Make Good Art. Neil Gaiman’s Commencement Speech & My Thoughts on the Apocalypse.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech to the University of Arts class of 2012. Then watch it again. It’s inspiring for artists of all kinds, and is just the kind of message I need to hear every once in awhile. In fact, I may go listen to it again, right now.

Yesterday I started daydreaming a post-apocalyptic short story idea. Or, maybe you’d just call it apocalyptic, because the story was kind of a “What if this happened?” kind of scenario. I once heard that if for some reason our food supply chain got cut off, grocery stores would only have a few days’ worth of food, and then we’d all be screwed. I wanted to verify that time frame, so I googled it.

I found Modern Survival Blog and it blew my mind. Seriously. Go read it. I can’t imagine living with that mindset, let alone that several people appear to have made successful businesses around it. Just look at the ads. It’s such a goldmine of inspiration. Isn’t it kind of fun to think about which people you know might be closet survivalists? Then make them into the unlikely hero in the event of an apocalypse in your story.

After I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I spent a few days pondering what I could do to make sure I’d survive an apocalyptic event. I soon came to the conclusion that I would not be one of the survivors, and stopped worrying about it. At least, it would be very, very, unlikely. It is fun to think about it sometimes, though. If I had to get away, where would I go? When I was working at the convention center, I liked to imagine what would be the best place to defend against zombies or just other humans who want to steal our food. If I did survive, I would know how to make wool into yarn and then cloth, so I would have some talent to contribute to any kind of community formed by survivors. Chris could be the one to cobble together broken cars and turn one into a biodiesel fueled car. And maybe our husky would pull us on a sled in the winter. If “winter” still exists by that time, anyway. Haha.

On a semi-related note, when I walked on the neighborhood trail yesterday, I was happy to notice all of the thimbleberry plants coming up everywhere! Thimbleberries are mostly like raspberries, but wild and with different leaves. Last summer we took a walk down the trail and snacked on berries all the way. I will know where to go to hide in the woods when the apocalypse happens and I can survive on berries!

Do you like my picture? I just made it by playing around in Photoshop. It’s not very good, because I’ve never used Photoshop and I was just playing around. But that’s okay, because I’m learning, and right now it’s my best. Earlier, I dumped an entire salad on the floor before I even got to take a bite of it. That’s the kind of day I’ve been having. So I hope nobody cares that I made a crappy .gif with Photoshop to go with this post. It’s all Pinterest’s fault anyway. Just go listen to the commencement speech and forget you ever saw any of this!

Summer School!

Yesterday I spilled coffee on my editing. I was just getting into a good groove, too. Then I had to bring the whole thing inside and let it dry out. The good news is that after it dried, I finished editing it! I actually just finished scribbling all over it, which I’m not sure counts as editing. The next step is to type up the new draft.

After I finish this draft, I may post the story at Scribophile. I haven’t used it before, and I only just signed up about a month ago. They use a system called karma to determine whether you get to post your work for review. Before being able to post a story, I will have to earn karma points by doing a few thoughtful reviews myself. It seems like a great site, though I am nervous to take the step of offering my work for criticism.

Another cool site I’ve found is Coursera. Coursera offers free online college courses from well-known universities. Heck yes I’m taking advantage of that! There’s no college credit or certificate offered, just the good ol’ satisfaction and pleasure of learning something new. I’ve signed up for Intro to Sociology and Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. I’m so excited!

As June gets closer, I’m getting more excited about Camp NaNoWriMo. I’m also getting a little nervous! I’m stacking lots of things up on my plate right now, from the courses mentioned above to other self-imposed learning endeavors, not to mention my job. Luckily, working with kids tends to follow a school-year schedule, so my service this summer will be with a summer program, and I will get done around 3 each day, and have Fridays off! Additionally, I’ll have almost a whole week off between the end of school and the start of the summer program. I plan to make the most of all the extra time I’ll have. You may have to remind me I said that a month from now, when I’m sitting around being lazy “because it’s summer, and that’s what you do in the summer!”

Check it out, one of our staff members brought her baby chicks to school! That’s me with one of them. She’d ordered 4 hens, and to keep them warm, they were packed with about 10 baby roosters! Nobody really raises roosters, apparently, so all they are good for is packing material Instead of killing them, she gave them away to another staff member who lives in a rural area and already raises chickens. Yay!

