Typical Homeschooling Day

I still tend to think of myself as new to homeschooling, but just this morning I was counting back and realized this summer makes six years of doing formal school everyday. That kind of makes me an old hand at it now. Not only that, if we follow the plan and have Aidan take college classes for the last two years of high school, that means I'm halfway through with his schooling. Now that feels really weird. So, for those who wonder just what it is we actually do all day, here's a sort of amalgated "typical" day around here.

8:30 a.m.: Aidan, the pathological clockwatcher, wakes me up, then wakes his brother up and the two of them get their own breakfast. I wonder out to the computer and read blogs, consume something caffeinated, and don't officially wake up until about 9 a.m. (Not because I'm lazy, I should point out; I work til midnight and take at least an hour to wind down after that before I can sleep. I need 8 1/2 hours of sleep to function properly, which I'm hoping I'll be able to get again in about ten years...)

9:00 a.m.: Mom's awake; time for the fifth grade class to get going. (Grade level is pretty meaningless when you're homeschooling. "Fifth grade" here only means we're following that level of curriculum in Well-Trained Mind, so he's doing biology for science all year, and he's starting logic. He's not quite ten so he's considered a fourth grader this year on the forms we send to the public school. He's doing Saxon 6/5 this year, which is for normal 6th graders or fast 5th graders, but in other subject areas like spelling he's doing fourth grade work. I would guess it averages out to fifth grade, but again pretty meaningless.) Aidan gets a sheet with all assignments to be done during the week every Monday morning, and he has until 6 p.m. Friday to get it all done. He picks what order he does things in and how much he does each day. We had a few very stressful Fridays at first, but he's worked out how to pace himself now, mostly. Logic stage history has a lot more reading than he's used to, he's constantly reading one novel or another about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or some other Middle Ages story.

10:00 a.m.: Time for the first graders to get started (again, the grade is a bit meaningless; Oliver is 6 so for reporting on public school forms he's still a kindergardener, but he's already halfway through first grade math). First graders and fifth graders don't mix well; if you try to put them in the same room they'll kick each other under the table. Worse, the first grader is the class clown and lives to distract the fifth grader from his work. Life has been much easier since the first grade relocated to the little table in the living room. Today, he's brought a stuffed octopus in a plastic tote to class. He says her name is "Octopussy". Not that he's seen any James Bond yet, apparently he came up with that on his own. He senses there is something about that word, though; you can tell, as he keeps watching for a reaction everytime he says it. Keep your game face on.

Aidan is studying the middle ages for history (we fell off the WTM schedule fairly early on so he never made a complete circuit of history for the grammar stage. On the plus side, he knows ancient history pretty well). For science they are both doing biology, and specifically studying animals at the moment. We have a tank with eight African lion frog tadpoles swimming in it. (The kit from Insect Lore insists that most or all of these will die before they make it to frogs, but we've yet to lose one. It would be just my luck to end up with eight full-grown frogs that have to stay in captivity since African frogs don't belong in Minnesota.) He also does math, writing, spelling, logic, and Latin. He's already looking forward to finishing Latin, as he gets to pick which language he learns next and he has his heart set on Hindi (I wonder why?). He's only halfway through the first of two levels of Latin, so he has plenty of time to change his mind a million times on what he does next (hopefully to something Mom already knows a little of, although with Hindi at least we know a native speaker he can chat with).

Oliver does math, writing, science (also animals; he already watched his caterpillars turn into butterflies and released them in our garden), and history (ancient history for him). He reads at night with his dad rather than with me, which gives me a little more time with Aidan during the day. We've been studying Egypt for a while now, as Oliver is mad for Egypt. He has a death fixation (Quin has taken to referring to him as "Tim Burton" lately because of his decidedly morbid leanings) and is also taken with the idea of having lots of different gods, so it's just his sort of thing.

10:00-12:00: I hope you didn't think you were going to sit down. Give the first grader his math drill sheet so he can practice addition, then go see how the fifth graders are doing. The fifth graders are out of their seats again, watching the tadpoles eat. Shoo them back into their chairs and get them going on something from their assignment sheet. Go back to the first grade room. Octopussy was getting stuffy in the tote, so she's now wrapped around his neck. Unfortunately he's having a tough time seeing the math sheet with the octopus in the way. Get that sorted out and head back to the kitchen in time to stop the fifth grader from shutting all the windows because he's cold. The fact that he's only dressed in underpants didn't occur to him as possibly being the source of this problem. Send him downstairs to get dressed.

Dhol Baaje just come up on the Party Shuffle. Everyone get up and leap and spin around the house! (Um, recess?) While it's generally understood that the Party Shuffle randomly plays songs (and it runs all day most days; we like music to think by), what's not commonly known is that the teacher can tell it to play something specific next. Don't spoil the secret! (What we do for "recess" changes a lot. Sometimes it's going outside and running around the house, sometimes it's running up and down the stairs. Mostly it's an excuse to get out of chairs and move around, which I think is particularly important for boys, and especially particularly important for my boys. Aidan is calm now, but when he was 4-6 I got asked a lot by "well meaning" types if he was ADD. Nope, just a normal boy with lots of energy). Sometimes, to everyone's surprise, Dhol Baaje comes up twice or three times because it's just that kind of day.

12:00: Time to make lunch while giving the fifth graders their spelling test and checking their memory work (he knows all the kings of England, all the US presidents, and all the dynasties of China plus a bunch of poems. We're working on the time periods of Japan now). Consider once again putting your school on bag lunch, but then you remember you'd still be the one packing the lunch. (I love teaching school; I hate making lunch).

12:30-2:00 p.m.: The first graders have wrapped up their work (although they're still carrying Octopussy around in that plastic tote, and she keeps farting through the plastic in the direction of the fifth graders. Have the first graders sit down and watch Crocodile Hunter. We're going to call that a science supplement, OK?).

2:00 p.m.: Technically the school day is done. This is "nap time" when everyone goes to separate rooms and does their own thing. This is supposed to be your writing time, but you haven't gotten on the treadmill yet, Aidan has left you a stack of reports to proofread, and the house is a mess. Don't be surprised if it takes you until 4 p.m. to get this all sorted out.

4:00 p.m.: Nap time is done, time for doing math homework, correcting the math homework, starting dinner, and checking work e-mail before everyone in the office goes home for the day.

4:30 p.m.: The boys sit down and watch their favorite show, Arthur, and fantasize about what public school is like (no lie; they are completely fascinated by this show. It's like anthropology for them).

5:00 p.m.: Get Aidan settled in with the computer and Teach Me Piano. A human teacher would be nice, but expensive, and just when are you going to take him to lessons? Luckily he likes the program and it doesn't take any time from you. Although the first graders and Octopussy are still lingering in the living room looking for trouble. You can usually lure them into the kitchen if the music is good, although his interest in food preparation waxes and wanes.

5:30-6:00 p.m.: Dinner with the family. This is also the only 30 minute time in the day you spend with your husband, and you'll be lucky to get a word in edgewise. This is the downside to homeschooling and working both. He'll sneak down to your office later to steel your gum out of your drawer, no worries.

6:00 p.m. to god knows when: Slaving for the man. Although you like your job; there is always a cool new word you have to hit the books to check the spelling of, and even the old words are just fun to say. Crista galli. Diastometamyelia. Astrocytoma.

Now you can probably see why I prefer books that lend themselves to being read in 5 or 10 minute chunks, held in one hand while you stir something or unload the dishwasher. Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love spending every day with my boys.

