For Mom

I'm in the Tulsa airport, waiting (im)patiently to begin the part of my trip that involves flying metal boxes, and I'm thinking about my mother.

I love it when people say we look alike. Go on, say it.

When I was little, somewhere in the vicinity of nine, my parents decided that it was time I visited my French family. At least, I assume that's what they decided. I was nine, as stated, so I wasn't privy to all of the discussions that led to things happening in my life. In any event, it was decided that I would be taken to Chateau-Thierry, where my grandmother's people live, and, happily, that is what happened.

Unfortunately, my dad wasn't able to come for reasons that I assume were related to his job, so my mother and I packed our bags and headed to the Kansas City airport, flew to New York, then to Paris, then boarded a train and rode to my Tante Alice's house, where we were greeted with what is still the most delicious soup I've ever tasted. It was the best trip I had ever had, and to this day is top 5.

I tell you that to tell you this: My mother is one hell of a woman.

I am nervous about this trip, as I am nervous about all trips. I'm worried my bags will get lost. I'm worried I'll miss a connection and have to live in the Rio de Janeiro airport like Tom Hanks in that movie, living on ketchup-and-cracker sandwiches and cups of water cadged from kind-hearted airport employees, fending off scurvy with lemon juice in little packets. I'm worried there will be A Problem (I am aware that my brain has manufactured this Problem, as it is prone to do; I've made so many lists I've got lists of my lists, and I'm sure all my proverbial ducks are in their proverbial row.). But I worry. Like Yeats (or Chinua Achebe, if you're more of a novels person) says, things fall apart. And I never feel so vulnerable to that idea as when I'm leaving my comfort zone. I'm worried about all this stuff, and here's the thing:

I don't have an inquisitive nine-year-old to corral. I'm just responsible for myself, no one else, and certainly not someone who is almost completely dependent on me for their every need.

Dang, mama. My hat is off to you. All the hats I've ever owned. Hell, all the hats I've ever seen. All off, to you. Because of you, I can do this.

Crime Scenes and Carl's Junior

Next time, on Hoarders...

I hate moving. I'm a nester by nature, and the whole process of boxing things up and carrying them away to be unboxed elsewhere gives me the icks. This little whinge-fest is by way of excuse: it's not that I didn't want to blog, it's that my computer was in seven pieces in four different boxes. But I'm getting settled, and it's time to get back to our buddy Aristotle.

To recap: you've got ethos, where an argument (buy a Buick) succeeds or fails based on the character of the speaker (Tiger Woods), and you've got pathos, where emotion is used to persuade the audience to do such varied things as adopt puppies and commit genocide. Now let's meet the new kid, logos.

Pathos, Puppies, Panzer Tanks

Here's the scene: It's late at night, and you can't sleep. You sit on the couch all bleary-eyed and cranky, pick up the remote, and start channel surfing. You settle on something light, something that doesn't tax your intellectual or emotional capabilities too much (after all, you are tired), maybe an old John Hughes movie or a little Adult Swim. Suddenly, right when you are at your least able to deal with it, it happens.

Aristotle, Ethos, and Tiger Woods

Ethos in Action

Here's the thing. If you're still here after reading my last blog post on Aristotle, there has to be a reason for that. Maybe (I hope)  you found value in what I had to say. Maybe you felt an emotional attachment to the material (even if it was just giggling at pictures of Doctor Who). Or maybe you felt like you got a sense of me as a person, and you decided you wanted to hear more. From that person. The "me" of the blogosphere.

Ta-da! You've just defined ethos.

Ethos is one of Aristotle's basic rhetorical categories, and any argument that hinges on the character of the speaker is using it. Aristotle puts it like this: "We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is..." In other words, we believe good men because they are good, not because they are experts. And this gets really interesting in modern culture. Consider, for example, the curious case of Tiger Woods.

Back and Badder than Ever - Now with More Aristotle!

