My Mid-Life "Writis"

“I cannot wait to read your novel” is the written 42 times in my senior high school yearbook.

When I first went to college, I took a creative arts class every semester. I did not pick it as my major, because my parents were very “boomer” minded with the “you need to pick a major that will get you a job.” Despite that sentiment, my final college choice was determined by my favourite English teacher. How? Turns out, she knew the head of the English department of the one college. I left after one year. It was too far away and my disability at the time required constant medical updates.

I tried another college, again sticking with a science major, which I did love, but indulging with the arts. Then, 2008 happened. I couldn’t get enough money.

After the economy recovered, and I could finally go back to finish college, I took creative arts classes every semester once again. Getting to escape the formulas, the memorization, and the pressure of the presentations made them some of my favourite classes.

After college, I was in a few casual writing groups, and had one manuscript that was nearly completed but never reviewed, and a few short stories submitted to local places.

Back in 2020, when Covid-19 began to break out, I was amongst the fortunate group who was not affected in the slightest– medical manufacturing. In fact, I received more hours of work, as we had the resources because other industries were not needing the raw materials, and the company offered bonuses and flex time to ensure those workers who had to work on site could and did work on site. I happily took the chance to make more money, I had six years of student debt that had barely been tapped.

But, my work was dull. I had a degree in science, my passion was specifically in micro, and I felt I wasn’t using it. I reached out to my manager, to other departments, and saw that help was needed all around the location, and it was all stuff I qualified for.

I mentioned it to the team leads, and they seemed enthusiastic, and they would talk with the site lead. But I received no feedback. I came to the conclusion that they were deliberately not promoting me because they were afraid to try to find someone new to fill my roll– I had been working 6 days a week and one day each week was 10 hours. So, I decided to look elsewhere. I was getting tired of manufacturing in general and wanted to get back into the laboratory settings. In manufacturing, the shift is really determined by the process. Some days you will have nothing to do but review expiration dates for eight hours, others can be 16 hour days because the feed line was faulty. Plus, the monotony. Often, you get one project to produce, and that will be your sole project unless you transfer, get injured, or quit. It is also very dead end. Your only real growth is 1 out of 10 is to team lead, then to management, and then possibly into quality assurance or client relations. And that’s only if they have enough people to replace you.

I found an R&D position right up the road, and after the initial interview for it, they called me up for a “hybrid” role that sounded like it would be a mix of manufacturing and pilot engineering. It had good pay and sounded like it would have room for future job growth. Okay. I took on that role.

Nope, the position has evolved since they initially posted it- straight manufacturing. It has become responsible for doing a single set of tasks over and over. It is a high demand product with a complex process with expensive ingredients, so to produce profit they need to use rather archaic methodology. A mistake as simple as an incorrect calculation, can cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in product and a loss of over 2,000 labor hours.

With everything going on at this high-intensity job, I fell out of touch with most of the people in my life. I stopped the exercise that kept me sane. Covid-19 had shut down the places in small town coastal New England that I adored. All I have done for the last four years now is– work. I semi-started up a story that I absolutely love, but even the tones in the narration started to remind me of work.

Then, my friends who run a book club, bullied me into reading a book that they loved. I will not disclose which book it is. But from the end of the second chapter, I loathed it. I hated the characters for being flat and the mocking use of incorrect accents, the weak imagery to try to portray the time the story took place, and the silly fact the other characters just knew they had to save her, even though it went against everything they had learned. By the third chapter, I was bored. By the fifth, I knew exactly how the story was going to end. I asked one of the friends, who confirmed.

While I hated that damned book, somehow it woke something up inside of me. I analyzed it, I saw things I could improve, I saw plot holes and thought “Oh no, I would never write that”, “sweetie, you just contradicted yourself”, and “ten bucks she’s going to hate him at first, and then accidentally admit he’s hot to her token male friend”.

Then I decided to put that ten bucks where my mouth is. I had about 10,000 words of the story written through all of last year. Since opening the file up last week, I have added about 10,000 more. And this blog will be the story behind the story.