I don't even know where to start

(11,062 words completed yesterday.  Oh, and one correction: yesterday I said that ScriptFrenzy is in June, and though it was a June event its first year, it is now an April event.)

In today’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times, this letter to the editor:

***

[snip]

Prayer, paddles

…I do know the cause of the decay in quality of education.  It is not the three Rs that are missing.  It is the three Ps that are absent from the education system (prayer, pledge, and paddle).  Those were the things made each generation a little smarter and a little wiser than the ones before.  When the three Ps left the school system, the three Rs followed them out the door.  

[snip]

Larry Reid, Rockport

***

I’m not sure why this letter to the editor irritated me so much.  Usually I can pass up the really annoying ones with an eyeroll or a sigh.  And there’s usually at least one of those every day.  

The inaccuracies are a bit grating.  

I’m not sure when Mr. Reid was last in a classroom, but my kids recite the U.S., Texas, AND School pledges every day during the morning announcements, and the U.S. pledge is recited at the beginning of all parent meetings.  Sporting events always include a performance of the national anthem.  So I would politely suggest that “pledge,” or other manifestations of American pride and patriotism are far from missing in American education. 

Prayer is also far from absent in public education, at least in some local institutions.  As recently as last year, all meetings, concerts and sporting events in our school district were opened with a prayer, in spite of the clearly established unconstitutionality of official-led prayer in public educational settings.  As defenders and teachers of the U.S. Constitution, public schools must observe the separation of church and state that ensures our religious freedoms.  This year such invocations are practiced in a more clearly constitutional way.  “Spontaneous,” student led prayer is a-ok according to the Supreme Court, and it happens all the time.  Every school in our district practices a minute of silence each morning, in which students can choose to pray or reflect or doodle simply sit quietly.  Every Friday night at the football game the athletes convene at center field after the national anthem to recite the Lord’s Prayer.  The difference this year is that school representatives do not invoke the prayer over the loudspeaker, or actively call for prayer in other meetings.  

The one point Mr. Reid is sort of right about is the paddle.  Corporal punishment is rare in American education today, though if you check the books, it is still within the power of teachers and administrators in Texas to administer bodily punishment.  As someone with intimate knowledge of a school administrator, I can vouch that parents sometimes ASK administrators to paddle their children, though no school official, to my knowledge, uses corporal punishment in this district.  Part of the reason such punishment is thankfully almost unheard of today, even here in Texas, is that educational philosophies today advocate positive discipline to help students choose to learn rather than learning out of fear.  There is also the obvious litigiousness of our society.  Consider the liability a school faces if a corporal punishment is deemed abusive, or if injury or other extreme harm comes to a student as a result of that corporal punishment.  

I wonder if Mr. Reid could pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (the infamous TAKS, a standardized test, administered beginning in third grade, and ultimately necessary for graduation in Texas)?  Did his praying, pledging, and paddling experiences help him to remember and understand essential information or ultimately make him a better citizen?

What, I wonder, is Mr. Reid’s evidence of the “decay” of the educational system?  Perhaps it is the broken buildings, the high teacher turnover, or maybe he relies on test score data?  I think this decay argument is often trotted out as a precursor to some sense of insecurity about the U.S.’s place competitively in the world.  But the mandate of public education has grown so far beyond the three Rs that simplistic proclamations about how praying and beating will make our schools better are really rather ignorant.  

I understand that his implicit argument is about the balance between local educational control and federal educational control.  The Constitution leaves education to the states.  Changes in policy under the second Bush administration (No Child Left Behind and its offspring) enacted sweeping accountability measures which grabbed some control of education from the individual states (though often without funding for its proclamations).  I don’t necessarily agree with Mr. Bush’s educational policies, but I do think that in today’s global culture and economy, that we need to think as a nation, and not as a collection of loosely confederated states, about what our educational standards are and how we will train our young people to be citizens of the world.  And I hope those standards include respect for each student’s bodily integrity, cultural integrity and desire to learn and succeed.  

The NaNoWriMo Post-Election Update

Proud to be an American

Wow.  Just wow.  I’m still so excited and proud and relieved about the results of the presidential election.  Disappointed in the outcome of some local races, but I have a good feeling that things will work out for the best.  

