We finished the SWTWC presentations today.  As part of the process, I shared with them my expectations for the activity, and then I had them write a reflection letting me know what they thought of the activity.  It all looks good.

I just heard from the illustrious slushmaster that Realms of Fantasy will be taking my short story, "The Radio Magician."  I think that means I'll be in Realms two issues in a row since they took "The Light of a Thousand Suns" at the end of October.

The entire new TOC is here.

Here's the assignment (instead of a traditional essay):  My honors 10th graders finished reading Something Wicked This Way Comes, a book that is so cool that almost every teacher in the department teaches it (replacing one of the other choices, Bless Me Ultima, Tom Sawyer or Catcher in the Rye). 

The students had to find a quote from the book that they would like to illustrate.  This is the easy part since you can hardly open that book without finding something arresting to contemplate.  Then they illustrated it on a piece of poster board with the quote included.  Doing the art is fun and a nice change of pace from the other ways we have worked with literature, particularly since we are at the end of the year.  The payoff in the assignment, though, is when they present their quote to the class in a sort of show and tell of their poster. They have to connect the scene they chose to illustrate with a theme in the book.  I've included one their posters here.

I spend a lot of time talking about theme as just what a work says about its topics.  So, Romeo and Juliet, for example, has numerous topics, like friendship, love, violence, revenge, etc.  But a topic is not a theme.  It doesn't become a theme until you make a statement about the topic.  "War" is only a topic, but "War is hell" is a theme.

I also stress that there really is no such thing as the theme in a work.  Works have multiple themes, including some that appear to contradict each other.  A teacher who says, "This is the theme" in a work is expressing an opinion, not a statement of fact.  A theme, to be valid, must be supportable from the text, so just any old statement about a story isn't necessarily a theme, but there are many ways to look at text.

At any rate, most of the kids find it kind of liberating that I'm not expecting them to find the "right" answer for theme, and that if they can support their interpretation, their expression of the work's theme can be valid.  Most honors kids get the idea that all literature is essentially metaphorical.  That we tell stories because they are meaningful to us in some way.  If they weren't meaningful, we'd be left when the work is done scratching our heads and asking, "What was the point of that?"  A discussion of theme is just a way of asking what the work says about the universe or the human condition.  Some stories have such familiar themes that they hardly seem worth discussing, like "love conquers all," or "athletes who are pure of heart can defeat stronger or faster but corrupt competitors."

Something Wicked This Way Comes presents interesting themes in unfamiliar ways.  The discussions of the posters so far have been wonderful.

Tonight was my last night for the college creative writing class.  I end by giving them the "everything I wish other writing teachers had told me but didn't" lecture.  We talk a little about growing as writers and publishing.  I end with this pep talk about why writing is good for them, whether they decided to write for publication, or just tinker around on their own.  It's kind of a pep talk that uses an extended simile.  I stretch the simile quite a bit by the end.

Writing does for the head, what jogging does for the body.

• Like jogging, writing requires dedication & a consistent schedule to be the most effective  (three thirty minute sessions a week will do more for you than one four hour marathon on Saturday).
• Like jogging, writing must be fitted into a schedule that already looks full--the benefit is writers organize their time better (The best time for me to write is between 4 & 6 am)
• Like jogging, a writer must work her way into it, but with time and training, impressive efforts are possible (Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in one forty-eight hour period, but he'd been training for years).
• Writing helps the writer lose brain fat and build the thinking muscle--the fat caused by consuming the junk food of television, and the predigested pap of People Magazine.
• Writing fights the build up of cholesterol on the arteries of imagination.
• Writing improves the efficiency of the heart of the intellect.
• Writing clears out the lungs of thought.
• Writing keeps us young (imagination & creativity are the hallmarks of youth) 
• Writing encourages us to give up mentally unhealthy habits (not thinking about what we hear, accepting written words as gospel, keeping us open minded)
• Writing improves our sex lives--nah!  probably not (though some people maintain that half of good sex is thinking about it, and who is a better, more practiced thinker than the writer?)
• Writing helps us live longer:  by stretching our subjective lives, we both notice more about our own past and pay more attention to our present.  You know how sometimes you can be reading in a book and realize that you have no idea what the last couple of pages said?  Our lives can be like that too, although the "couple of pages" can be a couple of days or couple of years.  I think that lost time happens less frequently to writers.  They are more aware more of the time.

