you gotta start somewhere

Why I have started at 5:45 this morning I am not so sure. I don't have children of my own. I don't have a dog to walk. I don't even have a job to get up and go to. I used to be a teacher. I stopped to finish my Masters Degree and now I can't seem to get back in. These are troubled times. In fact, if one more person says, "I thought there's always a need for teachers" or "I didn't realize they were cutting back on teachers as well," I may just lose my mind. Oh wait, some days I think I already have lost my mind.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like a teacher's paycheck is huge or something. I never expected to make millions. Yet, after having lived on my own for eight years, I also never expected to be back in the bedroom I grew-up in at my parents' house. And so we have the reason I may lose my mind.

So what keeps me sane? Easy. Bill Cosby (I mean, let's face it, throughout the whole series of that show, he wonders if his children will ever leave his house, but they just keep coming back home. haha). Well, I do love that show, but the truth is my craft. My craft is what gets me through the day (oh if my freshman year English professor could hear me now). Whenever I meet someone new and a friend of mine is around it somehow or other gets mentioned how creative I am. I have always wanted to be able to do something with it, but I knew that the whole Art Degree thing wasn't for me. I was what one would call "artsy" or "crafty." Creative, yes. Attention to detail, yes. Yet, somehow in the eyes of deemed "professionals" it was always lost. I took a 1-credit drawing class in college just for fun = my only 'C' out of Ann Arbor!

I honed the craft of writing in college. It's still a craft. Ask Stephen King (his book On Writing is wonderful). Again, that craft wasn't going to make me millions (unless I was the next Stephen King -- shoot, I'd settle for one book, a children's book maybe? I worked in publishing). Maybe I had gone about this all wrong. Maybe I was just doomed to be a starving artist after all. But, if that was going to be the case, I needed to come up with something good because I needed my life back.

Stay tuned for my first craft....