Day 34 (a future history)

Thursday, February 22, 2018

I’m going to run away. I’m really going to do it. I don’t care if I don’t have enough money. I’m not staying here anymore.

This week has been shit.

Tuesday morning when we got to school, we found out that all of the little Nazi boys had had their lockers vandalized. All 18 or 20 of them. I don’t even know how many there are, though I think they’re adding more. yay It was all stuff like

Fuck Nazis

Nazis suck cock

Nazis are LOSERS

Most of us thought it was pretty funny.

Caleb didn’t. Caleb was going around school calling it terrorism and demanding to know who’d done it. Like anyone would tell him. No one liked him before he had his Nazi goon squad, and everyone hates him now. But Caleb whined to daddy. He actually went to the office before school had even started and called him, so there was a special emergency assembly called during first period. It turns out that Caleb’s dad isn’t just in the National Guard but is a captain or a sergeant or something and is the Nazi in charge of the Nazi babies.

Captain Nazi gave us a long speech about how this kind of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated and that the people responsible should turn themselves in to avoid horrible punishment. He also offered a reward for anyone who would turn in the people who did it.

So there’s this guy, Evan, who’s kind of a smart ass. He’s always saying disruptive stuff in class and making teachers mad and, sometimes, making them look dumb. He’s super smart and he knows it. He doesn’t care about any school stuff because he already knows it all. But he really doesn’t try to make people feel stupid. Except for teachers when they act like they’re right because they’re the teachers or people who are really just being stupid. I think he likes the attention he gets from being a smart ass in class because he’s so bored with being in school.

So Evan stood up, just stood up as soon as Captain Nazi-pants offered a reward, and said, “I know who did it.” Everyone got real quiet, and I’m sure whoever did do it was scared. I would have been scared. But I also wouldn’t narc on people bashing Nazis and couldn’t believe Evan was going to, even for a reward. Evan didn’t say anything. He just kept standing there. Everybody was looking at him, and I think he was enjoying it.

Eventually, Nazi-pants said, “Well?”

And Evan smirked and said, “It was your momma.”

Which doesn’t sound very brilliant coming from Evan – that’s the kind of thing a 6^th grader would say – unless he was trying to say the thing that would most piss off Nazi-pants. Or almost the thing that would most piss him off. Because Caleb started yelling, “You take that back! Take it back!” And Evan looked at him and said, “And your momma was watching and sucking a big black dick while it was happening. Two of them, in fact.”

Nazi-pants lost it. He went flying off the stage in a rage but some other National Guard Nazi guy had Evan by the arm and was pulling him from his seat by the time Nazi-pants got there. Caleb was right behind his dad. Evan was freaked out and trying to get away. Caleb’s dad grabbed Evan and punched him in the face. Just punched him in the face! Blood hit the wall and Evan collapsed. Caleb started kicking him and no one stopped him.

Evan is just a kid. Really a kid. He’s in 8^th grade, but that’s because he skipped a couple of years of school. He might only be 10. I don’t know.

I think everyone was too shocked by what was happening to do anything, but the soldiers weren’t shocked; they just didn’t care. Eventually – and it probably wasn’t really very long, but it felt like a long time – Mr. Chambers started yelling for them to stop and headed that way, but soldier dudes got in his way. But Mr. Chambers is a big guy and used to play football and wrestle and stuff, coach stuff, and kept pushing his way through. Then the soldier dudes started attacking him, and he was knocking them all down until one of them pulled out his gun and told Mr. Chambers to freeze.

By that time, Nazi-pants was arguing with the principal, and a few moments later, the police and an ambulance showed up. I guess someone must have snuck out and called 911 during all of the fighting and confusion with Mr. Chambers. Nazi-pants didn’t want to let the ambulance take Evan away, but the police made him leave them alone. I think they may have been trying to arrest Nazi-pants, but I don’t really know. All I know is more police came and, when the more police got there, they made all of us clear out.

At some point, between the police getting there and the more police getting there, the soldiers took Mr. Chambers away. He hasn’t been back to school. Neither has Evan.

Evan, though, is in the hospital. The school did let us know that so that any of us who want to can go visit him. I want to visit him, but I wasn’t really friends with him, so that seems awkward to me. Especially since he can’t talk because of the broken jaw. And broken nose. And cracked ribs. And internal bleeding. His dad is someone kind of important, I think, so I hope he makes bad things happen to Captain Nazi-pants.

No one knows what happened to Mr. Chambers.

So far, nothing has happened to Nazi-pants, at least according to Caleb. He’s been bragging, now, about how his dad can do whatever he wants and no one can do anything about it or stop him. And, according to Caleb, that means he can also do anything he wants and no one can stop him, either. It seems like the teachers believe it, because they are letting Caleb get away with everything, even telling them what to do.

Mom is calling for dinner. More beans and rice, probably. That’s all we’ve had to eat for a week, and I’m sick and tired of beans and rice. But I’m also hungry. Mom is talking about getting chickens, but dad keeps saying no. Mom says we at least need them for the eggs because it’s been almost three weeks since we’ve had any meat, and it was two weeks before that.

But, anyway, all of that was JUST Tuesday, but I’ll have to talk about Wednesday later.

How the System Failed My Son: Part Five -- The Horse He Rode In On

[Seriously, you need to go back and read the other parts of this before reading this one. There's no recap, just full speed ahead.]

This is the period full of second guessing for us. Middle school was... Well, it was problematic, to say the least. Homework was a nightmare. We quit being able to do anything as a family, because my son would spend all night, every night, doing homework. There was never time left for anything else.

Sure, some of it was his fault. He did have the ability to work faster but, from his perspective, why was he even having to do it at all? I can't even think of a good analogy for this, because, other than school, there is no part of life that requires this kind of thing. Which is not to say that there aren't some jobs which require you to take your work home with you, but those are by choice. I mean, you choose those jobs, and you can un-choose them if you want to. School isn't like that.

Look, it was kind of like this:
It was like having to drag your horse to water because it refused to walk there. Once there, you had to force its head under to make it drink but, instead of drinking the water, it would just hold its breath until it couldn't, at which point it would breathe in a bunch of the water, so you had to pump its chest and do CPR just before holding its head under again.
Oh, wait, this sounds like some torture technique...
And that's what it was, familial torture.

It was at this point we were just trying to power through middle school with the hopes that high school would be better.

Let me back up a moment:
For one thing, middle school is miserable for virtually everyone. I hated middle school. I mean, I loathed middle school. Not that my parents ever knew. My mom, despite how many times I've told her to the contrary, is still under the illusion that I loved middle school. But high school, which I had dreaded, once I acclimated to it, was pretty great. Okay, well, it was pretty okay. I mostly enjoyed high school.

We had had issues with his older brother in middle school; not the same kinds of issues, but we'd still had issues. When he got to high school, everything had turned around for him, and he loved high school

This may have been part of the issue that was created...

For years, Phillip had wanted to go to Tech High, a local area high school that specialized in math and, you guessed it, technology. Phillip really likes to build things, and they have a robotics program. It seemed like a good fit. He even applied there and was accepted. (You have to be ahead of the curve to get into that school, and Phillip was certainly that, being two years ahead in math when he got out of middle school (if you count the year he skipped, he was actually three years ahead).)

But, see, math... We had been struggling with him over his math homework constantly, and we couldn't see how it would be better if he went to a high school centered around math.

The thing that had turned everything around for his brother had been drama and choir, and, as I mentioned last post, Phillip developed a real love for acting and, specifically, musical theater during middle school, and he had decided that he wanted to follow in his brother's footsteps and go into the same program his brother had been through.

Trying to find the thing that Phillip would enjoy and give him some joy in school again, we let him make the decision. There was some ambivalence on his part because he had wanted to go to Tech High for years but, when he went to shadow there (if you don't know what that is, ask in the comments), it was a horrible experience where he was pretty much just left to sit alone for hours while the students worked on some project on their computers. He did get accepted there, but he chose the arts program and to go do drama. His shadowing experience there had been very positive considering everyone knew his brother and welcomed him right away.

