While working through a fairly productive day today, I brought up my Mac dashboard to check the countdown widgets, looking to see how many days were left until I should give up on the next agent on the list. There was another widget there off in the corner, one that I had put up 40 days ago that had 40 more days left on its countdown.
40 days until school starts. Yes. My 2010 summer vacation is half over.
For the record, I'm counting the first day of school as the first day when I am contractually required to show up at my school at 8:35 in the morning and work a full day. There are going to be several days when I go into my classroom on my own time for a few hours here and there to get a head start on setting up my room, and there 2-3 days of technology work I'll need to attend to before the year actually begins (luckily, these are all PAID days), and then there's the potential of going to Summer Institute for two days in a couple of weeks. Summer Institute is staff development training that takes place, well, in the summer. It's a great idea since it happens when teachers have time to go, and I openly acknowledge the value of staff development, but most of the times I've gone to Summer Institute have wound up with me suffering through such an overpowering combination of boredom and stir-craziness that I've considered slowly chewing off one of my pinky fingers just to remind myself I'm alive. And please understand, this has almost everything to do with my undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder and nothing to do with the sessions -- a convenient qualifier for me to throw out there, since I've been the presenter a few times myself. After all, the second best part of SI is that it's voluntary (the best part being the money we get for going). But right now, two weeks out and thinking about sitting in a high school classroom painted in a shade of industrial white that had to be engineered to lull one into complacency? I shudder. However, they are paid days that will be an enormous help in the coming months, so there are certainly WAY bigger problems I could have. But not whine? Where's the fun in that?
So 5 paid days out of 40 really isn't the end of the world. The hardest thing to believe is that there are still 40 days of summer remaining. Speaking for myself, June is mostly defined by shaking off the previous school year, July is the meat and potatoes of summer vacation, and August is when the new year begins to slowly creep into my psyche. I remember writing something on here about how the beginning of the last school year felt routine for me, but there's nothing about this upcoming one that feels that way, which is really good. But it's too early to begin thinking about that yet.
My summer has been remarkably uneventful this year, which, seriously, doesn't bother me a lot. I had a good time with my cousins for a weekend in Wisconsin, I've played fewer video games than I've read books, I've gotten into the habit of staying up late enough to see if Craig Ferguson is going to open his show with a puppet, I've celebrated Garbage Day about six times, I've put in well over 200 miles of cardio work at the Y (and a big thank you to those two ladies sitting poolside in my line of sight today that made my time on the stationary bike much easier to endure), I've seen eight or so movies, I've watched the first season of Mad Men on DVD (Pete Campbell = Weasel who needs a good slap, because it would be more insulting than a punch in the face), I've worked out a couple chapters of one book, finished revising another one, and have fought though great conceptual struggles with a third, I've downloaded 11 new albums from iTunes, and have walked Spencer through the neighborhood approximately 34 times. I did have an unpleasant streak of days in there largely defined by anger, depression, and self-pity which is thankfully over, and I'm easily sitting here tonight in the best health I've been in for what has to be close to fifteen years -- a statement so much more ironic than most people will ever understand.
The biggest disappointments of the summer have been: (1) One book I'm having trouble getting off the ground; it went nowhere for the longest time until I was able to reconcile a big plot problem I couldn't get past, but now that seems to be more or less resolved, and (2) The still mysterious absence of the white iPhone 4. Yeah, Antennagate. I know. I don't care. I always planned to get a bumper anyway and still will, because I'm going to get one. My contract is over on my current phone, which I hate so much I don't even turn the @#$% thing on anymore, and the VERY DAY I'm able to pre-order the white iPhone, I'll be putting the gears of commerce in motion. Why the white one? Why wait, when I could just get the black one pre-ordered now? BECAUSE IT LOOKS SO MUCH COOLER. And I know that's a stupid reason, but for someone as visually attuned as I am, it's a good enough reason for me to continue waiting. At least that's what I keep telling myself....
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
The Blank Page
I'm at something of a creative impasse these days.
