Gauthic Times #84 News & Other Stuff from Bill Gauthier, or 47 Rotations

Hello, friends!

This week saw me returning to school for year eighteen. I had two PD days and started to get my stuff set up in the new classroom. I won’t be teaching in the room but will be there in the mornings and afternoons, stopping in for prep periods, etc.

Before the PD days, though, I had an event at a Barnes & Noble in Warwick, Rhode Island. With everything going on lately, I’d forgotten to mention it last week. It went extremely well.

Finally, yesterday (or today as I write this) was my 47^th birthday. Forty-fucking-seven. How is that even possible? I literally opened action figures and took pictures of them today in celebration. But here I am, 47.

Anyway, let’s get into this week’s updates!

Welcome to the 84th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and time’s unwillingness to stay still.

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Anyway, let’s do this!

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I’ve cut a bit from Project: Monster this week. About 6,600 words were cut, or about 29 pages. I don’t know that I’ll get down as far as 50 pages from the recommended 50-100 pages that my friend suggested I cut, but I may.

What surprises me still is how much work I put into the small things on this pass, considering I’d already edited the novel twice. It shows you that you can always revise your work. Or it shows that I did a shitty job editing/revising the last two times. One or the other.

I also printed out Project: Amusement Park. The massive 682-page manuscript was printed single-sided.

I recently placed Project: Monster in a binder, something I’ve never done with a manuscript but have seen others do, and I’m planning on doing the same thing with Project: Amusement Park.

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I’m 47. It’s a weird number to write. I’m a few years away from 50, which also feels very weird to contemplate. I sit here writing this to whoever will read it and I think about what I thought 30 years ago when I was 17 and beginning my senior year of high school. I’m starting my 18^th year of teaching high school now. Weird.

I feel like I’m still at the beginning of my writing career, though I’ve been publishing since I was 21. My divorce and the subsequent years after threw me off-course. I’d just had my “big break” but pissed it away thanks to depression and being lost in so many ways. I think of those years, 2004 through 2007 as the Dark Years.

I met Pamela in January 2007, turned 30 that August, began teaching days later, and here we are now. One novel, a collection, and two novellas. Lots of work in-progress or being sent around.

I’ve gained a lot of weight in the last several years. My blood pressure is too high. I have some other issues, too. I’m not at the age where I have to be careful. I don’t want to end up like my mother, whom I miss as much today as when she died in 2019.

Or was it yesterday? Time seems fluid. I just sold my short story, “The Growth of Alan Ashley,” to my first pro market! It’ll come out in the fall of 2003. Wait. That’s 21 years ago. I wrote that story while my daughter was at school in kindergarten. Except, that daughter graduated college a few years ago now.

The character Missy from Echoes on the Pond is 13, three years older than my daughter except not my older daughter is 13 years older and my younger daughter is just over a year away from that age. But how? Because I held her in the hospital yesterday?

Things need to change. When I’m older, I’ll be able to fix it. Except, I’m older now. How do I fix it? Because it won’t sit still. Time keeps moving. Time keeps flowing.

And it’s too much sometimes.

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