A New Endeavor

Today was back to school day. For me! I logged on early this morning, worked out the technical glitches, and started my on line doctoral program at Walden University.

I have this coffee cup sitting in my closet, chipped, broken, stained.

It shows a harried woman in a business suit, holding a briefcase, baby hanging onto her ankles and toys scattered all around her.

The sentiment:

I am working woman

I hold down a job

I am nuts

Only now I have three jobs plus a husband, three kids,  a dog, a cat, a garden and a car sporting three bumper stickes: Peace, Not a Republican, and I'm in the 99%.

The black one with flashy red letters proclaiming "This IS My Brilliant Career"disappeared from the office I shared with about fifteen other people. Either someone stole it or broke it--but it doesn't matter. Fact is, I stepped off the fast track in 1990, when I was pregnant with my first child, knowing I could never do it all. And that a career is never as important as family. A lesson learned the hard way when my first marriage ended in divorce.


It's all in my two memoirs Someday I'm Going to Write a Book: Diary of An Urban Missionary and Karma, Kickbacks and Kids.

So, my am I going to spend the next 15-18 months researching and reading the most boring, dense, and academic material one can imagine then re-synthesizing it into my own theoretical framework for clinical research?  Because I know that my fledgling theory of management of psychosocial risk can help clinicians like me take care of the toughest, most vulnerable patients--and help them get off a path that leads either nowhere or to self destruction. And unless I prove it, no one will pay any attention to it.


So in about two years, I will be Dr. Carole Ann, and still be doing what I love: taking care of patients., focusing on creative writing, and reading for pleasure instead of work.  It goes by in the blink of an eye, especially when you're back on the fast track.

In the meantime, fiction sales are humming along. More about that on my other blog. I just got back from Chi-Con, the World Science Fiction Convention where I met up with many of my like minded writer friends

And non fiction ain't doin' too bad either.

Two of my favorite essays, "The Dance Class" and "Endless Possibilities" are in This Path, just reissued as an e book. And a tribute to my grandmother is coming out in A Quilt of Holidays in the next couple of weeks. Sometime this fall, an excerpt of Someday, "A Catholic Schoolgirl's Primer" is due out in Not Your Mother's Book: On Being a Woman. Not for the shy or easily offended, but I've never been one to sugar coat things.

Time to sign off now and get to that 150 pages of reading and two papers due by next Friday. I still owe my editor two short stories. It will all get done. It always does.