NaNoWriMo, A Month in Review

It's hard to believe that November's over. After a month's worth of scrambling to write or think of what I'm going to write next, I'm both exhausted and feeling strangely empty. Empty in that there's no deadline hanging over my head any longer. Guess what,

I love deadlines.

But,

Statistics

• 50,899 words
• 52 Chapters
• ~ 150 Pages in manuscript format

Overall Plot Structure

I originally planned to cover Nigel's life from age 9 to about 15 in the span of 50k words. I ended up covering from 9 to 10, or about the first 1/3 of what I was looking into. This leads me to Lesson learned #1:

• I am a wordy bastard. And as such, I expect to cover about 3 times what I actually cover. And that's not a bad thing. (Let it be known though, that My wife, who also did NaNoWriMo, Covers exactly as much as she expects to cover in the range of words she's working with, which is something that I find both awesome and amazing [We'll talk about that more in a bit.]).

So the story if you break it down covers the time from when Nigel leaves his decaying family behind and goes out into the world to make it on his own. Almost immediately, he meets up with smuggler and revolutionary, Robert McKee, who takes him under the ole' wing and teaches Nigel to read all the while filling the boy's head with ideological dreams of a better future.

Nigel then breaks McKee's friend Aleistar Tweedy from prison, a man reknowned for his ability to read any text. With Tweedy out, they steal an elven tome containing banned magic (The Diruleans don't do magic, or elves for those of you not up on your Ae'rinus lore). Their plan, cast some spells and wreck up the town. But,

Nigel gets captured by Leicaster Dunnovan, the noble (and apprentice Necromancer) that Nigel stole the book from in the first place. Nigel spends a good bit of time in the dark, being tortured, before eventually breaking free and killing Dunnovan.

In the process he finds out that there is a second book, which is in possession of Dunnovan's master, William Blakesley. Nigel goes after the book, spends ten days in a shipping crate crossing the Portsmouth bay, and rides back to Darkepoole with a bunch of Na'Claad gypsies led by Quick Jonny Quink.

Upon returning with the second book, things are starting to look good, until town guards attack the tavern where McKee lays out his plans. [details of the climax omitted] Nigel barely escapes with his life, and is forced to flee to Rae'lan.

Flavor of the text
If you've ever read my stuff, you know I'm annoyingly postmodern with orientation--footnotes, metafictive elements, plurality, blah blah blah. This book doesn't have much of that at all. Overall, what I thought of when approaching the writing was two things: Grit and language. So I channeled a lot of what I learned from Ann Pancake's glorious use of language together with a bunch of good dark grit ala the kind I get from reading Kilean Kennedy and all his recommendations, and came out with something that's full of clipped incomprehendible (possibly to some) dialog, and lots of teeth getting knocked out amid spraying blood and gore. I tried very hard to vocalize the differences in accents spoken by the characters in the story, and even varying accents from the same localized area based on age and experience and what not. According to Sue, I was successful. Once it's publishable (word on that below), we'll see how it flies in the wild.

Sound of the text
Music is a requirement when I write. And usually I get some sort of playlist going that builds the mood of whatever I'm working on. This project was a bit problematic with music in the beginning as nothing really seemed to drive the narrative inspiration for me, but once I got up around 20k words, I found myself constantly hopping onto YouTube to watch a quick video or two for inspiration. I ended up making a playlist of them, which is now up to 51 songs. Here's a feed:

Overall though, I think the most influential song was Handlebars by the Flobots (thanks Rod for turning me onto that song way back when in Grad School).

The Highlights
Perhaps one of the best things of NaNoWriMo wasn't the writing so much as the fact that my wife, Sue decided to join in the fun with her own NaNoing. She started out by hand, writing her Cersee stories, but then eventually switched online and managed to hit 30k by the end of the month, which considering that she spent a good chunk of the month rewriting what she wrote by hand, and the fact that she, unlike me, values sleep she did a super job. It was truly a great month for us to be sitting side by side creating things together. And since she isn't done, I'm looking forward to this month and future months of us working on finishing her story, and building new ones. I think this writing process might be a real great replacement for D&D, which with real little kids right now, is very hard to pull off.

I'm also very happy to have finally gotten back to my roots by writing fantasy. Back in college, I felt pushed to bury my love for genre fiction in favor of literary writing...which was probably a good thing, but now it feels awful nice to decend into fantasy again. The Nigel cycle is far from over, and in the coming weeks and months, I plan on building a transmedia experience out of it using a combination of background information-like blogs on my Ae'rinus blog, as well as even more in-depth stuff on the Ae'rinus wiki. As for the actual text, I plan on serializing it and releasing direct to teh Intarnets as soon as it's revised enough for release.

