Instructor jockeying career paths of writing, teaching
by Brian Shults, se news editor

    Some people are not satisfied with one career. Yvonne Jocks, SE Campus English Instructor, is one of these.

   In the 1980s Yvonne Jocks was a student at the University of Texas at Arlington, shuffling through an assortment of majors and trying to find a career path that suited her personality.

   She paid the bills and followed her interests, but in the end, one profession was not enough.

   Jocks came to enjoy two jobs: college instructor and novelist.

   Jocks began college as a radio/television major, looking to write in the entertainment industry but, after a year, her professors discouraged her pursuit of screenwriting.

   “My teachers had a very competitive view of screenwriting: that it was a dog-eat-dog or kill-or-be-killed world. They said, ‘If you’re not willing to draw blood, don’t even bother trying,’ ” she said.

   "I wasn’t willing to draw blood,” she said.

   Instead, Jocks pursued other majors, such as humanities and music, while taking English courses because of her joy for reading.

   Eventually, a friend pointed out that she was only a few credits short of a bachelor’s degree in English.

   Capitalizing on this realization, she received her degree and began working on a master’s degree.

   During college Jocks became a fan and avid reader of romance novels.
   Her devotion to reading was born largely because of her nomadic life as a young child.

   Her father was in the Navy, a job that required moving from town to town, and even after his departure from the armed forces, he bore a disposition for periodic relocations.

   This disposition took Jocks to four states across the mid-west before she finally settled in Texas during her teens.

   Her love of romance novels made her seek the same qualities in other genres she liked, books ranging from science fiction and fantasy to horror and suspense.

   However, those books did not always satisfy her as a reader.

   "The older I became and the more I read, the more the authors seemed to short the romance story. Many of the fantasy books have romantic subplots, but that was never the emphasis, and it should not have been,” she said.

   Yet Jocks did not think that meant it could not have been.

   Jocks’ college roommate introduced her to a woman wearing a T-shirt saying, ‘If You’re Going to Write, Write,” and she took the message to heart.

   When she learned the shirt came from the North Texas Women’s Writers of America, a romance writers’ group, she joined the organization.

   Jocks continued working on her master’s degree in English while sporadically writing fiction in the hopes of getting published.

   The degree required her to do some graduate teaching and, with a bit of trepidation, she did.

   “I was one of the worst graduate teaching assistants because I was such an introvert,” she said.

   “I had very little backbone at the time, and I almost didn’t finish because I didn’t like teaching so much. But I felt I was so close to finishing that I had to finish my thesis, get my degree and not look back,” she said.

   She also admitted telling a friend to “shoot me if I ever say I am going to teach again.”

   Not quite two years after graduating and swearing off teaching, she needed money. Jocks applied at Mountain View Community College and taught a few night classes. She described that experience as wonderful and fulfilling.

   “The community college atmosphere is great, and teaching night classes are still my love,” she said.

   And while her teaching career began falling into place in the early ’90s, her career as a novelist still had not succeeded.

   During the two years between college and teaching, she worked to discipline herself by writing regularly on her book Knight’s Enchantress. She tinkered on it for three years.

   “I was making the same mistake many new authors do: going back and polishing what I had instead of realizing the need to have more than one piece to work on at a time. I still have not sold Enchantress. I entered it into the same contest four years in a row, and it was rejected each time,” she said.

   In fall 1992, she moved from Mountain View to NE Campus as a adjunct and began writing a new novel in the horror-romance genre, Waiting for the Wolfman.

   Wolfman had a brighter fate than Enchantress, being accepted after its first submission to an editor. It was published in April 1993.

   “The publication of my first book in some ways was a non-event. It was huge in my life, yet not that much changed. It was unusual because I was still living and working where I was before it happened. It dispelled some illusions about publishing, like you make a lot of money early on,” she said.

   Jocks likened the experience to a young woman who builds in her mind the act of getting married to such a degree that it overshadows all other aspects of her life.

   “Once she gets married, its cool, but you still have bill problems and you still get a cold … I had this idea in my head that after I published, I’d be cool and sophisticated and wouldn’t make any more mistakes. Clearly that’s not the case,” she said.

   Since Wolfman, both Jocks’ writing and her teaching career have evolved into a way of life.

   The instructor has published eight novels and several short stories since 1993 under the name, Yvonne Jocks, Evelyn Vaughn and Von Jocks, and this fall she began teaching as a full-time instructor on SE Campus.

   Jocks stays busy. She has two novels in the works with Decoding Proteus, a techno-savvy thriller-romance, due out August 2003.