I want to hold on to this hope and enthusiasm and do Something.  I’m about as far from the White House as most of us, but I think we can all find some little way to Be Nice, Live the Hope and try to make our communities and our country and our world a better place.  

For me, this starts small, helping out a little more at the kids’ school, on the philosophy that every little thing we can do to make the whole school better helps all of the kids.  I’m also investigating volunteer opportunities at the local library.  

What thing, small or large, can you do to help us all live in a better world?

A Month of Literary Abandon

In other news, we are in day six of NaNoWriMo.  For those of you who don’t know, this is a crazy, month-long, writing extravaganza, in which people from all over the world try to write a novel in one month.  The goal is to write 50,000 new words during the month of November.  And this year is the tenth anniversary.  More than 120,000 writers from all over the world, many of them just regular schmoes like us who might never have written a thing in their lives before right now are whipping out blank sheets of paper or opening up text files and starting to pound out stories.  

There are writing forums, a procrastination station, a very cool word-counting widget that lets you mark your progress, weekly encouragement newsletters from writers un-famous, famous and infamous.  Last year Neil Gaiman put in his good cheer, among others.  Brian Jacques, Meg Cabot, and Philip Pullman are among the list of notable Pep Talkers this year.  And at the end of the month, if you’ve written more than 50,000 words, you can verify your word count with the word counter robots and you get a lovely certificate and badges for your blog or web page, as well as the satisfaction of know that you did a hard thing.  

Participation in NaNo is free, but The Office of Letters and Light, the non-profit organization that runs both NaNo in November and ScriptFrenzy in June, takes donations to cover their overhead costs as well as in support of the Young Writers Program.  YWP seeks to provide materials and support to get young people involved in writing as a valuable form of self-expression.  Their motto: “We believe in ambitious acts of the imagination.”  The goal this year, in honor of the tenth anniversary of NaNo, is to get donations, big or small, from at least ten percent of participants.  They’re up to 3.6 percent at last count.  

In my personal novelling quest, I have achieved 8500 words so far.  My goal is to write 2000 words per day.  I missed goal on the first, which was a planning and mapping day for me.  I also missed goal on Tuesday (the election was just too distracting and exciting), but managed to make up a little ground yesterday.  The tickle of sinus congestion promises to be a challenge today, but I’m hoping to hit 11,000 before I go to bed tonight.  

If you’ve ever thought that there might be a novel knocking around in the back of your mind, this is a fun and butt-kicking opportunity to start to capture that idea and get it down on paper.  It’s totally not too late to start.  I try to write in 15 minute bursts here and there throughout the day (though mostly during afternoon naptime and after the kids go to bed), and on a good day I can spit out 300-400 words in each 15-minute stretch.  If you can manage to get a friend writing at the same time, it can be very motivational to have 10- or 15-minute Word Wars, races to see who can write the most in a short burst of time.  (Go ahead, suggest another metaphor for me to throw in that messy mix)

I’m eglentyne on the NaNo site.  Send me an email to eglentyne at gmail and I’ll add you as a buddy.  

Writing with a friend—or 120,000 friends—or writing with a deadline can make the writing fun and really get the words flowing.  

Give it a shot.  At least drop by the site.  And leave a fiver in the jar as you pass through.  

Time to start writing!

Throwing the Bones

Fancypants

Still standing.  Some small Newton has absconded with the ruler, and the blue tape measure refuses to stand up, but I assure you that this sock is measuring up at 10 inches.  I guess that I’ll need six more inches before doing the heel and foot.  

In other news….

NaNoWriMo begins in a week.  I am proud to say that I’ve finished a NaNo all three years that I’ve participated in it.  

2005 Something Knitty, about a knitter who’s yarn starts talking to her

2006 I can’t remember the title, about a normal-seeming couple who come to a very bad end

2007 Amy vs. The Mud Vampires (my personal favorite), about a social studies teacher who realizes she is a witch when mud-vampires start knocking on her door

I’ve taken several approaches to writing each year.  The first year was totally seat of my pants.  I had no outline and no early plan.  Each day I just made it up.  This was hard, and energy-consuming, and led to a NaNo novel that, while it holds some really lovely, weird, and hilarious scenes, is sort of a meandery mish-mash of funny and poignant that is less than coherent.  No, you can’t read that one.  

