Sunday, October 17, 2010

Oops ... Missed a Week

That's okay.  It was a typical week with the usual shenanigans at school. 

Some good news there, though.  I think the graffiti artists have decided to call it quits for now.

I did actually get the "dog ate my homework" excuse.  I told the young lady that her excuse was old when Moses tried it.  Sadly, I got the blank "Huh?" stare for that one.

My paperwork reduction experiment is working.  I didn't get a lot of extra time to write, but I did use the time to do a bunch of other wacky things like setting up a computer to replace the one that was gradually experiencing more and more hard drive problems. 

I'm going to embark on a new story today.  I have the prewriting stuff done already, except the plot mapping.  I had tried it once already, but I didn't like where it was going and how it was getting there.

To fix that, I'm going to try doing something a little ... odd.  I'm going to try to tell the story from inside the POV of a parrot.  No, I'm not going to have the parrot be a small, feathered human.  I want to have the parrot act and interpret things as a parrot.  I have an excellent model: my Timneh African Grey engineer bird.

This may be rough for a couple reasons.  First, I'm not very good at telling a story from just one character's POV.  If I run afoul of problems with this, I'll make the parrot one of the POV characters along with the two main human characters.

Second, I'm not a parrot.  I'm only guessing at what goes on through their cute, little heads.

*Shrug*  I'll try to write a couple test scenes and see what my crit group thinks.

I have to catch up on my crits for the week before I dive in, but before even that, church.

Speaking of which, I'd better go see about breakfast.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Graffiti is not just an alternate form of expression

The district where I work just built a new elementary.  They needed to.  The old one has been falling apart and the district is experiencing a population explosion.  Sharing space with the middle school and high school wasn't an option any more.

So, now we have a nifty, new facility.  Lots of color.  Lots of space.  Lots of new technological wizardry funded by a grant ... and now lots of new graffiti.  Some 2nd-4th grade gooberhead has mistaken the walls and floors in the privy for a writing tablet.  In the girl's restroom, it's a lot of girl-drama along the usual lines of "I hate ______ because she likes _______."  In the boy's restroom, it's an expletive written over and over in large letters ... and spelling incorrectly.

It isn't just there, though.  I have other, probably different, gooberheads writing all over stuff in my room, too.  In my room, though, the writing has been confined to folders, science journals, a clipboard, and someone's paper.  I positively identified one of the perpetrators, and she was dealt with by me and by the parent.  So far, nothing new from her.  As for the other, I'm pretty certain I know who it is, and I've contacted the parents about the incidents I can absolutely link to him.  Although I know in my head that he's responsible for the rest of the incidents in my room, what I know and what I can prove are not the same thing.  So, unfortunately, one rotten apple is making the whole room stink, and now I have to get much more strict about movement around the room.  Not the way I like to run a class, but I can't afford to be constantly replacing stuff because someone decides to write all over things.

My paperwork reduction experiment didn't work, but then it was the end of the 6 weeks, which involves unit tests and a flood of incoming redos and missing work as procrastinators decide all of a sudden that maybe they've missed enough recesses for their missing work and all those zeroes aren't going to improve their amount of playtime at home.

So, the experiment continues next week so I can try to recover more time than just Sunday afternoon to work on my writing.

I do have news most fabulous, though!  Virtual Tales reviewed my book proposal for Remnant in the Stars and requested the full manuscript.  Whoot!  They tell me they'll need a couple months to review the book and decide if they want to offer a contract.

This could get interesting!