I know, a weird title. But they do go together.

I was talking with my mom recently about our youngest, who had H1N1 last week (he’s much better now, thanks!).

My parents live in California, where the H1N1 stories in the news are fairly common and tend to highlight cases that seem to be people who are not in the “high-risk” groups, providing details about this pandemic. While, here in Utah, I really don’t hear very much on the news, and the stories tend to be about ways to stay healthy and about how this is just another flu and the death rate is as expected.

So, while we weren’t too worried, I’m sure my mom was kind of freaking out.

It got me thinking about why a Democratic state would focus on the negatives and a Republican state would be more optimistic. (This is where the “party” lines comes in). After all, I am a fairly optimistic person.

I’m not so sure this has to do with pessimism versus optimism as a nature of certain parties, though. While some may argue this, I think it goes deeper, into the world view of those in each party.

Democrats tend to be more focused on the poor, the downtrodden, the under-represented. Republicans tend to be more focused on free markets and improving from the top, keeping government out of our lives. These are simplistic definitions, obviously, but I feel they are useful here, if not completely black-and-white.

In California, the focus seems to be on these suffering people and how bad this is, how we need help to fix the problem. In Utah, the focus seems to be on how we can handle this problem ourselves and reassuring us that we can do it.

In some ways I think these world views tie in with how people take on the “global warming” issue, even. From the, in my opinion, exaggerated sky-is-falling outcries on the left, to the nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself, we-are-not-the-cause anti-response of the far right. The answer here, and for H1N1, is somewhere in the middle – a complex, problematic issue that is not easily solvable, nor should it be ignored.

At a writing conference I attended Thursday, Stephen Covey was speaking about changing universities to be more involved in communities as a way to lower crime.

Interestingly, one of the audience members asked him how to change universities to be less liberal. The idea being that liberals would need to change so they could help people.

And yet, isn’t the definition of “conservative” that of someone who does not want change? Therefore, in order to get universities to change, by definition, we would need them to be less conservative.

Sometimes people are so blinded by their world view (on both sides) that they don’t see the illogic in their stances.

Iiiiiiii’mmmmmm Baaaa-aaaccccckkkkk.

I’m still really tired, but I got back Saturday night from Akela’s Council (Cub Scout Leader Training). I was on staff and felt like I was still a participant in many ways – I have a lot to learn still about the scouting program.

But, I had a great time and really enjoyed being there, despite the lack of sleep.

Hope I get asked again some time – it was way awesome!

Uugaa chucka, Cherokee!

6 months out from corrective eye surgery and I am stabilized at 20/15. Woo hoo!

Now to remember all the things my mother told me – don’t read in bad light, don’t sit so close to the tv, don’t stare at the sun, and so forth.

My last post, I wrote about sending off my short story. Well, I just got a response back yesterday. It was a no.

But, the note was kind and didn’t totally tear down my dreams of fame and fortune.

It said:

Thanks for submitting your story to IGMS. It had some good qualities, but in the end I only have a limited number of slots and your story didn’t rise high enough to make the final cut.

Makes it sound like my story was at least considered. Of course, this is probably a form rejection, but it is still nice and positive.

The next step for this story is to put it up for my online writing group to critique. That should help me figure out where it is weakest.

I have no idea where else to send this, so I’ll have to do some more research on that too.

Well, last night I sent off my first short story submission to Intergalactic Medicine Show. It is a bit frightening.

I originally created the story at Liberty Hall Writers as part of a flash fiction contest. I liked the story but haven’t done much with it for a couple years.

Then, I needed something for my Writing Group (The Point Writing Group, to be specific) and pulled it out, dusted it off, and totally revamped it. My writing group gave it a pretty good reception, with some much needed advice on how to improve the “surprise” for the end, and I rewrote it again. That was a couple months ago.

Then, yesterday, I pulled it out again and added in more world building-type detail to bring it even more to life.

I felt like I’d done all I could for this story and so I sent it out into the big bad world.

It will probably be rejected (it is my first submission after all), but the experience has been good for me.