Watch me try to tie this into Heinlein

So I've decided to go ahead and tackle those Heinlein novels. I've read some of his later stuff, but now I'm going through it all in chronological order. My husband is a big Heinlein fan. Back when we were just friends ("just friends" here means only one of us was crushing badly over the other. The other was bragging to his friends how cool it was to be platonic friends with a girl. I only occasionally rub his nose in that), we used to trade books to read. To start, I had him read The Power of Myth, and he gave me Stranger in a Strange Land. So that was the first Heinlein I read. We've discussed Heinlein's open relationships and lack of sexual jealousy back when we were "just friends" and again when we were married (we never really did date properly), and more recently as it came up again when I was reading For Us, The Living. I think it's a nice enough idea but totally unworkable for most humans, and the idea that people who are "more evolved" can handle it I find a bit repulsive. (And don't even get me started on the idea that everyone should be nude all the time. I have a prudish streak embedded in my DNA, this is true, but just speaking purely physiologically, I could not be naked all the time. 'nuff said).

My husband will say he is more in line with Heinlein's thinking than I am, but between you and me he really isn't. He did admit when I first read the book and came back to talk to him about it that on his first time through when he was a teenager, when he reached the scene with Michael and Jill and the circus performer he actually threw the book away. He didn't read it all the way through until he had left home (and more thoroughly discarded his fundamentalist upbringing). But it is his favorite book of all-time, and his cat is named Valentine for Valentine Michael Smith.

But he's not as "evolved" as these Heinlein characters. Now, it's entirely possible I've been having a bit too much fun at his expense of late. He caught me watching the movie No Entry while in my office the other day. I wasn't really watching it, it was on in the background for noise, but I saw his jaw drop in mid sentence and glanced over at the screen. It was this scene, with Salman Khan comes up out of the water, shirtless natch. Now, for my money he's much hotter when he gets out of the car at the hotel, wearing a shirt and a jacket, but Quin was so appalled I just had to rib him a little.

"I know, it's like looking directly into the sun, isn't it?" I said.

"That's so not what I was thinking. Good god, those are tiny shorts," he said. You should've seen his face.

So that night we sat down to watch Salaam-e-Ishq, which I was supposed to wait to watch with him because it has Govinda in it. It's an ensemble modeled after Love Actually (only it's nearly four hours long). We were about 30 minutes into it before Salman Khan turned up, and Quin actually pegged me in the head with a papertowel.

"You didn't tell me he was in this!"

"Yes, I did! Look, he's on the box and everything."

Then the DVD glitched halfway through (ironically enough just when Salman had taken his shirt off) and I have to wait for my replacement copy to get here before I can see how it all ends. Now we're watching Baadshah instead, a Shah Rukh Khan movie. He's fun too. He reminds Quin of Jerry Lewis from the old Martin and Lewis days. I get more of a Michael Jackson feel from him, but maybe that's just because he likes to sing and dance while he's chasing women down the street.

So you'd think that would be the end of it, but no. I woke up this morning and my desktop had been changed from this:

To this:

I haven't said a word. I did sneak over to his side of the computer and change his picture of airplanes to this:
Only because I couldn't find one where she was showing off her butt. I was looking to change mine anyway. I like darker colors on a desktop. This shouldn't offend, I don't think:

Writing colorblind

I'm piggy-backing on a very interesting conversation that's been happening on Scalzi's blog here, as it got me thinking about my own writing. "Writing colorblind" means the writer does not give any racial identifiers to any of their characters; it's up to the reader to fill them in themselves. The argument against this is that for nearly all readers, the default is all-white. Which leads to the debate: who's the racist, the writer or the reader?

Yeah, I don't write colorblind at all. Quite the opposite. There are a couple of reasons for that. I have very clear ideas in my head what all my characters look like, for one. In order to write characters with no tip-offs as to their race, you'd have to leave out any mention of their appearance, wouldn't you? I couldn't do it.

But mostly it's because the culture my characters come from is so integral to who they are I couldn't possibly leave it out or try to be oblique and let the reader guess what background I'm referring to.

I think this is one of the ways that fantasy is different from science fiction. To have people in separate cultural groups in a fantasy novel is the default setting. But science fiction looks to the future, and the majority opinion seems to be that in the future we'll all be mixed. No one will be Asian, European, or African anymore; we'll all be sort of tan and not really have any cultural identifiers at all. We'll all eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and of course no one observes any religion.

I find that vision of the future really dull, frankly. Give me Tobias Buckell's Caribbeans, or Ian McDonald's India of the near future.

This is going to have to be a half-formed thought for now, as school beckons. I'll just close by saying one of the things I find really cool about YouTube is watching how other places around the world reflect American culture back at us. Take, for instance, hip-hop and in particular the "pimp walk". When you take it to Taiwan:



Or to India:



What you get back does not look to me like a melting together into one meta-culture. It's an exchange of ideas where what you get back is a thoroughly Chinese take on it, or a thoroughly Indian one. Cool.

Jaan-E-Mann

I remember the first time I saw Moulin Rouge very well. It was the very night it came out on DVD. Not a good night for Oliver, who was single-digit-months-old at the time; I watched the whole movie on foot walking back and forth across the room because he refused to be laid down until well after midnight. I also saw all of The Mummy on foot walking back and forth with a single-digit-months-old Aidan, but it was at a drive-in, so I couldn't even hear it. Which is fun in it's own way, but we gave up and went home five minutes into The Matrix. You kinda have to hear that one. But I digress, I was reminiscing about Moulin Rouge. Hot, sticky night. Cranky baby. Husband in the "I'm in indulging you watching this with you. I'd rather be watching the Discovery Channel" mode.

Then the line came up. "Suddenly an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof. He was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun." I turned to my husband and said "This is the best movie ever." And that line is in the first five minutes of the movie, before any of the musical numbers. But I already knew. And yes, I re-watched it a lot in the following weeks, so much so that Aidan, not quite 4 at the time, took to singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" when we were shopping at Target.

I really hoped that more musicals would follow. I love old musicals, but I crave the new. Sadly, that never happened. Unless you count "Once More With Feeling", the musical Buffy episode, which I've also rewatched about a million times (I'm counting it).

I've finally found a movie that not only is a musical but has the same kind of surreal, silly, whatever humor that lends itself to lines like "Suddenly an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof. He was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun." It's almost metafiction: the characters in it are well aware that they are in a musical. The back of the set morphs into a huge stage with colored lights, and the MC tells his uncle it would be easier just to show him his flashback than to explain everything. And the present day characters walk in and out of flashbacks, look at younger versions of themselves. When two of them are about to sing the cabinet in the living room rattles until they open the doors and let the band out so they can set up, because you can't sing without a band. And dancing girls. And dwarves in brightly colored costumes.

Now, this is a Bollywood movie, so this means 1) it's in Hindi (although you'd be surprised how many English loan words and slang phrases are used in Hindi films) and 2) it's three hours long. I had to watch it in two segments because I just don't have 3 hours of TV time all lined up like that. The first half, which is very much a Cyrano de Bergerac story with the cool guy helping the mega-geek score with the woman he's adored since college, had me laughing my ass off (all alone; my husband didn't watch this one. It's possible he's Bollywooded out, so we've been watching the BBC episodes of the The Office together). The second half nearly had me sobbing (of course with all this extra stress I've been carrying around lately, that doesn't take much. But it's nice to have the release. And watching The Office, about a company where everyone may or may not be about to lose their jobs, helps as well).

The director does so many cool things with digital effects, the angles of the camera; it's a gorgeous movie just to look at. It has a little Singing in the Rain homage. It has an Irish step dance complete with bagpipes (in a Bollywood movie - so cool). It's also written incredibly well. It circles around the same events from the past, but everytime it revisits them, it adds a layer that changes the context from the last time you saw it. Then there is a huge reveal which was such a complete surprise. It made me appreciate how cool it is to see a movie I've never read reviews of, or seen trailers for, or heard people talking about. I haven't felt that level of surprise since the first time I saw The Sixth Sense.

(I've not just been watching movies, honest! I wrote a short story in two days, which is tremendously productive since it's a school week. I hope to have it all nice and polished by tomorrow for my critique group to have at it with the mallets and hacksaws. I might have to settle for semi-polished. I think it came out pretty well though, so we'll see.)

