I’m very excited to announce that my dragonslaying short story, “The Seventh Trap,” is being reprinted in the forthcoming Crunchy with Ketchup anthology! This story first appeared in The Big Bad Anthology, way back in 2013, but that’s a long time ago, folks. If everything goes smoothly, the anthology should be out in early August. Stay tuned for updates!
No new posts recently. Sorry! I have been hard at work on my next novel– A supernatural horror novel called “The Fire Below the Waves.” I am in the final stages of revision before I start pitching it to agents.
Pull a chair up by the fireside, folks, and listen to me talk about the creative process, the failings of the education system, and writing through a pandemic.
Brian Wolff is a musician in Austin, TX. He and his band, Fair City Fire, have taken the city by storm with their bluesy hard rock. With the pandemic putting everything on hold, Brian has begun podcasting to talk with other creative people to keep the positive energy moving. It seems to be working! He asked me to be on his show, and of course I could not pass up the opportunity to ramble about my creative process and about the inspiration for my novel.
In a future where schools have no teachers and no classrooms…
Does this sound familiar? My novel, At The Trough, which was published last year at NineStar Press, depicts a world where the physical school building is gone, replaced with online learning through video modules and edugames. I predicted this sort of change might occur in the next several decades, based on the troubling changes I saw in public education and in its relationship to technology and corporate power.
I did not think we would see it in 2020. But here we are.
Schools all over the country are turning to “remote learning” as a way to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Students are connecting with their teachers through email, and through programs such as Google Classroom and Zoom. The results are mixed– it is probably the best that can be expected in the mad scramble to contain the virus, but is leaving a lot of students with a less-than-ideal education.
So what exactly did At The Trough get right? And what did it get wrong?
What was right:
Someone is Making Lots of Money Off of Children
In At The Trough, the company EduForce has essentially a monopoly on all educational products and testing. They are so successful because they thoroughly mine student data and bombard students– a captive audience– with advertisements and opportunities to make in-lesson purchases. Well, the remote learning of 2020 has a lot of legal experts and parent groups very worried about the wide reach of companies to watch students, invade their privacy, and collect their information. These concerns are valid. Citizens have a right to privacy, but when a school requires that students utilize these programs, it puts families and students in a difficult position.
2) This Hurts the Poor Students. And the Bi-Lingual Students. And the Special Education Students. And the Homeless Students. And the Students Living in Abusive Homes. And the Students...
Sure, learning from home sounds efficient, and even fun!
That is, if your home is equipped with devices for all children in the home, if the wifi is reliable, if there is a concerned parent home all the time, and if the child is at or above grade level. But millions of American children are left struggling to comprehend the lessons their teachers are assigning remotely. Four children in a household may share a single laptop. Many children depend on going to school as a place of safety and nourishment that they do not have at home.
In At The Trough, one student is implied to have a learning disability. He has struggled through years of incomprehension, and only makes any progress in school through the help of his friend. Another character is implied to have undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Without the personal interaction with a teacher to raise the alarm, and without proper medication, she is in great peril.
3) Schools Are About Much More Than Book Learnin’
In At The Trough, one of the main characters, a former teacher, pontificates about how schools were once a place where hundreds of people came together for the good of the children Not just teachers. Guidance counselors, cafeteria workers, custodians, all of these people play vital roles in a child’s upbringing. A child may not connect with a teacher, but befriend the cafeteria aide or the paraprofessional who listens to them. Remote Learning severs these relationships. The hope is that this is only a temporary measure until the COVID-19 crisis abates. Which brings me to…
One Thing At The Trough Got Wrong:
The Speed of Change
When I wrote the novel, I assumed that the educational changes put in place by Eduforce would take years, would require a slow disintegration of individual rights and a gradual increase of corporate influence. It would take about a generation– the generation who right now is growing up with privacy-stealing apps and are perfectly fine with facial recognition technology– to put into place.
The shift to Remote Learning occurred in a matter of weeks.
Yes, it is temporary (or so we are told). But pause and consider America’s teachers. In mid-March, many of us were told to develop a way to engage our classes online instead of in-person, and we had mere days to do this. Personally, I had about 72 hours from being told our district initiative to putting it into place. And for the most part, it is up and running.
Many readers have pointed out one response to the pandemic is eerily similar to the premise of my novel, At the Trough. In the novel, physical school buildings no longer exist. Students work from home, at their own pace, learning from pre-recorded videos.
I can say from my own teaching experience that this models has its advantages. I can teach while wearing sweatpants! I can use the bathroom whenever I need, and not have to hold it in for 3 1/2 hours!
But the art of teaching depends upon immediate feedback from students. A good teacher can tell pretty quickly if a student does not understand. And a proactive student can raise a hand and ask a question. That doesn’t work in this model. Especially vulnerable are special education students who depend on (and are legally entitled to) additional support with a specialized teacher. Obviously, public health and safety is the highest priority right now, but most teachers I know are chafing at this imitation of teaching.
It is dehumanizing.