On one hand, a year after completing the manuscript, I now have a polished version of "The Ghost of Lake Emily" sitting on the hard drive and ready for submission. Which isn't a huge milestone since I felt it was pretty solid to begin with, but there were a few things that needed to be updated and consolidated and cut. Making those changes wasn't a huge issue, but hammering out a query letter was. I don't know if I've gotten into the query process much here, but just in case not here's the short version: The query is a letter you send to an agent asking them to take you on as a client so your book has a better shot at being published. This letter serves two purposes: (1) Make your book sound so compelling that Agent X absolutely has to check it out, and (2) offer some kind of proof that you can actually string coherent sentences together so they know they are dealing with someone who is taking the endeavor seriously.
Writing a letter that does these things is no ride around the lake, but I think I've got one in place now that could get the job done. I've researched up some agents and have sent the first round of 'Emily' queries out, so there's not much more to do but wait. BUT. I still have more than half of my summer left, technically. I could get some serious writing done in that time, and there's no reason I shouldn't. Except that I'm hung up. I wouldn't call this writer's block so much, because the story I want to begin has been coming together in my head for years now, but I just can't get it off the ground because I'm too busy second-guessing myself with it. When you begin writing and you look at that blank page, whether it's in a notebook or a typewriter or a brand new Pages document (or, God help us, friggin' Microsoft Word), it's kind of daunting.
If I was going to tell a student how to get past this, I'd tell them to just start writing. It's not going to be perfect on the first try so there's no sense worrying about quality since you'll have to revise it anyway. Yeah, well. Easier said than done. I figure my best play at this point is to get out one of the middle-grade / YA novels I brought home from school and just read. If it turns out to be good, that's usually enough to kickstart my brain. Trouble is I'm reading a non-fiction book right now, "War" by Sebastian Junger. With a cousin in Afghanistan, I thought it would be interesting to read a book by an acclaimed journalist who spent a great deal of time embedded with the military in Afghanistan. A tip for anyone out there who knows someone in Afghanistan and is thinking, "Hmm, yeah, that might be kind of interesting." Trust me - you'd rather not have your questions answered, at least from reading this book. No punches pulled whatsoever.
Very compelling, but not the type of writing that gets your wheels turning for writing a vaguely sci-fi middle grade novel.
On one hand, a year after completing the manuscript, I now have a polished version of "The Ghost of Lake Emily" sitting on the hard drive and ready for submission. Which isn't a huge milestone since I felt it was pretty solid to begin with, but there were a few things that needed to be updated and consolidated and cut. Making those changes wasn't a huge issue, but hammering out a query letter was. I don't know if I've gotten into the query process much here, but just in case not here's the short version: The query is a letter you send to an agent asking them to take you on as a client so your book has a better shot at being published. This letter serves two purposes: (1) Make your book sound so compelling that Agent X absolutely has to check it out, and (2) offer some kind of proof that you can actually string coherent sentences together so they know they are dealing with someone who is taking the endeavor seriously.
Writing a letter that does these things is no ride around the lake, but I think I've got one in place now that could get the job done. I've researched up some agents and have sent the first round of 'Emily' queries out, so there's not much more to do but wait. BUT. I still have more than half of my summer left, technically. I could get some serious writing done in that time, and there's no reason I shouldn't. Except that I'm hung up. I wouldn't call this writer's block so much, because the story I want to begin has been coming together in my head for years now, but I just can't get it off the ground because I'm too busy second-guessing myself with it. When you begin writing and you look at that blank page, whether it's in a notebook or a typewriter or a brand new Pages document (or, God help us, friggin' Microsoft Word), it's kind of daunting.
If I was going to tell a student how to get past this, I'd tell them to just start writing. It's not going to be perfect on the first try so there's no sense worrying about quality since you'll have to revise it anyway. Yeah, well. Easier said than done. I figure my best play at this point is to get out one of the middle-grade / YA novels I brought home from school and just read. If it turns out to be good, that's usually enough to kickstart my brain. Trouble is I'm reading a non-fiction book right now, "War" by Sebastian Junger. With a cousin in Afghanistan, I thought it would be interesting to read a book by an acclaimed journalist who spent a great deal of time embedded with the military in Afghanistan. A tip for anyone out there who knows someone in Afghanistan and is thinking, "Hmm, yeah, that might be kind of interesting." Trust me - you'd rather not have your questions answered, at least from reading this book. No punches pulled whatsoever.