Editing: Seeing Red!

Look at all that red! It’s fun, marking up the rough draft as much as possible, cutting out whole paragraphs and squeezing in whole new paragraphs between the lines. This is what double spacing is for! Just do me a favor, and don’t try to read the story that’s on that page. Now that I’ve said that I’m sure you will, if you weren’t already going to. I suppose I don’t care, knowing that it doesn’t look anything like it will when it’s finally done.

I managed to get three more pages of this marking up done tonight after a wave of anxiety over the hugeness of my project hit me. It is so easy to get lost in the big picture, especially if you are a big picture person like me. I want to make an awesome website, with lots of pretty stuff like pictures and graphics, and I want it to be perfect, but how do I get there? Seeing the big picture without having a grasp on the small steps to take can be paralyzing.

Instead of letting my discouragement and fear stop me, I got some groceries, a latte, and came back to write. Even if I can’t make a stellar website in a day (let alone learn the skills to even start making a website), I can write. I can edit. Journaling also helps me get past it and into the writing mindset.

Also, I’m learning Photoshop and InDesign CS2. Chris and I have a legal copy of Adobe CS2, which is way old (the current software is Adobe CS6), but it is cheap for learning. It’s my guess (and fervent hope) that learning CS2 will give me what I need to adapt to the newer programs if and when I decide it’s worth it to purchase those ones. No use spending all that moolah when I don’t even know if I will end up using the program for anything but a hobby! Plus, the learning guides are cheap for the old software, too. I got “like new” copies of Adobe’s official “Classroom in a Book” books for it for less than 6 bucks each, including the mandatory 3.99/each shipping price. Someone tell me if I’m grossly wrong in thinking that learning the old software will be at all useful, but until you do, I will continue to be excited to learn from my shiny newish books.

Don’t Count on the Weekends

How do you stick to a writing schedule?

I find it too easy to say I’m too busy on weekdays. I’m tired in the morning, and when I get home from work, I feel like relaxing, not working my brain. I’ll have plenty of time on the weekend, I think.

In order to make sure I keep up a consistent writing habit, I have learned not to count on the weekends. It always seems like I can get a whole lot of writing and other things done on the weekends, but that’s not always true.

Social events can take up a lot of time on weekends. Sure, on one weekend I may get to spend 4-5 hours per day writing and working on website stuff and preparing blogs in advance. But as soon as I take that amount of time for granted, something comes up the next weekend that takes it away from me. My brain still expects it, because I had it the weekend before, then suddenly my weekend’s over and I didn’t make time for writing.

It can be hard to keep up 5 hours of solid work, too. Since I haven’t developed any kind of routine or habit for working in long stretches like that (because I only do it on weekends), it’s easy to get distracted and off task. So that big chunk of time might not be as productive as my smaller chunks during the week.

I do take advantage of the extra time I have on weekends to get more work done, and to do it at a more relaxed pace, but building regular time into weekdays (or work days, if you work on weekends) is key. Whether it’s getting up early and writing before work, or scheduling regular time to write after work, having a daily expectation to write will help you make progress on your project and exercise your writing muscles.

It can be difficult squeezing regular writing into a schedule that’s busy with a full time job, but if it’s important to you, that’s what you do. I look forward to my evenings and weekends as time to work. It sounds strange, but it’s one of the ways that I know I should be doing it.

The timers pictured above were at Ikea. There were two different displays of them, and in both, all of the timers were ticking. Somebody had come by and set all of them! They didn’t go off while we were within earshot, which was strange since they are only minute timers, but it would have been funny to see!

Camp NaNoWriMo, here I come!

Well, it’s May already and that means it’s time for me to start preparing for Camp NaNoWriMo for June! I just got an email about all of the camp goodies that are in the store, and I want all of them! Just look at them. I want the poster. And the coffee mug. And the merit badges. And the camp care package. And the tshirt. All so cool!

Since I am using Camp NaNoWriMo to motivate myself to revise my novel from November, I’m kind of cheating. I’m not starting a brand new novel for the 50,000 word goal. My thought is, though, that things like NaNoWriMo are a tool to help me accomplish what I already want to accomplish anyway. My revision will be an almost complete rewrite as well, so having a word count goal will still be a legitimate way of tracking my progress. And boy, do I ever need the motivation!