So that's more or less where It all stands. Here's to more stuff in the future!

I win!

50,899. We'll talk later. Mmm K?

Novels, November, and TransMedia

Back in July, I posted this bit on TransMedia and fiction. Since then, I've continued to mull on the subject, and much to my happy surprise, I got into a pretty cool email conversation with Scott Walker, one of the founding members of BrainCandyLLC, an online startup that does exactly what I was talking about--facilitates world-building for all sorts of media, and unlike the Harry Potter fanfiction type stuff referenced in the Henry Jenkins essay that kicked my mind off on this whole thing in the first place, Walker's flagship at the moment is a custom fantasy world, Runes of Gallidon, with a surprising breadth of detail and contribution. So from what I can see, this sort of collaborative setting is working out to be a very successful force even outside the already successful fan-fiction realm. And this is a good thing for fiction. Good because:

1. In an increasingly electronic world, classical literacy is decreasing, so an increase in these types of sites, fan-fiction, or not, will help combat this loss of literacy.
2. I'm deeply bothered by people who casually say, "I hate writing." Often I think this stigma is created by bored teachers in the public realm, who lack either ability or energy to properly motivate students to write. Online collaborative communities change that.
3. If traditional print fiction is languishing, fan-fiction, and now other types of fiction are demonstrating that a new collaborative home on the net, may be the spark to kick things into a new renaissance.

So, coupling in with National Novel Writing Month next month, I've decided to start pushing my own brand of collaborative openness. Here's how.

I've been a D&D gamer since way back when. 5th grade maybe. And in those many many years, I found that as a DM, I've always gravitated away from official gameworlds to my own, Ae'rinus. I have a wiki: http://aerinus.wikispaces.com, and an Ae'rinus related blog, neither of which have been all that active in recent years, but I've always wanted to do something with them. So here's the gameplan: I'm going to start writing the fantasy novel I've always wante to write. The one that I've forever put aside for the silly notion that literary fiction was what I needed to do. And while I won't be posting it as I go (because good god, my early drafts are bad), but I do plan on posting both environmental information about Ae'rinus, side stories, as well as other relevant material as I develop the main novel. When the novel's sections reach "publishable" form, I'll post them in serial, and hopefully one of two things will happen:

1. People will read and enjoy what I've written
2. People will feel motivated to start adding to this ontology of Ae'rinus.
3. (with a 3rd pipedream goal of: I become a rockstar D&D DM/writer and get to tour the country running gaming sessions, writing books, and having plenty of time with the family without having to have a soul-sucking dayjob..oh and medical benefits too [hey If I'm going to dream, might as well dream big.]).

Here's a blurb of what I'm working with. A sort of half-assed preface if you will:

Deep-seated in the heart of history there is always the blemish of darkness, dark times, of painful memories and hearts hardened—winter for the soul. Every age knows these stories, of overcoming darkness, transforming a landscape, but stories embellish—they forget the depths, the lows we sink to when faced with demons on all sides. They celebrate the outcome as an inevitability, as if men and women are born heroes destined to save us all. Stories are a point of convienience; they have the vantage to see the whole process from afar. But sliding within the morass, buried in the deep-gut-drop stink where your life is entrusted to a dagger blade so chipped and stress cracked you're pulling your thrust a bit and hoping to hell you don't catch it off a rib or hidden hauberk.

To a great many, Nigel Caedman was a hero—involved with bringing the gods back to the land, becoming one himself, slaying demons. Spread the growth of independent guildhalls, which led to safer roads. He fought in the civil war to overthrow the corrupt Dirulean crown. He traveled the planes. Found lasting love, married, and raised seven children. How could he not be a hero? Unblinking, he murdered men, women, and children if they crossed his ideals. He lived by gypsy code to point of fault; respecting nothing, taking everything from food and lodging to sex. He raped. Pillaged. And even despite the grandeur of ascending to the role of deity, this two he has squandered again and again, opting to cast it all off for a few more years wandering a land that he loves. A land where he has no permanent home. Surely no hero does these things. Heroes are just and pure. They stand for light and hope. Faith, humility, honor and love. Heroes are legendary and celebrated, like Cersee Nailo Caedman—Nigel's wife. But this is not the tale of a true hero. This is the story of that which creeps in the shadows, the bloody knife blade, the stink of whiskey-breath in the morning rain wet from another night under the stars. Doing what needs to be done, whether or not the people agree or realize what horrors are kept at bay by his stained hand.