"The End" but not really

I typed those words yesterday, but I don't feel like I've finished yet. Some things are still bugging me, but in a vague way I can't quite pin down. I'll see if next week brings any enlightenment. I hope so; I'm kind of looking forward to starting the next thing.

I was watching another one of those Bollywood movies last night (yes, we call this obsession; this is the way I do everything), where Salman Khan plays a half-Italian who goes to India to learn singing from a master. After the teacher accepts him as his student, he tells him the difference between a false singer and a true singer. A hungry singer is a false singer, because he sings from his stomach; a true singer always sings from his heart.

Which is a much more poetic way of saying what I was trying to say earlier this week about my writing.

My July Book Report

I didn't get much read this past month, and what I did read were all new arrivals, so nothing came off my To Be Read stack. At least what I did read was all cool.

Of course I started off by rereading the first six Harry Potters. Two of them fell apart on this go-round; the spines split and the pages now come in a few discrete chunks. (They still look better than my first copy of An Elegant Universe, which is held together by a rubber band, but I have to keep it because that's the copy with all my notes in it. Yes, I'm the evil kind of person who writes in books). But I finished off the rereading a few days before Book 7 was due so I plunged into Lois McMaster Bujold's Legacy, which is the second half of The Sharing Knife two part series. I liked it better than Beguilement, the first half; she took her world-building to some interesting places. She is trying to do something different here than with her Vorkosigan books or even her other fantasies, so you can't really compare them, but even so I felt like these were just slighter stories than what she usually does. A pleasant way to spend an afternoon or two, but I didn't get that buzz in my brain reading Bujold usually gives me.

I was still only two-thirds of the way through with Legacy when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turned up (I had ordered it from Amazon.com; I don't know why. I had the day off work just to read it, I certainly could have started the day with a trip to the grocery store to pick up a copy. Force of habit, I guess). It took almost exactly 12 hours to read it. On the one hand, she did lots of things I liked (not the least of which was not killing off Harry), but mostly I prefer that other version of Book 7. You know, the one I was writing in my head since I finished Book 6. My version took place at Hogwarts, went deeper into the history of the place, and had a lot more of Snape, Neville, and Ginny. I think when all is said and done, I'd rank Deathly Hallows after Order of the Phoenix for sure, that one's still my fave. It might be second or third after The Half-Blood Prince. I don't know; I'll let you know in a year when I've read it for the third time.

The next book I read this month was another one I plowed through in a day, The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, otherwise known as Lemony Snicket. I had no idea he had written other novels under his own name until Andrew Wheeler mentioned this one on his blog (and if you're like me and are on the look out for new things to read, his blog is the bomb. I could never read that many books, but Wheeler's tastes are a lot like mine (SF and fantasy but also mainstream and literary novels and even comics) and I've found him a pretty good guide to what's cool). You know, I have lots of writers I admire for one thing or another; Handler is one of the very few that makes me outright jealous. I wish I were half so clever with the word play. This book isn't for kids; it's about some kids in their last year of high school. It has elements of Heathers and Fight Club in it, but mostly it's Handler and well worth a look.

The only other book I read is actually a 3-in-1 of Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness books called The Magic of Reason. If there is one thing that bugs me about Harry Potter, it's that the magic has no rules or cost. If it's convenient to the plot, anything can happen because she doesn't really have a magical system she has to fit it into ("The wand chooses the wizard" might be considered a rule, but it's so lightly used it's really inconsequential. The fact that it becomes a major hinge point for the plot of book 7 is another reason why I prefered the one in my head. I don't get this business with the wand). At any rate, Larbalestier's books are the opposite of that. Her magical system is very clearly thought out, and it rocks. Different characters have different ways of perceiving magic (the MC Reason sees it as math, most of which went over my head in the most delightful way. I love a writer who doesn't feel she has to talk down to me just because I never made it farther than pre-calc). Even cooler than the clearly defined way magic works is the cost: the characters give up years of their life every time they use magic, but if they don't use magic at all they will go insane. So these 15-year-olds are constantly weighing the costs of any action they take: will they take a step closer to dying before they're even 20, or a step closer to madness? And just to show how suggestible I am by other people's use of language, when I was writing the other day one of my characters was in zero G and chundered. Delete, delete, delete; my characters are Greenlanders, not Aussies; they don't chunder. (The book actually has an index for all the Aussie-speak used).

Well, that's a brief wrap-up, but I'm hoping to get another 2000 words in today before I have to go to that picnic thing. I'm off!

I wrote 3700 words yesterday...

...and looking them over this morning they mostly don't suck, so that's good. I celebrated with lots of dancing. Since it's been so unremittently hot I've given up treading the mill for the last few weeks, but what with all the dancing I've actually dropped a few more pounds (well, that and the lack of appetite I always get when it's just too hot). Oliver likes to dance with me, but Aidan finds it distracts him from reading the subtitles. He's trying to work out which Hindi words mean what in English. I guess he must be my kid after all.

You know, George Lucas has talked about watching Akira Kurosawa films before making Star Wars, and how he loved all the little rituals and things that a Japanese viewer wouldn't need explained, but as an American you don't know what it means but it surely means something. He was going for that effect in his first three films, that sense that this or that gesture meant something specific but didn't feel like he needed to explain it all. (Two problems with the second trilogy: he lost the sense of fun and he started explaining stuff instead of going for that sense of it all being foreign and cool. Mitichlorians, anyone?).

I only mention this because Salman Khan is in a Hollywood movie about Bollywood movies coming out next Friday called Marigold, and while I'll surely go see it, it looks from the preview that they missed that crucial fun element. It looks like it's going to be all explainy about what makes Bollywood great instead of just being a great Bollywood movie. (Like Moulin Rouge, which was essentially an English language Bollywood movie, and tons of fun. Baz Luhrman, where did you go?) Plus the MC seems like she really belongs in the movie Braatz. Personally, I'd rather see the new one he's doing with Govinda called Partner that just came out in India, but it'll probably be a year before it makes it to DVD here. Sigh. At least there's always You Tube.

Brief Notes

So this week is our homeschool vacation week, the only time I get these days to write. I'm not making any goals to finish anything, though. I'm standing on shifting sands employment-wise, which is making me panicky. Quin's career is taking off now, but it's not the meteoric rise we'd need to get by on one income, and it would be hard for me to find another work-from-home nights and weekends thing which is necessary for the homeschooling, especially as Quin sometimes has to go out of town overnight with almost no notice. I couldn't really do the overnight shift at the Red Cross again unless I was constantly calling in sick or something. I might have to work my way through less and less savory transcription employment (working for services, ugh, and just until they outsource out of country or replace humans with computers). I hope to milk out another six years. Ten would be nice. I could always go back to being a lab tech, although at this point it would be a huge drop in pay. I've gotten spoiled on this pay for productivity thing; it's easy to forget that most jobs you can't get more cash just by working harder and faster.

It's hard not to have the "what if I did this for a living?" fantasy about the writing, but I don't really find that to be a healthy influence; in fact the quality of the work suffers when I'm in any way thinking of who would ever want to buy it when I'm done. It's just not good for the writing to be looking at the WIP like it's a potential Powerball ticket where I can skew the odds if I just write really, really well. Because nothing can ever be brilliant enough for that, and it's leaving me quite dejected. So I've had to get my head straight and just focus on the craft again and not worry about whether or not it will sell. I haven't written any actual words for it in over a month, but I've come up with back stories on secondary characters I need to add to the second half, and also a sense of some other things which are missing. I'm focused to work now, but I'm not quite as joyful as I usually am when I write. Maybe I'll find the joy when I get in the zone.

