Backstory (pt. 2)

Teach Your Children Well...

"their father's hell will slowly go by," and they will grow up, quickly and swiftly.

A single baobob tree growing in just behind a pool of
water and in the middle of a plush green field.
The baobob tree is also growing up and was the author's
very favorite tree, grade 3.

In pt. 1 you surely noticed the main character was Alex. I am Alex, or I was. Just before entering the third grade I tacked the -a on at the end and became Alexa forever more. The story goes that that summer I was on vacation with my family and we were at the beech. A bunch of other families were there too, of course. A bunch of other families also had kid's called Alex. I distinctly remember half a dozen other moms standing on the beech calling for their kids "Alex!" "Alex, come here!" "Come on, Alex!" "Alex!" "Alex!" Every time I turned to answer I see some other kid, more often than no a boy, running and answering to my name. When we get home I demand to have my own name. One that no one else on any beech or anywhere else is going to share. My family, and everyone else, acquiesced.

Of course, now Amazon has gone and stolen my name.
I demand compensation. 

Age: 9, Grade 4
The floor is hard but not cold. Typical of classroom carpets the carpet is grey, thin, and itchy. Alexa's elbows rest on the carpet and the carpet presses back, indenting them with an angry red pebbled-pattern, that her elbows will share with her knees. The rest of her body, from knees to chest, is protected by clothing and the pressure from the floor pressing up as Alexa lies there reading is comforting. Her head rests heavy in one hand, the other hand hold down the pages of her book, preventing them from flipping pre-maturely. There is probably enough time left of SSR for Alexa to finish the chapter, for Eragon it looks like Eragon might finally reach Teirm, not that it isn't super cool to read about his trekking, magic learning, walking, sword fighting, and dragon riding with Saphira and Brom. It feels like it takes forever to finish each page and a the minutes of silence and stillness of the early afternoon are ticking by fast. Too soon the lights with flicker on and Alexa will need to move on to finding the mean, median, and mode of the scores of the past months lost Bengals games. Still, she has time.

I had lots of time. Time to finish that book and so many others.  I also realized I didn't have much time to get down to business writing if I was going to publish by fifteen, like Christopher Paolini, or eighteen, like Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (my, then, idols). Spoiler alert: I didn't make it.

Unless you count the story I "published" in sixth grade with the help of my teacher. The Wind Blows was a story about orphaned sisters living on a farm who found out that a body of water on their property was actually a portal to the elven realm and in that realm they were some sort of elve royalty that had to save the world. If you want to read it here you go. Full disclosure, it was written by an eleven year old who didn't care too much for spelling or grammar yet and I have not gone back to proofread it. The font is so tiny because it was "published" by being printed, then cut and paste onto the pages of blank book, and when it was a normal-readable-font size I had too many pages to fit into the book, so I improvised. Other parts of the book were a bit more professional, take a look at my cover and copyright pages or my about the author blurb with experimental comma usage.

Alexa, eleven-going-on-twelve, circa 2006.
Image description: girl with messy shoulder length brown hair and blue-eyes smiles,
mouth-closed probably full of food, because she is sitting cross-legged at a cherry wood table
eating what appears to be blueberry cake on a square black plate. She is wearing a yellow t-shirt
and has a white blanket covering her lap. A family room with a old-school tube TV, fireplace, and
assorted furniture is in the background.

