Daily Principal Emails

Since March 22, I have been principalling from home.

During that time, I have sent an email every day to my families and teachers with themes of the day.

I have decided to start posting them here too. I haven't figured out what else to post recently so let's give this a whirl. 

Here is this week's Week Ahead email - it's Victoria Day here in Canada so we are starting the school week on a Tuesday.

The week ahead - May 19 - 22

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Mrs Allison

Mon 18/05/2020 5:07 PM

Hello Knights!

I hope you enjoyed your long weekend.

I think we are just about done with the rain and the forecast for the week looks like shorts and t-shirts! 

Here are the themes for this week.

Telephone Tuesday - Phone, FaceTime or video chat someone today to say hi. Texting doesn't count!

You could phone a friend, an aunt or uncle or cousin or a grandparent...whose day will you brighten?

Send or a tweet a picture or story of how you made someone's day better.

Would You Rather Wednesday - I'll give you a couple of "Would You Rathers" to talk about with your family or share with us.

Throwback Thursday - Share an old TV Show or Movie that you have enjoyed.

Maybe check with Mom and Dad about one of their favourites. (Do you know this one?)

Funny Friday - Share a joke with your family, then email or tweet it to all of us! @monsignorONeil.

Let's have a great week together.

Mrs. Allison

Looking Forward

Be positive, they said.  Look forward to the future, they said.

Here's what I'm looking forward to.

I'm Canadian. I live an hour from the Michigan border and about once a month, Husband and I drive to Michigan. I shop at Kohl's and Meijer and Hobby Lobby. (He sleeps in the back of the SUV in the parking lots.) We have lunch at Cracker Barrel and get coffee at Dunkin on the way home. I cannot wait to sit in front of that fireplace, drink ten glasses of diet Dr. Pepper and annoy Husband by how long I spend in the gift shop.

My baby brother is my favourite person. We go out for breakfast about once a month. We have favourite breakfast spots and favourite items on the menu. I can't WAIT to go out for breakfast with Zeke again.

(Am I looking forward to anything other than food? Maybe.)

THE MOVIES. Every other Friday Husband and I go to the movies. Usually to the cinema around the corner where we can order dinner in our seats. Every year we try to see all the nominees in Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress. We go to the movies for New Years Eve and sometimes on Christmas. I can't wait to get my butt into one of those reclining seats, shoveling popcorn a small distance from the bag to my face. I can't wait to watch a movie.

The thing I miss the most (still food) is Sunday Dinner.

Family dinners are a big deal at my parents' house and they're on hold.  I can't wait to have another Sunday dinner. Even when my brothers drive me crazy. Even when someone complains about what I made for dessert.

There are a lot of things to look forward to.

Tired

We have been in quarantine since March 13th. On March 12, the day before my March Break at the school where I am the principal, we got news that the school would be closed for two weeks following the break. It was the biggest shock of my life.

I will never forget that moment as long as I live. I had been following the virus numbers, looking every day at both the linear and logarithmic curves, tracking the travel and community spread by country. But on March 12, closing school for two weeks was a complete blow to the gut.

I called over Patti, the secretary and asked her to read the email. My staff were distraught. I had no answers for anyone and only questions myself. There was one day left before the break. I threw myself into making fun activities available for staff and students, to distract everyone from the scary news and to fill the day with positives. It was harrowing. I kept a smile on my face and hugged the children. I had no idea how long it would be until I hugged them again. I still don't.

We self-quarantined at home. My father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. We can't go to his appointments. We can't sit with him. We bought a Portal and we talk to them from the end of the garage with them at the door. 

I started ordering groceries online. We support local restaurants by ordering delivery every week. They said don't wear masks; save them for the doctors so we didn't wear masks. They said start wearing masks to protect the doctors, I ordered masks. I work from home while helping my daughter with her school work. She won't have an 8th graduation. She can't see her friends.

I did all the things they said to do, patiently and with a smile on my face.

Now, I am tired. I recognize that this is a grown-up tantrum I'm not entitled to but I'm just tired. Tired of growing plants and doing puzzles and baking and baking and baking. I am tired of online meetings. Of not being able to take the dogs for a run at the dog park. I want to eat at Cracker Barrel and go to the movies. I want to sit beside my father at the end of his life. I want to leave my work in a different building from where I live. And I want to stop this new level of feeling guilty because I'm not drawing on the sidewalk and putting a picture in my window and banging on a pot with a spoon at seven-thirty in the evening. 