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Really Cool Phrase for the Day: Caledonian Antisyzygy, which means "a combination of opposites."  I found it while doing some reading on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

We have two weeks left of this school year.  The seniors are gone, so my days loosened up a little (I lost a full class of seniors and a sprinkling of them in two other classes).  This week is graduation, which will be extra special for me since my oldest graduates Wednesday.  It's also his birthday, so we get to double the festivities.   For the first time in my teaching career, I won't be sitting with the senior class.  Since my son will be in the ceremony, I'll get to be with my family in the stands.  This means that I won't have to spend my time trying to stop beach balls from flying around or watching for illicit drinking.

I've been teaching for 27 years, so most of my life has been tied to the rhythm of the school year.  The beginning of summer feels exactly the same to me now as it did when I was in 3rd grade.  I get a little giddy just thinking about the alarm clock not starting my day.

At the same time the academic year is wrapping up, I'm also getting ready for what looks to be a busy summer.  On the writing front, I want to finish the plot book and have it into Fairwood Press by the middle of August.  Also, I'll plan out the new novel, finish a couple of short projects and continue with my non-fiction work at The Fix On-line.  I'll be doing a bit of convention traveling too.

Somewhere in there I want to fit in golf, hiking, fishing, rafting and yard work.  Whew!

Dylan John Van Pelt: Class of 2008

Another great hike in the Tabaguache today.  We scored what I believe is a Desert Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus magister cephlaflavus), although it might have been a Plateau Lizard (Sceloporus undulatus).  I couldn't get a look at its underside to see if it had the blue markings.  The Plateau Lizard is called a swift or blue belly commonly.

I took a picture of it with my wife's hand nearby so you can get a sense of its size.

We also startled a Striped Whipsnake that took off out of sight before I could get the picture.  This is our second snake in two trips.  I don't remember seeing a snake in this area in the last couple of years.  Maybe there were a lot more small rodents or the right kind of insects for them to eat last year, so we're having a mini population explosion.

Also, defying my earlier declaration that collared lizards are less commonly seen, we spotted another one.  I think their coloration is spectacular, so seeing one is such a treat.

I hope no one minds my deviation from my normal writing/education posts for these nature shots.  The hiking is a big part of my down time.  If I'm by myself, a lot of good thinking has a chance to bubble up, and if I'm with my wife or family, it's good conversation and shared experience time.  Win-win either way.

This whole writing gig is clearly made to look harder than it actually is by elitist Hemingway wannabes who only sound literate because they spend countless hours polishing one-line bon mots to sound spontaneous and witty, like that guy you saw at a party once who went home with three women while you discovered after two hours that the quiet beauty you were trying to woo was actually the coat rack.

Clearly all that someone needs to do to reap the rock star like monetary and social benefits of writing  is to regularly visit a web site like Seventh Sanctum.  Here, you can find such easy short cuts as the Quick Story Idea Generator that with the simple push of the button will get you started on your way with gems like "The theme of this story: dark adventure. The main character: weak champion. The start of the story: research. The end of the story: funeral," or "The theme of this story: psychological horror. The main character: driven heroine. The start of the story: conspiracy. The end of the story: insight." 

If you don't like that format, you can use an alternate story story program, like Story Generator that might give you the right push with this suggestion, "The story is about a technician, an artistic fisherman, and a dispirited princess who is engaged to a snide boatman. It takes place in a military town in a solar system of magical space travel. The story begins with a birth, climaxes with someone building a dwelling, and ends with an inheritance. The formation of the UN plays a major role in this story."