Composite, Grades 7/8
Alexa flips through the pages of her lilac composition notebook, the covers are soft around the corners and the pages are crisp and crinkly. She runs her finger across the indents from her messy writing on the backside of the previous page and skims the her notes about her wrath towards Brandt and his last stupid lesson. She swears she likes school its just Brandt she doesn't like. Something about him makes her angry and so after she has paid attention long enough to figure out all of the important bits of his lesson she gets to open her notebook (it is not a diary or journal) and write, most of that writing is stream of conscious, as often as not about how frustrated she is with Brandt but sometimes actual stories or poems. It is lunch now, though, so she sits on the curb at the top of the hill going down to the soccer field where most of her peers are running around screaming. The sun is warm on her back and her knees make the perfect desk. Alexa stares at and then dates the next clean page. At first she pauses to worry about how messy her hand writing looks. The letters are too rounded and the each lean in different directs, and when she isn't careful like she just wasn't they smear together. Then she refocuses and starts actually writing. Sometimes her stories get a bit graphic, when she writes these bits her stomach clenches worrying what would happen if someone else were to find her book. Would they heed her warning scrolled on the first page, "If found: please return to Alexa. NOT FOR YOUR EYES." Or would that make them more likely to read it? Wouldn't that be mortifying. It doesn't matter, Alexa knows, because no one is going to pick up the notebook, it doesn't leave her hands long enough for that to happen, ever. 

 I have about eight composition notebooks from middle school. Each filled. Short stories, starts of novels, and stream of conscious. Some of them are so worn that the cardboard covers have fallen off. Now, they are mostly useful for insight into a middle schooler's head, I don't have to wonder how I thought when I was thirteen, I know. I have it written down in great detail.

In middle school I also go super into Maximum Ride by James Patterson. If you corner me today and demand I name a favorite book there is a good chance that will be my answer. It was one book series that was fundamental to the formation of my identity. Except, when Final Warning came out I was highly disappointed and kind of angry at James Patterson (and his team of ghost writers) for all of the mistakes they made with the story. So I wrote my own version of book four. You can take a look at most of that here.  Although I didn't finish, and again I could have benefited from some proofreading, I maintain that I did more justice to Max than J. Pat's goons did. Seriously, don't try to have a civil conversation with me about the latter Maximum Ride books. Although, on a different note, if you go to my FanFiction.net profile you can also find crossover Maximum Ride / Twilight fanfic that I wrote. Good stuff.

Now, I'm a big kid and I pretty much only write my own stuff. Still, I can't deny where I got my start and some great practice in the craft of writing. You shouldn't ever hear my knock fanfiction. If you want to know what I'm really up to today check out my recent announcement.

Announcement, August 2017

What did I say about Fits and Starts?

This is me starting and fitting and starting again. 

I promised I am going to make this into something.

Something consistent. 

Getting there will take some trial and error, I promise.

Image Description: Green and glowing interlocking systems.
Image source described as a "chaos clock." 

1) Because I swear it a bold-faced-lie turned myth that it only takes 30 days of consistently doing something for it to become a habit. I can do something daily, religiously, for months and one bad week and its dead in the water. That issue doesn't quite apply here but it goes to show it will take sometime before I really get into and keep the rhythm of writing for public consumption. 

2) I actually have been writing. I just don't know when exactly it happened. Or how, besides sometimes I do keep by habits regardless of external forces. Given the circumstances of its drafting I'm currently operating under the assumption that very little of it is of a caliber worthy of an external audience. 

3) Back in June my goal was to get to the point where I was reliable writing at least one post a week, totaling to four a month. So that by the end of August when there was some material established and a posting schedule established I could start marketing/sharing/really putting this out there on the inter-webs. Keeping such goals private obviously didn't work. So, I hereby set my future goals so such: by the end of August I will have posted 3 posts total (this one plus 2), I will post once a week in September and October, so I can re-access a full public launch in November. By November there should be at least 11 new posts total. 

I am writing though.

I am a writer. Still chipping away at Slowdown Peter, starting the pre-writing stage of a project with my BFF, and expiermenting with short-form prose.

As a writer I of course am still reading. I have finally finished A Dance With Dragons by R.R. Martin and am sad that it will be a while before I can consume the final Song of Fire and Ice installment. At least I only have to wait a week before the season finale of Game of Thrones. Currently, I am also keeping myself occupied, working on reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. 