He's really good, by the way. A natural actor and able to do character parts really well. He also has a great ear and voice. Basically, he's a natural.

So we made it through middle school, got him into the high school he wanted to go to, and we held our breaths. Just like that horse with its head being held under the surface of the lake.

The Philosophy of Change (Change: part 1)

On the whole, people don't much get along well with "change." Most of us just don't like it. Change is something to be fought against and conquered, not embraced. Change is the enemy.
To most of us.

To be honest, I am one of those "most of us." I do well with routine. I don't get bored easily. I'm not always looking for the "next, new thing" or anything like that. However, I am not necessarily averse to change; I just forget about it. Forget about doing it.

That's really the core of the issue with change: For most of us, change is something that happens to us, not something that we instigate. We become victims of change, and that is really the thing we don't like. That and things are different afterwards. Most of us would rather bad things stay the way they are than risk any kind of change. Change could, after all, make things worse.

But let me remind everyone of Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different (or better) result.

Look, I am fairly anti-tradition, mostly because tradition is the antithesis of change. Being locked into tradition (or doing something the same way) for the sake of the tradition (or doing something the same way) has always been (well, since middle school, anyway (yes, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson had a huge impact on me)) mostly foolish in my eyes. Tradition (or doing something the same way) should always be evaluated to see what purpose it's performing and held up against the purpose it's supposed to be performing. For instance, Christmas gatherings are supposed to be joyous and fun occasions but, if gathering with your family doesn't not meet that goal (like if it's a thing you dread every year but do anyway because of tradition) then you shouldn't do it. That's a bad tradition. But I digress...
(And, no, I am not talking about my family with that example. It's just a thing you see a lot of at the time of year we just came through (that being Christmas (as I'm writing this)).)

So...

A thing I try to do every so often in my life is to look at the things I'm doing to see if they are meeting the goals they are supposed to be meeting. I don't want to be one of those people who just keeps doing the same thing, only harder, over and over and hoping for a different result.

Now, before I go on, I need to say a few things:
1. My wife says that I missed my window for writing this post, especially since it's not going to post until some time in February.
2. I disagree with my wife because, as I write this, it is technically (and by "technically" I mean that it is (by almost a week)) still January, and this kind of thing can be done any time during January. (Traditionally (heh heh))
3. My wife says this post (series of posts) is for me. You can read it, but it's not for you. I think I agree with that. This place has become a good one for sort of keeping track of what I'm doing in my life at any given moment, so it will help me remember the changes that took place last year, a year of more than the normal amount of changes. Remember, I sometimes (frequently) forget to make them, so there aren't always changes. At least not ones initiated by me.
4. If you choose to read it... well, I hope it's helpful in some way, but it's not meant to be. I'm just putting out there what happened and, probably, some context so that it's understandable.

All of that said, 2015 started out with change. I spent the last month or two of 2014 looking at where I was and what I was doing and deciding on what things were working and what things weren't. So January of 2015 started with change.
But I guess we'll get to that next time.

What Roller Derby Taught Me About Writing

I got to go to one of the practices for the Cinderollas.

I was watching them warm up, and they started doing this thing with a bunch of balls. Not what's in the above pictures, that was something else entirely. No, what I mean is that when everyone was just there skating around (and there were a lot more people than just the ones pictured because there junior team was there, too, along with some other skaters), they threw a couple dozen of those lightweight brightly colored balls for kids out onto the skate floor.

Let me back up a moment:
As I said in my first post about roller derby, I grew up skating and working in the recreation program at my church. We did skating in the gym, and I was often in charge. One of the first and basic rules of skating was balls and skates don't mix. When I was in middle school, one of my best friends broke his leg because he tripped over a basketball while he was skating. Well, perhaps tripped is too light a word. It's not like it was just there on the floor in front of him and he didn't go around it or something. No, it came rolling across the floor and hit his feet. At any rate, the rule was no skates and balls at the same time (not that we always followed that rule, mind you, but that was the rule, nevertheless).

Needless to say, I was surprised that they were tossing all of these balls out onto the skating floor during the derby practice. They were kicking the balls, throwing them at each other, and, generally, having fun with them. Eventually, when they got ready to actually start practice, they gathered up the balls.

About that time, Dirty Carie, the CEO of the Cinderollas (with whom I'm trying to get an interview), came over and asked me if I had any questions. My initial response was, as is always the case, "No, I don't think so," but I immediately changed my mind and asked about the balls, something like, "What's the deal with the balls?"

Her response was very interesting:
We try to get them not to think about their feet and what they're doing with their feet. Newer skaters tend to focus on their feet and think about how they're skating and not pay attention to what's happening around them. Of course, that doesn't work in a match. So, if we give them something fun to do, they are more likely to think about the game and let their feet just do what they need to do. If they get busy playing with the balls, they forget to think about their feet and just skate. The more we can get them to do that, the better they skate.

That's true for a lot of things, especially physical things for which muscle memory can take over. Often, thinking about it, thinking about what you're doing, can just mess you up. I think we frequently call it "trying too hard."

It works for writing, too. Writers often get too focused on the individual words and sentences. They think they have to only have "useful" words or just the right word or that every sentence has to further the story or be perfect or beautiful in some way. They do word counts on specific words and go back and cap that particular word at some arbitrary number of usages. Or other weird things. It's like thinking too hard about what your feet are doing.

Writers need to just tell the story. Don't think about the words or the perfect sentences or any of that and just tell the story. The better you get at telling the story, the more easily the right words and sentences will fall into place. All on their own, really. It's kind of magical that way. Sure, it takes practice and, sometimes, especially at first, thinking about the words helps, but you can't stay in that place. At some point, you have to play with the balls and forget about your feet. Just have fun in the game and tell the story.

It's Time For You To Grow Up (part 3)

It has been my general policy since I started doing reviews and stuff to only review books that I've finished. Mostly, I made that decision based on the reading of one book many years ago. It was a horrible book (an author requested review), but the very end was just good enough to take it from a 1-star to a 2-star rating. Because of that, I figured I ought to see a book all the way through before reviewing it. So I've slogged through many terrible books, the L'Engle time quintet, for example.

However, for the most part, a book that is a struggle to read is not going to redeem itself at the end. I mean, a step up from a 1-star to a 2-star doesn't mean that I liked the book. It was still bad, and I would never recommend it to anyone. And, honestly, as a whole work, the book was probably still just a 1-star, but I was surprised enough that the author pulled his threads together at the end that I bumped the rating up to 2.

Anyway... All of that to say that I have read some bad books over the past several years. Really bad. When I start a book, almost always, I will finish it.

But there have been two books during this same time period that I have not finished. Yes, two books that weren't even as good as Many Waters, which stands out to me as the worst book I've read (all the way through) in years. Or maybe that was An Acceptable Time; they're both so bad it's hard to tell which is worse. At any rate, having made my way through both of those, I think it's significant when I say that there are books that I actually couldn't make myself read.

One of those, I will share with you.

Initially, I decided to pick up Where You Belong by Pat Dilloway because he said it was the very best of his books. He said he was inspired and that he would never write anything better than that novel. I think that's what he still says about it. I figured that sounded like a good place to start. I mean, if an author says about one of his books that it's the best thing he's capable of writing, you may as well start with that, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

It didn't take me very long to realize that if this was the best that Dilloway had to offer, then I wouldn't be reading any of his books.

First, it's written in first person. I'm sure you all know by now how I feel about first person. But it's worse, because it's written in first person omniscient and, well, that's just not a thing. I mean, unless your protagonist is God (or, maybe, Charles Xavier), omniscient and first person do not go together. That's the whole reason for writing in first person, to have a limited view of what's going on. A view limited to only what the protagonist knows and observes. That's why first person works so well in detective fiction, because the whole point of that is the protagonist trying to work out what he doesn't know from his rather limited perspective. This issue of allowing the first person protagonist to know too much is very pervasive in first person stories, but I'd never seen full-on first person omniscient before. Yes, it set me against the book right from the start, because, again, first person omniscient is not a thing.

