Heading off to do the signing of FLYING IN THE HEART OF THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE in a couple of hours.  All the background work is done: flyers in the libraries, the college, and the local coffee/bagel/pizza shops where readers hang out.  Postcards mailed to folks who have been interested in my books in the past.  Press releases sent to newspapers/radio/television.  E-mails sent to contacts.  And, of course, announcements on Facebook and LiveJournal.  Signage created for the signing.  Extra books boxed and ready.  Handouts for English teachers and new writers prepared and copied.  I'll pick up candy for the signing table on the way.

As most of you know, when I'm not teaching or grading papers, I write science fiction, fantasy and (some) horror short stories. When enough of them pile up, they add up to a book-length selection of stories.

I'll be doing my debut, Grand Junction signing of my latest book, FLYING IN THE HEART OF THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE, at Hastings Books on North Ave. from 3:00 to 6:00 on Saturday, April 27.

They say that you should write what you know. Sometimes I take that advice, which means several of the stories are in schools, and feature administrators, teachers, and/or students.

A writer's greatest fear is that he/she will sit at the table, surrounded by books, and no one comes by, not even to say hello. If you are in the area on Saturday, and the spirit moves you, drop in.

Some good reviews of the book have appeared. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY said, "Van Pelt’s fourth collection contains 23 examples of his deft, imaginative science fiction and fantasy."

NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author, Carrie Vaughn said, "If Van Pelt’s stories don’t move you, you have no heart."

Faren Miller at LOCUS ONLINE, the website of the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field had a nice review at http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2013/02/faren-miller-reviews-james-van-pelt/

I've always been fond of maps, particularly the hand drawn ones in the frontpieces of big fat fantasies, so when I get a chance to hand draw a map, I will.

Today I wanted to let Tammy know what course I was going to run.  Since Tabeguache is complicated, a map works better than trying to explain it.  As I have done before, I drew a map.

But what's the fun of a map without extra stuff?  I'm embarrassed by my Shelob, but I thought the dragon turned out well, even if it's just a free hand copy of an image I found on the Internet.  I reduced it 50% to put it on the map.  It turns out that reducing a hand drawn image minimizes the obvious errors.

I have about as much practice drawing as a ten-year old, so this interest in drawing takes me back to being a kid again.  If you need me, I'll be in my blanket fort with a coloring book.  I did, by the way, buy artist's pencils and a nice pen set.

Of all the art I like, and that I'd like to do better, I like pen and ink drawings.  James A. Owen does fantastic ink work.  He's one of the very few artists whose pieces I've bought (the others are Alan M. Clark and Gary Hauschulz).

Running is an up and down thing; I know this.  But when you're running poorly, when every hill feels undoable, when the clock is the enemy and not a friend, when every runner says hello as they pass, I feel like Eeyore.

To feel like Eeyore, you have to do the opposite of uptalking.  You have to drop your voice at the end of every sentence as if the world couldn't possibly get any worse.

Go ahead, try saying this speech by dropping your voice at the end of each sentence: "Oh, well.  It's another hill.  I guess I'll have to run up it.  Not that anyone will be able to tell.  They'll wonder who that man is who is going up the hill so slowly.  Oh, well.  It's a hill."

When I typed the title for this post the first time, it read "Prom 2913."  Now that would be an interesting exercise!

I chaperoned prom last night.  Teachers are required to chaperone one dance a year.  I choose prom because it's the best behaved dance of the year.

I almost forgot about the dance.  I took my wife and youngest son out to dinner to celebrate my short story sale to Asimov's, when I saw a group of kids in formals.  Shoot!  I'm chaperoning prom tonight!  Fortunately I made it to the dance on time.  Fairly irresponsible of me to almost forget it's prom night!

So, in no particular order, here are my observations and thoughts on a 21st Century, western Colorado prom:

• A couple of years ago, the girls' formals all seemed to be chosen from the palate of colors available in a neon crayon box.  This year featured much more variety in styles and colors, from sleek 30's gang moll, to antebellum hoop skirts, to spangled Dancing-With-the-Stars tight fitting numbers, and everything in between.


• Boys, of course, look the same year after year: your basic, ill-fitting tux.  Some of them pull it off better than others.  Color choices are white or black with some variation in the vest.  I saw one boy in tails, which looked cool.  He also carried a cane.  I was sorry he hadn't gone for the top hat.


• When boys modify the look, it's almost always to dress down.  A tux with tennis shoes, for example.  Because this is western Colorado, there was more than one boy who went for the cowboy boots or work boots look.


• Although the dance seemed well-attended to me, there was some talk of kids boycotting because of the administration's insistence that they don't "grind" while dancing.  The biggest administrative response to dirty dancing has been to turn up the lights.  Instead of prom looking like a mosh pit, lit only by the DJ's light show (which means you're mostly in the dark), they've left enough lights on to give it an early dusk look, which screws up the DJ's lighting and removes the other worldly effect that most dances achieve.


• I'm pretty sure there is way less drinking at dances than there was when I was in high school.  The kids can't leave the dance once they enter (this keeps them from going to their cars to drink), and the police presence is huge.


• Speaking of police presence, I talked for a while to a security guy who was bitter he'd gotten the gig.  He said he'd pissed his boss off.


• Some kids only stay at the dance long enough to have their pictures taken.  That means they are heading off at 9:00 from a dance that doesn't end until midnight.  I worry about their plans.


• The best danced to number of the evening while I was there was a techno remix of "Move It" from the Madagascar movie.  How is that song a soundtrack for a kid's movie?  It's a straightforward sex tune.  Of course, the Muppets did a cover of The Beach Boys' "Kokomo," complete with its reference to "afternoon delight," which the kids don't know anything about.  Not nearly as blatant as the "Discovery Channel" song, which I've heard at more than one prom.