Very compelling, but not the type of writing that gets your wheels turning for writing a vaguely sci-fi middle grade novel.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Summer Song(s)
First of all, a brief update since I'll be writing about music today -- my "Unplayed Archive" iTunes playlist currently sits at 3,910 songs. Will I be able to successfully reach my New Year's resolution of playing each song in the library at least once? Really not sure. It's getting harder to do as I realize how much mediocre crap is taking up space in my library. And yet I can't bring myself to delete it. Go figure.
But today we're going to talk about the music that does get played; in fact, music that gets overplayed in such a small concentration of time that it becomes symbiotic with a particular period of time. These are the kinds of songs that you can't hear without remembering something in specific detail from the part of your life when those songs were important, and you can't think about that part of your life without hearing those songs. For example, I have a very clear memory of my high school best friend Todd and I painting the walls in the drugstore that my father managed during one June overnight in 1985. I remember this because we had the radio on the whole time, and the station we were listening to played two brand new songs they were very excited about no less than four times throughout the night: "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams, and "All You Zombies" by The Hooters. We liked Bryan Adams well enough back then and liked hearing his new song. "All You Zombies" left us nothing but perplexed.
But for me, summer isn't so much about particular songs as it is about albums. Since I'm essentially laid off from my job for some 70-80 days each summer, I get a lot more time to listen to music, and it seems like every year there are one or two albums that become definitive for that year. A few even get so much play time that the whole album will be locked on to that summer for me. The same could really be said for the other seasons as well, but somehow summer is different.
To prove my point, here is a short list of some of those albums, and a sampling of the memories they recall for me.
**"Busted" by Cheap Trick. Summer of 1990. The ugly little brown 1983 Dodge Colt I drove and how I had a small boom box riding shotgun all the time because the cassette player in the dashboard went out every time I made a left turn; driving across the Division St. bridge into downtown St. Cloud; the academic whiplash of taking a philosophy class and my Phy. Ed. content course within an hour of each other; the way the living room window frame in my apartment swelled in the humidity to the point I couldn't close it; driving up to Sauk Rapids to work at the Boys and Girls club summer program; Paxton, the kid who threw nothing but granny shots all summer; how awesome Laura looked in that dress she wore to our staff meeting, and how I hated her boyfriend for the month that followed.
**"For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" by Van Halen. Summer of 1991. Playing side 2 of the cassette in my Walkman while I ran up and down Variolite to train for the Turtle Trot; driving all over rural Minnesota pursuing fruitless job interviews and staying overnight in a few motels to make sure I'd be at the interview on time; seeing the video for "Poundcake" more than once since it was all over MTV during what may have been one of the last years they actual played music videos more than anything else.
**"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. Summer of 1984. Seeing the first concert of the tour at the St. Paul Civic Center, and then listening to a Kansas City version of the same tour on a bootleg tape in Todd's Pinto, and naively hoping we wouldn't get pulled over for speeding and found in possession of a Springsteen bootleg; dropping my sister off at the grocery store where her summer soccer team met to leave for away games, and hoping to see a girl I had a crush on (and now 26 years later I don't even remember who she was); singing along to "Darlington County" in my cousin Paul's Pinto (I know, Pinto summer, right?) on the way to a wedding in South Dakota -- some girl in a passing car saw me rocking out and laughed and pointed me out to the rest of the car and I was so into the song I didn't even care.
**"Hot House" by Bruce Hornsby. Summer of 1995. Driving back and forth between my memorably awful Coon Rapids apartment and Elk River to help my dad close down his drug store; staying up until midnight consistently to watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000" on Comedy Central; foolishly driving headlong into what had to be the ugliest, ominous, multi-colored storm front I have ever seen with my own eyes; summer afternoons at the Moore Lake Athletic Club, and killing time at Northtown on the way home, back when Northtown wasn't as post-apocalyptic as it is now; spending most of August playing games and signing on to eWorld with my very first computer, a Macintosh Performa 5200 CD, which still stands today as the most expensive computer I've bought. But man, was Dark Forces an awesome game. Totally worth the headaches and blurred vision.
I don't have one solid album on track for the summer of 2010 yet, though I do have a favorite playlist I've developed that gets a lot of car time. There's some older Better Than Ezra there, some OneRepublic and Train from last year, old Glen Burtnik, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, even this year's Ozzy release, which doesn't completely suck. I guess with the advent of digital music, it's easier to put together a playlist that is strong in great songs and low on filler, which is a claim that very few albums by any artist can make. But even with that advantage, I still love having that imprinted relationship with one particular piece of music, awesome songs, filler and all. But with the ADD nature of music today, it just doesn't seem to happen as much anymore.