On a totally unrelated note, Quin's company picnic is this Wednesday, and he's very excited for me to go. I don't go to any of my work's functions; since I work from home the only people I actually know are the other transcriptionists, with whom I have almost nothing in common, so there's very little point (plus, I just hate parties). Since Quin works for an engineering firm, his coworkers are all just like the guys I hung out with in high school, so that's cool for me (it's still a party, but a tolerable party). Quin is particularly anxious for me to go this time since he can dump me with his Indian coworker who has been lending me all of her Bollywood movies (almost all of which I went on to buy my own copies; those movies have an insanely high rewatch factor. I've had Hum Aapke Hain Koun on in the background while I've been working or doing whatever. I've only had it for two weeks but I've played it about 20 times. It's my favorite). Quin's not only been carrying these movies back and forth, but I have him ask her questions about what this or that means, or what other movies with the same actors are good. Then this became "Ask her which one she likes better, Aamir Khan or Salman Khan?" She says Aamir Khan, because Salman Khan has pictures taken with his shirt off and that's just so inappropriate in India. "Well, inappropriate photos aside, I like him in the movies. He's got this dorky-funny thing going on. He reminds me of a Hayao Miyizaki character, that big-hearted, opposite-of-cool vibe is just so... cool." Well, she says you may like Salman Khan now, but that's just because you've never seen Shah Ruh Khan. She doesn't have any of his, but here's a list of titles (none of which are here yet, so I still haven't seen Shah Ruh Khan). I don't know why he wants to get out of the middle of this fascinating conversation. I can't imagine a bunch of engineers giving him crap for discussing which actor is the cutest in this or that musical. Oh, wait...

Squirrels

They're so cute when they're helping themselves to your stale pita bread...



But then they do this to your (admittedly cheap) patio furniture...

I think there's a man-eating squirrel lurking just out of sight in my backyard.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie)

So I saw this last night (and just managed to squeak in reading the book for the third time before I went). I suppose I was bound to be disappointed; it is far and away my fave of the series (I'll let you know on Saturday night whether that is still true). This is the first installment by a director whose work I've not seen previously. He had an amazing visual sense; the Ministery of Magic looked fantastic, Harry's dreams/visions and the dementors were genuinely creepy, and the wizard fight at the end was phenomenonly good. In some ways the movie actually tops the book (what the director did at the end is so much cooler than statues coming to life to shield Harry, and having the Room of Requirement provide the mistletoe just when it was required was a stroke of genius). The screenwriter deserves some praise for masterfully condensing the longest book into what I'm pretty sure is the shortest movie.

Alas, in the end it didn't quite do it for me. The scenes without visual effects just really fell flat. They were staged funny, the actors didn't seem to know where to stand or which way to look (particularly Emma Watson, who never seemed to know what to do with her arms). It all felt so wooden; none of the emotional resonance carried over. None of the anger was angry enough. Harry should've been much more sarcasic in Umbridge's class, and the scene when Trelawney is fired really needed more, and should've been on the stairs. I have to blame the director here because I know these actors can act. Somewhere out there I imagine they're moaning "that's the take he kept? That one?" My favorite scene from the book didn't make it into the movie (when Neville's mother gives him the gum wrapper), but it's just as well. A bad rendition would have completely ruined it for me.

My boys didn't see it. From what I heard I thought it might be a bit much, and as they hadn't seen the Transformers yet they went to that one without me. They enjoyed it very much. Quin says that Oliver was on the edge of his seat, grinning, practically vibrating with excitement. I'll have to catch that one on DVD (probably about a million times...)

This and that

Mostly links here.

First off, check out the latest issue of Fusion Fragment, which features a certain "My Bonny" by a certain J.F. Peterson, a fine tale from one of my favorite writers. This story came from the same Backspace contest as my own "Tale of a Fox". It's always cool how the same set of parameters can lead to such varied works.

This is why Ursula K. LeGuin rocks. The whole review Ruth Franklin did of Chabon's book is full of chuckletastic quotes like the one that set LeGuin off. Frankly I stopped being bothered by this "genre is crap" rhetoric some time ago. I just like to point it out and mock it.

And posts like this are why I love John Scalzi. (Someone in his comments linked to this Gandhi quote, and on days like today I can totally agree with him. But then I would, because apparently I am Gandhi).

(You can see the incident Scalzi is referencing on YouTube here. I find it just sad and upsetting. Actually I find most of CSPAN sad and upsetting, except their coverage of British parliament, which is fun and engaging, although the fact that none of what they're saying is going to directly affect me could be a contributing factor there).

Here's something more on the fun side: a clip from Boondocks. I'm anxiously awaiting season 2 on this show; it's funny but unlike most of Adult Swim it's gorgeously animated. The reflections on the hospital floor, the detail on every person in a crowd scene, Huey's anime daydreams; it's all good. And I love these two characters, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson and Charlie Murphy:

Who reads this blog?

It's been a while since I checked in with my StatCounter (and I totally promise I am going to get some writing done today!). Myspace I like for having the little counter box right there in the corner, very convenient for obsessives. However, it doesn't tell you who stopped by or what they were looking for. I have StatCounter on my blogspot blog, so I do get that information. However, it's not particularly enlightening, is it?



All spanking, all the time. With just a hint of basketball (and the basketball searches are usually from Germany or Sweden. Actually, so is a lot of the spanking). (Hey, dude from Germany, if you find that Marko Jaric wallpaper, send me the link!)

I'm fairly certain the "Kate's blog" searches are looking for Kate Moss...

I've only just started getting stats on my website from Google Webmaster, and while it's not gotten very many hits, at least the hits in question have been for "Kate MacLeod", "Seagull and Raven", and "Fantastical Visions V". Those are probably relevant (although I hate the website in question. Now that I have the laptop paid for I'm going to start hoarding cash to pay someone to make my website look all spiffy. Me alone with Website Tonight just doesn't cut it).

My June Book Report

Many, many things slid to the wayside last week during my failed attempt to finish the WIP. For instance, Aidan was delighted to find that his assignment sheet for school this week was completely empty. That means he doesn't have to do anything! (Uh, no. It means mom flaked and didn't do her prep work last week for this three week school period. It was a long morning).

So today is all about getting non-WIP things done so I can plunge back into it tomorrow with a clear conscience. Ergo, this book report which is now 9 days overdue.

First off: the book I didn't finish. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Now I remember why I stopped reading Gibson (although I never stopped buying him; the books just kept stacking up waiting for me to finish this). It's official: I give up. I want to like it; it has a lot of cool ideas in it. I think what it needs from me is a quiet afternoon with me, this book, and maybe a cat or two. When my youngest goes to college and I have quiet afternoons like that again, I'll take it back down. In the meantime, I'm moving on to books more amenable to my 10 minutes at a time reading style.

Namely, the sequels to Mona Lisa Overdrive: Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. These I liked immensely. Gibson writes teenage girls who have no close friends very well (and I should know), and I particularly like the character of Rydell, who carries over from MLO. At the end of May, my favorite Gibson novel was MLO, but that changed to Idoru, and then to ATP, and in the end wound up being Pattern Recognition. PR doesn't tie in to any of his previous efforts. It is, however, dead brilliant. If you're cynical at all about the forces behind marketing, you'll want to check this one out. It also touches on 09/11, something I've been avoiding in fiction be it books or TV or movies. I know it's been nearly six years now, but I'm still not in a place where fiction about 09/11 doesn't really upset me. Gibson only touches on it, he doesn't try to explain it, there's no "this is what it's all about" moment. From a writing stand point, I think he handled it very well. It did, however, bring my nightmares back for a brief encore.

(And for those who make fun of me for shedding tears for characters who die in Harry Potter; yes, it is much worse when it happens to real people. This is why I don't watch the news).

I'm officially out of Gibson until next month, but I have Spook Country on preorder.

At that point I decided to take a break from sci-fi and read the latest Johanna Lindsey. Feel free to mock. It's like potato chips; I know it's not real food but I can't help myself. Plus, it only takes a day to read one of these. It's sort of the anti-Difference Engine.

