Scraps of Time and Time to Write

Even though I've been up since 3 (it's 6:18 as I type this sentence), I feel like I've gotten nothing done.  But I have gotten things done:

--I've submitted both fiction and poetry to The Kenyon Review.

--I've checked on my online students, and even though I didn't grade, I did get an e-mail sent to the students who just started last week.

--I swept the floor.

--I had porridge for breakfast.

Let me capture a few moments from the past days before I go for my walk:

--I started re-reading Harriet the Spy last night.  I find Harriet unlikeable, which was not my reaction when I read it as a child.  Maybe I am re-thinking my plan to re-read childhood favorites.

--I have also been re-reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is even better than I remember it being.  I had that reaction the first time I read it, and then was a bit disappointed a few years later when I re-read it.  This time, I'm loving it, while at the same time feeling a bit sad about the fate of all these characters.

--My Creative Writing students had interesting reactions to the chapter from A Visit from the Goon Squad that is a PowerPoint.  Maybe that lesson wasn't the disaster that it first seemed last Thursday when we did it.

--Yesterday I thought I'd go back to more traditional stories.  I wanted something very short, but nothing came to mind.  I thought about Poe, but wasn't sure which one to photocopy.  Then I thought, why make copies?  Everyone's got a device--let them access this Poe site which has A LOT of stories.  So, after talking about stories and Poe, we spent 15 minutes reading Poe stories (I pointed out the first detective story, which was one of the choices).  We talked about Poe some more, and then I gave them two worksheets.   One I created in February to have students create a spooky/Gothic story (see this blog post for the worksheet contents) and one was the Build Your Own Detective Story worksheet, created by a colleague, that inspired me to create the one that more closely matched the class I was teaching (see this blog post for more details).

--The writing went well.  They had half an hour to fill in the worksheets, which require some amount of detail.  Not everyone needed the full time, and even the ones who zipped through the assignment came up with some great ideas.

--Happily, I did too.  I am trying to remember to seize scraps of time throughout the day to do some writing myself.  So far, I'm doing a better job of that than I was this summer.