Plan B

It's been almost a week now since the last of the small envelopes turned up in my mailbox. I found it as I walked out the door to work last Friday, and spent the fifteen-minute drive in stony silence, with Damien Rice filling up the hollows in my melancholy. The first people I saw when I got to work were two of the people I like most there, and when they saw my face, they looked concerned and Maggie said quietly, "Did you hear?" I nodded and sucked my lips in, trying not to cry. "Plan B?" she said. "Which was really Plan A in the first place?"

When I walked into the breakroom to put away my coat and purse, I actually did start to cry. I collected a hug from another co-worker, took some deep breaths, and refused to talk about it anymore, because people don't usually trust the recommendations of a crying bookseller, and I wasn't going to be able to talk about not getting into any PhD programs without crying.

By the middle of my shift, after a few hours of mostly solitary work and then reading to children in my pajamas (for Friday Night Pajamarama), I was no longer in danger of crying. But even now, a week later, I'm still confused. Maggie was referring to the plan I didn't want to detail here unless life really came down to that. For a while I wasn't actually sure what to hope for, because if I got into a PhD program, awesome, and if I didn't, I would get to try out this new plan, which I'd been kind of excited about.

So the plan is this: I have an opportunity to make money by writing for a friend's website--enough money, if I do it right, to go down to part time at work, and probably eventually quit. Writing regular articles for the website will take up some time, but not so much time that I wouldn't be able to write fiction and submit it to publishers. Writing fiction is what I've really wanted to do for as long as I can remember, and if I retrace my thinking over the past few years, I realize that my desire to be a college professor originated with a desire to have a career that would allow me time to write. Until recently, I've been ignoring certain bugs in that plan. For instance, if I have a PhD and I'm teaching at a university, I have to do research and publish scholarly writing. I kind of enjoy writing literary criticism. But. How much time and energy would that leave me for writing fiction? Probably not much. In a way--and you probably won't hear many people say this--getting a PhD would have been a cop-out for me. That was me playing it safe. Because jumping naked into a big swirling pool of pure writing? That's scary. There's no guarantee of money in it, and creativity is an unpredictable beast. Writers become alcoholics for a reason.

So this is Plan B. But yeah, sort of Plan A in the first place.

I'm not saying I'll never get a PhD, because I think it sounds like fun, and I think I will someday be able to get into a program. Also, not seeing graduate school in my tangible future has changed my self-perception slightly. Before, I was just passing time in a bookstore before I went on to more respectable things. Now there's a possibility I'm stuck. Getting unstuck will be a frustrating and painful process, and I won't lie: I'm scared. But if I can make it work...