Nothing is right and everything is a mess and every time someone says, "I hope things don't go back to exactly how they were," I want to say are you KIDDING ME? because that's exactly what I want. 

I know that things won't go back and I don't like it. I'd love to accept it but I don't really even know what I'm accepting.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

The Process Continues

What a ridiculous thing to say. What else could the process do? I suppose it could end. But I'm what my father would call 'principled' when he describes pretty much everyone in our family. What it really means is stubborn. I'm okay with that.

I got the first pass on the manuscript. It's bizarre but when I get that rejection email, I feel relieved. Why is that? Maybe because that piece of the uncertainty is over. The end of this round of queries ends one of two ways - publication for realsies or self-publication. I know there are people who are good with and prefer self-publication. I am not good with it. I want representation and publication and a spot on the Costco book table. Sometimes I take pictures of the fiction shelf at the book store where the 'A' authors. I have one of those pictures at my desk at work and when I look at it, I tell myself that's where my next book is going.

One of two things will happen first - I'll get published, or I'll die trying. It's a pretty safe eventuality. 

So the process that continues at this moment is me carefully picking my way through the table of agents and publishers until they all pass, or offer representation or publishing. 

The outcome is unknown. There is comfort in the process.

Write on!

Why Write?

There are a million things I could do with the hours I spend writing.

I could work more.

I could exercise.

I could get more sleep.

I could cook healthy meals or keep my house cleaner.

Especially in this time of tragedy, I question whether it is selfish to spend time creating fiction and then time trying to get it published.

Besides the virus which is all-encompassing in a way that maybe not even fiction could have anticipated, in the past few days in Nova Scotia, a province in my native Canada, a mass-murdered killed at least eighteen people.

It feels like Rome before the fall.

This is the sort of blog post that is supposed to end with something pithy and insightful about the reason I'm still writing in the midst of this bad-news-hurricane but I don't have one. I don't have a big picture view on the subject. It's just day by day doing things that seem normal.

I wish I had better, funnier, wittier observations. I wish I were the person who was 'making a difference' in a sweeping, awe-inspiring way.

I'm the person pushing forward with an umbrella in a windstorm, putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that the weather must surely change at some point.

Be safe everyone. Keep your umbrella up.

Am I the only person on earth who, once they start blogging, thinks in blog posts? It's like twitter - I also constantly think about how I could squish my internal monologue into a witty tweet. It's so nerdy. My son would say it is cringe. At least I think that is the current word. He re-friended me on Facebook today after I blocked him and then unblocked him when he made fun of my political views in the middle of an unrelated argument. I forget what he called me in the heat of said argument that made me block him on Facebook. Then I had to unblock and re-friend him after I was done being mad at him. It took him several weeks to accept. How old am I, you might ask? Sixteen? No. Forty-five. But this is the messy realness of my life.

A book is about polish and redoing and voice all at the same time. I am always trying to mush up the voice and push it through the clean copy. This blog is only about voice. And gifs, obviously.

Maybe two posts in a row is a good sign even if they are both about nothing. As long as I keep hearing the blog in my head I'll keep writing it, I guess. Even though it is cringe.

Possibly I am procrastinating from writing a query letter.

Here we go again

Here I am, taking a break from watching Tiger King, revisiting this blog for the first time in well over a year.

At the time when I started the blog, I was fixing to get my novel into shape for Pitchwars. Which I did. I don't know that I'll ever put myself through that again. It's a great program. But for me, it was too all-or-nothing and the deadline was too tight. On the positive side, it did motivate me to get through that first draft and as far as first drafts go, I was proud of it.

I queried that dang book a lot of places. Got a few full requests, which was an improvement from how my first novel did on the query game before I self-published. I felt pretty okay about that.

Then I got a couple of really constructive pieces of feedback from a couple of agents who requested but turned down the full book, and I went back at it in a different way.

Fast forward a thousand years but in another more actual sense only several months. The book is reworked, re-edited, re-proofed and re-titled. And I am now in the process, the excruciating minutiae process of writing the query again and the synopsis. And in that query is this link. It's also on my twitter which I have been working at for years, all with this dud link in the profile.

So here I am, writing about the writing, which I find terribly meta and obnoxious. But such is life. And I do care, passionately and way too much, about getting an agent and selling this book.

Also, there is the added and unrelated complication that I am listening to Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers so much and so often that my internal dialogue sometimes accidentally attempts an Australian Accent.

Add all the normal angst. What if someone reads the blog? What if no one reads the blog?

Thanks for reading the blog. I promise I will keep at it.