My Boy Aristotle

It's been a crazy few weeks. I'm apparently now a Master of Art, which is nice. I haven't found a job, which is less nice. I have gotten plenty of sleep, spent time with some truly awesome people I hadn't seen a lot of lately, and gotten all caught up on Doctor Who. I may have mentioned, though, still no job. It's scary. No, scratch that. It's terrifying. In the meantime, I am falling back on something that never (well almost never) makes me feel incompetent and useless, the thing I have studied for most of the last two years, and the thing I will study some more should I get up the guts to go for a PhD at some point: rhetoric. So today I think I'll talk about my buddy Aristotle.

No, wait, where are you going? Come back here and sit down. 

Six Sentence Sunday 5-15-11

Here's my six:

They came at night, without warning, professionally silent, disabling our security system, overriding our door locks, and moving around in the living room unnoticed.  I would never have awakened if one of them hadn’t bumped into something – probably the antique Chinese vase on a stand by the sofa – and muffled a curse.

“David?” I groped  for my husband, looking at him wide eyed. “Did you hear that,” I hissed. “I think there’s someone in the living room.” 

“Stay here. I’ll take care of it.”  

If you're keeping score, this comes from the same WiP as the last six I posted, although from another section, and is narrated by the woman narrating last week's six sentences, although in a different time. Enjoy! :D

My First Six Sentence Sunday!

The twitter-folk inform me that today is Six Sentence Sunday. Seems like as good a time as any to post some actual fiction. What follows is the first six sentences of my as yet untitled work-in-progress:

I was asleep, to begin with. My bed was soft and warm, the room was dark and soothing – as soothing as an improvised bedroom that had once been a high school history classroom could be, anyway. Posters that I’d never bothered to remove peeled slowly off of the walls, leaving greasy spots behind where adhesive gum had been. Some long-gone teacher’s desk still sat by the whiteboard, presumably stuffed full of worksheets, grade books, and uninspired term papers;  I’d never bothered to look. Taped to the desk’s surface, a picture of a smiling woman and a man I presumed was her smiling husband. I didn’t look at that picture often, not at all on a good day. 

That's my six! Feel free to comment, suggest, encourage, discourage, speculate, like, or dislike. Yes, you. :)

Let's Do This

So I've been tweeting. It's...weird. I made fun of Twitter when it came out. I still make fun of it a little. I've got a snarky streak (well, ok, I've got a non-snarky streak, running through a personality made up mainly of snark), so making fun of things comes naturally to me.

Anyway, tweeting. I was wrong, Internet. And you were right. Twitter is actually pretty cool. I have had conversations with people who are writing cool stuff. People who have done what I thus far have only rarely had the chutzpah to do:  put their writing somewhere where people can read it.

I hate being scared. I hate admitting I'm scared even more. But I am. I'm scared to tell you about my book. I'm scared to offer it up to you and say "I wrote this." I am so tempted to throw it out there under a pen name and then tweet/blog/facebook about how "my friend wrote this and you should check it out."

But I won't. If someone else has the guts to do this, so do I, dammit.

So what's my book about? Well, it's your classic girl meets boy, boy takes over the world using telecommunication technology, and chaos ensues kind of thing. And it's coming this summer.

There. I said it. Oh crap, what have I done. 

Writer's Block...Sort Of

Avoidance FTL

I have writer's block. Sort of. I know for an absolute fact that if I were to give in to temptation and open up any one of the fiction pieces I'm working on, I would be kicking ass and chewing bubblegum in no time. It would feel great. I know this, just like I know that if I were to open up a blank Word doc and try to write an academic paper on, for instance, emotional rhetoric in political campaigns, I would sit staring blankly at the screen, wander off and have a smoke, call my friend and chat about random crap, pour myself a drink, drink it, consider making bread, and finally sit down and bang out a whiny, self-absorbed blog about how hard grad school is that I would then realize is crap and subsequently delete.

Three guesses why I know this.

An Infinite Loop of Revision...

