This journal has no title

It is a weird thing, feeling things wrapping up, after this has taken up so much of my mind over the last four months, and particularly since September.

After it started taking up so much of my time, from the 2nd week of September, without any end seeming in sight, I decided to do NaNoWriMo as a way to get the damn thing done. 50,000 words in a month: that should be more than enough. I aimed to go into November with 50,000; 100,000 words seemed about right.

In the end, I started November with about 55,000. Interestingly, my original belief that this was a 100,000 word story proved increasingly right; last week, I figured out how things would end, and wrote the final scenes, and then started writing both backwards and forwards so that I would eventually meet in the middle.

Up through last week, I banked as many spare words as I could, because Gwen and I went to Amsterdam yesterday and Sunday, and I knew I wouldn't be able to get much done then; turns out, I was wrong, as Saturday night I crossed 45,000 words, and...realized that I was actually basically done. Sunday I filled in a few bits and pieces in the chapters, but this morning rolled around, with 4440 words left to go to "win" at NaNoWriMo. Now, what was more important: Writing the right story, or winning?

Well, winning of course. I struggled to find a way that I could insert another 4500 words into what I had, but it quickly became clear that that was stupid.

So instead, tonight, I sat down and did what I do best: I stopped writing fiction and started writing academia. Sort of. I added a chapter at the end, which is currently titled "This isn't really a chapter." It's a place where I started writing up all the bits and pieces in the book which are in fact true, or at least based in actual fact/research, along with citations.

20 minutes later, I had 950 words. My usual average, when hand-writing, has been about 500 words per hour. This evening, at home, it took me another hour to write another 1200 words. The big number sure is nice, but...it sure does feel different. This is such a different way of exercising my mind and my words.

This "chapter" probably won't even make it into the book, proper, but I'm glad I'm writing it ,and will probably use the rest of my words (2532 to be precise) adding to it. I am afraid that if I don't write this down, I will forget where my impetus for certain parts came from, and why I made the decisions I did. So it's part research paper and part memoir.

But the story itself: There is nothing more to build. There is a huge amount to add to the beginning, and a huge amount to be changed during the editing process. (I suspect that many of the last 25 chapters or so need to be rearrange substantially.) But I will be surprised if any new chapters are added. It is a strange feeling, to have gone from "I have no idea how this will end" to "I see how this can end" to "I now know what the end is like" to "I have ended it", in four weeks flat.

As for now? For the first night in a month, or more, I won't spend 8pm-11pm on the couch writing. Instead, it's 9:30pm and I'm going to go take my beer and a new book I just bought upstairs to the bathtub.

Like many people, I grew up in the suburbs in a neighborhood with plenty of other children my age nearby, relative freedom as to where and with whom I went, and given that my mom did home day-care for a number of years, our house was general the place where the kids hung out anyway.

One thing I'd always vaguely worried about having kids and NOT living in the suburbs AND not having a car was whether that ubiquity of play would even be possible, or if I'd forever find myself scheduling play dates weeks in advance and giving up all or part of a day to ferry my child across town by bus, etc.

And, yeah, that still happens. We make a point of ensuring that there are fixed days when friends come over or when she goes to friend's -- even if it means that we spend an hour on public transport to get there and another hour to get back. (We didn't realize H. lived so far away when we invited her to come over and play; it wasn't a problem for her parents, since they have a car, but then when they reciprocated the invitation, it was a bit of a trek for Joel to get her out there.) And with D. living across the street we can make plans somewhat more flexibly -- we can knock on her door en route to the forest, for example, or I can text her parents on Friday to make plans for Sunday. But this morning Gwen asked if D. could come over or if she could go over to D.'s in the afternoon, way less notice than we usually have and with the ubiquity of birthday parties I knew the chance was high she might not be available but I texted Lauren anyway to see if she would be free after Gwen and I got back from the new house (I'd promised her we'd go over there so she could play at the park there for awhile. Especially as it was turning out to be one of those gloriously sunny fall days!). No answer, but I had told Gwen not to get her hopes up, so we were okay with this -- and she was still excited about going to the playground.