[Note: Dilloway has spoken on his blog and various other places that the book was originally written in third person and that he later went back and converted it. I think he must have done this through a simple replacement of pronouns, because he didn't do anything to adjust the viewpoint. I'm saying this based on my experience with my middle schoolers. There have been many times when I have given writing assignments to write from a particular perspective. It is not infrequent that I will get stories that were originally written from a different perspective so the student just went in and changed the pronouns. That's not enough when making a perspective shift and, anytime I have asked, for instance, "Did you originally write this in first person," the answer has always been "yes."

So that would explain the omniscience problem. He originally wrote it in third person omniscient but didn't narrow the viewpoint to first person when he converted it to a first person story. I'm just going to call it what it is: a middle school mistake.]

The next issue with the book is that it shifts back and forth from past to present tense, but not in a way that makes sense. For instance, it would make sense if part of the story was being told "now" and part of the story was being told "then." However, what we have are clearly places that are "then" that are being told in past tense, followed by a section that is still "then" but now in present tense, followed by a section that is still "then" but back in past tense. These are chronological events, so the shift in tense didn't work for me.

[Note: This is a thing I am extremely sensitive to, because it's an issue my middle schoolers struggle with a lot. The most common reason I hand a story back to a student is because of an issue with tense shifts. My comment is generally, "Pick one, past or present, and stick to it."]

Then there's the issue of the voice, and this, also, is probably related to the shift the author made from third to first person. When you write in third person, the voice can be whatever you want it to be, because it's the narrator's voice, not the character's. When you write in first person, though, the voice needs to be the character's voice and, thus, reflective of the character. The protagonist starts out at age three or four, but the voice is definitely that of an adult. That would be okay if it was clear that it was an adult reflecting back on his childhood, but the feel of the story is that it's being told by the kid, especially since some of it is in present tense, but not in a kid's voice.  Now, I get that writing from a child's perspective can be difficult but, if you can't do it, don't choose to do it.

I put the book down. At the time, I decided it wasn't worth the effort to wade through it when there was no indication that it would get any better. Sure, the kid grows up to fit the voice, so to speak, but it was already messed up for me by that point, and none of the other problems were going to work themselves out. And I haven't even talked about the editing issues (and being years ago that I read this, I don't specifically remember what they were; I just remember being bothered by things). [Note: It should tell you something that these other things stood out to me so much that I still remember them now. I did not go back and re-read this so that I could do this review.]

Basically, if I want to read stuff with these kinds of... issues, I get plenty from my students, and they don't cry and go on a rampage when I tell them they have things that need to be fixed. They take the manuscripts back and, mostly, do the best they can to fix the problems. And, honestly, some of the stuff I get from my middle school students is of a much higher quality than I see from a lot of adults. Not much of it, granted, but I have had a handful of very gifted writers over the last few years. The point, though, is that if you can't handle criticism of your manuscript with at least the grace of a middle schooler, you have no business putting your manuscripts out for public consumption. And I have never had any student, to be blunt, lose his/her shit over me handing back a story and saying, "It needs work." Sure, the middle schoolers I teach aren't trying to make a living at writing, but some of them are very invested in their stories, and middle schoolers are emotional volcanoes, and, yet, all of them have taken criticism better than Dilloway does.

Now, Dilloway will probably take this as a "revenge review" for what transpired in this post but, really, it's not (which is not to say that I won't take some amount of satisfaction in posting it; I am only human). This is an example of "my medicine," a review reflecting my experience of a product with the actual reasons for the response that I had. The reasons have nothing to do with how I feel about Dilloway nor did my dislike of the book. For instance, from what I know of Orson Scott Card, I would not like him as a person, but Ender's Game is, at the very least, a very good book. On the other side of that, I like the person of John Scalzi quite a bit. I like the things he has to say and I follow his blog; however, I did not enjoy either of the books I read by him despite the fact that I really wanted to like them. The product is not the person and should be evaluated separately from any feelings having to do with that person. At the time I tried to read Where You Belong, I had no particular feelings of antipathy toward Dilloway. I did know that he was petty and disliked my notion of honest reviews, but I didn't, yet, know he was one to go around down-rating books out of some erroneous stance of righting the wrongs done to him, real or perceived. [Because, as in the case of Alex Cavanaugh, there was no wrong done to him other than that Alex is more successful and more liked than Dilloway.] I just knew that I did not want to fight my way through Dilloway's book, so I made the decision to not finish it.

Now, it's not that I think it's only authors who have maturity issues, because, actually, I think people in general tend to have maturity issues. Or maybe it's just Americans. I can't really speak for the rest of the world. However, the writing profession does seem to have more than its share of people who can't maintain a professional detachment from their work. Rather than go into it again, though, I'll just refer you back to part one of this series. If you feel offended at any part of it, you probably need to grow up.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 1)

I grew up in the South. I don't mean the quasi-South like Missouri or Tennessee; I mean the deep South. Louisiana. Even so, I grew up without any idea that race should ever be an issue. I'm not sure why this was so other than that my parents weren't particularly racist. They weren't particularly un-racist, either. For instance, at some point when I was a kid, I remember my dad using the term "porch monkeys," and I had no idea what he was talking about. When I asked, because I couldn't find the monkeys, no one would explain to me what he meant, so, I suppose, he was ashamed enough for having said it (and my mom ashamed of him) that no one would explain it. Later, when someone did finally explain it to me, I still didn't understand. The term just didn't make sense to me; it was years before I understood that it was a racial slur.

The Oscars this year, "the best and whitest," have me thinking a lot about race and how and where I grew up. I am not much a product of my environment. For instance, I don't have an accent. Someone asked me recently about how long it took me to get rid of it after I moved to California, but, see, I never had an accent. And, no, there is no explanation for that, because my family most definitely does have an accent. In fact, I can barely understand my brother anymore.

I went to a desegregated elementary school. Of course, I didn't know that. I'm not sure any of us knew that when we were kids. I don't know for sure if it made a difference, though. The school was mixed, sure, but the classes, on the whole, were not. I never realized that until now in thinking about all of this. Supposedly, the classes were divided based upon ability and, to some extent, I'm sure that's true, because there were a few black kids in my classes, but, mostly, the black kids were in one class, and the white kids were in the other class. I'm pretty sure there were no white kids in any of the "black" classes. The white kids got a white teacher, and the black kids got a black teacher. Except 1st grade: In first grade, both teachers were black, but that was the only black teacher I had until I got to middle school.

The principal, though, was black: Mr. Hudson. I loved Mr. Hudson. By the time I was in first grade, he called me Dr. Leon. I was Dr. Leon to him all the way through 4th grade, my last year at that school. He said it was because of all my brains. Or something like that. He was always very serious with me and would shake my hand when he saw me in the hall. Evidently, race wasn't an issue for him, and he was the first adult male I admired other than my grandfather.

Middle school... I went to an experimental middle school. It was following in the footsteps of the experimental high school I would soon go to. These were some of the first magnet schools in the country and an aberration in Louisiana. I suppose the logic was that if they could get magnet schools to work in Louisiana, which was (and still is) among the worst educated states in the country, then they could get them to work anywhere. And they did work. CPMHS was in the top ten high schools in the country the entire time I was there. In Louisiana.

So, yeah, I had some black teachers in middle school and in high school... but they weren't academic teachers. They were P.E. teachers and an art teacher. The only exception to that was my biology teacher in high school. However, she barely counts, because they let her go half way through the year, because she was not able to handle the academic load of teaching the AP Bio II class. This class was geared toward academic decathlon training, so they had to find someone able to teach that class above all else. Just to be clear, she was not the only teacher let go from Magnet because the teacher couldn't handle the academic load in the advanced classes, and it was her first year teaching.

