The Fox's Den

The Week in Words (August 21)

2010-08-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

This week was so busy it ran into next week! Sorry for the late newsletter, but it's been delayed by some truly exciting projects, so I'm sure you'll forgive me.

Master of Professional Writing

This week I attended the orientation for new graduate students in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Oklahoma. It's a two-year graduate degree that focuses on writing novels, non-fiction books, and screenplays. You know I'm already focusing pretty heavily on the first two of those, and I've got secret dreams of seeing Gods Tomorrow as a screenplay within my lifetime, so there's incredible potential here.

I said a little bit more about orientation (and my expectations for the coming semester) over at the Consortium blog, in case you'd like to know more.

Gods Tomorrow

I've also spent most of the month really wrapped up in last-minute improvements to a two-year-old manuscript. That's because I'm planning to self-publish Gods Tomorrow in early September.

It's a huge undertaking, but I've been making rumblings here lately against the publishing establishment, and I've been linking you to article by J. A. Konrath who makes screeds against the establishment, so I'm doing my due diligence. I'm going to publish my best, most polished, most promising manuscript as a total gamble, and let you know what I learn.

Of course, I'm doing everything I can to bias the results, so I've been pretty busy planning a coverart photoshoot with the amazing Julie V. Photography (not to mention contacting Julie Roads for some help with the back cover copy).

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: after exhorting you to accept your expertise as a writer (I called it "writing in the deep end"), I went on to demand that you obey some writing rules again.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on expertise with a story about throwing my daughter in the deep end of the pool, and watching her struggle back to the top. Ugh! Just typing that makes my stomach tie up in knots, but it turned out to be a good thing.

Then on Monday I talked about pretending to be an expert writer. I've spent most of the last year practicing what I preach, as far as that goes, and it's definitely turned out to be a good thing.

Then Tuesday I tried to tell you how to overcommit yourself as successfully as I have done. It's all about stretching your competence, and I'm pretty confident that's the only way anyone has ever earned the rightful title of "expert."

On Wensdy (as we sometimes say it in these parts), Courtney told us what she learned about writing this week when she returned to her writing Bible, a memoir/textbook written by Stephen King; in essence, she told us -- as he told us before -- to use the words we know and stay away from the big and fancy words, no matter how tempting they might be. I think it's good advice. How about you?

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on writing rules with a story about a high school math teacher who let me sweat it out, before doing me a tremendous favor. Who would have thought math could be so suspenseful?

On Friday I talked about suspense, and the challenging balance of surprising your readers without keeping them in the dark. One of those things is a requirement of good writing, and the other one is absolutely against the rules. Fun.

Saturday's article cleared things up a little bit, though, because real suspense isn't built out of ignorance. The best way to write suspense is by creating real concern for fictional characters. Once that's in place, you can do more to worry your readers by revealing what's in store than by hiding the things they need to know. It's liberating...and incredibly powerful.

The Week in Words (August 14)

2010-08-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

This week my works in progress included four books, and all of the How Tos. That's not normally the way I run things, but this week has been an excellent exception.

Catching Up on My Reading

This week I didn't get any new scenes written for The Girl Who Stayed the Same, but I've been busy reading anyway. I finally read through Chris Baty's No Plot, No Problem (the NaNoWriMo book), and it was inspiring. I wanted to start writing right away. None of that's a big surprise (most of you know I'm a three-time NaNoWriMo winner), but the message wasn't a surprise and the book still got me ready to go. It's incredibly well written. I recommend it highly.

I also picked up ePub: Straight to the Point this week, and started working my way through it. It promises to teach me everything I need to know about digitally publishing a novel and making it beautiful. So far I'm a couple chapters in and it's telling me to do all the thing I'm telling you to do, but I have high hopes the second half will be the actual application bit.

Getting Behind on My Writing

And I'm not just getting behind on my writing for The Girl Who Stayed the Same. I'm making it worse by adding new projects to be behind on!

This week I designed and outlined a new e-Book that's all about using Google Docs as a Documentation Production Environment (or, put simply, getting the most out of Google Docs). Much of the book's foundation (just like the ePub book I bought) will be the stuff I've said here in the last month or so, but I'm going to get into some pretty detailed advice for management and publication in the e-Book that would be hard to present on the blog.

I'm also working on a new e-Book that's all about writing a novel during NaNoWriMo. And yes, of course, my finally reading No Plot, No Problem is related to that. I needed to make sure my book wasn't too much of a duplicate, and it's not. I think the two guides could coexist quite peacefully.

Two new e-Books, three novels I'm working on at the moment, and the publication of Gods Tomorrow scheduled for September. It's going to be a busy summer.

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: programming your language and pointing your plot.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on programming languages with a story about writing a macro in VBA to handle complicated Word tasks. It protected my productivity and saved my sanity...and gave me a great chance to show off my technical skills, too.