And then whom did we meet coming across Framwellgate Bridge? D. and her parents and little brother! They were on their way home after a family morning out, and Gwen was begging for D. to come to the playground with her. Within two minutes I'd relieved Lauren and Oliver of one of their children for the rest of the afternoon and the girls were skipping off hand in hand. Gwen got to show D. her new bedroom, they played at the park for 45 min., and then we came back to the old house where they had hot chocolate and spent at least half an hour upstairs pretending to take naps, and then colored until Oliver came by around 4:30 to bring her home for supper.

I very much like that things like this can happen WITHOUT buckets full of advanced planning. I love living in a small enough city where you can run into a friend downtown, head off in one direction to a park, then walk back the other direction home, and still have plenty of time to play at both places.

...and it's amazing.

Yesterday morning, a schoolfriend's mom picked Gwen up and took her and N. to T.'s house, where both Gwen and N. had been invited to spend the night. Gwen has been asking to go on or to have someone come over for a sleep over for six months or so, so she was SO EXCITED. Monday night involved packing an overnight bag (I got to decide whether I should send her to the sleepover with a "Computability in Europe" bag from the Azores or a "Indian Conference on Logic and Applications" bag from Delhi. We opted for the former; it was a better size.)

Mid afternoon yesterday T.'s mom texted us a few pictures of the girls playing outside (an amazingly sunny day whereas it's been mostly rainy for the last week or so), and it was so weird when 5pm rolled around and I didn't have to rush off to get her from wherever. Instead, I hung out at my office until Joel was done working, and then he met me there and we went out for supper. There's a pub/hotel on North Road that has been recommended to us for its food, so we decided to try it. We split a partridge and pear starter, and then I had venison with gin-soaked blackberries and girolles, and he had a sort of "exploded fish pie" (as he described it) -- all very good. We didn't stay for dessert because they needed our table for a reservation, so instead we went over to the Elm Tree because we know they have good sticky toffee pudding. I was too full for dessert, so I just had a G&T instead. We had a lovely time lingering over it, and then walked home.

We were home before 9pm. We are such losers. :)

Joel then showed me a whole bunch of websites selling skirting boards, and finished up his taxes. As he commented "we are old and boring". But as I replied, "we are old and boring TOGETHER." I would rather be old and boring with him than young and exciting on my own.

This morning, I didn't have to set my alarm. I slept until nearly 9am and was still out at the office by 9:20.

Late in the afternoon T.'s mom texted that the girls were covered in mud and picking conkers, and that she'd feed them and then bring them home. When it's just me, if I leave the office at 16:55, I'm home by 17:05. It's amazing.

I could get used to this.

...revising a paper from something that was not very good but adequate and something I didn't mind too much having my name attached to into something that I am embarrassed to claim but which hopefully jumps the requisite hoops, so when I received an email whose subject line indicated it had the decision on a piece of fiction I'd submitted to an anthology back in August, my thought as I opened it was "Eh, they didn't want it. That's okay. I knew it was a long shot, it isn't really exactly on the chosen topic."

So I was shocked and delighted to read:

Thank you for submitting a story for the forthcoming Nothing anthology. We really enjoyed reading your submission, and would like to accept your story 'The Sum of Our Memories' for inclusion in the collection.

Suddenly, having devoted much of the last three months to working on a novel doesn't seem as silly a way to spend my time. This is my first piece of fiction to be published since...wow, has it really been since the essay competition I entered when I was 10? I won a 10-speed bike and got my short story published in the hosting society's newsletter. I've had some poems along the way, but this might actually be my first "real" piece of published fiction.

--

And on the topic of "all writing counts", yesterday I received an inquiry from the Surnames Society of Australia asking if they could reprint one of my DMNES blog posts in their newsletter. It's an informal, non-profit thing, so they were apologetic that they couldn't pay me -- but honestly, I put it up on the web for free, if they want to reprint it for their readers, I'm happy to! So I briefly rewrote it a bit, to make it less blog posty, and send it off to them this morning.