Since I don't know what happened to July and August it might be worth mentioning for record here that in that time I also started working at an office supply store, applied to and enrolled in graduate school, and just on Monday of this week began working towards my Masters of Education. 

Exciting times.

Exciting times we are living in. Except totally in the terrifying, what on Earth is going to happen next way? 

Quotes, Quoth the Raven

I am a collector of quotes. 

I like other people's words. 

Now to share some of my favorite bits of other people's words, particularly related to the topic of writing. 

"Quoth the raven, nevermore." -- Edgar Allen Poe, "The Raven"
image: a single robust black raven sitting on a red rock with blurred
 landscape and dim blue sky in the background.

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg

 “Write every day. When you write every day, it becomes a habit and you do it automatically. Habits are things you get for free.” Cory Doctorow

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.” Ray Bradbury

“When you’re slammed, your novel becomes a refuge from the chaos of the rest of your life—a secret world you get to escape to at the end of a long day.” Chris Baty 

“Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.” Johnathon Franzen

“A word after a word after a word is power.” Margaret Atwood

“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” Tom Clancy

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” —William Carlos Williams

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” Catherine Drinker Bowen

“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.” William Zinsser

“Creativity is an act of defiance.” Twyla Tharp

“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We read to know we are not alone.” William Nicholson

“A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.” Mark Twain

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler

I have more tucked away and folded into my calendar(s) to fall out on a surprise day when I may need a reminder of what I am doing and why. Shortly, I will make an effort to go through and accumulate then curate those for you as well.

You may have noticed that last few quotes were more about reading than writing. With this keen observation in mind I ask you to remember, writers read, writers read a lot, and therefore when talking and thinking about writing we should never forget to talk and think and write about reading. 

Backstory (pt. 1)

Let's start at the very beginning:

A Very Good Place To Start

I am an odd person. I started out that way and haven't found a good reason to try and change.

Age:5, Kindergarten
Montessori classrooms are busy but quiet. A hush falls over the room when the little bodies find focus, settling into important work. Alex sits tracing sand letters only half paying attention to the form because she is watching and waiting. Her crush is sitting at her favorite writing desk and she needs him to move. He's not even writing anyways, he is flipping through the pages of his copy book side-eyeing the kids at the counting beads. Alex finishes the alphabet and takes her time packing up the letters and rolling her rug. She walks slowly to put these items back in their spots then re-routes to the pencils shelf. The pencil shelf has its own smell, from the wooden pencil shavings and graphite mixing with the editing crayons despite each being sorted into coordinated cups. Alex stares at them with her hands behind her back she knows which pencil she is looking for, sleek dark blue, triangular, never too sharp, reliable erasure, and she isn't going to touch any of the lesser pencils. Besides, she has time; the counting beads are still in use so Connor is still sitting in her chair. She finds the pencil in the second cup, the wrong cup, mixed in with the right-handed-grip pencils. Alex claims her pencil and buys time by checking the sorting on the rest of the pencils so they are each in the proper containers. The kids at the counting beads are cleaning up, Connor is already out of his seat, Alex pulls her copybook from the pile on the bottom shelf and takes great satisfaction sitting down in her favorite spot. The desk is just the right height, the chair smooth old wood always warm even when she isn't taking it from her friends, and it is very nearly in the middle of everything situated just by the door, across from the math corner and adjacent to the science center. Energy buzzes in that seat. She sees everything. She hears everything. Alex puts her head down, chews on her tongue, and practices her letters on the lines. Every few lines her hand cramps. Instead of stopping she switches the pencil into her other hand. As she tires she switches the pencil more frequently, until almost every other letter is written by a different hand.

I was writing well before I could write or read.
My first stories were written in a sketch book my grandmother gave me as a surprise gift. The cover is Picasso and the inside is filled with genius. Or scribbles, who can tell the difference?
By that age I was also already beginning to teach, groups of stuffed animals, the Barbies my aunts kept giving me, my friends and brother when I could cajole them into playing along.
I came by my callings early and honestly.