The second year, I used the ever-loving sticky note.  I put 20 of them on the inside of a cupboard door.  The cupboard was near my computer, and I could open it to see my sticky note “outline” or close it when I wasn’t writing.  Each sticky started as a chapter idea.  In this chapter I will…. “kill the protagonist,”  “talk about the speeding ticket,”  “detail the marriage proposal,”  etc.  I started sometime in October to put details onto each sticky note as they occurred to me.  A new idea was scribbled on what seemed to be the appropriate sticky note as it occurred to me, with no thought for order at first.  If a new chapter idea popped into my head, I added it to a blank sticky, until all 20 were filled.  Then I rearranged them into what seemed to be a reasonable order.  When nano began, I’d take down a sticky note, whichever one moved me, and try to write about whatever was on that note and only that note until I hit 2000 words.  Then I’d stop and take up another note.  The writing on this one went a lot easier in some ways, which I ascribe to the plan (and the familiar subject matter).  The novel was still terrible, mainly due to the familiarity of the subject matter.  That novel was all about exorcising demons though, getting those somewhat “too real” characters out of my head to make way for the fictional characters that I really wanted to write about.  No, no one can read that one either.  Ever.  

Last year, I scribbled in my journal during October.  I wrote down dreams.  I wrote down song titles that I liked.  I would free-write about whatever character or setting or whatever popped into my head.  And from one of those scribbled dreams emerged the mud vampires.  A bit of research and sculpting turned them into golems.  Which led me to witches.  Which inspired the creation of Amy.  A favorite archetypal character of mine who has popped up in short scribblings as a knitting sex-shop owner, a witch, a down-on-her-luck business executive, a high school teacher, and a few combinations of each.  Yes, you could argue that each of those is a different character, sure.  But somehow, in my mind, each of them was Amy.  I did not have a sticky note outline for the mud vampires.  Or a more conventional outline.  I did do some work ahead of time to flesh out characters in a different way than I’d done before, trying to make them fuller and more complex.   Writing this NaNo was super fun.  (I just cracked my gum to go along with that, and you can imagine me bobbing a pony tail if you’d like, since I know that sounded like a weirdly ditzy thing to say).  The words just poured out of me.  I don’t know where they came from, but each day that I wrote, they were there.  Lots of them.  Gushing out of me faster than I could type (and I type pretty fast).  That one will be shared, eventually.  For sure.  

This year, with a week left to go until NaNo 2008, I have no idea what I’m going to write about.  My journal is really rather empty of anything useful.  Though the Soap Stealers keep popping up.  Dreams have been uninspiring lately.  I did take a look back through the Mud Vampire NaNo the other day, though, and I’m sorely tempted to do a sequel.  Amy and her weird family could totally be serialized.  

Maybe.  

In an effort to jump-start the inspirational process, I have started using my favorite idea-maker.  Some people roll dice, or use tarot cards, some people might go use the Plot Machine over at ScriptFrenzy.  I use music.  This idea-maker would work with a favorite radio station, Rhapsody on shuffle, an iPod with an extensive play-list, or, as I tend to use, a big CD player.  I put the music on random, and write down the first ten songs that get played.  If I know the songs well, I don’t even listen to them all the way through, I just write down the titles and skip to the next track.  This is a great tool for developing a character.  Each song might illustrate a nuance or experience or mood of that character.  But when I’m stuck for big ideas, like I am now, I try to make the songs fit together into a pattern or narrative or mood, or something.  

Here’s one list I came up with yesterday. 

“Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” by Gorillaz (this one might inspire a novel all by itself)

“Allison” by Elvis Costello

“Wishin’ for You” by The Flatlanders

“Searchin’” by Lynyrd Skynyrd

“Hey There, Fancypants” by Ween

“Long Long While” by The Rolling Stones

“Samba Pa Ti” by Santana

“Oh L’Amour (Live in Nashville)” by Erasure

“Baby Can Dance” by the Hoodoo Gurus

“Beautiful” by Smashing Pumpkins

I don’t know what to do with these.  There is some irony to the juxtaposition of artists here.  I’m not sure I would ever every put Erasure and Lynyrd Skynyrd in the same list, but I guess there is some sort of Southern connection in there since the Erasure is live in (of all places) Nashville, Tennessee.  I’ll work on it, but I’m thinking “Hey there, fancypants” might be by new working title.