Guess I need to update my "projects" spreadsheet.

I present you with this, which was in Gwen's school bag when I rifled through it last night.



I would bet good money that this came about because she was asked to write her name.

--

There is a lovely story about Joel when he was in grade school, regarding the week's spelling words. They were asked to write sentences containing all of the spelling words. He asked if it were acceptable to have more than one word in the same sentence, and the teacher said Yes.

His sentence? "These are our spelling words for this week: [list]."

His teacher was not amused.

Friday is the end of September. The new academic year always starts the first of October, mentally if not actually. Wednesday is matriculation. Thursday I run a study skills workshop and meet my advisees. The following Monday is my first lecture. Sometime before then I want to meet with my tutors for my intro class. At that meeting, they will expect me to have a clue about what I am planning to do. I do, but I'm not sure that clue extends beyond the first lecture, which is unfair to both them and to the students. I need to map out at least the first term's worth of topics, start sketching homework topics even if not homework assignments.

I have been amazingly lucky to have been able to spend the last three weeks basically dropping everything else in order to write. I wake up in the morning, wake Gwen, we get dressed, we eat, we walk to school. I may spend an hour or so reading emails, etc.; I learned long ago that I cannot simply turn up to my office and work, I have to fritter away at least 30 minutes, usually closer to an hour. I became a lot more productive when I realized this and gave myself permission to do so, years ago while still in grad school.

But then I settle in my rocking chair, pull up another chair next to me to balance the computer, another in front to serve as my footstool, and then I write. I write until lunch time, or through lunch time when I forget, I write until my tea is gone and I need to make more, and then I write more, until my alarm goes off at 16:45 so that I can be up to get Gwen before 5:00pm and we don't have to pay the extra 5GBP for after school care. On the walk up to the bailey, I think and reflect and plot and plan. On the walk home, I am still distracted. We make supper, eat it, clean up afterwards. Gwen does her homework, watches a video with me. We have snuggle time and then I read her a story and sing her a song, a song from the music that I have been listening to on repeat in my office, loudly and in gratitude to the fact that no one else is in my stairwell to be bothered by it. Then she is in bed, and despite my best intentions, there is always about an hour of TV on the couch before anything else happens. But 8 o'clock roll around, and then the music comes back on, and the paper comes out, and I write, I write until it is late enough that Joel is home and he expresses surprise that I am still awake, that I have often still been awake when he comes home.

It's something like 10 hours a day, my primary purpose has been to write. Even when we went to the Netherlands for Borefts this last weekend, I wrote on the ferry, I wrote on the bus, I wrote -- legibly and sensibly! -- while drinking beer. My pagination of handwritten pages is up to page 88; the PDF is 166 pages long. wc -w tells me I have 32792 words, though some of them are commented out; roughly all but 8000 of those have been written in the last three weeks. My three alpha readers have been so encouraging (I expect it from my mom. She has loved every word I have ever written. She is the very best of alpha readers. It has been wholly unexpected from others, to have them enjoy what I am writing so much, to hear from them that reading it has kept them from other work they should be doing).

But I cannot keep this up. I feel like I'm writing against a deadline, when the end of Friday comes (or maybe Saturday; Saturday morning I get 1.5 glorious hours uninterrupted at the public library while Gwen is at her drama lessons) and I will have to face up to the fact that I actually am employed to do something other than write a novel. So I will write all that I can before then, and then? I don't know how I'll arrange things then, but I'll arrange something. Because I now cannot imagine not finishing this, and soon.

And when it is done, I'll know how to write a book. I never felt like I learned that, while writing the dissertation, and since then, the idea of writing a book has frankly terrified me: A book is just so big. I have been very lucky that even though in my field, a book is expected, in my niche field, they are not, so I have been able to get away without writing on yet. But somehow, I feel like once I have completed this, the shear dint of having done so will make doing it a second time infinitely easier.