Then on Monday I talked about automating tasks as a Technical Writer. Programming might not be a normal pastime for writers, but it's an incredibly valuable one.

Then Tuesday I told you which programming language you should start with, if you're ready to get started. Dive into Python. It's a programming language that does its best to read like a human language, and it can do remarkably cool things.

On Wednesday, Courtney told us what she learned about writing this week from painting trees for Julie V. Photography. She told us to get really good at the things we're good at, and...well, to get good at the things we're not good at, too. I think Chris Baty would agree!

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on plot points with a story about my high school graduation, and the dedication of my first home. Both of them were monumental moments in my life, and both of them proved to be major turning points in my story. I think that qualifies them for a couple hundred words of memoir, don't you?

On Friday I talked about monumental moments and turning points in your stories. I explained the concept of plot points -- what they are, and what they have to offer.

Today's article came with a little caveat, though: they won't really pull their weight until you learn how to write effective plot points. It's a matter of deliberate design. You don't have to outline every scene in your book, but every scene should know which plot point it's moving toward, and what that change will bring.

Around the Web

I also found a couple of good articles around the web this week, that I thought you might find interesting.

Jane at Writer's Digest's There Are No Rules insists that Self-Publishing and Online Publishing Will Not Ruin Your Chances at a Traditional Deal. It makes sense, and it's certainly good news. I see the future of the industry working that way, even if the present of the industry doesn't.
Self-publishing advocate J. A. Konrath at A Newbie's Guide to Publishing talks about The High Cost of Self-Promotion. He's saying exactly what I want to hear...and that always makes me a little nervous. I'm hopeful, though. That's what I want the future of the industry to be.

The Week in Words (August 7)

2010-08-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

After last week's big reveal of my other project, I think it's time to get back to a real focus on what brings us all together here: hating Dan Brown.

Freelance Services

It's a shame that I've never gotten around to preparing a sales page around here, but as some of my blog posts in the last couple weeks have probably hinted, I do have some valuable services to sell. In addition to my own extensive experience with creative and technical writing, I've done writing coaching, document design (fiction and nonfiction), story editing, voice editing, line editing, copy editing, and several types of copy writing.

At the moment, I'm working on breaking into grant writing, and I'm in talks to maybe do a ghost writing gig. It all sounds like a lot of fun.

Incidentally, since I don't have a strong sales process set up at the moment, I've got some open availability, so if you find yourself in need of some of those services, you can feel free to send me an email (or use the site's Contact Form) to ask me for an estimate. I'm not cheap, but I'm terribly good.

The Girl Who Stayed the Same

There's the technical and the creative writing to do, though, and I'm still going strong on my current work-in-progress. This week I finished chapter seven and started chapter eight of The Girl Who Stayed the Same.

Someone finally asked Jonas if he was an angel (and he answered with a qualified no), and we also learned that Jonas is really terrible at chess. He's also pretty emotionally unstable, but what do you expect from a dude who hangs around with artists all the time?

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: following directions and preparing a document according to the rules (specifically grant applications), and following the rules and writing stories with due respect for your readers.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on grant applications with a story about my three-year-old daughter learning to read...by memorizing the shapes of words. It's limited in a way phonetic alphabets aren't supposed to be, but it's also advanced in a way three-year-olds aren't supposed to be, so I'm considering the whole thing a wash.

Then on Monday I talked about grant money, selection committees, and how grant writing is just like the slush pile all over again. It's frustrating in ways, but it also gives experienced novelists a leg up on the competition.

Then Tuesday I took it a step further, saying that grant writing is just like writing Shakespearean sonnets. The metaphor isn't perfect, but the application is -- if you can learn to express your ideas well within someone else's strict structure, you're ready to call yourself a professional writer (and start raking in the dough).

On Wednesday, Courtney waxed domestic with a story about sewing up some torn garments, and in the process taught us how to patch up holes in our stories' plots. It can be a lot of work, and it's certainly the sort of thing we're often tempted to let pile up on our To Do lists, but a little extra effort can save a story from becoming scrap, and turn it into a perfectly serviceable Saturday shirt.

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on writing rules with a story about Trish trying to watch The Da Vinci Code in spite of all my lecturing. The lecture's got to go someplace, though! So I spilled it through onto Friday and Saturday, too.

On Friday I talked about respecting your readers, and specifically focused on understanding and deliberately crafting your book's reading experience. When you consider how your story affects your readers (and what they're offering in exchange for your storytelling), it becomes far easier to stick to some of the core rules of writing.

Today's article tied that up with a detailed look at what some of those rules are: premise, verisimilitude, and the unforgivable sin named "Deus Ex." It's been a pretty academic week, and if you've followed along you probably deserve a couple hours of college writing credits for it. Alas, my blog isn't yet accredited.

