mind.

Jim has done better with new definitions than I have.   He launched his retirement with a handyman period that still pays off in various improvements around here.  He's off on a rare outing into the hammer and nail world as I write this.  For the last two years he's been in writer mode.  It's the first time I've watched a person redefine himself without assigning a grade while he or she went through the process.  High school kids redefine themselves often.  I like that about them.  Adults hang on far too long at times--I am a prime example.   Anyway, Jim is redefining himself and I have a technicolor view.  He's a writer.  He's not a teacher.  Mostly.

Jim does lots of writer-type things.  In AP/Honors classes I always did some work on the nature of artists.  I taught kids that artists live in different worlds and get obsessed and generally don't behave like regular people.  Back then I lived with a teacher and I was a teacher and lesson plan obsessions and evenings where nobody did anything but read made sense.  Only one of us is a writer now though.  I think we're both on a learning curve here, but it's a good ride.

Jim has finished one book and is in the process of looking for an agent to sell it.   Another book is in its second draft and in the editing process.  A section of the first book looks like it will get morphed into a play soon.  There is a third book outlined in his mind.  Each explores music and requires research (blues in the first and string quartets in the second one) and he needs to do a bunch of research on Jack Kerouac and jazz in Five Points and around Denver before he gets rolling.  I think the play is a way for him to keep writing while he's researching.  I think this is addictive stuff.  He's getting better and faster and his ideas are getting ahead of his time alone and home projects we can afford.

Jim's life is wonderfully ritualized from my outside point of view.  He makes me coffee each morning, we either head to the gym or we don't, and I go off to schools until this time of year.  He reads his political stuff and then puts his current effort on the screen.  Notes on the left.  Text on the right.  He reads some of yesterday's stuff and he leaves the computer to nod off.

Stuff happens around the house at this point.  Decks get built.  The lawn gets mowed.  The kitchen floor gets washed.  He returns to the computer and writes.  Sometimes more work gets done around the house.  That happens if he gets stuck.  There was a moment during the first book when I was working in the garden and he was building a path to the backyard.  It was kind of a Eureka moment.  The flagstone went into the sand and he went to the computer and wrote a single sentence that shifted everything.  I mean, I saw that happen.  I knew the sentence when I read the book.  That was pretty cool.

Jim writes and does stuff around the house until he stops writing for the day.  Then sometimes he plays the guitar or does research or cooks.  It'd be a great life without some of the hurdles he faces.  The amount of thought that goes into a paragraph is hard to measure.  Dickens got paid by the word.  I wish Jim could get paid by the thought.

Sometimes he doesn't sleep.  Well, he rarely sleeps, but sometimes this makes it worse.  He thinks about what the people in the book will do or not do.  He worries about writing things he's never done.  There is a cool chase scene in the second book.  Characters jump off a dirt road onto a steep hill and have to struggle to get up the hill.  It's scary and it's supposed to be scary.  It took him lots of drafts and it still worries him.  I'm pretty sure Stephen King hasn't done all the stuff he's written about so I think it'll be okay if Jim has never barely escaped up a rocky slope after being chased by two weird Larry's.    Another time Jim lost sleep over what his invented ritzy music camp would serve for dinner.  You can see this gets obsessive.  I try to help.  I told him the ramps as part of the camp meal were a bit much.  The ramps are now wild ramps.  Like I said, I try to help.  Try to tell George Seurat not to use dots.

My best obsessive story happened about a year ago when he was trying to work out an ending for the first book.  He's had a plan for each book before he started writing, but when he actually started typing, the stories evolved and they didn't necessarily go according to the original plan.   At this time he was struggling between what he planned for the book and where the book seemed to be going of its own free will and I was having my own little pity party at the same time and I was crying and being my emotional self and our struggles met over wine one afternoon.  I was weeping and making no doubt ridiculous hormonal statements about something and I thought he was really hearing me and then he started jotting notes.  Had I looked at those notes at that moment, I think it would have been really bad.  I know it would have been.  I managed to wait though and I looked at the notes the next morning.  Sure enough--all about the book and the solution the book needed.  It's a good solution.  I needed to cry more than anything that day.  It worked out okay.

Sometimes Jim gets bad news that he has no control over.  That's the hardest thing to watch.  I don't know what to do.  It makes me mad mostly.  He keeps plugging away.  He survives better than I ever could.  Bad news is hard.

Jim writes because he loves it and he can see he's getting better at his craft and he's rediscovering all the creative stuff he did in a classroom and as a handyman.  There are such wondrous moments when something he writes and works on is good and we both know it.  I love watching this.

He'd like to be published.  I'd like that too.  It would be way cool.  He ardently works at that side too even though it is more opposed to his real nature.  This boy was not built to sell himself.   All three of our kids have to sell themselves to succeed.  I'm learning to respect their abilities here more and more.

What Jim is doing is both beautiful and painful.  He's being a writer.  It's amazing to watch.