I have three major academic projects to write and untold stacks of papers to grade, and instead of doing any of that I'm stuck on this infinite loop of revision ideas on this book-length fiction thing I'm working on. I think the internet acronym I want is FML. I have got to get focused, so I'm calling on you for help. Do me a solid and click through?

Refusing to Choose

Beware! I bring you terrifying news! Are you ready? Are you? OK. Here goes. When teachers aren't being teachers, they do other things. 


I know. I'm sorry. Shocking. 


It's easy to be sarcastic on this subject. At least, it is for me. For Judy Buranich, though, this is not funny at all. Because Judy Buranich is, like me, a teacher and a writer. She's a significantly more successful writer than I am, at that. And that might have been the problem. Because Ms Buranich is a writer of romance novels. And that apparently makes her fair game for the morality police.

Ms Buranich

This is Book Country

OK, I will try really hard to not make unnecessary Hunter S. Thompson references, and will instead focus on the really cool thing that just happened in my world: Bat Book Country. Sorry. It got away from me there. I'll be better.

Anyway, if you a) read or b) write, you have reason to be as excited as I am. Because Book Country is super sweet. Go ahead, check it out. I'll wait here. 

So? Pretty sweet, huh? How cool is this idea? I kinda wish I'd thought of it first, and I'm very excited about getting involved. It's basically a win-win: read other people's books, get them to read yours, get industry information that can help you find an agent (edited for clarity from original post). When worst case scenario is reading more, you can't really go wrong.

I joined yesterday, and I'm working up the nerve to submit my own book. And by "working up the nerve" I mean "glaring dourly at whole chapters that I thought were pretty OK, actually, until I considered someone who hadn't taken vows to love and support me reading them." But I'm getting there. You should too. When and if I finally get the chutzpah to put chapter one up, I'll let you all know. But even if I don't, go take a look at all the great work the good people at Bat Book Country are doing. I'm so sorry. I can't help myself. 

Revising = Winning

I've begun some substantial revisions on my largest writing project to date, something that I suppose I have to call a novel. I think it's pretty good. I think that it might become something that is pretty good. In any event, I'm loving the process of revising it. In a bit of odd synchronicity, I am also teaching revision to my Research Writing students. They do not share my love.

The Illustrious Mr. Sheen

For many of my students, revising is something they do under duress, complete with the obligatory under-the-breath "it was fine how it was" and the dreaded "this is stupid." But revise they shall. And I found a truly nifty way to show them how. I'm of the opinion that in order to revise for conciseness (my students' current writing task is revising a 4-page research paper into a 500 word essay), you have to really know what you were saying in the first place. So today, I unveiled my master plan. OK, well, that's a lie. There was no plan. My students were bored, I was desperate, and I went with it. It worked, so I'll call it a "master plan" instead of a "foolish catastrophe." Anyway, I chose a famous piece of American oratory, presented in text form. That's right, a transcription of the Charlie Sheen interview (from the Huffington Post).

My Work-in-Progress Blog

I'm trying an experiment. And I need your help. See, from the time I learned how to read, I wanted to be a writer. I've loved playing around with the English language my whole life, so much so that I decided (after a few missteps) to study it. When I was five, I wrote a short story. Not a great short story, but Mom sure liked it. I think she still has it, in fact. I know I still have the compulsive habit of converting my every thought, fear, and fantasy into prose of varying quality. Finally, after 25 years of this, it has occurred to me: why do I have a laptop full of short stories, novels, and outlines that no one has ever read?

OMG EEEEE!

Confession: I'm not really a writer. I'm really a squealing, weak-kneed fangirl pretending to be a writer. But, occasionally, if you're gonna pretend to be a writer, you gotta write. And not just write, but publish what you wrote. Otherwise, everyone knows you're just pretending in hopes that you can one day sit on a panel with Clive Barker, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Ewan McGregor being asked earnest and sincere questions about your "craft," and then later going for drinks (I know Ewan McGregor isn't a writer: this is my fantasy. Shut it.).