Recently, I came to an important decision about my future and my career.  I’m going to find an agent and attempt to step up to the next level.  For the first three years of this journey, I was uncertain about the quality of my work because of the old demons from graduate school; however, in the last year and a half, the feedback about both books has convinced me that I need professional representation.  It may take some time to find the right person, but I’m going to start the process.

When I first stepped out as an independent, I did so because I needed to have an audience reading my work.  I’m a firm believer that a book is not complete until it is read by a significant number of people, and since I was having no luck earning respect the traditional route, the Type A part of me took charge and got Brotherhood out there.  Now that I’ve gotten my foot in the door and have built a fairly good reputation, I want to reach a broader audience.  The message that friendships and relationships are greater than material possessions is one that needs to be delivered in our society, and there’s only so far I can go on my own.

Also, I know in my heart that I’ve only got a few more years of teaching left in me, and if I want to get out of the classroom and on with my writing career, I need to start seeing real income from the books in the next couple of years.  So I’m looking for an agent, and I will keep looking until I find the right one who gets me as a writer and believes in me.

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I’m trying to make sense of my life, trying to figure out why it seems that I’m perpetually stuck in catch up mode.  Part of the problem has to do with the state of education in this country, especially after eight years of the mistake from Texas.  I never expected to get rich from teaching, but I did expect to be able to maintain a modest, middle-class lifestyle.  Instead, for my entire career, I’ve been among the ranks of the working poor, earning just enough to disqualify me for public assistance but not enough to participate fully in the system.  Until I got hired at WSCC, healthcare was out of the question.  I’ve had one real vacation in eleven years.  The notion of home ownership is a distant, laughable dream.  My retirement plan is basically work until I drop dead.

The truly maddening part is that all teachers I know, with a handful of lazy exceptions, work as hard as anyone else in society.  A good week is fifty hours.  Most are sixty, and some push seventy.  It takes a real toll on the body.  I fear for the future of society because the situation is only getting worse every year, and most of us are so frustrated by the system, the lack of pay, the increasing impudence of the students, and the futility of fighting against the rising tide of ignorance that many either burn out much too early or slip into apathetic mode for survival.  If something doesn’t change in the next few years, the entire system will implode because no one qualified to do the job would be stupid enough to take it.

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This has been a brutal week, and I’m simply hanging on for the weekend at this point.  Teaching the dual enrollment courses is far more demanding than I had expected, and I feel more than a little overwhelmed by it.  More than half my time and energy is spent on crowd control, and that is something I am simply not used to dealing with.  Most of my teaching career has been spent with adult learners, and to tell the truth, I got spoiled by their eagerness to learn and willingness to do the work.  Trying to adjust to high schoolers who want to spend each class having social time is draining.

On top of that, I’m trying to get settled back at my old place in Morristown and commuting back and forth from Morristown to Sevierville and then to Seymour and back.  It’s almost too much, and I don’t know how long I can sustain this pace.  The sad part is that many of my students have commented on the strain that’s showing.

Then, as if all that weren’t enough, I haven’t seen the boys for two months, and I miss them terribly.  We still talk several nights a week, but that’s just not enough.  I need hugs and kisses, rough-housing and wrestling, messes and more messes.

Well, that’s enough whining for one day.

www.thirdaxe.com