More on the future of fiction

Apparently the topic of my Ontologica essay is on a lot more minds than my own. American Book Review just did a big bit on Fiction's future. Many of the authors quoted there echo a lot of what I was talking about in my essay. (By the way I'm writing this, you'd think I inspired people [I didn't though {wouldn't want to set the wrong impression}]). Though I did particularly enjoy Larry McCaffery's quote: "I have seen the future of fiction, and its name is Mark Z. Danielewski."

Ontologica 1.1

is LIVE! Check it out: http://www.warriorpoetgroup.com/Ontologica

Authors featured:
Sheldon Compton
Jarrid Deaton
Rod Dixon
Sameha Farag
Cameron Fry
Dave Harrity
Kilean Kennedy
Drew Lackovic
Jason Lee Miller
Jae Newman
Chelsea Pruckner
David Tipton
Amy Watkins

Artists Featured:
Susane M Lackovic (Andracki)
Dennis Waddell

Building Thoughts on TransMedia Fiction

Lately I've been reading a lot of essays about technology, preparing for my "The Age of Information" theme that I"ll be launching this fall in my composition class[es?]. The primary texts I've selected are:
Technopoly - Neil Postman
The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts
The Dumbest Generation - Mark Bauerlein
The Pirate's Dilemma - Matt Mason
Convergence Culture - Henry Jenkins

My primary goal with these texts is to design a course content that invokes introspection on some level relating to the technology that we all take so easily for granted. Back in 1995, Sven Birkerts warned his readers in the essay, "The Idea of the Internet," that taking the technology of the internet for granted would be a huge failing for our culture. Not only does the internet remove us from conventional definitions of communication (I'm paraphrasing Birkerts paraphrasing Derrida here), where the communication takes place between two physical people in an exact location at an exact time, but its top-level appearance abstracts the complexity lying underneath. For example, prior to the internet, a person was only reacheable via phone (most likely landline/fax) or in person. If that person wasn't home, I couldn't establish communication. Now, I can email a video of myself to someone's phone. I don't have to know where the other person is, nor does that person have to have his phone on when I send the communication--the idea of concrete time and place are effectively removed from the schema for communication. Furthermore, since the internet is so abstracted, without considerable computer skill, it's VERY hard to ensure that your communication is being delivered only to the person or people it's intended for. Consider the notion of a embarrasing email forwarded on to an entire organization, or the Bush administration's extensive wiretapping. Specificity of communication is also no longer restricted to exact recipients. Therefore communication as a whole has changed, yet few of us (if anyone) truly acknowledge this shift, or seem to care.

Consider this: How many 18 year old college freshmen post their drinking sex party pics up on facebook? Lots. Now consider this: A large number of HR firms these days make it a regular habit to Google EVERY SINGLE APPLICANT BEFORE SELECTING THE INTERVIEW SLATE. Guess who doesn't make the slate? Titsy McGee and Joe Pukeface.

While I can drive on in this vein for a while, all of this reading has been jarring up my notion of fiction and how it's to be consumed. A good chunk of my essay for Issue 1.1 of Ontologica has to do with the notion that contemporary realism, the dominant literary movement of the day, is driving fiction into the ground because contemporary realism offers little if anything over any other form of media, and in many cases, is very easily interchangeable with other forms of meda. And while this notion of media convergence, as cited by Henry Jenkins is inevitable, I can't help but think there has to be a better way to cross-pollonate fiction with other media without diluting the form. I think it bears importance to mention that I'm primarily concerned with Literary fiction, since the Literary genre seems to claim to have some sort of presigious clout over the other, more lucrative forms of fiction. I'm bothered by the notion that Literary fiction, for all it's clout cannot compete with other genres, and fares even worse in competition to other media. And at the same time, I'm not ready to just write off America as being too dumb to consume Literary fiction.

In Convergence Culture, Jenkins traces shifts in TV Series' plot formatting from Episodic , to Character driven, to season long arcs, to World Creation. Looking at these terms, you hear a lot about Character Driven fiction in MFA programs and other writing groups--it's definitely high on the do-this-and-you're-writing-good-literary-fiction-list. However, in terms of other media, that puts fiction FAR behind the curve. Think about the complexities in a story arc for a season of Lost, or better, the story arc for the entire series. Character driven fiction can't meet that, and it can't build any form of fanbase similar because it lacks said complexities. These complexities, or the current Trans Media way of doing things is that of World Building. Give me a world, any world, and we can build all the plot-driven or character driven stories we want, and each one contributes to the greater whole. Think Star Wars. Think The Matrix.

This idea of world building, of course, isn't new. Faulkner did it with his Yoknapatawpha County. Ben Marcus writes it from the inside in The Age of Wire and String, George Saunders in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, etc. All of these fictions employ world building at the most intrinsic level.

Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction talks (again I'm paraphrasing) in great deal about the effects of what he calls "Worlds in Collision," or, what happens to a reader when the reader is forced to recognize that the world within the fiction is not the world that the reader lives within. Such a collision firstly forces the reader to abandon all forms of epistemological interpretation for ontological interpretation. By doing so, the entirety of the fiction necessitates analysis--nothing should be taken for face value. Since ontological interpretation, at its most base level, is concerned with plurality and the absence of any absolute truths, our subjectivity, level of reading intensity, and knowledge come to be more heavily important on the understanding of the text than in traditional epistemological readings. Furthermore, in an age of TransMedia exploitation, particularly dense works get easily dissected by online forum groupThink exercises, where each person brings a different skill/knowledge set to the same text, allowing for greater depth to be achieved than possible without other perspectives.

I'm part of such a groupThink exercise--the Warrior Poet Group; and throughout our book discussions, we've consistently avoided contemporary realist works in favor of those that involve the creation of entire worlds: The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus, Rant - Chuck Palahaniuk, Visionary/Prophetic Poetry, and Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov.

So why do worlds work so well?
Perhaps in this age of information, our ability to be truly affected by an event is thoroughly diminished to a point nearing total desensitization. Everyday we joke, sing, or causually talk about killing, rape, stealing, etc without blinking an eye. Media Piracy is called "Filesharing" to downplay its illegality, and ask any college student, not one of them will tell you that music piracy should be illegal. Perhaps world creation works so well because in this age, we spend so much of our time trying to assemble a self out of the cacophany of information surrounding us--one tiny voice in the datafeed, we scrabble and scream our way to the top of Facebook, or whatever online den we call home. Star-struck and searching for fame and fortune, we fall into the glamor of world-building because it allows us to transpose not our true self, but the self we want to be into an alternate world where we pull a Burger King and Have it Our Way (for once). Look only to the success of Second Life, WoW and other MMORPGs. Shitty jobs become suddenly bearable when there's another world to run off to once you punch out.

My escape worlds have always been rooted in D&D and video games (currently Fallout 3), but increasingly, as I develop this thing called Not an Autobiography, the inter-connections between stories has begun building a growingly more complicated ontology of Self stemming from each individual voice. And as I see it, the book becomes multi-layered in this way--each character telling the what-if story of several personal past events and claiming each other character, but also the over-arching inter-connectivity; a sort of super-self that gets generated by the cross-overs, similarities, and other flair.

So what am I saying?
In addition to writing good stories, I think we should also start considering how the masses are to consume our fictions. If you can get a group of peole to dedicate a forum to your book, then you're also generating word-of-Internet marketing for your creative endeavor; it's like free promotion.

What if we take this a step further. Take the notion of world building and tack a Creative Commons license on our fiction rather than 1st American Publishing Rights or whatever other licensing offered by publishers -- you can still make money on your own work, but with Creative Commons, you also enable your fans to drive your work futher in derivative creations, building upon your world, and expanding, further your fanbase. Surely this already exists, but can such a creation lead to one or more published books? I'm not sure, but at the very least, on this blog entry, it sounds like a very tantalizing idea.

This is exactly not what I wanted to hear:

From Gargoyle:

Sorry Drew--

Almost impossible to land anything more than 20pp anywhere right now in these grim times. And we're in the 5-15pp range with most of our stuff lately.

Pax,

Richard

Thanks Gargoyle, for at least breaking up with me quickly. I hate that long drawn out feeling.
The good news: that was a < 24 hr response. I have to say though, if Richard is correct, I'm in a world of hurt. Look only to my currently unpublished list:

• Self [Inflicted] Portrait - 38 pages
• Endings Lead to Beginnings - 37 pages
• 7,500 Miles to the Bottom - 24 pages
• The Poetics of Self - 18 pages
• Contents Within - 17 pages
• Substrate - 17 pages

I guess this really means only one thing, I need to finish Not an Autobiography and start marketing it as a finished collection. If only I weren't so interested in developing long winding sentences each with a series of footnotes....

Everything Ends goes Electronic and other stuff

A cappella Zoo, recently started posting electronic versions of their back issues on their website, and as a member of issue one, "Everything Ends" now has a new electronic home. Given that my story is full of XML, footnotes and other elements of structural screwity, the folks over there assuredly had to do a lot of finagling to get that story online, so take a moment and read it again. Maybe even buy a subscription because they are one of the best mags out there as far as I'm concerned (one of the only literary magazine that touts that it prints experiemental fiction and actually follows through with it).

In other news, Rod, Dave, and I are getting very close to publishing issue one of Ontologica. The website is ready to go, and we're sliding into editing time right now. I expect things to be live sometime in early July. With that said, we're already starting to lay grounds for the Winter release--I know Dave's done some work on setting up the theme for that issue, basing it partially on some of Colleen Harris' work (Her new book is out soon. Buy it).

