What's Happening

It’s been a while since my last blog post – longer than I ever intended – and I feel like I owe you loyal readers an explanation. In short, I’ve been insanely busy these past couple of weeks in ways that are both tangentially and directly related to my writing. If you’re at all interested in learning why, read on:



To put it mildly, my writing career – and I admit calling anything I’ve done so far in my 28 years a “career” is a stretch – has taken two unexpected yet interesting turns of late.



The first turn, though still sudden and unexpected in its own strange way, stems back to last April, when, on a whim I decided to go through the relatively simple steps required to get certified to substitute teach in New York City. Anyone who has ever had a go at making a living as a freelance writer will tell you it’s pretty damn difficult to stay afloat, and during the many dry spells in paid work that every freelancer hits from time to time I would often consider teaching as a great way to pay the bills while I craft my theoretical literary masterpieces at night. Substitute teaching seemed to me like a great way to dip my toes in the water, so to speak, and I enjoyed subbing at various schools in Queens from April to June 2012 even if the job sometimes felt more like babysitting than actual teaching. Still, the work was flexible, the hours great and the pay damn good, and I enjoyed it enough to renew my license for the 2012-13 school year and continue substitute work while I pursued more writing gigs.

That’s where things took the aforementioned unexpected turn, and I quickly found myself thrown into the proverbial deep-end and thrust into a role teaching 11th grade English by myself for the month of September and, as far as I can tell, the foreseeable future. In short, and for reasons I still have yet to fully grasp, what began as a job helping out the school’s new 11th grade English teacher as she got her bearings and completed the necessary paperwork to transfer her teaching certification from California to New York quickly turned into my unsuspecting and very green ass flying solo once it became clear the transfer wouldn’t and couldn’t go through. Seemingly overnight I went from eager Teacher’s Assistant to Head of the Classroom, charged with teaching three classes of 30 seventeen year-olds this weird and often confounding thing we call the English language. And you know what? I’ve loved nearly every minute of it.

It’s tough for me to explain just how eye-opening these first five weeks have been – not just in the ways I’ve had to learn how to effectively teach after exactly zero experience, but in the ways teaching has forced me to reevaluate how I look at my own approach to writing. Though I’ve certainly had my fair share of wonderful, effective teachers over the years (as well as plenty of complete and utter humps), my writing, like that of probably 99% of other writers out there, has been and continues to be informed mostly by a combination of intuition, trial and error and the inevitable process of osmosis that occurs when spending a large chunk of one’s waking hours buried in a book. I know a sentence, phrase or paragraph works because it sounds, looks and feels correct, and I often leave it at that, saving any real self-reflection on what I am saying or trying to say rather than how I’m saying it. (Feel free to chime in in the comments section with any well deserved digs about how my writing would probably be a hell of a lot better if I thought about it more.)

Needless to say, this intuitive approach to writing is absolutely worthless when you’re trying to explain to a seventeen year-old the intricate and often archaic rules of grammar, sentence structure and usage. Good luck standing in front of a class of curious teenagers as you try to tell them a sentence doesn’t work because, well, it doesn’t fucking work and that’s the end of it. These past five weeks of trial-by-fire teaching have done more in terms of forcing me to think about writing in general and my own craft than any exercise I ever tried in four years in Carnegie Mellon’s Creative Writing program or six years in the trenches as a full-time working freelance writer.

And again, I’ve loved nearly every second of it – enough to apply to various channels (Masters Programs in Education, the NYC Fellowship Program) to get my full-time teacher’s certification. Not only do I appreciate the sort of self-reflection teaching has forced on me; I also genuinely enjoy the interaction with the kids. There really isn’t any proper way to explain how rewarding it is to see the jolt of recognition flash across a kid’s face when something you’re saying gets through to him or her. It’s a great feeling, and one I hope to have many times over moving forward. So far, because I’ve been thrown in the deep end in such a fashion, my teaching has mostly consisted of preparing the students for their PSATs and drilling them on the proper form and argumentative techniques of an expository essay (thrilling stuff, I know), but I hope to spice things up a little more moving forward now that I have a better idea what I’m up against.

But ya, I’m digging my young, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, wholly unexpected turn as an English teacher so far and look forward to my time in the classroom every day. (For the most part, the other teachers in the school have been every bit as great as the kids. Nearly all of them are helpful, supportive and truly love their jobs, which is also a great thing to see when you’re considering a path down a strange, new career. All except one teacher, that is, who seems to regard me as something between a curiosity and an utter abomination. But to hell with that teacher.)

And that’s just the first unexpected turn. Because freelance writing gigs almost never pop up when you need them to and instead surface when you have a million other things on your plate, I was fortunate enough to land an ongoing position writing ad copy for Scholastic Books just as my new job as a teacher began to kick my ass. Thus, I am now spending my days in the classroom and nights in front of the computer writing the blurb/plot summaries for Scholastics children and young adult books, both online and in print in those pamphlets you used to get in school.

This new gig, like my fledgling teaching career, has forced me to reevaluate my approach to writing in new ways I didn’t expect when I took the job. Having to read another author’s work – sometimes it’s a picture book, sometimes one of those educational National Geographic readers, and other times a young adult novel – digest it, and then spew its essence out into a 100-word chunk of online copy meant to convince someone it’s worth reading is challenging enough; doing it in 18 words for the print pamphlets is a different sort of puzzle altogether. Though sometimes tedious, both are engaging tasks, and, fuck, I’m getting paid for thinking up words and then writing them down, which any struggling professional writer will tell you is a hell of an accomplishment in its own right.

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying I’ve been too damn busy to properly keep up the blog. Both jobs are still very fresh, and as I try to get my feet underneath me with both I suspect my blog posts will remain few and far between. For now, I’m going to aim for one lengthy, worthwhile post a week and go from there. But by all means, please keep reading. In order to find out when a new post has hit, you can subscribe to email alerts via the box on the bottom of the site, subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter, where you’ll find updates on the blog as well as a litany of other diseased thoughts that flow from my warped mind. There are a number of comics-related topics I’m dying to tackle on this post, and I’m still in the early stages of a new comics project with the awesome Tom Travers on art. So stay tuned!

That’s it for now. Cheers, and thanks again for reading.