The site is useful for much more than that, though.  You can quickly come up with characters, like this one who I got from using the Vampire Generator program, "This wise male vampire has deep-set violet eyes with pupils shaped like crosses, and that can extend on stalks. His thick, wavy, night-black hair is neck-length and is worn in a dignified style. He is inhumanly tall and has a graceful build. He has an elegant nose and large hands. He can turn into a cloud of dust. He has the standard vampiric disabilities. He feeds on human ecstacy."

You can skip around to generate names, settings, descriptions . . . why, just about anything you would like.

This is high tech and so much better than the old days when you had to buy a book, like The Romance Writers' Phrase Book, where you had to thumb through a table of contents to find the chapters on eyes or voice descriptions if you couldn't be bothered to make up one of your own.  Who could resist a phrasing from the eyes chapter like, "There was an invitation in the smoldering depths of his eyes," or from the voice chapter, "He answered in a tense, clipped voice that forbade any questions."

[disclaimer:  Actually, I thought the Seventh Sanctum website was both entertaining and funny.  I don't think they intend it to be a real writing resource.  I'm pretty sure they don't.  Almost positive.]

Yesterday I went to a meeting for our "Scholars" program at the high school.  What is happening is that our local college, Mesa State, will now offer some of their first year classes at the high school to be taught by high school teachers.  The intention is that some of our seniors have completed their high school requirements and can start their college classes.  This way they can do it without paying tuition.  The college benefits by attracting more students.  The high school benefits by keeping the students on campus longer, and the students benefit by starting their college careers earlier.  Good news all the way around.

I'll be teaching the English class.  No problem for me because I've taught it before, and I'm teaching at the college in the evening.  The other three teachers are long-time high school teachers who haven't taught at the college, though, and that was the source of the educational dissonance in our meeting yesterday.  Once the representative from the college was done making her introductory remarks about the program, she asked if their were any questions.  The other three teachers started asking about expected behaviors, departmental standards, course syllabus, etc.  The representative answered a lot of the questions with, "Well, that will be up to you."  The more she said this, the more uncomfortable the other three teachers became, and I realized why: in the high school, the emphasis in the last few years has been all about measurable, quantifiable, standard results.  We have been moving toward "common assessments," "shared vision," "departmental goals," and a host of other homogenizing activities.  Our district talks about a "guaranteed education," which means, essentially, that no matter which school a kid goes to in our district, she will get the same experience.

College is not like this.  College celebrates academic freedom and trust in the instructors to achieve the class's goals (which are stated in the most general of terms).  At Mesa, there are about ten teachers who teach English 111, the introductory level class I'll be teaching.  They all use different text books.  They create their own syllabus.  They achieve the class goals any way they want to.  The college trusts that the instructors know what they are doing, and they let them do it.  One teacher could be very project oriented, another lecture oriented, a third works the class on collaborative efforts, another emphasizes a study of models, etc.

It suddenly occurred to me that many college teachers have taken no educational theory classes.  They have their expertise in the field behind them, but no course work in how to design a lesson plan, or on writing standards based questions, or even in student psychology.  They learn on the job.

I don't know what to make of this dissonance, but I notice that it is there.  Lately in the public schools the emphasis has been in taking away a teacher's input into the class.  The No Child Left Behind testing has pushed the individual teacher into the background.  The result is that many teachers feel that their knowledge, passion and professionalism no longer matter.  As several teachers have said to me at one time or another, after one or numerous "best practices" meeting, "Why don't they just video tape the teacher who does everything the way they want it done, and then show it to the classes.  Clearly they don't need me."

Since Patrick Swenson (tbclone47 ) at Fairwood Press has made the announcement officially, I can chime in myself with the news that I will be publishing my third, yet to be named, short story collection next year.  We're also planning on releasing in '09 the long-awaited and much discussed book on plot for writers if everything comes together the way it should this summer.