Then I read The Ice Dragon by George R. R. Martin. Technically a children's book; it's very, very short. I liked the story, being a sucker for all things ice and snow related. No replacement for the long-awaited Dance with Dragons, though, and it sounds like that one is still more than a year off.
I read a bit of nonfiction this month, Parenting Beyond Belief, a collection of essays on raising children in nonreligious households. More of a "you're not alone" than a how-to, but being a secular homeschooler, I can never hear "you're not alone" enough, frankly. The homeschooling community is a lonely place for an evolutionist to be, I can tell you that. It has essays from Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and Julia Sweeney. (Actually, that's kind of a litmus test for whether you'll like the book. Have no idea who Dawkins or Shermer is? Not for you).

I finished off the month with two new releases. The first was Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. I quite enjoyed Crystal Rain, and this is a sort of sequel (although it introduces all new characters and only picks up the old ones when the story is well underway, a structure I quite liked). Ragamuffin is even better than Crystal Rain. There are lots of cool ideas in it, the story is fast-paced, and the character of Nashara is very well done, especially when you find out who she is. As you can tell from the cover, she kicks ass, but she goes deeper than that too. You know, I've often been bugged by the scene in the movie The Matrix when Neo and Trinity blow away all the security guards in the lobby before going up to save Morpheus. These are security guards, not agents, so they're human beings who are stuck in the Matrix and have no idea of what's really going on. Do Neo and Trinity have to kill them to get to Morpheus in time? Almost certainly yes. But does it really have to be such a rah-rah moment? Or am I the only one thinking, you know those are really innocent victims if you think about it. No one is offering them the pills. Which is all to say a similar situation faces Nashara at one point, and she sees it like it I would. She does what she has to, but there is no rah-rah about it. Of course that moment is sort of a footnote to a scene that just happened to stand out in my mind. The whole book is both cool and fun (you know, there's just not enough fun around these days. The fun quotient is really what divides the two Stars Wars trilogies in my mind. I like to go to dark places as much as the next person, but having fun has real value too), and I would recommend this book just for the names the ragamuffins give their ships. And like with Crystal Rain, Buckell put the first third of the novel up on his website so you can read it for free.

The last thing I read in June was the little number I mentioned buying because I loved the cover: Mainspring by Jay Lake. Another fast, fun, cool read. (You know, I think I needed these two books to come back from the movie Pan's Labyrinth, which was marvelously well done, and I adore Guillermo Del Toro, but that movie left me seriously bummed out for days) Lake takes the idea of a clockwork universe with God as the ultimate clockmaker and really runs with it. If we're all very, very good, maybe Hayao Miyazaki will make a movie of it.

(You know, I'm tempted to call both of these last two perfect beach reads, but "beach read" calls to mind books with pictures of some woman's feet on the cover. Have you walked down the book aisle in Target lately? They carry nothing but books with close-ups of women's feet, bare or in flip-flops. What could these books possibly be about? I couldn't tell you, the feet are such a turn-off I don't pick them up to read the back copy. But books with airships and gigantic gears or burly women in free fall with big-ass machine guns? That's what I want to read at the beach!)

Nope, didn't do it

Didn't finish the novel. Got real close, though. I added in the subplot elements, revised the two chapters, and wrote one and a half chapters. I only have a chapter and a half left to go to reach THE END. I'm really hoping I get to it by next Friday. The mood swings are killing me: I either think I've created something really, really cool, the book I've always wanted to read but could never find because no one was writing it, or I absolutely hate it and wonder why exactly I've given 18 months of my life to something no one besides me is ever going to want to read. (You can probably pick which one I'm feeling right now, can't you?).

Well, time to set it aside for the weekend and get cracking on the job that pays.

Sprinting to the finish line

...which I'm still hoping will be this Friday. It's a vacation week from homeschool, and we have no plans for the 4th (quite intentional, I assure you). Still, lots left to do. Three chapters to write, two chapters to majorly revise, and a certain subplot thread that needs to get woven in all over the place to tie it all together.

Man, I'm tired now! I blame the cat who mastered opening the screen door; I've only half-slept while listening for him to come back a couple of nights this week, and he seemed to prefer 4 a.m. for that. There's a bolt on the screen door now (and boy is he pissed!) but I haven't made up that sleep yet. Not to mention like a dope I volunteered to work extra to cover other people's time off, again, which is going to cut into my writing time.

On a completely unrelated note, this blog is rated:

With only one use of the word "crappy". I was hoping for a nice respectable PG-13. I should unleash my inner Tarantino and write something like this.

Maybe next week. Well, wish me luck!

(PS - I have my June book report half finished, but you probably won't see it until the WIP is done and put away.)

Things that bring me up when I'm down

1. Shiny new laptops. Or shiny refurbished laptops. Whatever. I should have caved a long time ago. Not only is this going to help the writing, now I won't have to print chapters posted on my critique group, read them and mark them up promptly, then have to wait days to find enough computer time to type up the notes and line edits. I can do it all on the laptop in the kitchen, while I'm waiting for this or that boy to finish his math. Sweet! Also, paper-free.
2. Only having three chapters left to go to finish the WIP, and these are the three chapters I know exactly what to say since they've been in my head since the beginning. My only fear: there is a big emotional moment coming up, and I have a tendency to go all Marti Noxon on the emotional moments. I'll probably just let it all go full drama mode (frankly, it's fun to write, all over the top, you know?) and then dial it back in on the second pass.
3. My husband saying that when I reach THE END the whole family should go out and celebrate, because it's a big milestone. I've heard so many horror stories lately of writers with spouses who don't support the time-suck which is writing (or the time-suck which is homeschooling), that he would just volunteer this is frankly very, very cool.
4. Andaz Apna Apna, a Bollywood movie I've watched about a hundred times now. It's hard not to feel uplifted, what with all the singing and dancing and bizarre comedy bits. (Nothing on YouTube except a few of the comedy scenes, which won't make sense as they don't have subtitles, so you'll have to take my word on this).
5. A certain 6-year-old who filled my office window with flowers from the clover in our yard, poking the little stems through the screen (he seems to have gotten a disproportionate amount of Irish blood in him; he loves his ma).

On an unrelated note, I just bought a book based solely on the cover. Well, I read the description and I've read enough of Jay Lake's short fic to know I like his style, but to be frankly honest, I knew I'd be buying this as soon as I saw the cover:

A sort of survivors guilt, I suppose...

As a solution to various problems you may encounter upon the way, let me suggest this: Make Good Art. It's very simple. But it seems to work.
Life fallen apart? Make good art. True love ran off with the milkman? Make good art. Bank foreclosing? Make good art. - Neil Gaiman

To which I'll add: "A third of your department laid off with no warning because the Filipinos are cheaper? Make good art."

*Sigh.* Rough night. Well, at least it wasn't me making anyone cry at the department meeting this time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finish the novel, listen to some Nick Drake, and have some wine. Maybe not in that order.

In Which I Cave In

I hate making major purchases. Hate it. I cried the day we bought our Subaru, and the negotiations for buying that TV were extensive (spread out over several months, but in the end I got built-in bookshelves in trade. Plus it helps that Quin's bonus check was enough to cover the TV he wanted and the new fridge that I was pushing for. Our electric bill has taken a noticeable drop since we got the new fridge, confirming my suspicion that the other one only looked like it was shut most of the time).

Not that I'm particularly frugal; my book spending borders on the out of control. But that's just ten or twenty dollars at a time. Spending hundreds of dollars all at once... I guess I'm always paranoid that some major disaster will befall us and I'll desperately wish I'd held onto that money. Or something. This isn't rational, I know.

All of this is just to say that I made another big purchase today, and the very worst kind, the kind that is something just for me and not the family. I bought myself a laptop. It's a refurbished Dell with no bells or whistles of any kind, as cheap as I could go and still get tech support (which is why I didn't pick anything up on eBay, although I could've gone cheaper there). I haven't actually gotten it yet; perhaps when it's here I'll be all excited and not low-level nauseous that I just dropped a load of cash all at once. I've been debating buying one for more than a year now. The last week's worth of writing time spent copy-typing from notebooks kind of clinched it for me. I think it would behoove me to find a more efficient way of doing this. Now I'm very fond of writing longhand, I'm not sure if I can be creative the same way with a keyboard (and that worry is fueling the nausea, I'm sure), but now that the homeschooling is taking more time than before, my writing time is feeling the pinch. So I pooled my quarterly bonus and some of my overtime money and took the plunge.