In the past, when I’ve done NaNoWriMo in November, I’ve usually let it sneak up on me. I’ve never outlined, or planned very much ahead of time. This time, I am going to try outlining and some more advance planning. I still think November’s more spontaneous writing helped me–after all, I wouldn’t even know my characters or the world they’re operating in if it weren’t for all that writing! But now I need a clearer roadmap of what they’re doing so that this revision actually will improve the original draft.

Sponsor me!

If you support my novel writing efforts, consider sponsoring me at my StayClassy fundraising page! I always try to donate a little bit to the Office of Letters and Light when I do NaNoWriMo, but now I want to try to support them even more! Their resources allowed me to teach NaNoWriMo as an afterschool class and spread the novel writing love to some awesome kids, and the whole program provides encouragement, support, and community to tons of writers all over the world. I love it, and if it sounds cool to you, consider supporting my efforts. Plus, your donations will help guilt me into sticking to my word count goal for the month!

Learning to Use WordPress to Design a New Website

Check out this old computer! Chris’s boss was going to recycle it. It’s an Apple SE. He had it apart this morning and showed me the inside of it. The designers all engraved their signatures on one and then had a limited number of the cases made with the engraved signatures reproduced. This was one of them. So it has Steve Jobs’ signature engraved inside it, along with at least a dozen other people. So cool!

I’m currently in the process of building my own website for this blog to move to. I will have my own hosted space with my own domain name. Fun! It will be more than just a blog, but for now I’m just learning the ropes. Things have changed a lot since I made my fist website with Netscape Composer and hosted it on Geocities. That was when I was in seventh or eighth grade. Back then, people did a lot of different things with personal websites. One of them was creating “adoptable pets” for other people to have on their websites. Basically you “adopted” a picture of a pet and put it on your site.

I created my own adoptable dragons. They started out as images of eggs that I sent to the person. When their egg “hatched,” I sent a picture of a baby dragon. Then there was a young dragon, and an adult. All of these I made by drawing the dragon pictures, outlining them heavily in pen, then scanning them, touching them up in an editing program, and filling in the line drawings with different colors. It was fun.

Yes, times were different then. Now, I’m learning a new set of tools, and updating my knowledge of HTML (and CSS). I’m using WordPress.org to build my website. WordPress.org is different from WordPress.com (where this blog is currently hosted) in that you download the software and install it on your own server to use as a back end for your website. It still has themes, but you can edit the themes and customize more.

Last night, I was trying to play around with it and got discouraged. There is a LOT you can do with WordPress, which also means that there is a LOT to learn. I have to keep telling myself what I tell the students I work with: If it’s not hard, then you’re not learning anything. You don’t learn from doing things that already come easily to you. You learn when you are challenged. Yes, some things will come more easily than others, but the harder it is, the more you will learn if you stick with it through the mistakes and the pitfalls.

One of the goals I had for today was to change the colors of my theme. I know that I wanted some kind of warm but earthy color scheme. The trouble is, I always get afraid of getting sick of it. Then, I found myself getting stuck going back and forth trying different colors that didn’t quite work, refreshing the page, trying a new color. It was tedious. Well, thanks to Google, I found this: Color Scheme Designer. You can choose different types of color schemes and drag them around the color wheel to get a preview of how colors will look together. Way easier than my trial-and-error combinations! And pretty. I’m pretty sure someone showed me this once in relation to yarn and knitting.

I can tell I’m going to be slightly obsessed with this for awhile while I learn. But, I’m off to a wedding tonight, so I guess I have to take a break.

Share the Love of Your Craft with Kids

Check this out: Youth Take the Stage at Homegrown. It’s an article about a 13 year old and two 11 year olds performing at our local music festival. How great is that, for them to have this opportunity? I’m lucky enough to live in a city where a week-long local music festival has grown from a handful of bands to around 150, and it’s even luckier that local musicians are sharing their passion with kids. The students got the opportunity because they had been going to the new Music Resource Center in our city, which is “a program designed to bring children closer to music with instrument training, recording and the push to get on stage.” I am excited that this center exists.

No matter what creative thing you do, there is tremendous value in sharing the love of it with kids who are interested. There’s value in it for you, and there’s value in it for the kids.