One of my writing group friends pointed us to this website, and I thought the comics are all pretty funny (but mostly just if you understand Mormon culture.

But, these comics about Twilight take the cake:

http://www.9thwardcartoons.com/2009/01/did-you-get-your-visiting-teaching-done.html

http://www.9thwardcartoons.com/2009/03/on-which-side-do-you-stand.html

I attended this Cub Scout Leader training (called Akela’s Council) last year, and thought it was GREAT! It helped me learn so much (even after being a Cubmaster for 2 years) and helped me really get that scouting spirit.

I HEARTILY recommend it to anyone and everyone!

In fact, I am going to be on staff this year, and I am really looking forward to experiencing it again, from a different perspective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BErS6_6Ak7k

So, register today and come along! Just go to www.utahscouts.org

I recently started a writing group in my area. We critiqued each other’s stuff for the first time earlier this month, and I have to say that it was a great experience. It got me moving on my writing and should make it so that I write more regularly (creatively, not necessarily on my blogs ).

In February, a couple of us (the Founders) got together to come up with guidelines for our group.

Dave Farland had sent out several emails last year about writing groups, so I went through those again and pulled out the good nuggets of information.

In any case, we set up some rules about how we’re going to run the thing and our expectations. Basically, we expect people to write something new every month instead of just rehashing the same old thing again and again. We also don’t want critiques to get out of hand and so will use something similar to Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp method (which I believe is also used at Odyssey and/or Clarion). Everyone will get a turn and there will not be any cross-talking or commenting by the author.

We also decided to include a short writing exercise at the beginning of each one so that we can improve our craft and get our brains working.

Finally, we decided (for various reasons that I will not enumerate at the present time) to call our group The Point Writing Group.

We are open to anyone who is serious about writing and improving themselves.

So, if you live in northern Utah county or southern Salt Lake county (in Utah, of course), then we’d be happy to have you.

This is my first post using Wordbook. Should be nice to only have to post one place and have it go to Facebook (I already have a plugin for sending stuff to my LiveJournal account).

I had my classes do a lightning write activity this week, and I realized that I never shared the one I participated in at the Codex retreat (CoWW).

For this activity, you need a group (a group of 6 works pretty well). Each person has about a minute to write the beginning to a story. Then, the stories get passed around from one person to the next after a set limit of time (that gradually increases so as to allow people to read what has already been written). Finally, the original story starter gets their paper back and they get to finish the story.

See the story, after the break.

Today is the semi-annual conference for the LDS church. My family and I are watching it on tv. It is nice to live in Utah and to be able to stay in my pajamas all day while listening to our wonderful and inspiring leaders.

It is not easy to keep four kids quiet for 2 hours, though. To be fair, it is mostly the youngest two. Especially Bubba (he’s 4).

After taking an unintentional break from this short story that I started at CoWW, I’ve come back to it within the past couple weeks (first, because it gave me something fun to do during class when I had the students doing peer reviews of each other’s papers; and second, because I keep telling myself to watch less TV (I don’t really watch much anyway) and get to writing).

In any case, I started by rereading the beginning, and editing as I went. I tightened up the prose by making it more immediate and action-y. I also decided to just do it from one point of view. I think two POVs is a bit of a stretch for this story. I liked the idea at the time, but the only reason was so I could get the reader in the head of the love interest so they’d fall in love with him too. I can do this by showing it from Liza’s (the protagonist) POV, just as well. The other reason I had done it is because I believe that you should tell the scene from the POV of the person in the most pain (or happiest, depending on mood being set) at that point. But, I think this works better for novels.

I didn’t have to throw away much, though, because it was easy to switch his POV over to Liza’s. Which is also how I really figured out that it would be OK.

It’s going to get a bit dicey towards the end of the story, but I’ll just have to have him tell her what happened.

I just got back from teaching my Writing for Digital Media class, and I went through Orson Scott Card’s 1001 ideas in an hour with them. It worked out really well. I’m not nearly as good as OSC at pulling more and more ideas out, but we came up with some doozies. Very cool ideas.