*sigh*

At any rate, I have four chapters left to go on the WIP plus some things I need to go back and add in earlier chapters. I've had this problem with integrating the two parts of the story, and there needs to be more conflict and foreshadowing earlier on. After much stewing I think I know what I need to do now. I'm on track for my July 6 deadline, then I'll let this whole thing sit for Harry Potter Month before giving it one last hard edit and then it's off on the query-go-round.

I've never submitted to agents before. I think that nausea just slid up a notch...

It probably doesn't mean anything...

But The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which usually only takes ten days to get a rejection back from, held onto "Blood and Ink" for more than a month. And the rejection is from Mr. Gordon Van Gelder, not the Slush God.

Yes, it probably means nothing. Still, I like that feeling like maybe, just maybe, I got a little closer. And now I have a story free for this quarter's Writers of the Future (I was beginning to think I'd have to give it a miss; I don't feel short story brilliance in me at the moment, plus the deadline falls before my self-imposed novel deadline).

My foreign language addiction

So I've mentioned before that I have this little addiction to learning new foreign languages. Now there's a limit to how far one can go with no one else to talk to in that language, so I usually pick up a sense of the mechanics and a feel for the pronunciation and then move on to the next one. I have at one point or another studied Spanish, German, Latin, Japanese, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. I'm not remotely fluent in anything (one could make a pretty convincing argument against my fluency in English on same days), and my phobia against talking to anyone I don't already know pretty much limits my chances of ever practicing any of this in conversation. But I do like to read things in foreign languages, and the internet is great for finding stuff not in English. (I've read novels in Spanish and in German, although it's been so long since I've used my German I don't think I could do it now).

Mostly I do this because I find language tapes more diverting than TV shows when I'm treading the mill (a necessary but tedious 30 minutes I try to get in every day). The Pimsleur series in particular is excellent; it's all oral so you don't need to be holding a phrase book at the same time or anything, and rather than being a listen and repeat the phrase type thing, you have to come up with responses on your own to questions in the language you're learning. It really taxes the memory; a challenging kind of fun. The problem for me was that they only go up to 10 lessons in most languages (hence my mere smattering of Swedish and Norwegian). About a month ago when I was choosing which language to do next, I decided I wanted to really delve into one of the languages Pimsleur had more than 10 lessons in, and I wanted it to be something really challenging.

It came down to a coin toss between Japanese and Mandarin Chinese (I have tons of movies in these two languages, and it would be fun to understand them without the subtitles. Sadly, Cantonese is one of the languages Pimsleur only does 10 lessons in. I have more Catonese than Mandarin movies). Well, Mandarin won. This certainly has served its purpose as far as treading the mill goes; I've quit finding excuses not to do it because I look forward to the Chinese lessons. But the problem was as I've mentioned above, I largely use my foreign language skills to read, and this is strictly an oral program. Plus, Chinese? Well, I don't need to tell you their writing system is a bit of an intellectual Mount Everest. Luckily, it's my kind of rock climbing. I went out and got myself a book on Chinese writing and a monster stack of index cards.

And actually this plays into my whole being an example to my sons thing. Seeing mom learn something which is quite challenging for her by drilling flash cards is a much better motivator than just promising it really helps to learn that way. Aidan is learning Latin with flash cards pretty much on his own. I only go over them with him once when he gets his new words to make sure he's pronouncing it all correctly and then he drills them on his own while I drill mine.

I only recognize about 100 words so far (pretty good for a month's effort, though). It's enough so I can page through some of my books that have Chinese in them and pick out characters here and there I know. Then I found the coolest thing on YouTube: Wilber Pan karoake. (Wilber Pan is another one of those acts I saw on IMF, fell in love, and then had to buy his stuff from some guy in Hong Kong on eBay because it's not available here. Honestly, IMF is evil). Not only does this video have the written Chinese to match what he's singing (in Mandarin, not Cantonese, since he's from Taiwan) (actually he's from West Virginia, but that's not important now), they light up as he sings them. It's like the world's coolest teaching tool.

But my favorite video of his doesn't have the karoake feature. Which is a shame. But it does have subtitles, and it does feature Wilber Pan in a sort of kung fu epic pastiche. Cool.

My May book report

OK, my house is back in order (I would post pics, but to be honest it doesn't look any different. When the shelves are finished and the doors are on, I'll post a pic), I'm all caught up on critiquing I've been dreadfully negligent with (sort of, there's that stack of short stories for the Backspace contest I haven't even started on yet), and I only worked 19 hours this weekend instead of 21 or 22, so I'm feeling pretty good! I finished up working early enough on Sunday to take the boys to see Pirates of the Caribbean. I liked the second one better than the first; I now like the third better than the second. There's no way to craft an ending that will satisfy everyone, of course, but I have to say this ending satisfied me very, very much. I particularly appreciate the care they took to give every character a nice ending, whether it be Admiral Norrington or the characters I refer to as the Pirate Rosencratz and Guildenstern and the British Navy Rosencratz and Guildenstern (if they have actual names, I don't know them, but I bet you know who I mean).

My only complaint: I could have had a little more Chow-Yun Fat. On the upside, I got a new toy yesterday which should meet all my Chow-Yun Fat needs:

(There was also a specific image in that movie that is nearly exactly something that happens in my novel. Gave me quite a chill. I could probably describe mine better. Well, that's always true. Still, very cool movie.)

At any rate, I have this monthly book wrap-up to write, then that stack of short stories to read, then it's back to the novel. It's been tough finding time to write these last three weeks; homeschooling a fourth grader and a first grader is a lot more work than homeschooling a third grader and a kindergartner was. We're working together as a family to find a way of doing things that still gives me time to write, because apparently I get a bit shrewish when I'm not writing. (I wonder, if I say "shrew" is that going to up my "Kiss me Kate spanking scene" hits? Probably not as much as putting "Kiss me Kate spanking scene" in here. Well, lately my biggest source of activity has been the "Which Avatar character are you?" quiz and not spanking. But I digress).

May was a banner month for reading with 13 books. Sadly, many of these were either new buys or from the library, so it didn't really take that To Be Read number down much. Actually, since I put everything on Library Thing and labeled my TBR stack, that number went up (apparently I'd missed some things on my first tally). It now stands at 273.

Now the largest reason the homeschooling is more work these days is that first grade is a big change from kindergarten. The other big change is that Aidan moved from grammar stage to logic stage in the trivium (which is how we homeschool, classical style refers to the trivium. For the wildly curious, here's an essay on what that means from the woman who wrote the book which I've been using rather loosely as a guide). Part of that is that he's added logic into his course load (he loves it, but if you know Aidan that's not in the least surprising). Another part of that is he is learning to work more independently. I now give him a list of assignments on Monday that he has to have finished by Friday and he decides when he does what. Which has led to some very long Fridays, but it's an important skill to learn. The other big change is that his literature-based history program now has him reading chapter books and short novels rather than picture books.

Which of course means I have to read those books as well. As a student I had an uncanny ability to pretend to have read a book I hadn't (I got an A on my Robinson Crusoe test and paper in college without ever getting past page 30, and that was sans Cliff Notes or ever seeing the movie version. It pays to stay awake in class). I don't think I can fake it as well as a teacher. Plus, there's the whole setting a good example thing.

So three of the books I read were for history: The Door in the Wall by Marguerite De Angeli (dull, dull, dull! Strangely enough, Aidan liked this one better than I did), The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly (I quite liked this one. Bonus points for trusting us on "Philosopher's Stone". Am I the only one who resents that American Harry Potter is "Sorcerer's Stone", as if Americans cringe at the word philospher?), and Beowulf: A New Telling by Robert Nye, which I also quite liked (not as well as the Seamus Heaney, but that one would be a bit much for a 9-year-old. He'll be reading it in high school for sure).

