And then. . .

This summer, I am not teaching. While I love my job, I also love writing and it was time to take advantage of being able to take the summer off to return to my first love. Last week, I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself though. In fact, since the semester ended, I've been restless. I can't shake the feeling that I've forgotten to do something. I have to stop myself from checking my email several times a day. Instead, I've been reading about music, watching movies, YouTube videos, and documentaries about music. I made a questionnaire for listeners and a target one for women lead singers in bands. I am even attempting to learn the guitar. While I haven't spent a lot of "butt time" writing, my brain is churning, thinking, putting things in order, creating ideas and bridging others together. Even as I've made to do's to keep me busy, folding the-I-never-want-to-fold-laundry or cleaning out my closet, I've been thinking about music. Bu...

For the past week and a half, a hummingbird has visited me throughout the day as I write at my rectangular kitchen table. She swoops in and out around the banisters of the backyard porch and smells the herbs from the hanging garden. I don't have a nectar feeder for her, though. So, I wondered what she was doing visiting me every morning. I watched as her wings fluttered faster then I could see instead of writing. As each day passed, I found I'd space out in the direction of the sliding glass window trying to figure out what my characters were going to do next and hoping she would come visit me again. All day yesterday I wrote and wrote trying to meet a deadline for my editor. My hands ached after several hours, but then I saw the hummingbird and how her wings flapped, and I typed more. Later, I noticed, after she fluttered around, that she rested on one of the branches of the Mulberry in the back yard. Her tiny body moved left then right. Left then right. On a break, I went...

As I walk in the hot summer El Paso sun to my classroom at UTEP my shoulders sizzle. I sometimes feel like a rotisserie chicken. My skin browns more with each rotation to and from the parking lot to the Classroom Building where I meet with my students. Beads of sweat begin to pill at the base of my skull and race down my neck even as my hands snap to wipe them away. I loathe how hot I get. This is my daily routine. By the end of the month my shoulders and arms will be a deep coffee brown while my legs will be latte. I will never be evenly brown. As I walk I look at the people shuffling, biking, running, strolling past me. Today, a little girl around ten years old scurried toward campus as I walked away. She looked so odd because I wondered why she was by herself. As I stared, I forgot this. She ran pitched forward from the weight of an overstuffed backpack. The tips of her ballet flats were the only thing to touch the hot concrete. She skipped across as if she were skimming the surfa...

1. Set a schedule 2. Stick to it 3. Read lots of books. The trashy kind you haven't had time for because of school 4. Work out. Beat him in the P90X challenge 5. Take long baths and stay in until your fingers look like pink little prunes and you think you might drop your book 6. Wake up at 9am everyday, even when you don't have to 7. Write, but only things that don't have anything to do with the memoir you've been staring at for the last year 8. Go see bands, even if they might be bad. El Paso is full of free summer concerts to go to, sit on prickly crab grass and enjoy the cooler evenings 9. See your friends, the ones who have stood by the sidelines cheering as you wrote and wrote for the last few months, the ones who checked on you, gave you the love you needed to finish, even if from a distance 10. Celebrate being married, finishing your thesis, and being at a giant crossroads marked Future 11.  Purge things: all the things that clutter and get in your way,...