But today we're going to talk about the music that does get played; in fact, music that gets overplayed in such a small concentration of time that it becomes symbiotic with a particular period of time. These are the kinds of songs that you can't hear without remembering something in specific detail from the part of your life when those songs were important, and you can't think about that part of your life without hearing those songs. For example, I have a very clear memory of my high school best friend Todd and I painting the walls in the drugstore that my father managed during one June overnight in 1985. I remember this because we had the radio on the whole time, and the station we were listening to played two brand new songs they were very excited about no less than four times throughout the night: "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams, and "All You Zombies" by The Hooters. We liked Bryan Adams well enough back then and liked hearing his new song. "All You Zombies" left us nothing but perplexed.
But for me, summer isn't so much about particular songs as it is about albums. Since I'm essentially laid off from my job for some 70-80 days each summer, I get a lot more time to listen to music, and it seems like every year there are one or two albums that become definitive for that year. A few even get so much play time that the whole album will be locked on to that summer for me. The same could really be said for the other seasons as well, but somehow summer is different.
To prove my point, here is a short list of some of those albums, and a sampling of the memories they recall for me.
**"Busted" by Cheap Trick. Summer of 1990. The ugly little brown 1983 Dodge Colt I drove and how I had a small boom box riding shotgun all the time because the cassette player in the dashboard went out every time I made a left turn; driving across the Division St. bridge into downtown St. Cloud; the academic whiplash of taking a philosophy class and my Phy. Ed. content course within an hour of each other; the way the living room window frame in my apartment swelled in the humidity to the point I couldn't close it; driving up to Sauk Rapids to work at the Boys and Girls club summer program; Paxton, the kid who threw nothing but granny shots all summer; how awesome Laura looked in that dress she wore to our staff meeting, and how I hated her boyfriend for the month that followed.
**"For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" by Van Halen. Summer of 1991. Playing side 2 of the cassette in my Walkman while I ran up and down Variolite to train for the Turtle Trot; driving all over rural Minnesota pursuing fruitless job interviews and staying overnight in a few motels to make sure I'd be at the interview on time; seeing the video for "Poundcake" more than once since it was all over MTV during what may have been one of the last years they actual played music videos more than anything else.
**"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. Summer of 1984. Seeing the first concert of the tour at the St. Paul Civic Center, and then listening to a Kansas City version of the same tour on a bootleg tape in Todd's Pinto, and naively hoping we wouldn't get pulled over for speeding and found in possession of a Springsteen bootleg; dropping my sister off at the grocery store where her summer soccer team met to leave for away games, and hoping to see a girl I had a crush on (and now 26 years later I don't even remember who she was); singing along to "Darlington County" in my cousin Paul's Pinto (I know, Pinto summer, right?) on the way to a wedding in South Dakota -- some girl in a passing car saw me rocking out and laughed and pointed me out to the rest of the car and I was so into the song I didn't even care.
**"Hot House" by Bruce Hornsby. Summer of 1995. Driving back and forth between my memorably awful Coon Rapids apartment and Elk River to help my dad close down his drug store; staying up until midnight consistently to watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000" on Comedy Central; foolishly driving headlong into what had to be the ugliest, ominous, multi-colored storm front I have ever seen with my own eyes; summer afternoons at the Moore Lake Athletic Club, and killing time at Northtown on the way home, back when Northtown wasn't as post-apocalyptic as it is now; spending most of August playing games and signing on to eWorld with my very first computer, a Macintosh Performa 5200 CD, which still stands today as the most expensive computer I've bought. But man, was Dark Forces an awesome game. Totally worth the headaches and blurred vision.
I don't have one solid album on track for the summer of 2010 yet, though I do have a favorite playlist I've developed that gets a lot of car time. There's some older Better Than Ezra there, some OneRepublic and Train from last year, old Glen Burtnik, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, even this year's Ozzy release, which doesn't completely suck. I guess with the advent of digital music, it's easier to put together a playlist that is strong in great songs and low on filler, which is a claim that very few albums by any artist can make. But even with that advantage, I still love having that imprinted relationship with one particular piece of music, awesome songs, filler and all. But with the ADD nature of music today, it just doesn't seem to happen as much anymore.
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