I knew when I switched careers from teacher to writer there would be new challenges, learning, and expectations. Instead of dealing with students, parents, other teachers, counselors, and administrators, my world is now populated with readers, other writers, critique partners, literary agents, and publishing house editors. It made me nervous to think of starting over at the bottom of the pile, and I wondered if I was ready for the change. Did I have the necessary skills? Could I grow a skin thick enough to take rejection in stride and learn from it? Could I meet deadlines? Would the energy…
The Impact of Career Choice on My Writing
CHANGING CAREERS I was an English Language Acquisition teacher for almost twenty-five years. During this time, I worked with students from many different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. How these students communicated with me and each other, and when and why bilingual people chose to code switch, or alternate between two or more languages in a single conversation, have been sources of on-going interest and fascination for me. Randy Pausch said, “The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It’s not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or…