At The Trough did not have a pandemic as the inciting factor to dissolve the schools (in the novel, it was a collapsing global economy and escalating school violence). But the end result is pretty similar. I’m just shocked we are at this point in 2020!
Once the COVID-19 crisis has abated, I imagine we will go back to the traditional classroom. But who knows? In my next post, I will make four predictions about how the temporary shift to remote learning will result in permanent shifts in the way we teach and learn…
Introducing At The Trough, a new dystopian novel about the future of education in America.
From the publisher:
In a future where schools have no teachers and no classrooms, Jennifer Calderon is the perfect student. Every day she watches her video modules, plays her edu games, and never misses an answer. Life is comfortable in the Plex, a mile-wide apartment building. Corporations and brand names surround her and satisfy her every want and need.
Then one day, her foul-mouthed, free-spirited, 90’s-kitsch-wearing girlfriend Melody disrupts everything. She introduces her to a cynical, burned-out former teacher, who teaches them the things no longer taught in school. Poetry. Critical thinking. Human connection.
But these lessons draw the attention of EduForce, the massive corporation with a stranglehold on education. When they show how far they are willing to go keep their customers obedient, Jennifer has to decide what is most important to her and how much she is willing to sacrifice for it.
Order the novel that readers are calling “chilling,” a “page-turner” and “powerful and important.”
Don’t feel like waiting until May 13 for my debut novel? Pre-orders for At the Trough are available here.
Pre-orders are crucial for a book’s (an author’s) success. Strong pre-order sales show a publisher there is interest in a book. So…are you interested? From the publisher:
In a future where schools have no teachers and no classrooms, Jennifer Calderon is the perfect student. Every day she watches her video modules, plays her edu games, and never misses an answer. Life is comfortable in the Plex, a mile-wide apartment building. Corporations and brand names surround her and satisfy her every want and need.
Then one day, her foul-mouthed, free-spirited, 90’s-kitsch-wearing girlfriend Melody disrupts everything. She introduces her to a cynical, burned-out former teacher, who teaches them the things no longer taught in school. Poetry. Critical thinking. Human connection.
But these lessons draw the attention of EduForce, the massive corporation with a stranglehold on education. When they show how far they are willing to go keep their customers obedient, Jennifer has to decide what is most important to her and how much she is willing to sacrifice for it.
Missed that link above? Here it is again! Pre-orders available May 10.
I am thrilled to announce that my debut novel, At The Trough, will be published on May 13! The folks at NineStar Press have done a marvelous with the novel, including the cover art. Check it out!
Full disclosure before I begin– I have not yet published a novel, so maybe I am wrong about this. But I have just run my first marathon. After several months of training, I finished the New Jersey Marathon in a respectably average 4 hours and 3 minutes. While I wasn’t thrilled with my overall time, I (A) did complete my first marathon, (B) did not stop running at any point, other than a port-a-potty stop, (C) did not get seriously injured, other than typical post-race soreness, and (D) did not throw up on the course, though I did come close at a few points. So I consider the run a success, all things considered.
When it comes to writing, the old saying about novel writing is “it’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” The parallels are apt. Both take a long time. Both involve pain and inner struggle. You might throw up. Both give you justification for putting bizarre things in and on your body. Both are things that many people say they will do, fewer set out to do, and far fewer finish. So if you finish– either a novel or a marathon, or both– congratulations!
There were moments in the marathon, mostly between miles 18 and 22, when it was just a pure grind. One foot ahead of the other, feeling crappy, but refusing to let myself stop. And having completed at least two novels, I can say there are moments in writing a manuscript where the exact same feeling comes into play. You feel as if you’ve been writing (running) forever, but the end of the novel (race) is not in sight. A long, listless place where only sheer will and determination will get you to the end. This is where a lot of people stop. They set the manuscript aside, say “It’s just not working,” and move on to something else in life. It’s the part that makes or breaks the writer (runner).
But just as I wanted to run my marathon well, I don’t just want to finish a novel. I know I can do it. I’ve done it before. I want to publish a novel. And here is where the analogy falls apart. I have been querying two separate, very different novels. One is historical fiction, an account of a Holocaust survivor starting a new life in upstate New York. It is based closely on a survivor I knew. The other is a science-fiction work, a near-future dystopia about education. I have been querying agents for the first novel for over a year now, and the second one for five months. Nary a nibble on either one. I know what I must do– persist. But where is the finish line? Querying is nothing like a marathon, because in a marathon, I know that one way or another, whether I sprint or run or jog or walk or crawl, once I reach 26.2, I have met my goal. But querying is like running a race, unsure if it’s a 5k or an ultramarathon. A rare few authors find interested publishers immediately, some query a dozen agents, some thirty, some seventy-five.
Querying has been harder than writing and harder than revising. Revision, even when it’s a tiresome slog, is at least forward motion. The story is getting better, one deleted word at a time. But with querying, I’m running toward nothing. I’m running in the hope of a finish line. The race isn’t over yet, and I have no idea when it will be.