Four of the books I read were from the library. Two were Robert Zubrin books I read for Mars research for the novel: Entering Space and First Landing (technically a novel, but in actuality the more helpful of the two for my purposes). I also have been toying with the idea of writing a YA novel next (keyword: toying). To that end, I've been combing YA book lists and putting stacks of them on hold at the library. Most I only really skim through. I'm trying to get a general sense of content, length, and that. They are overwhelming fantasy; what I'm toying with would be straight-up sci-fi. I haven't had much luck finding current sci-fi YA. I did find YA steampunk which I liked enough to read all the way through: Airborn and Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel (the one is the sequel to the other). If you like airships and ornithopters and steam power, I highly recommend them. As with all YA, it's not just for kids.

The last Hellblazer finally turned up from my Christmas batch: Reasons to be Cheerful. Perhaps it was just reading it on its own after reading all the others back to back, but it felt very disjointed. It didn't really have a beginning, and it definitely didn't have an ending.

I got books for Mothers Day as well: Hellboy: Wake the Devil (Hellboy is one of my favorite comic book movies; the source material is of course quite good as well), and John Scalzi's trilogy Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. A very satisfying read. He gets compared to Heinlein a lot; I think he's better than Heinlein. Scalzi's women actually act like real women, just for starters. (This is a long-running argument in my house, Heinlein's women. I do give him points for trying, but I don't really like his women characters).

That just leaves the book I read first in May: Virtual Light by William Gibson. That was the third time I've read it. It's my favorite Gibson novel so far. I have a few I've not read yet, and those I'm tackling next.

You know, after I finish the novel. I'm knocking that deadline back a week. I expect to be finished by July 6. This will give me one more homeschool vacation week to get things done but will still have me done before all the Harry Potter things start coming out (there was a trailer before Pirates that had more scenes than the one I'd already seen. I'm beginning to suspect that my favorite Harry Potter book is about to become my favorite Harry Potter movie).

At the expense of seeming like I spend too much time on You Tube...

Look, I was a die-hard MTV fan back in my teen years. You know, back when they used to play music videos. These days, I'm just grateful that my favorite band has so many Brazilian fans who post crappy copies of their videos on You Tube or I'd never see any of it. (Music videos are basically advertising for records, yes? So why don't more bands put them up on their websites? You know, like OK GO does.)

Now, it would not be the weirdest thing I've ever seen on You Tube to see 20-year-old concert footage of my favorite band cut to a John Lennon song (at the very least, it loses out to the scenes from The Matrix cut to "Lifelines". Most a-ha songs don't really mesh with The Matrix; that one really doesn't). Imagine my surprise, that's not John Lennon singing! How is it possible that an a-ha cover of a John Lennon song exists, and I don't have it?

Just one way: it's part of an Amnesty International compiliation which won't be out until June 25 (which just happens to be someone's birthday; however, I don't think this is on his wish list).




(Look, my house is still in disarray as that quick finishing of the bookcases that was supposed to be done in one day still isn't finished. My computer is all-but-inaccessible. Perhaps next week I can write a blog that takes more than five minutes. Like my May book report, for instance. Soon. Soon.)

Well that's interesting

I didn't think anyone saw what I saw in a Keanu Reeves performance. Apparently someone else does, and it's Joss Whedon. Go figure.

Library Thing

I've spent most of this week moving books around. Quin is going to spend the long weekend sanding and finishing the built-in bookshelves. (I'll be spending this weekend working. All three days. Don't even get me started on that one. The really sad thing is I volunteered for it...)

The project still won't be done. The shelves need to be sanded and finished separately and have the front strips added to them, and the bottom cabinets will still need doors, but this is the last time I'm going to be moving all my books around. And I did pretty much move everything to make room for the living room books. I don't like stacking them on the floor in my office since it's a basement with a tendancy for wetness (although all of that drainage work Quin did last summer seems to have done the trick, so that's good news).

As long as I was touching every book, I decided to go ahead and tackle that cataloging project I've been meaning to get around to. Those of you reading this at Blogspot will notice a new sidebar feature, three random books from my library. I probably shouldn't admit to how much time I've spent refreshing the page just to see what combos come up. So now if you go to my Library Thing page you can see all 1906 books I own (no making fun of my extensive Johanna Lindsey collection, or my role playing games, thank you very much). I went through and added a few tags as well. I've cordoned off the books which really belong to my boys and books which are sheet music and not actually book books (actually, I'm not sure why I did that. I'm thinking with sand here these days). I also tagged the books I use for homeschooling (it's possible to do this homeschooling thing with fewer books, of course, but those massive encyclopedias are just so cool).

Most significantly, I tagged the books on my To Be Read list. All 277 of them (yep, that number just keeps creeping up). For those of you so inclined, now you can see what I'm neglecting and chew me out for not getting to the Niven or the Zimmer Bradley or the Dickens.

I showed this Library Thing page to Quin, the author cloud and author gallery are particular favorites of mine, and statistics are always cool. Not only did he not particularly share my geeked state, he noted that this probably meant I haven't written anything this week. Which is pretty much true (I eeked out about 500 words over five days).

I have nothing much to say...

...working hard on that thing I'm working on. I did want to post this video I saw, possibly the funnest music video I've seen in a great long while (it's not in English, so you'll never see it on MTV). These kids must go to hip-hop dancing cram school; they've got the moves. I saw this with the family on IMF the other night. During the middle bit, Quin remarked he didn't think they had any open fields in Japan. I said I think there must be just the one; I would swear that's the same field the Prince of Space lands on in that classic movie.

My youngest is now six!

And he came home from the barber's with a faux-hawk:

It's a bit short for a faux-hawk, but he's enormously proud of it.

I installed the DVD drive in the PC yesterday, but the software that came with it does absolutely nothing unless you buy the $60 upgrade. I mean it, nothing! It won't even play the disc. So it will be just a bit longer before I can post clips here (I'm exploring options that don't involve giving money to companies that enjoy raping their consumers. What, me pissed?)

I have been doing the two-man kung fu forms with Quin again, watching them on the video to fill in the gaps in our collective memories. I remembered more than I thought I had. You can totally tell I'm starting from a non-kung fu state, though; my arms and shins are covered in little green bruises. Once I get used to blocking punches and kicks again I'll toughen up and that won't happen. It does remind me of the last time I started out, and one of my classmates at lab tech school was convinced I was being abused but couldn't think of a way to broach the subject with someone she'd just met.

Right, well, back at it. For some reason when I'm writing I keep hearing Michael Biehn's voice in my head: "Ease up! You're just grinding metal!" I'm sure it doesn't mean anything...

This and that

Time to start week two of the writing sprint. Wish me luck! Some things to clear up first:

Reading report for April: I read seven books, but four of them I'd read before. I read two more LeGuin novels (The Lathe of Heaven, which used the Tao idea of the uncovered block in a really cool way and also contained the word "odiose" (Backspacers will get why I'm geeked about that), and The Eye of Heron, which was a bummer). I had a few more to go but wanted to get away from Tao novels while I'm reaching the Tao part of my own novel. So I picked up The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke. If you loved Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell, definitely pick this one up. It's a collection of short stories, some connecting to the novel and some not, but all very good. (I'm totally jealous; I would kill to write something that was illustrated by Charles Vess). Then I decided to dig back in to Gibson. I read Gibson like I read Harry Potter; every time I want to read a new one I'm compelled to re-read all the prior novels first. Which is probably how I came to have four of them stacked up unread. So I read Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and I'm working on Virtual Light right now, which is the last one I've read previously.

I admit, I'm a heathen. While I'll admit that Neuromancer is his most important work, I actually like MLO and VL better. Kumiko and Chevette are deeper characters than Molly, I think is what does it for me. I particularly like Kumiko and how she wears her mother's expressions.

To be read stack now stands at 253. Yes, I'm moving backwards.

