Bric-a-brac is moving to St. Louis!

So yeah, I am moving to St. Louis. I didn’t say much at first, because I have a work audience and I needed to wait until we’d both given notice to avoid any awkwardness or unpleasantness and then I didn’t say anything about St. Louis because, well, I wasn’t saying anything much about anything since I was swamped at work and home and couldn’t spare two seconds to blog. But, for those of you who’ve been waiting for the formal announcement, here ya go : Hey guys! I’m moving to St. Louis!.

I’m still mighty busy, but if I could spare an hour for Eternal Darkness earlier today, I suppose I can spare twenty minutes for an update to the blog. My husband has already started at his new job, the one that is causing us to move to St. Louis. I have stayed behind to finish a major project at work, pack, and keep Sophia in school as long as possible. We should all be living there, together, by mid-November, if everything works out.

Sophia is very excited about St. Louis. This pleases me, and reinforces my belief that maybe this is the right decision for us. Sophia is never ever excited about anything at first. She’s always resistant, so her wholehearted and uncharacteristic embrace of the move to St. Louis is very reassuring. (Isn’t she cute intrusion : Sophia now calls our friend Lewis “St. Louis”. In retrospect, I wonder if this is who she thought we were giving her pants to in this story). Today my beloved and much missed husband paid the application fee and first month of enrollment for Sophia’s new Montessori school in St. Louis. I hope to get a chance to write about the search for a Montessori school in St. Louis as it has been really exciting and complicated and we had so many good options that it was really a difficult choice. However, we’ve made our decision and so today I could start to tell Sophia a little about her new school, about her teacher and the classroom and the woods behind the classroom. I am so excited for her. We are going to miss St. James which has been such a perfect fit and such a healing place for her, but I think she will get a new perspective and some new opportunities at a school well-grounded in Montessori principles, and that’s really the most we can ask for. St. Louis has about 20 Montessori schools (I was able to drag up addresses for about 15, but at one of the schools we visited I was told there are closer to 20), of which we visited 4. Of course some of those twenty schools were loosely Montessori, and some much more like daycares than Montessori schools, so our process of elimination was made somewhat easier by that. Anyone can open up a school and say it’s a Montessori school, so one has to be careful. However, there were still plenty of genuinely Montessori schools to choose from. Unlike St. Louis, Jackson has only two choices. It was not until I started our search for a new school for Sophia that I realized that St. James is a top-notch Montessori school, comparable to the very best, despite being small and practically our only choice for Montessori education here. Incredible, and sad that we must leave it, but a new beginning is welcome to us on many other levels.

I went to my job for the last time last Friday. It was not sinking in that I was not coming back, despite stripping my desk bare and all the goodbyes and farewells I was given. It hasn’t sunk in completely yet, but I’m sure it will. I am suddenly and unexpectedly jobless. While I found my job engaging and rewarding, it was ultimately pretty focused and niche, and will be hard to replicated elsewhere. I have all sorts of avenues open to me right now, including pursuing writing. Seriously pursuing writing. That’s the forefront idea, because all the other ideas can wait until I’ve tried my hand at this one, and be the fallback positions should I not have the grit and determination to make myself write, or not be able to write anything someone might want to publish, or change my mind about wanting to do this for real or fail in some other way that I haven’t thought of yet, but I’m sure will come to me in the middle of the night at some later date to torment me. Because I’m toying with the idea of writing things for public and possibly even published consumption, I’m not going to try to do Nanowrimo this year. Primarily, I don’t want to be intimidated by the volume demands or the novel demands. I’m thinking of starting really small, with a couple of short stories or something. I have to actually be able to finish a thing, I think, and though I’ve had a blast in both prior Nanowrimos, I’ve not finished either thing that came out of it.

It’s strange to be in the business of thinking about writing for publication. A long time ago, I thought about this all the time, but I had stopped. At some point, I decided that was an unrealistic pursuit and an unsatisfying way to look at writing. Now, with my author goggles on, I read books and find myself saying “Oh, I can so do better than this,” or “Wow. That’s it. That’s the sort of thing I want to write.” or “People read this stuff? Why?” and so on and so forth. There’s a level of deconstruction that didn’t go on a few months ago.

I was half afraid to say anything about the writing thing. I’m not superstitious at all, but I didn’t want to set myself up for failure, or for queries about that whole half-cocked writing plan in two years when I’ve turned up nothing as of yet. Still, everyone’s been asking me what I’m going to do, and I have been somewhat evasive. To be fair, I’m still not sure what I’m going to be doing, but I do have ideas and a vague plan, so I figured it was only fair to lay it out. We’ll see how things evolve. Expect, for a start, to see more content here, as I flex my mind and my writing muscles.