A two-book year!  This is exciting.

I like all parts of the book-making process, from the initial proposal (which is always vaguely orgasmic, as in, "Oh, my god, we're going to do a book!), choosing the contents, lining up an intro writer, designing a cover, previewing the galleys, releasing ARCs, getting the first shipment of the completed book, doing the release signing, and basking in the glory (hopefully).

More news as I know it.

We were up on the Tabaguache Trail again today.  Late last week we had a couple of rainy days which provoked everything in the desert that flowers to flower.  I could have spent the entire hour of time we had to hike taking pictures of flowering things within one-hundred yards of the car.

I think the flower I have here are your ordinary prickly pears.  They're gorgeous when a whole hillside of them go into bloom.  We have a family history with the prickly pear.  When my wife and I were hiking with my first born when he was three, he did a face-first trip onto an bed of prickly pear.  We spent an hour picking the needles out of him.  He was unhappy, as you can imagine.

I love my macro setting on the camera.  These pics I'm sharing are amateurish compared to the_flea_king's beautiful shots, but they're fun to take and make good backgrounds for my desktop.

As always, clicking on the picture reveals more detail.

I've been grading for four hours at Panera Bread.  There's a guy sitting in the table next to me, staring into his laptop, who was here when I arrived.  He's in his early 20s, sporting a ragged beard, black tee shirt, beige carpenter pants, and sandals.  He's equipped with a headphones/microphone set, and I think he's been playing World of Warcraft the whole time.  He says things occasionally into his microphone, like "Greetings Swordthumper.  We're waiting for Gizzardqueen . . . No, she had to finish an air campaign . . . it would be stupid to go without her . . . okay, your funeral."

The checkout clerk told me he's there on the weekends for twelve-hour stretches.

He's probably texting some friends of his: "I've been sitting next to this clown for hours.  He's grading papers.  Lots of red ink.  Fascist."

Same planet.  Different worlds.

My wife and I are in Denver today.  She's at a conference on phonics, and I'm sitting across the street from the conference hotel, in a Panera Bread, grading papers.  I've spread out a little bit on a table for four so that my laptop is available, and I can pile the papers.  That means I'm watching the crowd.  If the place starts to fill for lunch, I'll have to pack up.

On my mind, though, while I'm doing this productive work, is jaylake.  If you read his blog you know he has posted about his (early) colon cancer diagnosis.  He is characteristically upbeat and funny about what is going on, but I'm thinking about how he's doing just the same.

There are many lessons to be learned when disease reminds us that we are mortal.  Certainly an easy to apply one in Jay's case is to get your colon checked if you are 50 or over, even if you feel fine, or if you have any symptoms.  Don't mess around.  Do it!  I want my friends to stay with me.

We're into the Little League baseball season now.  All three of my boys played in the league, but only our 11-year old is still active.  He's in majors, which means the games look a lot like real baseball, with stealing and stuff, but the field is smaller.  Except for the occasional ugly moment from a parent or coach, it's mostly fun.

Yesterday we had a nice bit of situational irony.  Over the fence home runs are pretty rare at this level, even on a short field, but yesterday one of our bigger kids lifted one over the fence.  The ball bounced once and caroomed off of a car's front bumper in the parking lot.  Of course, everyone went crazy.  The team ran out to wait for him at home plate, and there was a lot of cheering.  His parents, in the stands, were loud and ecstatic, as you can imagine.  So, of course, when he came up the next time, everyone was cheering for him to do it again.  Sure enough, he hit it even farther, burying the ball into the windshield of a minivan parked too close to the field.  Everyone shrieked and whooped, no one louder than his parents, until one of the other parents said to the home run hitter's dad, "Hey, isn't that your car?"

It was.