Lastly, my summer job's led me down the path of web-development, and I've recenly learned massive amounts of CSS, XML, and XSL, all of which is coming mightily handy in building the Ontologica site and setting forth a roadmap to one day rebuild my own domain and the Warrior Poet Group Main Page.

Good bye Spring '09, Hello Summer

As I type this, I'm finishing up the last of my grading deluge. I posted my composition class' grades the other day, and momentarily, Business Writing will be set to the books. It's an awful nice feeling to be 'done;' very much akin to the done-ness achieved at the end of a semester when you're a student. Funny how when you're a student you never consider how much work is involved on the prof's side of the house--really it's about the same as what the student faces.

Between Last Thursday and Sunday, I slammed through 71 five page essays. I just finished slugging through 5 business proposals weighing in at nearly 20 pages a piece (some more, some less), and sorting out grades on a multi-tiered system for them.

Here are some more stats:

Overall, I read over 3,050 pages of student writing this semester, and that doesn't include revisions; so I wouldn't be surprised if there was another 150-300 pages sneaking around that average that I didn't account for.

I went through 7 pens.

I averaged 10-15 student emails per day.

For my business writing class, we read two books: Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, and D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship, as well as three 30 page articles from CQ Researcher, and a good chunk of The Business Writer's Handbook

In Composition, we read five essays: Gerald Graff's "Hidden Intellectualism," Christopher Lasch's "The Lost Art of Argument," Sven Birkerts' "The Owl Has Flown," Susan Bordo's "The Empire of Images in the World of our Bodies," and Arlie Russel Hochschild's "From the Frying Pan into the Fire." We also watched and discussed Steal this Film.

On the side, I managed to read Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, and The Watchmen. Currently, I'm reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.

Oh and I haven't written a word of fiction since...um...maybe November? So sad.

As far as students, I noticed a dramatic improvement in attentiveness, class participation, and overall quality of writing in comparison to the fall semester. Part of this is due to students moving into the comp class after having taken an introductory class (which is optional based on entrance tests), and/or repeating the class after having failed in the fall. In any event though, we generated a lot of good discussion, and I didn't have any 'dead' sections like I experienced in the fall. I also had a dramatic improvement in seeing students going to get writing tutor help; largely this was a good thing.

I did however learn that there are several topics that I never want to read about again. They include:

• The Drinking Age
• Gun Control
• Abortion
• Steroids
• Gambling
• The Smoking Ban
• Stem Cell Research
• The Death Penalty
• Alternate Fuels
• Global Warming
• Illegal Drugs

While I encountered exceptional papers throughout the above list (particularly there was a fantastic Pro-Life paper, and last semester brought me a stunning Legalizing Marijuana Paper), overall, these topics end up being dry, predictable, and very very similar. Fortunately, next semester, Behrend will be kicking into full-on LRS mode, which will involve required course "Themes," so as long as I'm crafty enough to select a theme that doesn't involve any of the above topics, I'll be safe so to speak. As far as themes go, I'm currently kicking around the following:

• Capitalism
• Piracy
• The Information Age
• Counterculture
  

Now that I have a couple semesters under my belt, I hope to start revising and deviating my lesson plans a bit for the future. I want to incorporate more focus on MLA citation in my Composition classes--this semester's addition of the Annotated Bibliography assignment revealed that many students are still clueless about proper citation. Also, in one of our departmental meetings, Craig presented a sort of handout relating to asking "Good Research Questions." It's something I hadn't considered before, and when I presented it a couple weeks ago, the students really seemed to like it; so that'll go in much earlier in the semester. Also, I think I'd like to develop Problem Statement Format introductions more clearly from the start-- the weaker writers in my classes always benefit from this, as it helps them form a clear direction to their papers. Currently, PSF comes in around week four; I think I'm going to move that up to hit before the first essay is due.

I altered the way I handled open revision this semester (in the fall I didn't put a timeline on revision and received a deluge of last-minute revision), and it worked really well, so I'll definitely keep that as an option.

I'm also working on creating a sort of revision checklist of common errors that I'd say 80% of my students make. Things like putting your punctuation inside your quotes, proper citation format, not opening or ending paragraphs with evidence, etc. Hopefully such a document will help them organize their workshop sessions more, and help them get away from focusing only on grammatical feedback.

So now that School is over for the moment, I've been working at gainful summer employment. At the moment RGIS is my only current holding. I had my paid training session today. The work is ridiculously easy; the hours are awful. Strange times are dealable--Verizon hardened me against weirdo shifts, but the pay is awful, and they only have me down for 17 hours in the next 2 weeks; nowhere near enough to pay the Man.

