Back to School Shopping – Doing It the Easy Way This Year

It’s time for that rite of passage known as Back to School. While many parents look forward to the sound of the school bell as much as their kids dread it, there is another side to this season – back to school shopping. Armed with supply lists printed from school websites, parents have to schlep into stores pushing big shopping carts and prepare for battle.

This was the scenario that we participated in every year since our oldest started school 15 years ago. Like all the other people, we jostled in the crowds trying to get the marble notebooks, pencils, index cards, and glue sticks. Each subject required a folder with two pockets, and we couldn’t forget the ream of copier paper, the markers, and pencil case with sharpener.

In recent years this list has expanded to include – hand sanitizer, facial tissues, and paper towels. When all this is actually found and placed in the cart, it is usually overflowing. Then to add insult to injury and rub salt in the wounds, we would wait on insufferably long lines to check out.

This year with one child going off to college, we decided to say “Enough is enough!” Despite wanting to give our local stores the business – and this is something that we usually do – this year our shopping list included materials for a dorm room. That made us turn around and make the big decision to shop online. While this experience was going to still be expensive, at least we could shop in our pajamas in a comfortable chair with a cup of java.

This back to school shopping is extremely profitable for retailers. According to the National Retail Federation, families with children in elementary school and high school will spend an average of $696.70 – up $12 from last year. Parents like us who have a college student, will spend a whopping $976.78 – up $24 from last year. 

Judging from our online shopping bills, this is just about what we spent, but we may have gotten a little carried away with certain dorm items that pushed us over the average cost listed.

After the final click on screen, we just had to sit back with our ankles crossed and watch Stranger Things episodes. With free shipping thrown in, this is the ultimate no-brainer. When the packages arrived – in huge boxes – it seemed worth foregoing the dubious pleasure of pushing shopping carts around a crowded store.

Back to School sales now are now rivaling Christmas sales. Amazon announced that this year’s Prime Day – July 15 – was its biggest sales day ever, and much of this success was due to back to school shopping. Overall approximately $80.7 billion will be spent on back to school shopping this year. 

The other day I went to a local store to get copier paper, and the line of people waiting to check out wound up and down the aisles. I looked at their carts brimming with back to school items, smiled, and went back outside. No more of that for me.

So, if you’re a parent and you haven’t gone shopping for back to school yet, there are a few days left. My advice – skip the line and shop online. The stuff will probably come in a day or two, and you will have saved yourself a whole lot of stress and, more importantly, time.

My Summer Challenge – Finish Writing a Book

I have finished writing the first draft of my latest book – a novel (the title and subject I choose not to reveal) – and you would think that I am ready to pop the champagne open, right? Wrong! Because even though it feels wonderful finishing the first draft – what I call Phase One – I know the real dirty, hard work looms over me.

The way it happened is a usual process for me – I get all excited about an idea, sit down, and bang out a story. This is why I love short stories because my investment of time is minimal in comparison to working on a book. I do revise it a few times, but at 10-15 pages – the usual length of one of my stories – it is not all that time consuming. There is still work to it, but it is nothing like the time writing a novel requires.

Then, like most of my stories, I submit it someplace and then forget about it. Maybe it gets rejected or gets published, and if does get published I will go over it and think about ways I still want to change it. This has happened to me again and again over the years.

The original story that inspired this novel was submitted and not accepted, so I shelved it for about 15 years. I thought about the story one night in May while watching The Day the Earth Stood Still on television, and it made me think about the story because that film is something the characters in the story watch, so later on I pulled this story down from the shelf, brushed off the cobwebs, and decided that my original idea to turn it into a book was a good one.

Now I had my summer challenge. Since I am not teaching during the summer months, it is a perfect time to commit to writing a longer work. I had to set a schedule and stick to it. Since the kids are off from school, it would have to be earlier than they get up, so my target time was 5-8 in the morning. I started on the first day by going into my office and shutting the door, and I stuck to this routine all summer – except on weekends and vacation – and this worked for me.

There were some speed bumps along the way. One of the kids would get up early and want breakfast, or I had to go to the store because we were out of eggs or milk. But most of the summer I got my three hours in each day, and I found myself surprisingly awake and fresh and mostly excited when that alarm went off. Still, when those unplanned things happened, I looked at my picture The Distrest Poet by William Hogarth that I have hanging near my desk, took a deep breath, and carried on. Like the poet in the drawing, I wanted to write but life had other plans.

Every writer is different, but I am a visual learner and need to see the story. What I mean is that I must plot out the story on little storyboards and post them around my desk where I am working. They consist of an outline of exactly what (or will) happen in that chapter and characters names that appear in it. So, I started out with eight chapters – it would later grow to 14 – and each one was posted on a storyboard and was visible for me to see as I was writing.

If I am in the middle of writing chapter seven, and I forgot a name or an event in chapter two, it is very convenient to have the storyboard there with the information I need. Sometimes as I write a chapter it starts writing itself, and thus the story changes from what I have on the storyboard. I use pencil to make them up, so that I can erase some of the outline and plug in the changes if I make any.

Does this sound like fun? I know why many people hate writing – it is work – hard work. After a three-hour session, I am tired but exhilarated too. Then if my kids want to do something after breakfast – pool, beach, mall, movie, etc. – I can participate without feeling like I didn’t accomplish something that day, but I may yawn a few times along the way.

Besides the physical effort necessary for writing, there is an emotional toll as well. I get attached to characters and the story, and in one instance when two characters had to die – sure, I am the writer and can change it, but it was necessary for the plot – I felt real pain. Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” All I can say is that I know what he meant, because my office looks like a crime scene.

Now that the first draft of the book is done, I must go into what I call Phase Two – the revising of the book. I started doing that this morning during my three hours, and I didn’t get out of the first chapter. There were several things that I didn’t feel worked, and now some pages are totally different. I felt like a movie director sending snippets of film to the cutting room floor.

Writing the first draft was work but it was joyful work. Revision is the heavy-duty work of writing, and it always takes longer than actually writing the first draft.  After I am finished revising the whole book – and judging from this morning it is going to take a while – I will then have Phase Three to deal with. That is the editing and proofreading stage, which is the hardest step of all. This sometimes takes even more time than the revision depending on the story, and it’s very tedious, but necessary work.

Of course, I go back to work in two weeks and the kids go back to school, so my wonderful 5-8 window will be gone. Inevitably, I will get the work done and have a book ready for publication, and then there will be happiness that it is over but also the despair of an empty nester whose baby has gone away.

For now, I am satisfied that I succeeded in my summer challenge and the book’s first draft is done. Usually, every summer I would say, “I’m going to write a book” and then never get to it. I did it this year, and felt the need to write about the process, so this article is the result of that.

Okay, enough already. Now it is time to get back to work.