Interesting set up for Gattaca today.  We read a series of articles on bioethics issues yesterday (one on genetic discrimination, another on the growing power of prenatal genetic testing, and a third on designer babies).  I put a series of questions on the board and let the kids discuss them for a while.  Here were the initial questions:
 

• When does life begin?
• When does life end?
• Are there areas of life that humanity should try to change?
• How valuable is human life (how much money or resources should be spent to save a single human life?)
• Who should pay to save a human life?
• Which is more important, and old person's life or a young one?
• If it is possible to make "better" human beings, should we?

Conversation ranged widely about differing attitudes, from the parents who for religious reasons refuse medical care for their children, to people who have a child to serve as a donor for an older child, to genetically modified animals (glow in the dark fish, pigs with human compatible organs, etc.), to the possibilities of preselecting desirable traits in a fetus. 

It was a good talk.  The kids were thoughtful and generally listened to each other well.

One of the cool elements of teaching Science Fiction as literature is that I get to talk both about the literary topics the story raises, just as I would in any other literature class, AND the science fictional components.  Between the two, I almost always manage to engage everyone in the class.

Last night my college class students were taking a test on fiction writing terms while I evaluated their journals.  The journals are an ongoing assignment.  They are to add 1,000 words a week to them.  At the beginning of the class I give them tons of suggestions how they can make the journals more functional than mere diaries, but they have a tendency to write about what is going on in their lives quite a bit anyways.  So, reading them gives me these awesome, private and privileged glimpses into how other people are processing their lives.  Even the weakest writer is bound to say something interesting and instructive over the course of eighteen weeks, which makes the reading fun.

I wish sometimes that I could photocopy whole sections out of their journals.  There are so many cool people and situations within them.  Of course, I wouldn't, but reading them reminds me that I will never run out of things to write about, and that reality is so much richer, deeper and broader than I can imagine.

I tell students that they really only need three attributes to be a writer:

• An ability to observe
• A felicity with language
• Something to say

I always add to that list, "a willingness to make connections."  The list isn't a bad one.  It's at least a good place to start a discussion of writing.  The journals are where all the attributes can come together, and they often do.  What's funny is that sometimes the weakest writers in the class will have the most interesting journal.  They will be loaded with frank, voice-filled narrative and unforced language, but when they go to commit writing to an assignment, they choke up or ignore everything that they do in their journal that is interesting.

At any rate, reading the journals reminded me of how lucky I am.  The world surrounds me.  Sometimes I walk down the hallways and the high school and I just watch and listen.  How can I not?

Just saying.

Tammy, Dylan and I went on a hike on Tabeguache trail today and scored two wildlife rarities, a couple of collared lizards and a bull snake.

The collared lizard ( Crotaphytus collaris), while not totally rare on the trail, is always a treat to spot.  We see a lot of smaller lizards and skinks (a smooth-scaled lizard that's a bit larger than our most common lizard).  The collared lizards we see are a bright green with a yellow head.  They're good sized, maybe eight inches to a foot long?  When they want to move in a hurry, the rise up on their hind legs and take off like a dragster doing a wheelie.  I saw one last winter on a warm day when there was a lot of snow on the ground.  It skittered across the top of the snow and barely left a mark.

Oddly enough, as shy as they are, if you move slowly with the camera, you can get within a few inches of them.  This picture is one of about twenty that I took.

The real surprise on the hike was the bull snake (Pituophis catenifer).  Some places call them gopher snakes.  I'd heard from other people that they'd seen bull snakes in the valley, but I'd never spotted one myself.  They're occasionally mistaken for rattle snakes, but they are non-poisonous and really shy.  If cornered, though, they will strike, and I hear the bite can be painful.  I didn't get close enough to this one to find out.  A friend of mine found one in his basement once, which was freaky.  We found a small garter snake in our basement a couple weeks ago, and that was startling. 

According to my reptile research, the bull snake can be as large as six-foot, and someone found a 100-inch long specimen once!  Today's snake was more in the four-foot range and stretched across the trail when we found it.  A ton of mountain bikers were also on the trail today, so the snake was lucky it didn't get run over.