Fortunately, I managed to land an inteview tomorrow for a Marketing/web development gig at a place that's less than two miles from my house. From the sounds of it, it might solve all the summer monetary problems. So I'm looking forward to that with gusto.

Plus, since my next big project is to build the site for Ontologica, it'll be nice related practice. Speaking of Ontologica, I am finally going to be able to start drafting the essay that's been floating in my head since before Rod posed the notion of putting this journal together. Although I'm not traditionally an essay writer, I'm pretty psyched up to write this, so hopefully it'll pan out well.

Finally a note on the homefront: Sue's gone back to work, and though on many levels I feel like I'm somehow failing at bringing home enough money to cover bills, her work environment has changed drastically for the better, and she's really enjoying herself there; which is really good (and it's really helping with finances).

Molly's just coming out of a real bad stint of no sleep week (see my previous blog post). I guess most of the molars have cut through, because after nearly a week of no naps, and really poor sleeping at night, she's more or less back on her regular schedule (though the daytime nap is more floaty now--she used to crash immediatly after lunch, now it's hitting anywhere between 10:30 and 14:00). She and I have been hitting up the Zoo pretty regularly, and Molly likes that a whole lot. We'd like to hit some other zoos this summer, so hopefully that'll happen--kind of all dependent on work schedules and whatnot.

So now that I've written a blog post that, by all website usability rules is far too long, I'm going to end with a hopeful note about summer.

I hope summer rocks as much as I think it's going to rock.

O my child, why don't you love the sleep?

Day 2. Log. 8Am ish. I've been up since 2:30 ish (after going to bed around Midnight). Up with my daughter. For the second night in a row, she's on strike. The nightnight time management wanted to renegotiate her sleep agreement, and apparently she gave them a big mouthful of sass to the effect of, "No no no no NOO!" Either way, it means that for two days now she's blasted awake in the middle of the night with no apparent ailments needing attention, and also no interest in sleeping, unless said sleeping occurs on my shoulder while I stand and rock her.

Wednesday night, I stood and rocked her from around 4:45-6:15 before she finally relented and let me lay her back down.

Last night was far more complex. At first even the holding and rocking wasn't working. Sue and I ran the parent gamut--diaper check, food check, drink check, orajel check, no fever check, etc. She needed nothing. No gas, no nothing but a big pile of crab. To make it all worse, Sue is such a good mom, that she can't sleep if Molly's crying. Sue had to work in the morning.

So since it's day two of this and we decide to opt for the cry it out route. Tough love. Well although it's something that often works to help develop the ever lovely pattern of sleeping, last night it backfired; Molly jumped out of her crib for the first time. Not good. Thankfully aside from a scare, no damage taken. But there were still tears and lots of crabbing.

So I opted to take her downstairs in hopes that she'd fall asleep while we watched something. Fortunately The Heist was on HBO, and we caught it fairly early. We both enjoyed it. Which meant no sleeping for her. After that, there wasn't much good on, so I attempted to encourage sleep. Got her to lay on the couch with me...no real sucess there.

So it's 4:30 and I'm getting pretty crabby so we went upstairs and resumed the I'll-hold-you-and-you-sleep bit. It's a killer on the lower back, but she was sleeping at least. Anytime though I though she was enough asleep to lay her down, she snapped back up super fast.

Around 6 I was falling asleep standing. So I tried laying down on the floor with her on my chest. That bought us both an hour of sleep. Then she rolled and saw that the sun was up. So sleep time was over.

So far I'm feeling not too bad for 2 hours worth of sleep. We'll see how that pans out.

all I know is that Threequels suck. So tonight Molly, you better sleep like like a baby. But not like the baby you've been the last two nights.

Pedigogy and the 2009 CEA/PCEA Conference

A couple weeks ago I attended the annual PCEA conference, which this year was paired up with parent society, the CEA, for a conference at the lovely Omni William Penn in Pittsburgh. Since it was in the 'burgh, I got to cut cost and stay with friends, (and enjoy a nice metro ride into town). Overall, the conference was a pretty decent success as far as I'm concerned. Here are the highlights:

My own presentation:
Unfortunately, I was scheduled for the 1st panel on the first day; so I expected an audience of 0 much like last year's conference, but fortunately, we had two audience members in addition to presenters and moderator, so that was a 200% improvement. Things got off to a pretty good start. I read from "Deconstructing Happily Ever After," and it went ok-ish; nowhere near as fun as the smashing success the story had at Spalding, but still a pretty decent reading.