Also, to be clear, there were some black teachers of academic classes at my high school, but I was in all honors and advanced classes, and they didn't teach any of those.

My high school didn't have the regular team sports associated with high school. No football, no basketball, no baseball. We had what our principal called "Olympic sports": tennis, fencing, track. I only say that to reinforce that this was an academic school. There was testing to get in and you had to maintain a certain GPA to stay there. Each year, we lost about half of the freshman class. As opposed to my elementary school, at which the more advanced classes were more than 90% white, there were plenty of black students at my high school, and they weren't there to play sports. These were smart kids who had done the work to get into a kind of elite school. As I was reminded frequently by my friends at other high schools, we were the "nerd school."

Mostly, though, I want to focus on my elementary school, since it was a typical school in Shreveport. [I would like to think that my high school was more merit-based in its decisions on teacher hiring, and I think that it probably was because of the emphasis on the academic decathlon.] It makes me sad, now, thinking back, that my school got by by following the letter of the law while discarding the spirit of it, and I'm sure that my school was indicative of the "way things were." Probably not just in Louisiana, either. I have to assume that this was the way all schools got around desegregation all through the South. "Sure, we'll have mixed schools, but no one said anything about the classes."

Stand Your Ground (but not with a gun)

Back when I was in middle school, I had to take a law class. Seriously, it was a requirement because of the program I was in. It was titled something like "Introduction to Law" and was meant as a government-type course with an emphasis on the legal system and how it works. Toward the end of the course, one of the things we had to do was re-enact court cases, the idea being that if we had learned what we were being taught, we would come away from those re-enactments with the same decisions as the courts did.

Here's the summation of the case I want to talk about:
Two men go into a convenience store to rob it. Man #1 has a gun; Man #2 doesn't know Man #1 has the gun. The robbery doesn't quite go as planned, and Man #1 pulls out his gun and shoots the clerk. The clerk dies. Generally speaking, this is first degree murder because the man willfully took the gun into the store; basically, he planned to use it if necessary. The question was whether Man #2 was guilty of the same crime. Remember, he didn't know about the gun.

I'll pause for a moment to give you a chance to consider. Pretend the Jeopardy music is playing. Or something. In fact, here you go:


So... Once we had re-enacted the case, which resulted in a "not guilty" verdict, we were asked to give our own opinions on what the outcome should have been. All of the class said the outcome should have been "not guilty." All of the class but me, that is. First, all of my classmates started giving me a hard time; I was the only one who said the man was guilty so I must be wrong. How could I be the only one with the correct answer, as it were? Then, my teacher started pressuring me: "Are you sure you don't want to change your mind?" And here was the hard part; she had everyone that believed "guilty" stand on one side of the room (that would be me) and everyone that believed "not guilty" go stand on the other (that would be the 35 or so other students in the class). I'm not sure I can adequately relate what it's like to be in that circumstance. To be the only one standing up for something against a wall of your peers telling you that you're wrong.

But here's the thing:
Their decision was based on what they felt was fair. Basically, it wouldn't be fair for the man to be found "guilty" since he hadn't known about the gun. They were having an emotional response to the situation.
My decision was based on this law that said, in short, that the man was guilty of the same crime as Man #1, whether he knew about the gun or not, because he had participated in the crime.

As it turned out, Man #2 had been found guilty just as Man #1 had been because of the law. I was the only one in the room that had looked at the facts and made an objective decision based on those facts. And, as it turned out, my teacher had pressured me because, as she said, that's sometimes what happens on juries, especially if deliberations have been going on a long time and the jurors just want everything to be over. Basically, she wanted to see if I would cave under the pressure (and she allowed it to be a lot of pressure, almost two full class periods).

But I stood my ground, because I had actual facts sitting in front of me, so to speak. And that's not the only time I've been in that position in my life. By a lot. But that is one of the best examples of having to stand on your own against everyone else that I have ever experienced or seen. Man, I hated middle school.

So what am I saying here? That you should always just demand that you are right no matter how many people stand up against you and tell you that you're wrong? Well, no. But I am saying that you shouldn't back down just because everyone else is saying that you're wrong. Mostly, I'm saying to look at the facts, the data, all of the information. Make a decision based on those facts, not with your emotions. If you've made the best decision you can based on the information at hand (not how you feel about that information), you shouldn't change your mind just because everyone else says you should. Especially if they are appealing to you on an emotional level (and let me tell you, appealing on the basis of what is "fair" is about as emotional as you can get: "fairness" is rarely objective). Now, if someone comes to you with actual fact, data, whatever, you should certainly look at it, evaluate it, and, maybe, revise your thinking. But just remember: Being the only one on a side, does not make you wrong.

Having said all of that, for you writers out there, this is the same way you need to approach your manuscripts. The hardest part of that is to remove as much of your own emotion as you can so that you can evaluate your work as objectively as possible, then put your emotion back in and ask yourself the question, "Do I like this? Is it something I would want to read if someone else wrote it?" If you can say yes to those questions, it doesn't really matter what anyone else says about your work. And, if you can say yes to those questions, it can give you the strength to stand alone through the rejections and the pressure to change.

"Risk"ing Your Feelings

I have, as long as I can remember, always liked games. Seriously, as far back as I can remember. Like, when I was less than five, my cousin, who was three years older than me, and I walked three miles from my great-grandmother's house to her (mostly unused) house to get Mouse Trap ("You roll your dice, you move your mice; nobody gets hurt."), because that's what we wanted to play. I'm not sure anyone knew where we went, and I'm not sure anyone knew we were gone. But, you know, it was the East Texas countryside, and we were rarely where anyone knew where we were most of any given day.

As it turned out, though, when we got there, we discovered that about half of the pieces to the trap were missing and all of the cheese. So, yeah, we got to walk back empty-handed.

At any rate, well before the age of ten, I began having... issues... finding anyone willing to play anything with me. Except, maybe, Battle. Or War. Or whatever you call it. You know, the card game where you just flip over the top card and the player with the high card wins. That one was pure chance, so I could still get people to play that one with me. Then I discovered Risk.

I was in middle school. I'm not really sure how I got introduced to the game, though it may have been at school or, maybe, it was just a present or something I got for a birthday. At any rate, Risk became the game that people were willing to play with me. My brother and my friends and his friends and such. The reason? They could team up against me. Seriously.

Of course, it didn't just start out that way, but it didn't take long for them to realize that that is what it would take for them to have a chance to beat me, and it became the way every game started. Every game. It was just accepted that everyone started out with the goal of beating me and they would worry about each other later. Actually, it was not uncommon for them to just quit playing once they'd defeated me.

I lost a lot of games that way. BUT I still won games, too. Probably something like 1/3 of them. Sometimes, it was upsetting, the whole thing with having everyone always set against me. It's tough when you're 12 to deal with the fact that everyone wants to see you lose. Actually, it's difficult to deal with that at any age, but middle school is already the worst, and always having everyone team up against me made it the worst of the worst.

And it didn't stop there. I started getting into other strategy games in high school and carried that on into college and, pretty much, that became the routine I had to deal with in any group game. Everyone's goal was always to take me out as quickly as possible. The catch was, and I had known this since middle school, if I wanted to play, I just had to deal with it. And I wanted to play.

And that's the way a lot of things in life are. Not the having everyone team up against you but the balancing of the potential of having your feelings hurt against doing the thing you want to do. That's especially true in writing. You have to know going in that you're going to get your feelings hurt at some point. The question is, "Is it worth the Risk to get to do that thing you want to do?" (Look, another version of Risk!)

So I'm going to focus on the writing part since that's what I do, but you can apply this to, well, anything.

When you set out to be a writer, a published one, you really need to go into it with the mindset of having everyone teamed up against you, everyone wanting to see you lose. Which is not to say that everyone actually wants to see you lose, but everyone is playing their own game, and they are all trying to win, so it's not like anyone is on your side, not in any real sense. You're not part of a team like the guys who always teamed up to make sure that I didn't win. You are on your own.

