What keeps me off the street
I am finding retirement to be as busy as working if not more. It's partly because we still have three teens at home and they are all in sports; we live out at the end of a mountain road and there is quite a bit of rough driving and keeping vehicles going.I am still a writing tutor at Texas Tech and they would like me to keep up a professional front, perhaps studying and presenting at conferences online. But mostly what occupies my time is that, having written a novel and several other books, I've become obsessed with marketing them. And I do that by reading other books.
The setup is simple: I agree to read and/or review someone's book; someone else agrees to read and/or review mine. I choose carefully so that I read a wide variety of things I like. I'm retired, so I should be able to read, right? I'm reading a wide variety of mostly indie books. I'm surprised at what gramatically passes for publishable, but I also realize that not everyone can afford an editor at a decent wage. I could edit myself, having years of proofreading and grammar experience, but I still have books I want to write myself.
The current one that I'm writing revolves arund my great grandmother on my mother's side; she was an elocutionist, and was part of a movement around the turn of the nineteenth century, whereby women wanted to become elocutionists to have a voice in national debates. There was a National Association of Elocutionists, and they met and discussed matters of the day. Elocution was, in general, much more integrated into our education system than it is today. It was, in fact, in its heyday, since the organization had just recently sprung up, soon to be changed into Speech Com, Speech Path, and other fields. My great grandmother was at the cutting edge of the trends, in other words.
Meanwhile I'm reading all this fantasy kind of stuff that in short, makes writing harder. It makes me fall asleep late at night. I have to make a better effort to get the books in front of me more to my liking, less disruptive to my general life setup. Life is busy, what with kids to drive around and a home to maintain - the winter's coming, and the deer and elk all give me the big eyes as they stand by the side of the road wondering if I'm just another hunter.
Labels: personal, reading, writing
posted by tom @ 7:44 AM
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