Unlike the lizard, the snake grew wary if I got within a few feet of it no matter how slowly I moved.  It wasn't like I wanted to go for a six-inch macro shot anyway.

We watched it for a few minutes before it slithered underneath a rock.

Great hike!

On my computer, if I click on the picture, I get a much better quality picture that is larger.  If I click again, it is bigger yet.  The collared lizard picture really pays off if you look at the image in the bigger format because you can see the utterly cool textures and complications that give it its color.

As some of you know, I've decided to write a novel as kind of a public performance piece for my students next school year.  The odd place that I am creatively is that I don't know anything about the book yet.  Instead of having a burning need to tell the story (as I did when I wrote my first book), I only have a schedule.

Will the book be YA on purpose?  Will it be SF or fantasy?  Will it have multiple, threaded points of view?  Will it be the beginning of a larger story with the possibility or intention of sequels?  Will I mine one of my short stories for the idea?  The world of the O-Forms, perhaps?

I wandered around Barnes and Noble today thinking about the project.  Books stared at me from everywhere!  It made me think about what I could possibly say that would be interesting or different enough to add to the stacks and stacks of words that people can already choose from.  In one way a bookstore is incredibly motivating to a writer.  After all, every book in the store is the result of some author beating tremendous odds.  If that many other people can do it, I can too.  On the other hand, there are so many books that the idea that an author could pen a worthy addition to the choir is intimidating. 

Clearly, then, to write a novel, an author has to have either a "who the hell cares I'm going to tell the story I want to anyway" attitude, or an ego the size of a mountain.  Or both.

So, I'll continue to think about my future project.  My brain is generally short story oriented from habit.  Short stories are a little bit like A.M. top-ten radio stations used to be: if you hated the song, it would be over in a few minutes.  When I'm writing one, there's a little part of me that says it's okay if the story sucks.  My investment in time was small.  A novel isn't like that.  The investment certainly is larger.

Of course, thinking that the story must be worth my time in a significantly different way than a short story is might be a good way to short circuit what I do well (whatever that is).

Hmm.  I'll continue to think about this.  I have faith, though, that an idea for the book will seize me before I start it.  Somewhere in the future I'll post a note about how I've decided what I want to do.  I have faith that will happen.

Barnes and Noble is doing an educator discount day today (25%), plus a lot of other teacher-oriented give-a-ways and activities, so my wife and I dropped in.  We filled out door-prize information, dropped it into a box and went browsing.  Ten minutes later, they drew my name out of the box for a $50 gift card.  Hooray!  Of course, by the time we were done, we had $116 worth of purchases.

I picked up Terry Brooks' Lessons From a Writing Life, Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, and a book for school, Words You Should Know in High School: 1,000 Essential Words to Build Vocabulary, Improve Standardized Test Scores, and Write Successful Papers. 

Offered without comment:  At noon, an author started a signing for her first novel.  I looked at her book, a Publish America title, and talked to her a bit about how things were going.  She said she had a print run of 25,000 books for the title (I'm pretty sure she must have meant 2,500).  The book came out in July last year.  The only review it garnered was one at Amazon from a relative.  As far as she knows, it was never sent anywhere to be reviewed.  She also said she was working on a second book, but put it aside to do screen plays, since "the writer's strike has made Hollywood desperate for screenplays."

As I got into my car this morning, I could hear a steady thumping somewhere in the neighborhood, like a helicopter flying low.  The sky was dark and clear, and the moon lit everything.  It took me a minute to figure out what the sound was.  There's a big peony field behind our house.  The farmer has a couple of huge wind machines that he turns on if he thinks that there will be a freeze that might kill his crops.  He also lines his fields with smudge pots.  The temperature dropped to 33 degrees last night, so he had his system running.

About a week before Memorial Day, he'll start harvesting.  We'll be able to hear music, almost always the Spanish station, from our back porch as the workers bring in the flowers.