And, then, there are the reviews. Mostly, it's the lack of reviews, but it's also the negative reviews, and you have to go into it knowing that that's going to happen, so you have to go into it willing to put your feelings aside in exchange for getting to do the thing you want to do: writing. You have to put your feelings at Risk.
(Look! Another version of Risk!)

There was one time in college where we were playing a game of Risk down in the lobby of the dorm, five or six of us. One of the guys was really exhorting everyone to go after me. He started in on it as soon as we were setting up. It's not like anyone needed that much convincing, but he just wouldn't stop going on about it, so I decided I would make sure that he, at least, went out before me and started working on his armies. As I got pushed back, I pushed into his territory and slowly took him out of the game. The more he started to lose, the louder he got about everyone taking me out of the game, right up until I broke his last major stronghold, at which point he flipped out, flipped the board up into the air, thew the table over, and stormed out of the room. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for authors to act the same way over a bad review.
(And look again, another version of Risk!)

When you act like that, no one will want to play with you anymore. I have to tell you, it pissed me off, because it was my Risk board that he sent flying all over the room, and it took hours to find all of the little army counters. Oh, no, wait a minute, I didn't find all of the army tokens. I never asked him to join a game again and, guess what, no else ever asked him to play any other game with us again. Ever. All it took was that one moment of poor sportsmanship and no one wanted to Risk another explosion on his part.

You make your choices going in, but you have to be willing to take the consequences. You put your feelings aside in order to get to play the game or you explode to find that no one wants to play with you. Or work with you. Or be around you. Or all they want to do is push the big giant button you've shown yourself to have and they spend their time provoking you just because it's fun.

Personally, I wan to play the game, and I've had, I suppose, pretty good training in dealing with situations where I have to fight the odds to win. Of course, when you do win, it makes victory so much better.

By the way, I still love Risk. I don't get to play it very often, but I love the game.

The multiple versions could be a giveaway, I don't know. This isn't even all the versions I own; these were just the ones conveniently accessed. Right now, my kids are lobbying for this one:

Maybe Christmas...

Middle School Munchkins

On the scale of Favorite Years, I'm pretty sure this one is not going to rank very high. [Yes, that is a thing, the Favorite Year scale; it's not my fault if you've never heard of it before.] As I was talking about here, this year all of my kids are moving up to the "next thing" and I'm not enjoying that at all. bah! on aging! No my aging; I don't mind that, but, man, I just want my kids to quit growing up. Where's the reverse?

Anyway...

My middle kid, the younger boy, just turned 13. [We're working on his high school applications, right now. HIGH SCHOOL APPLICATIONS! Why is that a thing?] His birthday party, which involved a bunch of middle school boys sleeping over, was this past weekend. On the plus side, it's easy to entertain middle school boys, so a boy sleep over requires much less work than a girl sleep over. I say that from experience. Still, it was a lot of noise. [Seriously, it was a lot of noise. One of the boys (who had never been over before) has a rather booming voice (which I knew), and he's one of those people (like my son) who has to loudly exclaim at everything happening during a video game.]

The definite highlight of the evening was the game of Munchkin. None of the boys had ever heard of it and were a little apathetic about the idea of sitting down and playing a card game. I suppose board games, or anything that resembles a board game, are completely out of fashion these days. But my son really wanted to play, so I insisted. Ironically, that included having to force him to quit playing Minecraft on his friend's laptop (which shouldn't have been here to begin with because we had a no electronic devices rule in effect (because, last year, the boys did bring their devices and spent the whole evening isolating themselves on electronic crack). Apparently, my son conveniently "forgot" to tell this one particular boy not to bring his electronics, this boy being his main Minecraft buddy. [The underlying issue here is that my son's computer is ailing, especially the video card, and will no longer run Minecraft without crashing. The computer is nearly a decade old, so I can hardly blame it. At any rate, my son hasn't been able to play Minecraft (except for rare occasions when he gets to at someone else's house) for at least six months, now, so I'm mostly okay with this bringing his laptop and letting my son play Minecraft on it. Still, I had to kick my son off of it so that we could do what he wanted to do in the first place.]

Can I just say, right now, how difficult it is to set up a game like this with a bunch of middle school boys all asking questions at the same time, some of which are relevant but most of which are... less so. And all of them repeating, "Can we look at our cards?" while already doing it, so it was a good thing they could look at the cards or I would have had to re-deal about seven times. I say seven times (even though there were only four boys) because they would have compulsively looked at their cards anyway, even after being told not to, if that had been the case. I know this because three of them kept picking up cards they'd already played and putting them back in their hands and two of them kept trying to discard cards they didn't want to be holding no matter how many times I told them that they couldn't just discard cards and one of them kept trying to trade "door" cards even though you can't trade "door" cards. So, yeah, getting through the setup took much longer than expected.

BUT!
But once we started playing, it was a magnificent event! They were the most back-stabby players I've ever seen. One moment, one of them would be helping another of them; the next, he would be tossing a curse on him. It was both awesome and hilarious and made for an exciting game. They had no compunction and would do their best to make sure everyone lost every fight. Until... until they ran out of cards to make each other lose. It was a lot of fun, and they immediately wanted to start another game, but it was nearly midnight, and I had to just say no.

They also wanted to play immediately the next morning, but I had to cook breakfast for them and stuff and, by the time they were finishing up with their food, a couple of them had to leave, so we never got in another game. It was a big hit, though.

In other news, I am now on twitter. I'm still trying to figure the whole thing out, but feel free to follow my twitterings. I'll probably even follow you back.

Tiberius, "The Shadow Place," and Change

Well, this is it, the day of change. I'm  not actually a huge fan of change; I tend to like things to stay the way they are even if I don't like the way things are. Which is not to say that I don't want to be on the other side of the change; I just hate the process of the change itself. I blame my mother.

No, seriously, I do. When I was a kid, especially when I was in middle school, she used to like to move the furniture around all of the time because she'd get bored with the layout. I was the furniture moving guy. My brother was to little (I'm six years older than him), and my dad just wouldn't do it. There was a point early on when I think she was asking him first, but he would always say "later" until she'd get frustrated enough to make me do it. Eventually, she wouldn't bother to ask him anymore. My assumption is that the furniture moved so much during those years was because I was finally big enough to do the heavy lifting and it was before I quit being home all the time. That is to say, once I was a sophomore in high school, I was never home anymore, so she no longer had anyone to help her with the furniture, so it went back to staying put.

I just want to say, here, that if it had just been the normal kind of rearranging the furniture, everything would have been okay. But it wasn't...

See, when I was in 7th grade, we moved into a two-story house. There was a spare room that ran the length of the back of the house that connected to my parents' bedroom but could also be accessed through one of the bathrooms. My mom had a crusade to put that room to some kind of use beyond just being a spare room where stuff paused on the way to the attic and, then, never left.

Her first big plan was to make it into the "family" room. That meant moving the entertainment center we had in the "family" room up to the spare room. This thing was huge. It was, like, seven feet tall or something. It only just fit up the stairs with less than an inch to spare, but it wasn't the trip up the stairs that was the problem. It's just that it didn't really take all that long, a couple of months, at most, for my mom to realize that sleeping in on a Saturday morning would never be possible with the TV right outside of her bedroom (it didn't bother my dad; he could sleep through anything), so the entertainment center had to go back down the stairs. That was the hard part.

Then, she decided she would make that room the laundry room. It would be more convenient, she said, to have the washer and dryer right there in that room rather than lug the clothes down to the back porch and back up again. Yes, I had to move the washer and dryer up the stairs into that room. We won't go into the altercation my parents had over the issue of getting water to the washing machine. Eventually, though, the washer and dryer went back to the back porch; I'm pretty sure it had to do with the fact that my brother and I were travelling through my parents' bedroom all the time to get to our clothes.