Composite, Grades 1/2
Alex is sick and tired of Bob books. She hates Mat and Cat and does not care where either of them sat. Worse when Alex emerges from the privacy of the reading corner Caitlin is sitting at the long table smugly reading Magic Tree House to the gecko. Notebook in hand she sits across from Caitlin. She opens her notebook and finds the spot where she left off, Lothlorien. She feels the crinkled pages, heavy with the indents of her writing and stares momentarily at the bookshelves towering behind Caitlin. Caitlin is still reading to the gecko, show off, the books in the backdrop amplify the taunting. It is so unfair that Caitlin can read all of those stories, surely far more interesting than Dot walking with Spot. Alex refocuses on the blank page in front of her and pulls the pencil out from behind her ear. She is in Lothlorien now, among the tall green trees, walking through silver fog. Galadriel is in the distance, chanting, her characters are trying to find Galadriel but are lost in the thickness of the forest. The fog is making then tired and they are hungry, Elrond didn't give them enough Lembas to last after they got lost in the mountains on their journey to the woods and they are running out of time. They need Galadriel's help. The page fills and Alex pauses just long enough to turn the the next one, her hand is grey with smears of graphite. Alex takes a deep breathe and hunkers down to continue the story. It is okay if she can't read any of the good books in the class she can write a better one. 

In second grade, still before I could properly read, I finished my first fan-fiction of Lord of the Rings. My dad had starting reading The Hobbit to us as a bedtime story a couple of years earlier and didn't stop until he finished The Return of the King. I wanted more, so I made it. The love of the story was already there even if it was locked away in words I couldn't yet decode.
It wouldn't be until mid-way through third grade that reading clicked for me. Harry Potter was the first book I read on my own, and I got to be the first in my class to read it (take that Caitlin). I would continue to spend the next many years writing Harry Potter fan-fictions and more or less being Hermione.

Image of floor to ceiling bookshelves tightly packed with many books
lining a hardwood floor aisle that ends in another filled floor to ceiling bookshelf.

Now, I am still reading and writing. I am currently trying to pick up this project and create a platform of sorts here to share my work from. For now this means I'm going to do my best to post something every week or so to build up some content before going out and seeking the readers. If you build it they will come, right? With that I'm focusing on revising a number of shorter pieces I've accumulated over the years as well as trying to write more short-stories and flash-fiction-prose. I'm also working on finishing up the novel I'm calling Slowdown Peter so I can dig into destroy-rebuild-rewrite-revise-and-polish it and the already-drafted novels in its series/universe (namely Earthside and Gina's Story). I just finished reading Douglas Adams So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. I am still in the middle of A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin with very little desire to pick it up and finish so I've also just started Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema. 

Black Lives Matter

Tonight was the first night in a long while that I noticed quite so many lightning bugs out in force, enchanting the lovely summer evening. The mosquito bites were worth it.

Now, I sit and confront my privilege. My privilege to be able to sit here and enjoy the night when Philando Castile and Sam DuBose will never get that chance again because they were killed by police.I have the privilege to know that as a white women I do not have to worry about the police one day taking my life. My privilege to be able to think about their deaths, be sad, and move on. My privilege to want to be shocked that Castile's killer will not face legal charges. I'm not shocked, I'm not even surprised, yet again America's legal system fails to serve justice. I want to say the system is broken but I'm not sure it is anymore, it might be working just fine to protect the status quo.

I am still working to process how it can be Castile's wrongful death, dare I say murder, did not matter to the jury acquitted his killer. I am now more worried than ever that Sam DuBose's life my not matter enough in his current trial to bring his killer to justice. And let's not forget about Alton Sterling, who lost his life on the same day almost a year ago, we are still waiting to see if charges are going to be brought by the state of Louisiana, and yet we can expect the same pattern to continue--to the state Sterling's death might not matter either. And this is wrong.

Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter.
What do we need to do to make the system, and the people in the system, act in accord with this basic truth: that black lives do in fact matter?

I have the privilege to be sitting here, thinking this, knowing that it this status quo needs to change, and not knowing what to do.

What more can I do? There has to be more.

Here with the Black Lives Matter movement is a place where you and I can start doing more.
Please remember my voice is very far from the most important voice on this matter, please seek out other voices speaking up and out about anti-racism and related issues. I am publishing this tonight because it is important is important to be not to be silent on the issue, for I have learned that silence can hurt as much as silencing. Let's work together to amplify as many voices, especially of those most effected, as we can. On that note I'm also going to direct you to Shaun King's work via Facebook.

A Few Old Pieces

If I am going to do this I might as well do this all the way.

Today, I am publishing a few pieces I prepped to post way back in 2013 but for one reason or another never did. I'm going to blame finals. Finals always made a good scapegoat for not doing other things.

Short Stories
Backup (content warning)
Brin and Audrey 

Poems
As SnowDawg
Llamar el Gato

I found some other files in my backlog that might be worth polishing and posting. I'll probably get around to doing that in the next week or so.

Feedback always welcome.

President Obama's hand pointing to paper with the text of an
 early-draft of the ACA health bill with many revision notes.
(Cool pictures come up when you google "reading and writing"
 with CC fair use filters turned on).

Cheers! to taking risks.

_________________________________________________________________________________

All posted writing by Alexa Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at alexa.littering@gmail.com.

Starts and Fits

Blogging is one of those things that I've always flirted with in my head but have never actually successfully done. Thinking about doing all the the things that actually go into blogging makes me queezy. Not necessarily the work, but everything else, just doesn't sit right for me. I don't want to be a Blogger. Yet, years ago I started this thing here and I've been sad recently that I abandoned it in it's infancy. So hear Ye, hear Ye: I now publicly announce my intent to commit to this again and do this thing in anew.

This post itself is probably just another false start. 

It may have been years since I've touched this here blog but it has not been years since I've last written.
I am a Writer after all. 

As it stands today, right this minute, I'm more of a writer.*

As far as I'm concerned I've earned my -er.** I've written five novels (two are just slush pile manuscripts, the other three are in various states of revision) and numerous other essays, short stories, poems, drabbles, what-have-you. I've done the writing (and will continue to do the writing).

It is just that, sometime at the end of last summer I fell completely out of the habit of writing everyday. This happens; life happens. What doesn't so much happen is dropping from writing over 100,000 words in a year to writing maybe 2,000 or so words in about the same amount of time. Yet, that is exactly what happened, for a number of reasons I will outline here, for prosperity. 

July 06, 2016:

Context- I spent the summer of 2016 in Atlanta for TFA's teaching Institute. After a year of prep-and-dread Institute was actually pretty ok and for the first time ever I was able to maintain teaching and writing at the same time. It was pretty exciting. This was one of the last days we were in Atlanta and I had all morning and afternoon free--so I found myself a coffee shop and I wrote all day.

At the coffee shop (a Georgia Tech bookstore Starbucks because it was what I could find in walking distance) I unplugged from the outside world, sat down, and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I ate Starbucks lunch and wrote some more. My writing output was fantastic. I worked my way out of a couple dozen corners and think I put down upwards of ten thousand words. It was exhilarating. 

Eventually my free-time ran out and I had to go to some kind of TFA thing. So, as you do, I packed up and starting walking to the meeting place. It was probably about half a miles walk.

Atlanta in the summer is generally excessively hot and oppressively muggy, and this day wasn't any exception. The sun was out in full force and it was probably 97 degrees. Usually, I'd mind a lot. This time I didn't. I was on a high. The warmth of the sun on my skin mixed with the internal glow of creative-production. I noticed the slight breeze stirring the air more than my own sticky sweat as I walked. As far as  I was concerned it was an all around good day. 