What’s in it for me?

By signing on with a group of kids, you’re instantly gaining a group of people who look up to you for inspiration. It may not always seem like it from how they act, but trust me, they all look up to you. That’s a good feeling. You also will gain new perspective on your craft by seeing how kids encounter it for the first time. You’ve learned a lot since you first started, haven’t you? Kids will teach you things, too, things you never expected. Kids will inspire you. My NaNoWriMo group is largely responsible for the fact that I finished the rough draft of my novel this year, because they inspired me with their enthusiasm for continuing work on their own novels. There are also the added bonuses of being able to include it on your resume, gaining experience, and perhaps experimenting with ideas for future projects. Most importantly, you are creating more people who care about your craft.

What’s in it for them?

What kids will gain from having you there to teach them can be pretty obvious. First, they’re learning a new skill. Second, they have a positive role model. The Search Institute has put together this list of 40 developmental assets that help kids succeed. By teaching afterschool or extracurricular classes to kids, you are increasing several of these assets, such as having positive role models, participating in creative activities, positive peer relationships, and feeling valued by the community. Read the list, it’s good.

When learning a new craft, kids learn a lot more than just the craft. Kids will learn how to overcome discouragement and how to make mistakes. Lots of kids get very frustrated with making mistakes, even though it’s part of the learning process. Learning that mistakes are a part of the process will help them in everything they ever do. After making those mistakes, they will get to feel the reward of mastering the skill after practice. If it’s something that involves collaboration with others, like music or dance or a writing workshop, kids will learn to work together and to share their opinions respectfully. The “respectfully” part may take some coaching, but learning through trial and error and a little guidance is better than never experiencing it at all. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Tips for sharing the love of your craft with kids

Be yourself, be honest, share a bit of yourself with them. All within the limits of what’s appropriate to share with kids, of course.

Group brainstorm your group rules regarding respectfulness, rowdiness, etc, then stick to them. Establish a baseline for behavior before trying to become their best friends. It makes it safe (emotionally and physically) for everyone.

If you don’t need to, don’t make an example project first. I once taught a clay sculpture class for grades K-2. The day I told them “make some kind of animal,” I saw much more creativity from them than the day I brought an example picture frame. They spent all their time begging me to duplicate the picture frame for them or trying desperately to copy it, then getting frustrated when theirs weren’t perfect replicas.

Be flexible with the kids and meet them where they are. When I taught a NaNoWriMo YWP class, not all of the kids ended up being very enthusiastic about writing lots of words. I said it was okay if they wrote and drew comics instead, and others chose to write mad libs. The important part for me was to see every kid in my group so engaged in whatever they were doing that they were quiet and thoughtful. You are lucky to be teaching a class where you don’t have to shove the material down the kids’ throats at all costs. Enjoy that.

Finding somewhere to teach your class

1. Check with local schools to see if they have an established afterschool program or a volunteer coordinator.
2. Any other youth-centered organizations would be able to help you find a program that matches the kind of class you want to teach. The YMCA, Boys & Girls Club, and United Way are some places in Duluth that I know have connections, so might be a good start in other communities, too!
3. If your school district has a community education program, check with them. In ours, you are allowed to set your time, your schedule, and your price, if you decide to charge.

Sharing the love of your craft with kids, whatever it may be, will bring enrichment to you and them, and can deepen your own enjoyment of what you do. The passion and interest that you see in the kids will inspire you to do more with your craft, and to do more sharing with kids. This kind of sharing also enriches your community and creates more community centered around your craft. Plus, it’s just a good thing to do, worth it for the enjoyment of it and for the sake of putting your positive energy out into the world. I hope more people do it, and so do your local organizations!

Short Stories and Knitting Socks

The chalkboard at Caribou Coffee had this awesome chalk drawing. If you don’t get it, check out this post at Hyperbole and a Half

Short Stories and Knitting Socks

In my last post, I talked about my handknit sweaters, and how my learning process with knitting sweaters can inform my learning process with writing fiction. If I can compare writing my novel to knitting a sweater, then I can also compare short stories to socks.

Sweaters are long term projects that tend to sit at the background of everything you do. Just like I remember that I took that unfinished sweater to Turkey and Argentina, I will remember that I wrote this novel the year I got married, the year I also taught NaNoWriMo as an afterschool class, and the year we went to London on our honeymoon.

