Author Archives: Sarah Wagstaff

About Sarah Wagstaff

I am a mom, writer, musician and educator. I write sci fi/fantasy. I play flute, piano, violin and other instruments as I feel like it. I have a degree in psychology, history and flute performance. I sub and volunteer at schools K-12 grades.

January

I’ve started back teaching after the holiday break. As a musician I perform more in December, then the rest of the year put together. Holiday break for me means more performances. But it’s fun to transition back to teaching. It’s good to see my students again. They grow a lot in two weeks. Time to get back to practicing and reviewing foundational habits of posture, breath control, rhythm and learning new skills, using a metronome, listening to your own playing, relaxing your hands.

I’m usually one who comes up with a bunch of goals and things to do, but I think this year I want to pare down and give more attention to doing things well.

Doing Less for the New School Year

Start of the school year, time for lots of new things, new teachers, new grades, and new music students. It’s a time for exploration and wrapping up the events of the summer.

When you’re scheduling this fall, try for a little less, one less activity, a little less scheduled time. What really matters to you and your family? Is doing more really better?

Take the time, take time to practice, take time to enjoy, to remember why you chose an activity. Take the time to work, to improve and to polish a skill. Share and connect with someone. Play for a neighbor, play for a friend, play for yourself. Make time for you.

People – A Manual

When I brought my oldest daughter home from the hospital, as a baby, I walked out of the doors and felt this huge weight settle on my shoulders. Here was this wonderful, new, red and wrinkly creature that I had to take home and keep alive. My only pet, a goldfish, had survived less than a month. I regularly kill plants and here they sent me home with no instructions other than checking to make sure that the car seat was properly installed. “That’s wonderful, she’ll be safe for the ride home. But then what?”

I wished for a manual.

So I think I’ll write one. It might take me a while. Maybe by the time the computers/robots have taken over I can get it published. It’ll be a bestseller and all the little robots can rush to the pet store and buy their own human and my manual.

Kid Wars

It’s the summertime and my children are staying up until midnight, skipping meals (if they sleep through it), and that equals arguing. And it’s the same argument every time: “She’s on the [insert TV/Computer/device] without doing her chores first!” And they wouldn’t care except they did their chores so to be fair they need to tattle on their sister.

Other than getting them back to normal sleep patterns and feeding them (I skip fixing breakfast, because they are plenty old enough to fend for themselves.) I’m not sure what else to do. The rule at our house in the summer is 1/2 hr of practicing and 1/2 hr of chores before screen time each day. Chores are free form, but maybe that should change because the house doesn’t seem to get any messier, but it really doesn’t get any cleaner either.

I could  farm the children out to the neighbors, then the tattling would go away because they can’t see each other. Or send the little ones to a labor camp in Siberia, then the 1/2 hr of chores would seem easy. “Thirty minutes of chores, I can do that before waking up!” But the real solution is shipping them off to Grandma’s, where they only have cable TV and a computer and chores are something their parents used to do back in the good ‘ole days.

Caverns Found, the Sequel and Editing

I’ve finally released the sequel to Ocean Lost, Caverns Found.

On Feb 24, 2011 I started this book, I finished it four years later. I spent the last six months moving to Texas, unpacking and procrastinating editing.dragon final 20141125_cover_with_words

There’s something very emotional about writing a book and prepping it for publication. I love sharing my books with other people, but there’s a lot of fear involved too. I feel like Shalise and the writing is my dragon. I want to be on the other end of the warm reception without going through the process in the middle.

Editing is a very different process from writing. It uses new skills and different parts of the brain. It’s like being on a safari hunt for the perfect word. I read a sentence and see that the words don’t work right; that something needs to be shifted to better express the feeling I wish to convey. Editing is my monster within, but once I’ve made the transformation from creator to critiquer(yes it should be a word) it’s not so terrible.

I read once that most people will forgive a bad first book because you are expected to have mistakes your first time through, but that if you have a bad second book, they won’t read you again. I love Caverns Found. In some ways it surprises me. One of the difficulties in editing lay in that I kept finding myself getting caught in the story. I noticed that in my readers too. After about page fifty there were a lot less corrections or maybe I was a better writer by then.

Anyhow here’s to getting Caverns Found‘s sequel done in less than a year. Wish me luck.

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