"Are you used to being up at this hour?" the teacher asks me. It may be because I've agreed to her offer of a coffee, explaining that I haven't had my required third of the morning yet. Up until this point, I thought I had been competently connecting my Macbook to the LED projector.
My mixmaster hair is styled messy deliberately. Costs a lot of royalties to keep it this way.
My face is fully made up, teeth brushed etc. It's 9 a.m. and by now I've looked at a couple articles for the magazine I work for, copy edited a chapter of a basketball novel my Norwegian publisher wants to look at (hey I'm losing a whole writing morning to this class), fed my grandson Hunter breakfast and made his lunch, double checked to make sure his homework went into his backpack, walked the dog and packed up all my author visit gear. I know people in 9 to 5 jobs do a lot of stuff in the morning but still I can't help wondering about the public perception of the writer's life from her question. Or her perception of me.
"Oh yes," I answer. "I am an early riser." The first image of my Powerpoint presentation rises up on the screen with no difficulty at all. Ha! I think. When we first approached the idea of me visiting the teacher cautioned me that she knew nothing about technology and that I might be "on my own" getting the projector and computer to communicate.
I should add, we first approached the idea three days prior when Hunter told me I was expected.
The 21 students were a captive audience. Yes, I took the entire first period English as they may have hoped since their book review presentations were due that morning. We all had fun.
The teacher gave me a lovely plant which I will post a photo of a little later when I try my new camera on it.
That afternoon I continued editing articles for Today's Parent Toronto and matching up my basketball novel in text form to the book it was published as. While I walked the dog in between, made supper, went to aqua fit etc, I only put the laptop down at 10:30 p.m.
And here it is 6:30 a.m next day and I'm up and at it again. "Are you rich?" one of the grade fours asked me.
"Not in the way you think I am," I answered.
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