And I'm not even gonna start on the time she wanted to move the piano up the stairs...

So, yeah, me and change... not hand in hand. Just ask my wife.

But here I am changing things up. Today is the release of the first collected volume of Shadow Spinner parts:

"Shadow Spinner: Collection 1: Tiberius (Parts 1-5)"
Yeah, that's a lot of colons, but what can you do? You try taking a colon out of a place where it's needed and see what happens. But, anyway... the biggest process of change is recovering the 38 reviews I have scattered over the first five parts of series. It's kind of like moving furniture except that I have to ask other people to help out. "Collection 1" is only two bucks, which is less than the five bucks it would have cost to get the parts separately, so I hope you will pick it up, read it, and leave a review. PLUS! There is the excellent bonus story by Bryan Pedas, "Like An Axe Through Bone," which is actually longer than five chapters I have in this collection. It's worth the price all by itself.

[Oh, and just a note: I'm still looking for at least one more author to feature at the back of one of these collections, so let me know if you're interested in writing an Imagination Room or House on the Corner related story!]

So, now, after asking you to spend money, I'll give something away, because today is the FREE! release of "Part Twenty-eight: The Shadow Place." And, remember, there will be a new chapter every Monday until the serialization is finished. And, hopefully, the second collection will be ready in a few weeks as well. Here's the list of today's FREE! offerings:
"Part Twenty-eight: The Shadow Place" (also FREE! tomorrow, Tuesday, August 20)
"Part Twenty-seven: Leaving"
"Part Twenty-six: The Bitter Fruit"
"Part Twenty-five: The Light of Knowledge"
"Part Twenty-one: The Chase"
"Part Twenty: The Sword of Fire"
"Part Nineteen: Lost in the Garden"
"Part Eighteen: The Angel"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Eleven: The Kiss"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
That's 18 parts for FREE! today. You can't beat FREE!, right? Well, unless someone is paying you take it...

The Reader Net

I've decided that writing is like fishing. No, not that kind of fishing. Not the kind of fishing where you get up really early on Saturday morning and sit around in a boat all day long with your beer and your line dangling in the water. Although it can be like that. The kind of fishing where you just catch one fish at a time.

Most of my middle school writers do that kind of fishing, in fact. There's a few of them that write and share stories with each other all the time. The only problem is that they are the only ones that "get" the stories because they're full of all kinds secret language and stuff. Some of these get turned into me in the creative class, and I have to always say, "this is great but no one else will understand it." And I know, because a few of them have been read in class, and the students not in that group always respond with "I don't get it."

See, they are dangling their lines in the water in their secret fishing hole with their special bait and catching a few fish. One at a time. So, yeah, you can do that kind of fishing, but you'll never be able to do it as more than just a relaxing way to spend a Saturday in your boat if that's your route.

A real fisherman needs a net, and that's where it's like writing, because writing is like weaving a net to catch readers. But writers have to weave their own nets, which I kind of doubt that fishermen have to do anymore, although they did used to have to do it. And the smaller the fish you want to catch, the finer you have to weave your net. Stories have to be that way, too. Woven so as to catch readers.

And, well, size matters.

You have things like Harry Potter that end up being pretty finely woven and catch hordes and hordes of readers. And there are things like Twilight that also catch hordes of readers, a lot of the same kinds of readers, but it's not woven quite as tightly (because, hey, sparkly vampires?), so a lot of potential readers slip through. And, then, you have nets that are built for particular types of readers (like sci-fi or historical fiction or horror) and most everyone else slips through. [And I don't actually know to what degree or if fishing nets differ, but I suppose they must. I'm not looking it up, though.]

But my real point is this (and I've arrived at this mostly because of the discussion around Looper this week): Holes in your net are bad.

Fishermen spend a lot of time repairing their nets. They know having holes is bad. Too many holes, and the fish just swim right on through the net. When your livelihood depends upon catching the fish, you have to weave that net tight and make sure you take care of the holes. And this is the part that is liking writing, because anytime someone says "But why..." or "How come..." or "What...," you've made a hole in your net and some reader has slipped through. If there are enough holes, they pretty much all slip through.

I suppose that's why so many writers like to resort to "magic," and I don't mean actual magic, because anything can be used as "magic." For a long time it was computers. A lot of people are using nanotech as "magic" these days (there's even nano "magic" in Looper, although it's never mentioned in the movie (it was, however, in the writer's head)). If you can't use magic as "magic" because you're not writing fantasy, science as "magic" is the next best thing. At any rate, when a reader says, "But why...," the author can wave his hand and say "magic" and believe that closes the hole in the net. It doesn't always work that way, though, because, readers will only go for that so many times. Of course, different readers have different limits.

The best way to deal with those holes is to make your story as plausible as possible (not as possible as possible, although that's not bad, too, but  the story hinges on plausibility, not possibility) and make sure the details are there so that people never have those questions. Basically, if you have the question, someone else is going to have the question, so you better just go ahead and answer it (again, this is from listening to the writer/director of Looper who decided over and over again not bother with the 15 second answers to the questions that even he had (as he said, he didn't think it was worth spending the time to answer those things in the movie)). Never believe that the reader doesn't care or won't notice, because a lot of readers are out there looking for holes or are just good at finding them.

As for myself, I'm not out looking for holes, but I'm a pretty slippery fish, and I ask a lot of questions. All the time. It's in my nature to question, well, everything, so, if you have an unanswered question, there's a good chance I'm gonna find it. I do get that other people aren't quite like that as much, but there are other people out there like me. And worse than me. I mean, you think I'm bad, you should see my wife and the way she treats books and movies. I'm way more accepting of handwavium than she is.

All of that to say: Weave a strong net. Weave a fine net. Weave a large net.
Then throw it out in the water.

Middle School Boys Are Pantsers

It's Friday night as I'm writing this, and I'm sitting here in the midst of a sleepover for my middle child who just turned 12. How do you turn this aging thing off? Seriously! I'm tired of them getting older. Once May gets here, we're going to lose our last single digit child, and that's... very upsetting.

Anyway, I'm sitting her in the midst of this... well, there's no better word for it than chaos. Maybe cacophony. Actually, I really like the word cacophony. It just has such a cool sound to it. See, it's hard to stay on track with all the noise Noise NOISE and the constant distractions.
"Even better than the real thing... child..."
"Oh, my gosh! You guys are so premature!"
And, um, a lot of video game babble that I don't understand and can't repeat although the words "Mario"  and "Zelda" are common.
And there seems to be an outbreak of wet willies.

But all of that is beside the point. If there even is a point.

Well, no, there is a point.
"You're on  the road, but you've got not destination..."
The point is that middle school boys, possibly all boys, are pantsers. Other than  the fact that I bought some pizza and that they had cake, there is no plan at all involved in any of this. At all. In fact, if there had been a plan, a plot of any kind, it wouldn't have worked, because you can't get all of them onto the same thing at the same time unless it has to do with food, and  there was no way that I was going to plan a sleepover that totally revolved around food.
"Through the storm, we reach the shore. You give it all, but I want more."

But, see, I know this about boys. They are kind of easy that way. You invite them over and make sure they have video games available, and they are totally self entertaining. Maybe a movie when it gets late. Actually, yes, a movie when it gets late otherwise they just keep playing video games until they become comatose. That's another word I like, by the way.

You want to know some other words I like? Sure you do. And, if you don't, well, that's too bad.
"Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?"
I like "adamant" and "belligerent." I like the sounds of both of those, too, and I especially like them because they sound like what they are.
"Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth?"
I mean, if I didn't know what adamant meant, I could almost guess it just from the sound of the word. And belligerent sounds like someone itching for a fight.
Did I mention the wet willies?

See, boys, they don't need the plots. They just do their thing. Sometimes they're doing it together, but never are all of them doing it. There's always one or two off on the laptop or some iContraption doing something completely separate from everyone else and being completely fine with it.
"But I still haven't found what I'm looking for."