And this is why I have given myself permission to basically ignore everything else, these last three weeks, and simply to write. Because I am teaching myself an important skill that I need to have, and will make use of again in the near future.

This, folks, is why you give academics tenure.

Back in spring I joined an "Academic Mamas" group on FB, and it's been quite interesting. One thing that has recently come to the fore, in many different threads, is what students should call their teachers. There are a lot of people in the group who are very exercised by ensuring that their students call them "Prof. X" or "Dr. X" and not "hey [given name]" or "M(r)s. X".

I can understand stressing the importance of using Prof. or Dr. rather than a gendered title reflecting marital status, since the latter has no place in the classroom; I still remember my first course at UW-Marshfield/Wood County, and the first thing the teacher said was "You can call me Julie or Dr. Tharp, but Mrs. Tharp is my mother-in-law, and I will not answer to that." But what I find interesting is the number of people who take umbrage at the idea of their students calling them by their first name, and the reason many of them give is that it undermines their authority in the classroom, and they insist on the use of their formal title as a sign of authority and respect.

I find this baffling.

Maybe it's because, even 7+ years, "Dr. Uckelman" just isn't who I am. Dr. Uckelman is a person who writes snooty, irritated complaint letters, or who opens a bank account, or who has only recently gotten used to being "Mrs. Uckelman" on account of having a child. (This is an interesting side topic: I got used to being "Sara Uckelman" pretty quickly after getting married. But being "Mrs. Uckelman" remained a very weird concept, in part because growing up, my mom was "Mrs. Friedemann" mostly in contexts that involved her being my mother, not her being my dad's wife. So it was weird to be a Mrs. without kids. Since I've had Gwen, I've found it easier to be Mrs. Uckelman -- though since I had Gwen after the PhD, I often feel torn and that I should be Dr. Uckelman to these people.) Maybe it's because I started teaching back when I was still "Miss Friedemann" and like heck was I going to let ANYONE know this; in a sense, I established my authority in my first teaching experience by being Sara, rather than by being [title] [surname], and that is what I have become comfortable with. I respect that some students may be more comfortable with calling me Dr. Uckelman than calling me Sara; but that's their prerogative. I find it off-putting, especially when it's amongst students I work closely with or who are my supervisees; I worry that they do it because they feel that they must keep me at a distance, and I don't want them to feel that way. But I am not going to insist that they call me something that they are not comfortable calling me with. I'll just keep signing my emails "Sara", and eventually they'll come around.

Because with one exception, I don't recall any case where I felt like my authority in the classroom was compromised. The exception was when I was TAing intro logic with Antonio Rauti, so this had to have been my 2nd year in grad school, so I was 21, possibly (if it was second semester) soon to be 22. I had a student, a graduating senior (i.e., he had to be a year older than me) double majoring in math and computer science and already accepted to grad programs at Harvard and Stanford. He was taking Phil 211 because he needed humanities credits to graduate, and it made it clear during the first tutorial that he was unimpressed with the idea of a young woman teaching him logic.

The last day of class, he came up, shook my hand, and said basically that he thought I'd done a good job and he took back his comments (not in so many words, but that was clearly the intent).

Which makes me wonder: What is it about me or my teaching style that I am not encountering the sorts of disrespect and lack of authority that these other women, who insist that their students keep them at arm's length? While I'd like to say that I'm just a natural in the classroom someone who can command respect regardless of age or gender, I think a much more likely explanation is the same one as for why I feel like I've made it as far as I have in academia without experiencing the overt sexism that many other women have had: I'm simply oblivious to it. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If I don't feel like I am not maintaining my authority in the class room, does it matter then if I am or not? (In this case, authority is very different from sexism: If I am oblivious to the sexism, it's still happening. But if I am oblivious to my authority being undermined, is it being undermined?)

