Monday, Monday

Happy Monday. At least it’s the start of a short week. I hope it is for you, too. I know we could all use a little time off. Lately life has seemed just a lot more brutal and tiring.

I don’t usually talk about my real life online, but Friday I got my pink slip. My district, with the greatest regret, pink slipped about 230 of their 400 teachers. 48 teachers in the high school where I teach were pink slipped out of 106. And that doesn’t take into consideration the 50 or so teachers they are trying to push out into retirement with negative incentives.

So if I’ve seemed a little short or abrupt or not there at any point in my replies or anything, my apologies. Even though I’m in the top five to be recalled and no one seems worried about my job except me, and even though I’ve known for a while this was coming, I have been surprisingly cranky, and I’m not sure if that’s bled over into my online presence or not.

Either way, I’ll get my job back, or I’ll go back to school. I’ve wanted my Ph.D forever. Or I’ll write the novel this summer instead of curriculum. As my daughter would say, it’ll be fine.

But enough of the Monday gloom and doom. It’s award time. B. Miller and Shelley have given me the Prolific Blogger Award, so thank you very much to them. And Jen over at unedited has gifted me with the Supportive Commenter Award.

It’s my honor at this point to pass this award on to people that gift me with their heartfelt comments regularly. There are so many others that could be on this list, but a lot of them have already received this award. So here is my list. I appreciate you all more than you can know.

Christine at Christine’s Journey
Aubrie at Flutey Words
Lola at Sharp Pen/Dull Sword
Laurel at Laurel’s Leaves
Talli Roland
Tara at Feel of Something New

And speaking of Jen, she’s running a great contest to celebrate her birthday and her 300 followers. Click here and go over and join her.

And speaking of contests, Summer over at And This Time Concentrate is running a contest, too. She's celebrating finishing her MS. So go over and check it out.

Also running a very cool contest is Heim Binas Fiction. Go check it out and enjoy your Monday.

Writing from the heart

She Writes has an interesting post about wishes here, and I was thinking about that today. Along with myriad other wishes large and small, my overwhelming one right now is that I could spare my husband the next six months or so of his father dying. My father-in-law called Friday night to ask my husband to go with him to sell his house and set his affairs in order. The cancer’s back and it’s everywhere and it’s sooner rather than later for him. It’s a terrible thing to watch a parent or child or loved one die.

I’m saying this here because Piedmont Writer also had an interesting post on how weather around her affects her writing. It doesn’t affect me; the weather is what it is in the story, not what’s around me. My characters are hot or cold, wet or dry as the setting dictates. What does affect my writing is what is going on around me in real life and often, what I am teaching at the time.

I’ve spent all day researching genocide for an elective I will be teaching next year. Elements of genocide from Rwanda found their way into a novel I was writing during my teaching of that.

Elements of my writing that include setting, tone, dialogue, theme, and all their intersecting points come from life around me. So given my husband and my father-in-law and my curriculum prep, I expect that my writing will tend toward the dark for a while.

So what’s the bleed-through? What affects you and your writing?