The main one was about an alien coming to earth to desroy it since she is the last surviving member of her species and world. But she falls in love with the president of the world, who is 96, but she gives him a treatment that makes him look 30. Then, they must contend with the destroyer alien coming to finish the job he started with her planet.

Yeah, they were in a weird mood today. But, it was fun, and we got out some good ideas as we learned about brainstorming and loglines.

I am really enjoying learning all this new lingo and style in the digital media world.

A couple weeks ago, I had my two composition classes do the old describe the steps for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich exercise.

It went very well, especially in the early morning class (they are just better, more engaged students overall).

We did it because we were talking about informative writing, speciifically instructions. It seemed like an easy way to bring the idea home to them that it is harder than you think and you really have to know who your audience is.

The fun part is when they switch papers with someone and then have to actually literally follow the instructions and make a sandwich for real (I went through a couple loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter and a jar of grape jelly).

Most people were really nice about interpreting the instructions, but I had a few who kept it real and did follow the instructions exactly, ending up with one slice of bread with jelly on top and then another slice of bread and then peanut butter on top of that, and such.

I’ll definitely use it again in future classes. But, what struck me was how important it is to define audience from the very beginning. I knew this, intellectually, from my study of rhetoric, but it never really hit home for me before.

As a writer of technical documents or of stories or novels, my very first step should be to define who I am writing for so I meet their needs. I think that is why poor writing like in Eragon, Eclipse, and Harry Potter have succeeded so well as books - because they are meeting a need with a specific audience (OK, so maybe not with Eragon, it’s just his publisher parents).

I haven’t updated my site in quite awhile. Previously, I just had a basic, plain HTML page that had some links on it. But, after a friend went to this site to see it, I felt awfully embarrassed and decided a blog would be the easiest way to get content up and presentable.

I want this to be a place to link off to my other sites, so I won’t necessarily be posting here as much as other places (but that may change).

This should at least keep me a bit more organized.

Cheers!

Well, I got the story revised (a couple months ago ), and I thought it would be useful to talk about how I did it.

But first, I think you need a little background on how I wrote it in the first place.

I wrote the story as part of Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp. This means that I had to come up with an idea, stew on it a bit, and write the story all pretty much within one day.

For ideas, Card had us go to a bookstore and look for something we would never write about and then get an idea, interview a person, and watch people doing something.

I got the idea for this story by watching some kids play on a fake tree-thing where they would crawl through from one side to the other. And, ZING, I thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could use trees to teleport from one location to the next?

Then, we had to figure out a beginning and ending for the story using Card’s MICE quotient (milieu, idea, character, event - read Characters and Viewpoint for more information). I decided this was more of an Event story, with some Character stuff as well. Therefore, that meant that I had to start the story where something was wrong and then end it where it got fixed (or accepted). I did just that, but then I thought I needed to add a bunch of stuff in about the guy’s relationship with his wife, and it got really weird (I had been reading Heinlein, that is my excuse).

Then, I spent most of the day I had goofing around, thinking about what I wanted to have happen in the story. I also spent way too much time creating a map with a cool Mapping program (AutoRealm) that I had recently installed. I guess that was my way of doing a bit of background research. When I actually got down to writing, I wrote the entire 38 pages (double-spaced) in about 4 hours.

Then, we workshopped the stories and I got lots of great feedback on it from all the other students and from Card.

So, when I went to revise, I reread all the comments from people (I had consolidated them all onto one copy of the draft), especially Card’s, and thought again about what I wanted to accomplish here.

Then, I basically started from scratch (I had the original draft in the new document, but I only used about 2 pages of it). I stripped off the first 4 pages and started where the event began to be known and worried about. I added in more characters and conflicts (3 disaster structure). And, I made the mechanism of transfer more consistent and rule-based.

Based on the comments I got back on this from Ellen Datlow and the other Codexians, I still have a lot of work to do, but I didn’t get the same kinds of comments I did the first time, so I feel like I’m making good progress on both the story and my skill as a writer.