Around the Web

I also found a couple of good articles around the web this week, that I thought you might find interesting. They're certainly relevant to our most recent discussion.

Writing this week's aggressive broadside against popular novelist Dan Brown, I couldn't help thinking about literary agent Nathan Bransford's fantastic article last week, The One Question a Writer Should Never Ask.
Wouldn't you know it, though, Bransford followed up with another excellent post this week on the same topic, Writing vs. Storytelling. Be sure you read both of these -- you'll be a better writer for it.

The Week in Words (July 31)

2010-07-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

At last, it's here! Three months of talking about it, a month straight of setting up, and a week-long, thrilling extravaganza of business plannery have combined to make this the most exciting weekend at Unstressed Syllables since that one time when I wrote an e-Book.

We'd better get straight to the action!

The Consortium

This week I finally unveiled the glory that is my current project: the new new media, the right-brained brain trust, the Consortium...OKC. It's amazing.

If you haven't already been by, go check out the website. My graphic designer hasn't gotten around to making it pretty yet, but it's packed with good information about what we're doing, and grandiose hints at what we plan for the future.

Believe it or not, you'll probably hear more about it below, too.

The Girl Who Stayed the Same

I'm still talking about the girl I've been talking about for a while. (In case you haven't been keeping up, her name is Kelly Lane.)

This week I added three new scenes to chapter seven of The Girl Who Stayed the Same, messing with my newest narrator's muddled mind, and bringing back Jonas with the promise of chess. I'm looking forward to exploring his devious technique.

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: a business plan as an example of a good document template, and a business plan presenting the ultimate solution to a month's worth of complaining about (C).

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on business plans with a story about my first effort at a sales pitch for the Consortium. It wasn't terribly compelling...but it worked anyway.

Then on Monday I reminisced about the week before and its obscenely long list of template elements. I answered the questions in that list with a look at how the parts of a standard business plan line up with the template elements.

Then Tuesday I got into the nitty gritty, with a look at exactly what goes into the standard business plan. If you ever need to write one, it's probably a good place to start. Not a good place to stop, but you could at least start there.

On Wednesday, Courtney proved she's been paying attention with a timely look at how you can (and should) find inspiration in the public domain. By way of illustration, she talked Lincolns, zombies, Frankensteins, and Koontzes. (Personally, I find the Koontzes scariest.)

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on art with a story about a story about the Academy of the Arts in my fantasy world. Turns out fifteen years ago I was already laying a conceptual groundwork for the world-changing ideas I just dreamed up last February. How unsettling.

On Friday I settled down, though, and spoke to you for the first time in a totally mature and professional voice. Don't worry, I promise you won't hear it from me often. This was a special occasion, though. It's not every day I share the Executive Summary to a business plan about my world-changing ideas.

Then I wrapped up that discussion with today's invitation to become a part of the movement, and find your place in the Consortium. I want you working for me. I've got nothing to offer, and it's going to be a bunch of work, so dive right in!

Around the Web

I've also seen more than a handful of good articles around the web this week, that I thought you might find interesting. Here's the best.

Kate Shaw at Ars Technica reported on a recent experimental study that found "Pay what you want" benefits companies, consumers, charities. That's a pretty promising finding non-profit organizations and new-media artists hoping to compete with traditional publishing on customer service rather than litigation campaigns.
Speaking of litigation campaigns, the litigious J. K. Rowling is defending her own work against claims of copyright infringement, but she came out swinging this week. The Bookseller sums up the current legal situation with J. K. Rowling moves to dismiss plagiarism charge.
Meanwhile, guest writer Phyllis Zimbler Miller writes at BookBuzzr explains why Book Authors Need a Dedicated Website for Their Books. That's something that's been on my mind lately, with all the work on the Consortium. I'll let you know if I find any better ways to get it done.

The Week in Words (July 24)

2010-07-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

I spent the week getting ready for Trish's birthday. But that didn't take as long as it probably should have, so I've gotten some other stuff done, too.

Consortium Time

I've gotten to the point I spend most of my project time these days doing something for my new patronage program (which I do intend to finally announce in complete detail here all of next week). That doesn't mean I'm working on the Consortium instead of writing.

I started chapter seven of The Girl Who Stayed the Same this week, and started coordinating a photoshoot for the cover of Gods Tomorrow (which I intend to publish sometime before November).

I also spent a lot of time working with my programmers to get the Consortium's website working (and doing amazing things), and we've made arrangements to do even more of that this weekend.

My Homeroom

My other big project this week has been my three-year-old daughter. She's learning to read.