As I said in one of the twitter conversations this spawned, I like teaching 18+ people because they have the potential to be my peers. In terms of being fellow adults responsible for themselves, they already are my peers. Maybe in terms of the academy, they aren't my peers when they arrive fresh faced first term first year. But part of my job is to get them to the point where they can be them by the end of their 3rd years, by the time they're doing actual real research underneath me, by the time we're covering advanced topics in their classes. I want to be able to send these students drafts of my papers, to show them what the research process looks like. I want to encourage them to write papers with me. I want them to feel a part of a research group. This will never happen if they are always [given name] and I am always Dr. X. Why not establish things as I mean to go on? I don't want to spend the first year or two teaching them to call me Dr. Uckelman only to then try my best to get them to say "Sara" in their final year: This doesn't make sense.

Finally, I also asked a bunch of the women: If you insist that they call you "Dr. X" as a sign of respect, do you in return call them "Mr./Ms./Mx. X"? For the most part, the answer was no, and the reason given was that "Dr." is an earned title but "Mr./Ms./Mx." is not. I'm not sure I understand this as an explanation. Partly because, while "Dr." is an earned title, most of us cannot say that we earned our position at university, teaching these people, or that we deserve to be there (this isn't to say that our being there isn't merited); academia is such a crap shoot, that I feel it is more pure luck rather than any just desserts on my part that has put me in front of my students.

This novel started the 2nd to the last day of conferencing in Melbourne, when during one of the keynote talks I sketched a face and started writing, and I haven't really stopped since then, though it's gotten worse in the last few weeks -- I hit my New Year's Resolution goal on the 5th, and since then my brain has been like "whoo! go academic Sara, go you, you did it! Now: Do this instead!" So here I am, writing a novel instead of any of the papers I should be writing; but I learned long ago that I will be may more productive if I follow this out rather than try to ignore it.

I've been paginating sequentially, but "p47" doesn't mean I've written 47, it means I've written closer to 50-55, because some of the pages have branched to, e.g. "36a", "36b", "36c", before I realize that I'm not coming back, yet, to where I branched and I start over with the next number.

47+ handwritten pages.

18200+ words.

Formatted so it looks like a paperback book, because I need to be able to see the physical shape of the story to know if the tempo is right, 103 pages (including table of contents, list of citations, and bibliography).

18 chapters in full draft, covering 8 days of story. Another 5 chapters have snippets in them.

I have, for the most part, been writing sequentially: I started at the beginning, and went forward. Except there was one scene that I knew I needed, even though it was in the future, and I wrote that; and then I wrote sequentially from the beginning and from that scene. Late last night, I joined the two lines up, and am now working forward from a single point. At first I worried I had too little to say; now, I am 100 pages in and I feel like the whole of the story is still before me. I am happy with how things are going, and for the first of any fiction writing project I've ever done, I can see how to get it to being finished.

Don't worry, mom, you'll get a copy of it soon enough. :)

So, Gwen's been at school a week, and I'm still happy with our choice. She races off every morning, and almost every evening I've been met with a tantrum about going home (part of it is she doesn't want to leave; part of it is that school is a lot more tiring than nursery and she is often SO tired by the time I get her. So there are tears.) Monday night we had our first parent-teacher (group) meeting, and we got to hear a bit more about what school is like there. That day, the reception class (kindergarten; Gwen's) and the pre-school (nursery) class had picked apples from the school apple tries; they counted them, and compared numbers and amounts, and combined buckets and counted again, and cut them open, and baked with them, and generally had what seems to be a very awesome and very hands on learning experience. Yesterday they had French class. (Or maybe they didn't: It was on the schedule, but when I asked her about it, the story I got involved the teacher not being able to teach because he didn't know anyone's names? I'm not sure...) This morning on our walk over, we saw ahead of us a matching uniform and it turned out to be one of her classmates; she yelled his name and ran to catch up with him so we could walk the rest of the way together.

I get a detailed recitation of what was offered for lunch, as well as who ate what, every day. She often has received a sticker for some good behavior or other -- and for Gwen, there is no higher praise than a sticker on her shirt. (I know I've either done a good job or am clearly in need of something to perk me up when she gives me a sticker "for working hard"). Tuesday, she was sent home with a book, and before we could even leave school, she insisted on sitting down and reading it to me. I have no idea if it was memory or reading or a combination, but this is the first time she's ever done that -- and she point to each word as she said it and read every single thing perfectly.