"No! No pillow lights!"
"Wait! No pillow fights! Turn the light on!"

And now it's time for Mad Libs. With poop. Seriously. Every single one of them has to have the word "poop" or some variant at least once. Unfortunately, some of them are really funny:
"What big poops you have!"

But anyway...
You see how difficult it is to stay on track with all of this... this... stuff... going on?

I'm quite sure this must be what it's like to pants a book. See, the thing is, the boys, they're okay with what's going on, but no one else has a clue as to what's happening or what they're talking about.

My daughter got bored with them. She went off to practice her accordion because she didn't have anything else to do. The boys never noticed she left.

It's completely different from when my daughter has a party. Those things have to be planned. Plotted. Completely. They want things to do. Activities. A time frame. It's an entirely different experience. Okay, true, my daughter's not quite a middle schooler, yet, but I'm pretty sure this isn't gonna change. And the boys have always been like this.

What I do know is that if I were to try and introduce a few girls into this party and make them play by the boy's rules, they'd drive me crazy with how bored they'd get. And, during one of my daughter's parties, if I were to try and put some boys into it, they'd just wander off and not participate.

I don't really know what all of this really has to do with writing other than that different types of people like different kinds of things. Some people like books that don't have a distinct plot where things just sort of happen. Some people like books where only things that matter to the story happen in the story. What I do know is that the two types of people don't mix very well.

I won't be planning any co-ed parties for a while, that's for sure. Wait, what's that I said about halting that whole aging thing?

Oh! Also, don't forget the Great Chocolate Contest in which you could win the greatest chocolate in the world (that I've ever tasted)! Seriously, this stuff is as good as Russel Crowe's ego is big!

"Are you the guy that made The House on the Corner?"

I spend a lot of time at my kids' school. The younger kids' school, that is. I don't spend any time at the high school my oldest goes to. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I read from House in the 6th grade class, and, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach creative writing as an elective in the middle school there (I have 14 students this quarter).

Earlier this week as I was walking across campus, a young boy, a 1st grader, ran up to me. Now, I knew who this boy was because he's the younger brother of one of my younger son's friends, so I thought it was going to be something related to that. I was kind of surprised when he said, "Are you the guy that made The House on the Corner?" And I wasn't sure what was going on, either, because he's a few years younger than any of the kids I've read to at  this point. But I smiled and said yes. His face exploded in a grin, and he said, "I love your book! It's great!" Then, he turned around and ran off.

It was really sweet. I was touched.

And I love that question: am I the guy that made the book? Not wrote it. Made it. It's amusing to me, because, actually, that's how all the kids ask me that question when they ask it of me. "Are you the guy that made The House on the Corner?" I used to say, "Well, yes, I wrote it," but I don't do that anymore, because I don't think there's a significant difference to them. It would be like asking George Lucas if he wrote Star Wars. Well, yes, he did, but, really, he made Star Wars. And that's what it is to these kids. I made this world, for lack of a better term, called The House on the Corner.

It's funny, because I never think of it that way. I never think of it as a world building project, although I know that it is. It's just not in my head that way. It's not like my son building with his Legos or in Minecraft. I sit down and I write. Sure, I visualize and try to bring that environment to life, but I don't think about it as building a world. Clearly, that's what it is to these kids, though.

It's all kind of cool.

I really like that question, at this point. Yes, I made The House on  the Corner.
What fun!

My other favorite question, and I get this one from even the middle schoolers, is "When are you going to make House into a movie?"

I still have to hold in the laughter when they ask me that, but I love that they ask me. Like I just need to decide to do it, you know? After all, I did make the book, why can't I just make the movie the same way? I've been asked that question twice this week, in fact. I guess I'll have to get on that.

Douglas' Last Salmon

If you ever want to know exactly how popular something is, step into a middle school classroom and ask them if they know what X is (X being the thing you want to know is popular or not). Well, maybe a high school class would be better, I'm not sure as I haven't spent any time in a high school classroom in a while. I am, however, in middle school classes several days a week. It is always interesting to find out what they have and (mostly) have not heard of. It's kind of bubble popping at times.

Things the middle schoolers I work with know about:

• Star Wars -- They've all heard about it and know the gist of the story, but a surprising number have never seen it (interestingly enough, this is not true of the kids my daughter's age, who have almost all seen it (and love it (all of them))).
• Harry Potter -- They all know what Harry Potter is, but, mostly, they have not read the books. Most of them have not seen all of the movies, either.
• Lord of the Rings -- Ask them who Tolkien is, and you'll get blank looks, but say "Lord of the Rings" and the response is "oh! I love Lord of the Rings!"
• Hunger Games -- They're all over that. All of them.
• Twilight -- Mostly, they despise it. They all know what it is, and a few like it, but the voices of those that hate it drown out any people that might speak up in its favor.
• Dr. Who -- Of popular things, this has the most ardent adherents. If they've seen it, they love it. If they haven't seen it, they want to.
• Buffy, the Vampire Slayer -- Who?
• Joss Whedon -- Who?
• The Avengers -- Oh, that was awesome!

There are a couple of book series that a lot of them really like that I need to write down the names of so that I can check them out. Not surprisingly, though, they have no clue about some of the classics, books I think of as fundamental. Even things like Frankenstein and Jekyll & Hyde and Dracula that you would think middle schoolers would know about will cause blank looks and comments like, "I think my dad mentioned that once." They've heard of Dickens, but that's about it.

Yeah, it can be difficult to have a discussion about literature when the students don't know anything about it.

The thing about all of this is that it can really be humbling in a certain sense. It reminds me that some of the things, some of the names, I think of as essential are, from any realistic standpoint, almost unheard of to the rest of the world. Names like Neil Gaiman. Although, now, I have several of them interested in The Graveyard Book. And names like Douglas Adams. A few had heard of Hitchhikers', but Douglas Adams was another of those vacant look names.

But it's not just them. It's everyone. It takes a lot to break into cultural awareness, and, really, people like Gaiman and Adams and Martin stop shy of being names that any random person off the street is likely to know.

All of that being said, I just finished The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams. I really enjoyed the book, but, honestly, if you're not a fan of Adams, you don't need to and probably shouldn't read this book. That means that most people have no business giving it a second glance. That's kind of a weird feeling knowing that.

On top of everything else, it's not even a complete work. Salmon was the last project Adams was working on when he died, and he hadn't even decided what kind of story it was yet. What that means is that he'd started it as his next Dirk Gently novel, but, as he wrote it, he decided it was really a Hitchhiker book, and he's never gotten around to figuring out what he was going to do with it. The parts with Gently flow well and are interesting, but they have these other bits thrown it that make you feel like you're reading more than one work, which, in fact, you are.

But it's not really the Salmon stuff that's so great about this book. It's full of essays, articles, and speeches he gave, and that stuff is immensely interesting. The book is worth it for that stuff. IF you are a fan of Adams. If you're not, I have a hard time thinking you'd care.

The one thing it did do is make me want to go find my Dirk Gently novels and finally get around to reading them. I'm gonna have to do that soon... if I can ever get caught up on this teetering pile of books by my bed.

Now to get back to expanding the horizons of these kids...