Flow
Also during that panelone of my co-presenters spoke about Flow and theories set by herself and Csikszentmihalyi regarding the process of writing and how it affects our minds. The presenter, Julie Kearney of Penn State Harrisburg expanded on Csikszentmihalyi's theories by studing the level of serotonin in the brain in relationship to the state of Flow a writer is in. Basically, achieving flow is that state that we as writers, (and by extension, I would imagine any artistic endeavor as well) come to when we lose sense of the world around us and are totally absorbed in our work; that feeling you get fleetingly when "the keyboard is writing for your, or if you're old school like Dave Harrity, when the pen is writing the poem." She found that Seretonin levels go up, which makes me think then that (and this is my own thought, not Julie's) that writing is somewhat addictive; we're always searching for that absorbative high, when we're fully geared in creative mode; and we hate coming down from it. I wonder if so many writers over history were also addicts (Faulkner and alcohol, Ken Kesey and LSD, etc) for this reason -- sort of short circuiting the true payoff. Julie also reported that she planned on running writing experiments with folks that can achieve flow where she inhibits seratonin to see what happens. Interesting stuff.

The New Historicism way of Responding to Student Papers
I went to a panel geared towards comp teachers that stressed a new method of using critical theory as a method to respond to student papers. Essentially, the presenter, argued that "Rubber Stamp comments" were doing nothing for our students and that New Historicism theory will allow instructors to better approach the students' work without making the students just appropriate what we tell them for a better grade. I like the idea behind this; teach the student how to write what they want, and communicate their designs well, but I'm unsure of its effectiveness in the sea of 100 essays every 2 weeks. I currently average between 10 and 20 minutes per paper, which places me at around 30+ hours worth of grading per essay. Adding a new historicism twist by showing students how their essays fit into the historical context of their writing realm, while not rubber stamping comments, sounds, to me, to be very time intensive. Our departmental meetings have constantly stressed that when commenting on student papers, less is more, and that students rarely, if ever, pay much attention to the blood on the page, so I've got to say that I'm not entirely sold on this model of response. It doesn't seem to have openings for structural, grammatical, and clarity issues, which are all too common. Perhaps I'm missing the point of this methodology. I can see definitley how it'd work well in more advanced classes for seminar papers, and even creative works, but it seems a bit too much for a freshman comp class.

Other Stuff
One of the better aspects of the conference was that I got to meet up with several former IUP professors and hear about the very excellent sounding revision they've done to the English curriculum at my alma-mater. When I transfered into IUP in 2000, I was aghast at how archaic and backwards IUP's English program was in comparison to Behrend's. Not only did it severly limit a student's ability to gain depth in Literarture studies, it allowed little avenue to specialize and/or excel in particular interests. I ended up spending a rather large portion of my final two years taking survey classes that struggled to cover massive amounts of literary time, and offered little depth, and because I had pretty specific interests (postmodern theory and creative writing), I ended up taking several more classes than I needed to graduate, just so I could satisfy some of my curiosities.

Fortunately now, IUP is offering a much more modernized track system with several different areas of specialty, and an expanded and updated list of courses. They'll be launching this program in the upcoming Fall 2009 semester, and by the looks of it, it'll be a smashing success.

McDonalds is Craptacular

Went to McDonalds today for a Shamrock shake--you know a green drink for St. Patty's day.
"Sorry we don't have those anymore," says the disconnected voice coming through the drive thru window as I STARE AT THE FUCKING PICTURE OF A SHAMROCK SHAKE ON THE PLACARD.

Assholes.

So I got a Frosty and Fries from Wendy's instead.


My daughter stole my fries....all of them.

Alone at the Top now live

"Alone at the Top," the first story I wrote for my first Spalding Workshop is now live over at The Wrong Tree Review.

If you have a moment, go take a look.

State of the Estate

Life is busy, and by that extension, I'm guessing I can't complain. So here's a slice of the latest, freshest, bit o' life I can dish out. Straight from me to you. No lengthy emails, just straight bloggery at its logorrheic finest.

The Fam
We're all doing pretty ok. We're all busy as hell, but overall things are going as well as they can. Molly just turned 16 months, and she's not one, but three handfuls of cute. She can rattle off probably close to 10 different animal sounds, and has gotten very good at asking "what's that." She listens really well too (most of the time). She's very much in love with Nemo and Tinkerbell, though to her it's Memo and dinkdink (or something like that). Oh and don't think about eating ice cream unless you plan on giving her half.

Now that Molly's a little older and whatnot, Sue's been getting back into her art more. She's looking to expand and restock her holdings at a local art gallery, and/or start expanding onto etsy.com. Right now she's been buying up plain ole plates and painting them up with some really slick designs. She's also planning on doing some fabric art class with aunt Jeanie here soon.