They get homework every day -- phonics two days a week, reading two days a week, and math one day. Most of the time, she's already done the work during after care; for example, coming up with rhyming pairs, or a letter sheet with a specific letter that she should copy (and usually a picture of something starting with that letter, which I encourage her to color, because, hey, who doesn't like coloring!)

I can already tell that my biggest issue with homework is learning to treat it as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. See, I never had homework as a kid -- or rather, EVERYTHING I had was homework. The idea of getting assignments that you then worked on in your own time, outside of class, was SUCH a novelty to me when I went off to university; I felt exactly like Gwen did when she told me last Wednesday "I have homework! I've never had homework before!" It's easy to treat homework as an end: To ask her what she got, and to ensure she has it done before bed, so that it can be taken dutifully back the next day.

Except then we get a "pick and mix" math homework, with six different activities that we are encouraged to do with our child, and I find myself stymied. On the one hand, I feel a strong desire to work through them systematically and ensure that some evidence of our doing so gets back to the teacher. On the other hand, I look at the types of things they're asking, and realize either we're already doing them or we've done them in the past, but awhile ago and she's moved beyond that or we're doing much more interesting things already. For example, we've been doing a lot of addition lately: First, it was different combinations of two numbers that equal the same number. Next it was addition of zero -- which was a hoot because at first she simply didn't believe me when I told her you could add zero to eight and get eight. For awhile she refused to believe that you could add zero to anything; then she thought that adding zero to anything made it eight; and THEN it clicked and she realized that n+0=n for any n (up to and including omega). After she figured that out, I started asking about 0+n, and when she immediately gave me back n, we started doing m+n and n+m, until she was satisfied that addition is commutative. During waffle making Sunday morning, I heard Joel going over fractions with her, and on our way home today, she picked four blackberries and correctly divined that split evenly between the two of us, we'd each get two, so we talked a little bit about division and its relations to fractions.

So, I look at some of the activities and I have to remind myself that these are a means, not an end. The end is what counts, and if we achieve that end by our own devices, that's ok.

(I also have to say: For a nursery that does not consider itself a preschool at all -- unlike the chorister school's nursery which they've this year started calling preschool instead -- even though they do sort of follow the early years curriculum, the university nursery did a FANTASTIC job of providing the kids with an educational foundation. Gwen's numeracy and literacy seem to be way above where they're starting out at here.)

...and the other parent will understand.

Gwen has been in school for a week and already received two birthday party invitations (leading me to post an anguished screed on FB about WHY OH WHY DO PEOPLE PUT PHONE NUMBERS INSTEAD OF EMAILS FOR RSVP SO THAT I AM FORCED TO CALL STRANGERS ON THE PHONE JUST SO MY DAUGHTER CAN GO TO A PARTY and then found out that most people put their phone numbers down expecting people to text them. Huh. When did this become the convention? How was I supposed to know this convention?), so today we went out party shopping. One invitation was a dinosaur and the other Star Wars, so that gave us a pretty good guide. Gwen found a squishable rubber triceratops which roars when you press a button, which seems cruel to give to the child of someone I don't know, but she thinks it's the perfect choice. We then found a "Star Patroller" kit, with a mask and a few other things, which seemed suitably Star Wars ish.

In the afternoon, D. came over to play, and Gwen showed her the gifts (and allowed her to press the button on the dinosaur once, and then told her rather snottily that they shouldn't press it any more as it had "batt'ries" and we didn't want to wear them out). I was in the kitchen painting when Gwen ran in with a handle of chips and asked "what are these for?" I had never seen them before, so I asked where they came from, and that's when it transpired that she had opened up the package, cut all the plastic ties, and gotten the toys out. She did get a bit of a horrified scolding at that, but I'm sure I can find a way to put the pieces back in, maybe tie them down with yarn, and I'm sure the other kid won't mind and his mom will understand...