Back in the School of Things

School is in full swing again. It started last Wednesday for the younger two and on Monday for the oldest. Back to school means a lot of things:

• back to biking -- and, oh, man, after, really, all of the spring and summer away from it, it was a lot harder adjustment than I thought it would be. Not the actual doing of it, but, evidently, my butt got out of condition, and it had an argument with the bike seat the first few days. My younger son said the same thing. My daughter, however, just gloated about how comfy  her seat is. [I have to add here that it was my daughter's fault we didn't bike through the spring. She caused an accident by arbitrarily stopping that ended up with me flipping over my bike and breaking the rear axle. Yeah, it took me a while to get around to getting it fixed.]
• back to making lunches in  the mornings  -- Of all the things related to school, I hate getting up and making all of the lunches the most. I've tried doing it in the evenings ahead of time, but, evidently, I hate that even more, because I just won't do it on a consistent basis.
• back to badgering the kids about getting their homework finished -- Yeah, I hate this one, too, but lunches are worse.
• back to quiet during the day allowing me to focus on writing for more than 12 minutes at a time before I'm interrupted
• back to teaching creative writing! The class will be two days a week, this year. One day will be for writing and reading and the other day will be for technicals such as grammar, punctuation, and story structure. [My son will only get to be in the class half of the year because of Spanish and art, which are both required while my class is just an elective. He's not happy about it.]
• back to reading The House on the Corner! I've been asked to read the book to a new class of kids this year. I'm actually pretty sure none of these kids have ever heard any of the book before, or, if they have, it was years ago while I was still writing it. I think, though, this is the in between group that has not had any overlap from the reading in either of my son's or my daughter's class. At any rate, none of my kids are in this class this year, so it was a nice surprise to be asked to come in and read by a teacher that does not have one of my kids in her class.

Speaking of reading in classes, I found this

in our family folder last week. It's a thank you book from one of the classes I was reading in last year. Each kid wrote me a note, and some drew pictures.

A picture of the house.

Me reading to the class.

The thank you book was completely unexpected and completely awesome.

Since I'm going to get to spend more time on the technical aspects of writing this year, I'm going to be doing some posts related to that stuff. It makes me glad to be able to work with kids interested in writing and help them to develop their technique at an earlier age than most people get to. I mean, most of the writing samples I run across online aren't any better developed than middle schoolers', anyway, which makes me wonder what happened to their schooling, except, then, I remember the state of the education system and the lack of importance given to anything in the arts, which includes knowing how to write a decent sentence, and I quit wondering, but, then, I wish they would take it seriously enough to learn how to do it rather than just blowing it off and writing in 1st person because they think they can get away with it that way. I don't know... maybe, grammar lessons will be boring, but they will probably be accompanied by a decent amount of ranting, which can make pretty much anything entertaining, so I guess we'll see.

Hmm... It seems like I had one other thing for this post, but, if there was something else, it's gone now. At any rate, for those of you with kids going back to school, I wish you a very merry school year. Or, you know, the nearest approximation.

The Top Secret, Super Secret Project

Actually, there was nothing really secret about this project; I just didn't talk about it. Well, I didn't talk about it online, because I didn't know how it was going to turn out. Really, I didn't know how it was going to turn out until last Friday, but that's not really important. At any rate, plenty of people I interact with in the actual, physical world knew all about it.

As I've mentioned, I've been teaching a creative writing class at my younger kids' school. Some of the stories that have come out of the class have been really good. I mean, impressively good. At some point in there, I decided that I should make up a book of their stories for them. At some point right after that, I decided that I should make this book available to other people. Ostensibly, this is just a fundraiser for the school, and it is. Profits from the sale of the physical book will go to the school, making it a fundraiser.

However, it's more than that to me. Some of these kids are really good, my son being one of them. When he won that contest for his story "Into the Trench," it really made an impression on him. No, it wasn't a huge contest, but it was against adults, and he was, in his own laid-back style, elated. It came up a few weeks ago on a walking field trip (because several of the boys in his class were telling me about the books they are now working on (because they've been inspired to write books because I've been reading my book, The House on the Corner, in their class (which is all kinds of cool -- them being inspired, not me reading))), and he really stressed the part about how he won in a contest against adults (and the prize money funded a Lego purchase). All of that to say, I want to make an impression on all of the kids from this class by being able to hand them a book that they wrote.

And, like I said, some of them are really good.

At this point, what I really want to do is talk about the stories I like the most, but I don't want to predispose any of you to any particular story. Instead, I'll talk about my own representation within the pages of

(And, yes, that is the very talented Rusty Webb on cover duty, once again.)

Well, I'll also talk a bit about the structure of the book, but only a bit, because that's all in the book. Almost the first thing we did, though, was do a bunch of 2nd person perspective stories. I figured they should have some familiarity with it, since they gave me blank stares when I asked about it, so I threw them in the water and told them to swim. Okay, actually, I brought them an example I wrote and told them to go to it. My example is in  there along with the stories they wrote for me. That's section one.

The other thing we did that we spent a lot of time on was working on plot. Talking with them about plot and the stages of plot development is what caused the Tib stories to grow into something real. Some of you may remember back to when I was posting those every couple of weeks... Well, I was posting them in relation to working on them for this class as examples of how you develop a plot. Starting with exposition. Yes, I did start there. I don't believe in skipping it just because publishers these days have decided to turn the story arc into a story slide by cutting the exposition and as much of the rising action as possible. We spent a while working on introducing the protagonist, establishing the setting, and introducing the conflict. [And, I have to say, there are some really great examples of exposition in that section (section three) of the book.]

Working on Tib for this class is what has caused it to grow into the book that it's becoming: Shadowspinner. I don't have a release date, yet, but you can read the first five chapters in Charter Shorts. But, really, you shouldn't buy it for my stories (okay, well, you should, but you shouldn't buy it just for my stories), you should buy it to show these kids your support. Let them know how important reading and writing is. Oh, and, well, there's a bonus!

Several of you mentioned after this post about my daughter and how she should, maybe, be a writer. Well, as it turns out, she's quite good (I did already know this). On her STAR test last year, she scored 100% on the writing section. That's fairly uncommon. My younger son, who scored nearly 100% on the entire test, lost points only in the writing section (although, it wasn't very many). Even though she wasn't in the creative writing class (not being in middle school yet), I included a story she wrote this year. Yeah, I get to do that because I'm her dad. Also, I'm the editor of the book, so I still get to do it. Really, though, it's because I just love the story and, especially, hearing her read it. She's super excited to have her story in Charter Shorts and is already hounding me for a copy. heh And I apologize that you guys can't hear her read it, but, maybe, that will change.

So, yeah, here is why you should rush out and buy Charter Shorts:

A. It's another great cover by  the inestimable Rusty Webb!

B. There are a bunch of great stories in it by literary minded middle schoolers.

C. You want to support said literary minded middle schoolers.

1. You want to support them financially by supporting their school (because, while being a public school, it's not a regular public school in that it's a charter school and much of its funding comes from elsewhere (meaning not from the state of CA)).
2. You want to support the future writing of said literary minded middle schoolers, because there's nothing better as new writer than other people saying to you, "hey, good job!"

D. There's no telling which of these students could one day be a best selling novelist, and you want to own a copy of their very first work to sell on eBay for megabucks when they do.

E. Oh, yeah, Shadowspinner. Five whole chapters!

F. And, okay, yeah, I have to say it, my son has some stuff in there, and, well, he's just really good. His award winning story is included, and that's not even the best of his of what's included by him.

As per usual, it's available for the Kindle, and it will be available as a physical book as soon as CreateSpace allows me to make it available (and why that's not yet available is a (short) story all by itself that I don't have time to get into). I'd strongly urge the purchase of the physical book, because that's what helps out the school, but, really, anything is good. If you do want a physical copy, it's possible that I might even be able to arrange some autographs. Probably not of all of the kids, but some of them, at least.

[Edit: The physical book is now available through CreateSpace here for the low, low price of just $9.99! Really, it's worth it!]

A few other notes:
1. The link to "The Evil That Men Do" is over there on the side. That's the back story, so to speak, for Tib. It's actually just a story that became the basis for Tib, so it doesn't read like a prologue even though that's kind of what it is.
2. It would be really great if you could stop by Amazon and Goodreads and click on things like the "like" button, especially if you read and liked any of the books.
3. I'll get all the links posted for Charter Shorts as soon as they're available, including getting it added to Goodreads.

Thanks, Everyone! I really do appreciate all of you that stop by to read my ramblings, and I appreciate it even more when you take the time to listen to me plug a project!