Schoolin'
I'm teaching another full load this semester--100 kids this time, divided up 75/25 between composition and business writing. Now that it's nearly the end of the fourth week of school, I estimate that I've read and commented upon over 980 pages of student work so far, and that's taking only the minimum side of page requirements into account. That's a freakin' lot of damn grading. Fortunately, my kids this semester seem to be a good amount more attentive and serious than last semester, and that makes grading easier.

I also have several international students this semester, which is both humbling and really interesting. It amazes me that these kids not only can write well, but participate in class discussion just as fluently, if not more fluently than the rest of the students. While I'd love to think that someday I could subsist with my German or Japanese knowledge, I know I'll never approach the sort of fluency these kids have unless I'm living in one of those countries. Another cool thing about the international students is that they bring in a really diverse and worldly view on the types of issues we discuss; and these world views have done wonders for fostering our class conversation. While a lot of profs complain about having international students, I'm really enjoying mine, and looking forward to having more in the future.

Grant Musings
Since this is an ultra-random, catchall type post, NEA Grant applications are open now for Fiction/non-fiction. The deadline is 3/5/09. Here's the link: http://www.arts.endow.gov/grants/apply/Lit/index.html. I'm really hoping I can land something like this; it'd give me the time to write and finish Not an Autobiography without having to think about bills, and maybe a little on location travel research too.

Current Music
It's been a while since I've talked up my latest musical influences, so here's a list of things that have been consistently populating my Amarok Playlists:

• Blue Foundation--My wife's been spinning up the Twilight sountrack a lot lately, and I really dig the Blue Foundation Song on there....Now before I continue, y'all need to know that Sue's not one of the 800 million Twilight fangirls out there. Sue read Twilight long before it became harry potter rediculous popular; she even Emailed Stephanie Meyer back in the day some (and got responses). Anyway, Blue Foundation. Great band. Really nice ephemeral, trancy kind of stuff.
  
• The Ting Tings. I can't get "Shut up and Let Me go" or "Fruit machine" out of my head. Cha ching. Cha Ching.
  
• The Birthday Massacre--this band rocks. One of the best goth rock bands I've ever listened to. Excellent melodic female vocals backed by a great synthy dirty grind.
  
• Conjure One--another good ephemeral trancy kinda music. This kinda stuff is great to grade to.
  
• Fauxliage--see Conjure One's entry.
  
• Juli--She's German. I fell in love with their song on Rockband. Very good alternative rock sound.
  
• Oasis--loved em in the 90s. Still love em today
• "Love Spreads" by the Stone Roses--I forgot about this band and song, but Rockband again rescuscitated that memory for me. Back in high school art class, I borrowed this cd off of Mr. Humes. Great English band, and "Love Spreads" in particular rocks. Plus it's one of the few songs I can sing on Rockband without causing the paint to curl.
  

Writing
Ha! Not happening. Maybe Spring break. Maybe Summer. With 100 kids and a Molly, there just isn't time for much else.

Reading
I'm slowly chugging my way through Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Alan Moore's The Watchmen. For school I'm rereading D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship and Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma.

Watching
Right now we're cutting through several TV series on Netflix: Jekyll (very good), Witchblade, The Lost Room (very good), and Miracles (ok--Sue liked it a lot). Movie wise, we just saw Underworld 3 (very good), Wanted (very good), Rocknrolla (I liked it; Sue didn't), and Death Race (suprisingly good). Molly's been all about Tinkerbell, Finding Nemo, Monster's Inc, Baby Einstein, and to a lesser degree, It's a Big Big World. We're about to relive our college anime-nerdness by rewatching all of Rurouni Kenshin.

Speaking of anime, how I wish Netflix were around back when I was in college. I watched so much anime at such a terrible quality, because that's what we had--I saw all of Kenshin for example via TERRIBLE Real Player Rips. And I put up with it. Anime nerds today have it way too easy.

Well that's enough rambling. I have to finish grading persuasive memo revisions.

Fiction Reading

I will be reading from my fiction at the annual Behrend Reads! event Thursday February 5th at 6pm in the Smith Chapel on Penn State Behrend's Campus. Behrend Reads! is a forum that allows English faculty outside of the Creative Writing department to read some of their creative works.

It should be a good time had by all.

Upcoming Publication

I just received word that my story, "Alone at the Top," will be the featured story in the March issue of The Wrong Tree Review. Wrong Tree belongs to a couple of friends, and great writers from Spalding. Kilean and Rod kicked off the first two issues; great stuff too.

"Alone at the Top" was one of the two stories I submitted to my first workshop at Spalding. At the time it was so dense that no one really knew what to say about it, but thanks to a lot of help from Sue and Krista, it's finally found a home.