Tag Archives: homeschooling

July 1, 2010 · 4:24 pm

When worlds collide . . .

‘Twas peculiar when I first started working national fencing tournaments, and someone who knew of my homeschooling books turned out to be a fencer. Even though my daughters and I always thought fencing was a great sport for homeschoolers, being both individual and social, it always felt strange when our fencing and homeschooling worlds mixed unexpectedly.

(And then there was the time when I was working a big event with a woman I’d known from bout committee for years and we got to talking about alternative education while we were waiting for pools to come in. After she’d listened to me spout off about something or other, she looked at me funny, and said, “Good grief, are you that Mary Griffith?” Turned out I was—she’d homeschooled her son for a while and had read my books years earlier.)

Now I’m bracing myself for a collision between my real fencing world and my fictional fencing world. It’s not at all unexpected, of course, since much of the fictional version is based on my experiences in the real world. Mostly, I think the collision is good—it’ll give me a chance to see whether my fictional version has the right feel. Have I got the little details right to give the fictional version the texture of the real one? And have I developed my characters well enough to make them their own people and not just thinly disguised cardboard versions of real people I’ve met in the fencing world? It’s not just that I don’t want to be actionable for libel—I also don’t want every reader distracted by trying to figure out who each character is in real life. I want a real story that will stand on its own, whether the reader knows anything about fencing or not.

But it’ll be a little strange wandering through the GWCC in Atlanta and hearing echoes in my head of my own characters in among all the fencing noises.

Of course, if the past tournaments in Atlanta are any indication, I may not ever think of anything unrelated to the events happening right in front of me the whole ten days I’m there. Something about 6,500+ entries . . .

Why Didn’t I Try This Years Ago?

The way I look at it, I started writing while I was in college. While I learned about grammar and punctuation and the niggly details of form in school, I learned how to communicate with language by writing for the college paper. I’ve been writing—more or less steadily—ever since.

About fifteen years ago, I started thinking it would be fun to write a murder mystery. Since I was a homeschooling parent at the time, editing a bimonthly homeschooling periodical, my mystery would involve the contentious and often self-righteous politics of the homeschooling movement. Though I kept playing with the idea in the back of my mind, I never seriously developed it.

Three books later and mostly retired from the homeschooling world (aside from an occasional conference speaking gig), the mystery floating around in my brain had become a fencing mystery, though it was no closer to being written than the homeschooling mystery had been.

Suddenly last fall I realized I was sick of my dithering. “Put up or shut up,” I told myself, and promptly signed up for November’s National Novel Writing Month (more familiarly known to its participants as NaNoWriMo), which was possibly the most terrifying thing I’d ever done.

NaNoWriMo is a peculiar challenge. Nobody makes you do it. Nobody but you decides whether you win. There are no prizes, aside from a certificate, some downloadable web badges, and a couple of discount coupons. All you have to do is write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.

The genius of NaNoWriMo, though, is that time limit. You have no time to worry about how good the writing is or whether the characters are interesting or the plot makes sense. You can’t afford to look back and see how you’re doing. You can’t delete anything that doesn’t meet your standards—hell, you can’t even have any standards. You just have to get words down on the page and keep going.

To my surprise, at the end of November I had a first draft of a mystery. It’s crap, of course, but it’s crap with potential. Somewhere in that frantic mess, there’s a real book waiting to be shaped and polished.

That’s what I’m up to now. This part takes longer.

Consolidation Time

The time has come to consolidate my web presence, such as it is.

I’ve had various topics spread over too many different places and none of them focus quite where my interests lie these days. My Viral Learning blog covers mainly learning and alternative education topics, though I’m not much active in that area these days. Fencing—From the Inside Out is where I wrote about fencing and national tournaments and discovered that I was only intermittently interested in writing short informative pieces about fencing and national tournament.

Over at www.marygriffith.net I made a catchall site, with links to the blogs, plus pages about my books and conference speaking, along with a few other odds and ends. Mostly I used it to replace the Authors Guild site I’d let lapse because of the limited design options it had offered and to see what I could do just playing around with iWeb.

And there’s Facebook and Twitter and my Lulu storefront and my Amazon author page and I can’t even remember what other odds and ends scattered around . . .

Too often lately I’ve not bothered to blog because the topic didn’t fit well enough with one of my existing blogs. With the new writing projects I’m working on now, that’s happening more and more often, and a bit of blogging is usually a pretty good warm-up for the more serious projects I’m working on now.

Here I can talk about anything that interests me and tie it to everything else that interests me, too. Strangely, the more disparate subjects I’ve dug into lately, the more they’ve come to seem tightly connected to everything else I’m working on.

For now, I’m going to leave the old blogs as is and just link them in the sidebar rather than moving archives over here.

This should be an interesting new playground—lots of WordPress bells and whistles to play with and no more worries about what should be posted where.

Tag Archives: homeschooling

When worlds collide . . .

Why Didn’t I Try This Years Ago?

Consolidation Time

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