I was walking and thinking about where I stopped and one of the character development problems I was having. It was time for Fin, one-armed black dude and all around mensch, to have sometime a POV-filter character and I really wanted to take the opportunity to take his character to the next level, allow him to be as dynamic as his counter-parts. To date he had pretty much been stoic and dependable, mostly notable for his nose-to-grind-work-ethic and distaste for drama. As I was working on some aspects of his character and really trying to make sure I wasn't falling into pits of stereotypes or spinning Fin into the perfect token character I realized I wasn't entirely sure where exactly I was going to I got out my phone and turned on the data to get directions. 

That was when I got the push notification. Alton Sterling had been killed by police in Baton Rouge. Sterling was the 122nd black man to die at the hands of the police in 2016. I dismissed the notification, thought something along the lines of "well, that sucks" or "oh that's sad for him," and kept pulled up the map to my destination. All the while I was thinking about Fin. I kept walking.

One step. Two step. Three step. Four step. Wait.
I stopped. What was wrong with me? How could I so easily dismiss Alton Sterling's life, the violence, brutality, injustice, the pain. I had the privilege of choosing not to feel this pain and I knew using that privilege would cause a great number of my friends pain. Especially, because I did care, deeply. But for a moment, for four steps, I didn't. What did that mean? Had police brutality really become that normalized? Was I ready to accept it that readily? The cognitive dissonance was real. I was still on a writing high. 

I went to my TFA thing. Where tensions ran high. I was with a community I really cared about*** and we began to unpack the newest incident of police brutality, with questionable degrees of success. By the time I was free again, I was in an entirely different place feeling wise. A feeling difficult to describe somewhere in the intersection of anger and mourning mixed with the acceptance that I was probably only feeling a fraction of what my friends and others more directly affected by racism were feeling. 

Already, (and if very self-centered manner) I wasn't sure how I was going to pick up the pen again but I knew it as important that I tried if only to keep the momentum going. So I tried to funnel those complex feelings into my fiction and wrote a bit, kind of. It didn't go terribly well and I diverted to facebook where I learned of the murder of Philando Castile at hand of police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. I lost it. I spent the rest of the sitting in grief and listening to the stories, testaments, and calls to action of my communities at large in reaction to the tragic and inexcusable death of innocent black men symptomatic of living in a systemically racist country.**** From that moment, early July 2016, until the end of January 2017 I'm not sure if I wrote a single word. I still haven't returned to Fin or that project (although I yearn to and eventually will). 

Beyond July 06, 2016 I've had a pretty rough year.
I just finished my first year teaching. That first year in the classroom is always brutal. I had the honor of also muddling through it in an toxic and abusive school environment. Stir in some Depression and Anxiety* and I wasn't even able to keep reading. In the 2016/2017 school year I read two half books (the first-half Barskins by Annie Proulx a novel about colonial French Canada, stolen from the library, and the first-half of George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons). 

Now, I've made it through. I'm reading again (the second-half of Dance with Dragons, Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything, some of the short stories from Cory Doctorow I have saved on my computer, next up either Corrections by Jonathan Franzen or maybe the second-half of Barskins). I'm writing again; and it feels good. 

Stay posted for more. 

Now I am going to go edit a student's resume and go grocery shopping. 

*see this future post about w/W/d/D/a/A difference that will totally, definitely, exist by the time an audience of any size actually reads this
**I really wish Blogger had an option to do superscripts for footnotes (if anyone know how to make it do it, let me know). Anyways, credit to Writing About Writing for the idea of earning the -er. 

***Maybe some other time I'll share my complicated relationship with TFA

****Still a very, very important issue. For more reasons than being tangentially related to my prolonged writers block, seriously. #BlackLivesMatter -go learn more about it, what amazing organizers are doing to make change in our society, and how you can maybe help. 

(Long enough for you? Feedback of all shades welcome.)