Less than a week before my 50,000-word deadline!

Though I'm confident that, this close to the finish, I'll hit my goal, I've realized, comparing the first week to the last week, that this home stretch has been harder. I thought it would have been the other way around. Of course there are plenty of times I'd rather be doing other things, watching a movie, shopping, going out with friends, but the problem is, I'm not sure what I'm doing anymore. Everything seems just more…

I finally "put butt in chair" and got to work on the travelogue/memoir about my two years teaching in China. It's been stewing in my head for the past year, I've scribbled notes in different notebooks, I wrote individual essays based on that experience (food shopping) but I haven't actually started the memoir yet.

But I'm doing it, finally.

I decided to NaNoWriMo it because I think that kind of big,…

I returned to the U.S. from China six months ago and still I feel as if my life is in this odd state of flux. A puff of wind will easily blow me in another direction.



Most recently, it's blown me back to Chicago, (from my parents' home in Minnesota) the beloved city I left over two years ago to go teach English in a dirty, crowded Chinese town. I'm back, wiser, but still full of hope like I was that first I showed up only months out of college. I was jobless then, too, dreams of…