One other thing before I start my daily sprint. I've been nagging my husband for months and months to go back to our kung fu class and record some of the instructors going through the forms. I can only half remember them, and my favorite form, 18 point, I can't remember at all. He finally went and filmed one Sunday in December (when I was of course working), but he was using someone else's camera (it was nicer than ours).

I finally just this weekend got to see that tape (my husband lives in a different time stream then I do, I swear). I'm working out a way to get some of it on the PC so I can post some clips. I might have that worked out by Wednesday. In the mean time, here are some clips from You Tube to whet your appetite.

The first one is just Toph, the Earthbender who practices Kwong Sai Jook Lum, the style of kung fu I've done and hope to do again. The clip is long and very roughly edited (basically, someone took my favorite episode "The Blind Bandit" and cut it down to just the fight scenes). Toph's stance, the way she holds her hands, the way she walks her horse, are all spot-on for our style. And I love when she does the three point strike.

(Some would argue that I worry too much about the details when I write. I generally don't argue, but secretly I know how I geeked I am when someone goes through the effort to get something right. I would guess the number of people who watch AVATAR who can appreciate what they got right with Toph is in the 50s, maybe. Was it worth the effort? See, I just don't think the creators think of it that way. I don't think of it that way. It's a labor of love; it's all worth it).

At any rate, here's Toph:



This one doesn't have as much Toph in it, but it's set to "Kung Fu Fighting". There's another on their set to "Mortal Kombat", but this one won by a hair with me:

It's now the end of week one

So here's what I've accomplished in week one of my three week marathon:

Monday: 3495
Tueday: 2736
Wednesday: 1542
Thursday: 3353
Friday: 1158

Which is about 4000 words short of my goal for this week. Of course there's always the weekend; I might get time to write on the weekend (I think it's a tad more likely that the Swedish Bikini Team will stop by and bring me some really great beer).

Still, that's a nice chunk more than a usual week's worth of writing. In the normal flow of things, I average 1000 words a day. To give a sense of perspective to my non-writer friends, Stephen King in his book On Writing recommends writing 2000 words a day. Now Stephen King doesn't also have another fulltime job and homeschool two kids. But I also strongly suspect that Mr. King puts out more than 2000 words a day.

On a related note, Neil Gaiman recently posted some pictures on his blog of the notebook he's writing his current novel in. It's a gorgeous leather-bound Italian number and mine are just artist sketch books, but mostly I'm jealous because that bastard never crosses anything out!

So I thought I'd share my own pics. So far The Tao of Troth is in three notebooks, thusly:

The kirigami decorations are there because otherwise I have a hard time figuring out which is the front cover and which is the back. My usual inability to grasp simple things becomes even more hampered when I'm in write mode, so...

At any rate, the notebooks aren't all straight-up writing. I put a lot of things in there for reference. This page is a list of every member of the Norse village by family and age, which room in the house they sleep in, a table with all of the Norse dieties in Old Norse spellings, and a diagram of the Nine Worlds, just in case I need to know where Jotunheimr is in relation to Asgardhr.

I also have notes in there on Chinese alchemy. One of the characters from the last half of the novel is a Taoist alchemist. I very much doubt any of this will come up, since it's not really relevant to the plot, but it did help me understand the way he thinks:

This is an example of a page when the writing is going very well. Only a couple of cross-outs, a little "ooh, say this too!", and a Post-It clarifying something I thought was true when I was writing but saved the actual looking up for later (that the Spanish and Old Norse for "Greenland" is almost identical).

And here's a page from a more typical day. The "No. Dammit, no. No, not that either. Argh!" kind of day. (I don't remember this particular day, but statistically the little trailing off line marks the point when I was suddenly compelled to unload the dishwasher, or clean the bathroom, or start learning Swedish).

OK, it's time now to make dinner and then begin the endless drudgery which is the weekend.

Day 1 of my three week writing marathon

As mentioned previously, I'm trying to write the last half of my novel by June 30, with the plan that I'll tackle the majority of that in the next three weeks while we're on a break from homeschooling.

Now last week was a very good week for writing. I finished a short and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXII (for which I got one of those nice rejections where it seems like the editor really is regretful that they can't buy it; they already have something else too similar. The story in question has already moved on to the next slush pile). That one I had been working on for a week before, had my critique group give it a good go-over, then rewrote it to fix the problems. You know, my usual writing thang. I was working on that in the afternoons during my writing time.

But I also had an idea for the latest Backspace contest that I really wanted to commit to paper. But that MZB story was taking up all my time. So I broke from my usual way of writing by staying up til 2 a.m. two nights running to write the whole thing out, then getting up early on Friday to type it all up, give it a rather rigorous edit (it was 800 words over the parameters, I had to lose an entire scene plus a lot of adjectives it probably didn't need in the first place).

I must say, I was very pleased with how it came out, considering. I might even consider changing up my writing habits (except I'm still feeling sleep lag; the problem with my schedule is that there is never any time to make up missed sleep. I have no "weekend" to sleep late, it's school or work every day of the week).

But the other thing about writing that short is that I was writing at a sprint, and I didn't edit it much before posting. Which makes me wonder how the novel would come out if I wrote it the same way.

So the plan is to write all the way to THE END in the next three weeks, a first draft commited to paper at a sprint. I'll wait until the end to put in the computer and start tweeking. Since I religiously outline, I know exactly what needs to happen and when, so this should be doable. Barring collapsing from exhaustion, of course.

So, Day 1 (yesterday): 3450 words. Pretty much all of chapter nine (although I did stick a few Post-Its on there, so that for draft 2 I remember to actually describe a few things which need describing). Now Monday is the one day of the week I never work (unless someone specifically calls me to ask me to), so I'm not expecting to hit that number every day. Still, not too shabby.

Since Quin was in Ohio I rewarded myself with a Jet Li movie: The Legend. I laughed my ass off, but I think the writing sprint had me a little punchy. Still, any movie where a man says "The man who can beat my wife can marry my daughter" is by definition my kind of movie (and when the man who beats his wife is actually the hero's mother in disguise...)

On a totally unrelated note, here's a little quiz I picked up from Written Wyrdd:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The same web site had another quiz which I took:

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

You know, it was a lot of the same questions, and I answered the same way. How I ended up being both Gandhi and Apocalypse Now I don't know. Didn't see that coming...

Energy Absorb Skill!

It's possible I've gone off the deep end with the wuxia. My boys are starting to think I'm nuts, but there's just something about watching a ton of these movies that makes you want to not only do kung fu, but shout out your moves when you do them. "Swinging sword!" "Shadowless kick!"

I think if I could say them in Chinese it'd be cooler, eh?

Novel research is so much fun (especially when you really bend the definition of "research").

Well, the real point of this post was to make a personal goal public. I intend to finish the WIP by June 30. Since I started last January, that would be 18 months from start to finish, much shorter than the 5 years the previous novel took to write (although in my defense, infants are horrible distractions with no sense of boundaries or personal time). I think it's doable because summer in general gives me more time to write, as the boys go to the park every night and stay until it's completely dark, and also because I'll have a three week chunk of no homeschooling, as it will be the boys' between grades break. The further along we go on this homeschooling adventure the less grades mean anything; the only thing that marks fourth grade different from third is the math book, everything else just continues along at its own pace. Still, since we school year-round (three weeks on and one week off every month - we're not nuts!), the three week vacation in May is always nice, especially since the two weeks we take off in December are usually desperately needed for cranky, too-much-overtime-at-work Mom.

Note for Blogspot readers: If you notice that the Zokutou word meter in the corner of the blog isn't moving, that doesn't mean I'm not writing like a madwoman. It just means I haven't copy-typed out of my notebooks. Having spent last week's writing time copy-typing short stories and a bit of the novel out of my notebooks (did you notice it bump up a little? it did!), all I can say is that's a lot like work! I suppose I shouldn't wait so long and then have to do it all at once (or maybe get a program that can read my handwriting off scanned notebook pages - that would be cool).

At any rate, wish me luck!