• Most of the kids looked like they were having a great time.  The dance floor was hot, so the more enthusiastic dancers kept coming out for a breath of fresh air, before heading back for another round.


• I watched a really sweet moment between a mom, her daughter and the daughter's date.  The mom posed them for several pictures, and she was having a hard time not crying.  Finally, she let them go into the dance.  She stood in the lobby for several minutes, looking at the pictures and dabbing at her eyes.


• We live in the camera phone age.  Lots of kids were taking pictures of themselves and each other, amazed at their own transformations.


• My low point of the evening came when a group of my students were standing in the lobby.  One of them asked me what I thought of the prom, since, "You've seen like 89 of them or something, right?"


• Sheesh.

I sold a short story this week!  Shelia Williams at Asimov's e-mailed me that she has accepted "The Turkey Raptor."

I was going to say that this story was unusual for me, but I decided how every story came to be written is peculiar.  They come from different places, and the process of writing each ends up being odd enough that the lessons I learned from the previous stories don't help me much.

This story I had decided I would write at the Rain Forest Writer's Village.  My plan for the Rain Forest was to finish an old story I'd been working on for months, and then to tackle "Turkey Raptor."  All I knew about the new story was that it was about a high school boy who had a hit velociraptor.  I didn't do any planning beyond that.

I was able to finish the old story on Thursday morning at Rain Forest, so I started "The Turkey Raptor" on Thursday afternoon.  Five thousand words later, I finished on Friday.  Saturday night, at our late night reading, I shared the first five hundred words or so with the group.

Beyond the concept, on Thursday afternoon when I started I had nothing.  By the end of the first page, I'd only made decisions about the setting and some of the boy's actions.  Although I talk about ways to invent and flesh out characters when I teach story writing, my own technique is to create the character on the fly.  Since speech, thought and action a part of what makes a character a character, I start writing and then when the character first speaks, thinks or does an action, I'm making decisions about who the character is.  At this point, I'm trusting that I'll be able to stay true to my early decisions, or, if things don't work that I can change my early decisions to match the later ones.

I trust revision to save me.

The inventing part of the process is deeply, deeply indescribable and infinitely interesting to me.  First, where did the initial idea come from?  The air?  Second, I wrote the opening two sentences without a plan other than I had an idea about the scene.  The first two sentences were "Leon kept to the shadows on Mill Avenue, avoiding the street lights at either end, walking on lawns so he wouldn’t kick gravel on the sidewalk and make noise.  In one hand, he carried a burlap sack, in the other a can of tuna."

Once I typed that, I was up and running.  Scenes appeared.  Characters who I'd never thought about were born on the page.  Dialogue that I'd never thought about showed up.  Plot twists (which are often just surprising connections between characters and events) manifested themselves.  A completely unexpected correlation between the plot and a topical discussion in education suddenly drove the themes of the story into a new area.

And then, about twenty-four hours after I'd started, I finished the piece.

I do have one technique that I can share that's pretty consistent for me when I'm building the plot: Very early on in the story I have to know what my main character wants.  What a character wants is 1/3 of the conflict for me.  The other two thirds are what stands in the way, and what of value is to be gained or lost.  Once I know what the character wants, I can progress the plot.  I don't need to know the end; I just need to know the situation in the story so far.  My next move will be based on what my character wants, what he wil do next (or what will happen next if I have external forces at work).

When the character acts (or an external action happens), the situation of the story has changed.  If my character didn't get what he wants, the new plot move is to have him do something new.  Many stories for me are a series of scenes where my character does something that changes the conditions of his world.  He keeps acting, changing the world, discovering new things about the world or himself, interacting with other characters (who are all doing their own thing--sometimes in opposition to him), responding to external events that may change the condition of what he's trying to do, until finally I get to a point where the character gets what he wants, doesn't get what he wants, or gets something unexpected that somehow still is a satisfying place to end the story.

And, of course, somewhere along the way, the story has stopped being just about its characters, setting and events for me, and somehow becomes a meaningful narrative where actions and results are both symbolic and thematic.

Whew!

That's how I do it.

At any rate, did I mention that I sold a story?

I've been mulling over an incident from two weeks ago.  I was in Bookcliff Gardens, a local garden shop, picking the plants that I will probably kill during the summer.  An elderly, very frail looking man was ahead of me at the checkout stand with his flats of plants and seed packages.

The checkout clerk, who evidently knew him, looked at the seeds and said, "Getting ready for another season, Hal?"

He said, "I probably won't live to see most of them come up, but I can't help myself."

There's something powerful in that.

Hi, all.  Did you know that today is national Drop Everything and Read Day?

If only.

According to my calculations, I've worked with students for 140 days this year.  I have 28 more student-contact days to go.

There's so much left to do!

We are, however, past our state-mandated testing for sophomores.  A weird result of our testing culture is that once I'm past the test, it feels as if a weight has been lifted.  It's like psychologically the restraints have dropped off.  Now we can have fun, my brain thinks.

Fun for me is reading literature as an expression of the human condition, to be savored and enjoyed.  Fun is reading literature as if there is a chance that it could be mind altering.  This is instead of using literature solely as a tool to measure a student's analytic ability.  Earlier this year we taught "The Gettysburg Address," and as far as I could tell from our assigned curriculum, the only reason we read the piece was to demonstrate the student's skill in identifying rhetorical devices.

Fun for me is teaching writing in such a way that the students can be invested in what they are saying and write about subjects that they care about.

Fun is teaching where student growth is a natural result of passion-filled reading and writing, where the goal is passion and the side effect is growth instead of where growth is the goal and passion doesn't matter, because, after all, passion isn't measurable, so it must not be important.