If I remember the sweaters I knit at certain times, I will also remember the socks. Unlike sweaters, socks don’t take so long. They are more portable, more palatable, and they involve less risk. They can be a nice break from larger knitting projects, and are easier to do while watching TV. Some of those things can be true for short stories, too. They take less time, it’s easier to see the whole picture, and it takes less time to see the finished result and be rewarded with that sense of satisfaction.

I’ve written a couple of rough drafts of short stories in the last week or so. One is backstory for my novel, another is completely unrelated. On days when I just can’t fathom slogging through another few pages of my novel, I can relax by going back to devil-may-care rough draft writing on some short stories. Since they take less time, it can feel good to finish a story. I also feel that I get a chance to work on technique and style in the short stories, because I can get to the final stages of editing faster than I will with the novel.

I think it’s a good thing to take breaks from big projects for awhile, even if it’s only for an hour or two a day. My brain can use a change of pace. A good way to get a lot of work done is to vary the kinds of work I’m doing. Editing and writing a rough draft are two different processes, so when editing wears me down, I can work on a rough draft. When I’m burnt out on fiction for the day, I can work on a blog post. It can help me be more productive than if I were to sit down and try to work on my novel for five hours straight. Not that I usually have five hours straight of writing time, but for me, even one hour of focus on a single task can be difficult sometimes.

Much like typing with a fat cat on your lap can be difficult.

Writing a Novel and Handknit Sweaters

Maybe I shouldn’t keep comparing writing to knitting, but since they are two of my favorite things to do, it seems natural to me. I also think it can be valuable to look at how we acquire skills. Some tendencies and habits can carry over from one type of pursuit to another.

The first sweater I ever knit for myself, I ripped out and used the yarn for a different sweater. That second sweater, I never got buttons for, the sleeves were a slightly awkward length, and I sewed together sloppily. I think I also made up my own way to do a hood instead of looking up hood construction somewhere else. It wasn’t polished and I didn’t wear it much before I accidentally washed it (100% wool) in the washing machine, and I wasn’t too sad that it felted a bit.

I never finished my third sweater, but it had lots of potential. That’s it in the picture here. That sweater was an ambitious sweater. Knit on tiny needles and with tiny yarn, it took a long time to complete. It came with me on a college orchestra trip to Turkey, and on my semester studying abroad in Argentina. On one of the dusty bus rides through the mountains in Argentina, knitting away on the second sleeve, I lost my stitch marker. I no longer had any idea how many repeats I had done of the sleeve increases. Yes, I was that close to finishing that sweater, and I let a little thing like losing my place in the pattern stop me from finishing it. It’s been hanging in my closet since, the second sleeve in its own little bag in my knitting bin in the basement.

My fourth sweater has been my most wearable, though it’s still not perfect. My fifth is the same, except that the first time I knit it, it was way too big and I ripped the whole thing out and completely reknit it.

Now, what about my novel? Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit discouraged about the revision of my novel. Things are not working out, the plot isn’t lining up (I’m not even sure I have a plot!), it just feels like it stinks. Often, I will hear a quote from an author about their first novel, saying that it wasn’t so good, they were glad it never got published, or anything like that. I think my first novel is going to be like that. I almost feel a little bad blogging about all of my novel progress, when I strongly suspect I will never be sharing this particular novel with anybody. Maybe I shouldn’t think of it like that, but that’s my suspicion and it’s not really helping to motivate me to finish this revision.

One way I am managing to stay encouraged is to think about those sweaters. Just because I had to rip out my first sweater didn’t stop me from knitting. I didn’t think, “Wow, that sweater turned out really horrible, so I probably shouldn’t ever try to knit again.” Instead, I took the yarn I’d used and knit a whole new sweater out of it. And then I went on to knit other sweaters, none perfect yet, but all improved. So, even if my novel doesn’t turn out as perfect as I’d hoped, I’m learning as I go, and my next project will be better for having written this one.

I do promise, that even though I’m having misgivings about this novel, that I will continue with it through at least this revision! I am determined to do that, because I know that I will learn from it, and be more ready for the next novel. Now back to work!

My DIY Postgraduate Education

Like many people, there are two sides to me when it comes to making big decisions like “What do I do next in my life?” There’s the realist (pessimist?) and the dreamer. In all of my decisions, I’ve been able to see at least a little bit of the dreamer. When I chose to major in English, it was because I secretly wanted to write fiction. Except, I would never have told anybody that.

Instead, when I answered the question “What’s your major?” with “English,” I would often get the response, “Oh, so you want to be a teacher?” I always thought that a bit of a silly question, considering that if I wanted to be a teacher, wouldn’t I be an education major? Usually, what I’d do was shrug, and say I didn’t know, or make some joke about not having a job after I graduated. I managed to end up in education anyhow, thanks to AmeriCorps, but I still have no plans to become a teacher, either by going back to school or through any alternate degree program.

At each crossroads in my life, the dreamer in me struggles with the realist. It’s the same now that I’m approaching the end of this year with AmeriCorps. Going to grad school for English has always been in the back of my mind, and I did have enough professors encourage me to do it! However, the best advice I got was from one of those same professors who thought I’d be grad school material: Don’t go to grad school unless you know exactly why you want to go and what you want to study. He cautioned against grad school as a placeholder, or something to do just because you don’t know what you want to do next in your life. In the past few years, I’ve had vague thoughts of going back, but I’ve always wavered, because deep down I knew that’s all I would be doing: choosing grad school because I didn’t know what else to do.

Instead, I’m going to make my own DIY postgraduate education. Part of it will definitely include a job where I will continue to gain professional skills. The other part is going to be me spending time on writing and learning things related to writing. I still don’t know what form it’s going to take, and it’s going to take time, but I’m already taking the steps, and that’s what counts. It won’t be overnight, and it will be a lot of work, but if it’s work I enjoy, then I have achieved my goal.

What I won’t do is frantically try to latch on to the latest fad for making money on the internet, try to take advantage of people who don’t get it, or rush out sloppy work just so I can start promoting my first 99 cent ebook and expect to be the next Amanda Hocking. I’m going to do good work, hard work, thoughtful work, and quality work. If I’m going to do it, it’s going to be something I can be proud of.

Here is how I’m starting my DIY postgrad education:

Reading books:

I recently purchased Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and The Plot Whisperer when we stopped by Barnes and Noble the other day. It was an impulse buy, and perhaps a creative writing professor would have recommended different books, but it seems like a good start to me. I’ve started reading Self-Editing already, and it’s actually made me feel better about my writing. Not that I think my writing is so good, but because I knew a lot of the things it talks about already from the one creative writing class I took in college. I’m happy to know I’m starting good habits, even though I still have a lot of bad ones, too.

Practice!

I’m writing every day, so I’m practicing. I like this video with a quote by Ira Glass: Ira Glass on Storytelling, because it comforts me and motivates me to keep going. I’ve always written fiction, but it’s never been on a consistent basis until this year; it was always sporadic and unfinished. So I still consider myself a beginner. I’m going to keep practicing.

Studying others who are doing what I want to do

Mountain and Pacific is my big find for the day. It’s the perfect tonic I need to cut through all of the noise out there about marketing your book, creating content that you can sell, having an author platform, how to be the next kindle millionaire, or whatever. I’ve just read issues 19 and 20 of In Treehouses and I’m enjoying Thom’s philosophy that doing something well, and with depth and thought is better than all the tweeting and arm-waving you could do to sell your product. I do believe that the best way to stand out is to focus on quality and honesty and to let the rest flow naturally from that. Don’t get me wrong, I do think there’s a place for marketing, but the thing being marketed needs to be worth selling first.

Learning new technologies

I’ve downloaded the WordPress.org files to get started on a WordPress based website, and will be poking around with it for awhile. I learn best by just doing the things I want to know how to do, so I just have to jump in and try it. If I can make a nice website, this blog might move there.

So those are a few things I’ve been doing for my DIY education, and there will still be more. I’ll read and learn all I can, and take the best ideas from everything and mold them into something of my own. If you’ve read this far, I hope at least some of it was useful or inspiring to you. Maybe for all this, I won’t succeed, but I’m determined not to fail simply because I never tried.

Gru says, “I don’t care if it has no steering wheel and the hatch is filled with too much stuff. I’m going for a ride in the car!”