You can (of course) expect to hear much more about that in future blog posts, but I worked with her nearly every day this week, and she's accumulating words at a pretty impressive clip. By my last count, she's got eleven words she can recognize on sight now (with a little prodding, anyway).

It's fascinating watching the way she learns, the way pieces slowly start falling into place. And (again of course) I am extraordinarily proud of her.

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: what goes into a good document template, and what goes into mastering a craft.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on document templates with a story about a Photoshop tutorial, a blog post illustration, and a reality that's so much less than fantasy. It was a great reminder of the purpose and effect of a good document template, though.

Then on Monday I made the connection, explaining how document templates create context through style. That article included an incredibly handy list of all the elements that go into a document template definition.

Then Tuesday I explained how to use that list, by searching for sample documents and reverse-engineering a template. The trick is to recognize what's general and what's specific -- and then to borrow the best, and leave the rest.

On Wednesday, Courtney told us with a straight face that she's not an expert writer, and we just sort of snickered in disbelief. Who does she think she's kidding? That article was full of expert advice.

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on patronage with the story of the time Kris Austin offered to support my writing. It helped inspire this month's long-running series, and it helped drive me to be the best writer I could possibly be.

On Friday I discussed my ignorance of history, and then went on to give you a history lesson. At least I got a little expert input first. Anyway, it turns out the Renaissance community chose to support the artists to support the arts. They called it patronage. I'd call it retirement.

Then I wrapped up that discussion with today's article on becoming a master of an artistic style. It's all about learning the craft, practicing a refined style, and sticking to the path (even when it feels a little demeaning). My advice to you? Join the school of a master you can be proud to imitate.

Around the Web

I've also seen more than a handful of good articles around the web this week, that I thought you might find interesting. Here's the best.

I've got a little further reading on last week's Word Count articles. Karen Marcus over at Final Draft Communications offered her own numbers with the post Working With Word Count: How Long Should Your Business Document Be?
Joel Friedlander at The Book Designer shared a guest post by an intellectual property attorney, What Every Writer Ought to Know about Fair Use and Copyright. It's definitely worth a read, given the conversation we've been having on the topic.
And wow! There was big breaking news yesterday about "real" authors discontent with the big publishing houses. Alison Flood at The Guardian reported that several celebrated authors bypass publishing houses to sell ebooks via Amazon.

The Week in Words (July 17)

2010-07-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

This week I've spent a whole lot of time advancing hundreds of different projects and goals in hundreds of parallel paths. The net result is probably only a gain of a few inches on average, but miles and miles if you add them all up.

I suppose that's too vague to be useful, but getting into all the specifics would probably be tedious. So I'll just give you an overview of the more interesting pieces.

Visiting with Family

My parents came to visit two weeks ago for the holiday weekend, and my mom stuck around, so I got to drive her home last Friday night. That gave me five hours to chat with her on the drive to Little Rock, which was probably the first uninterrupted time we've had together in most of a decade. She just finished her degree to become a certified therapist, so she's got a lot of exciting stuff going on.

I also got to check out the major work they've done on their house, and spend lots of time talking with Dad about his plans for opening a web practice for his therapy. It just so happens I've spent most of the last six months learning the kinds of things he really needs to know right now.

It was a busy weekend, but it was also incredibly valuable. I've got to make the time to get out there on my own more often.

Writing

After promising to get caught up last weekend, this week I did prewriting work on three different books, and finished chapter six of The Girl Who Stayed the Same. I also got to know Jesse Lane in the process, and he's turning out to be a much more interesting character than I expected him to be.

In fact, I wrote a lot this week. I wrote six detailed project descriptions, and a couple dozen critical emails. I wrote editorial reviews for a dozen different projects in a dozen different media. And best of all, I wrote ten blog posts this week. For the first time since February, I've got an actual blog post buffer.

I'm really hoping to get some significant fiction writing done this weekend, to brag about in my next newsletter. In the meantime, here's the firstfruits of my blogging labor:

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: the ways writers use word count, and the value of free art.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on word count with a story about a busy weekend I spent finished up a digital copy of Ivanhoe. It wore me out (but, as I admitted this morning, it also inspired me to start on a brand new project).

Then on Monday I talked about the single metric writers, editors, and publishers use to avoid that same confusion: word count. It's amazingly handy for a lot of reasons (and you'd better believe I exceeded my allotted word count to list them all).

Then Tuesday I explained how to convert word count to page (and vice versa), and listed some standard word counts given for a handful of common document types. I also tasked you with figuring out the right word count for the documents you write, but what are the chances you followed through on that? Probably about (one):(the word count of the fifth Harry Potter book). I can live with that.

On Wednesday, Courtney told us what she learned about writing this week from words, and weird as the words were, their message was a simple one: until you've got them right, you're never completely making the connection with your reader that you want. Spend a little extra time, and hone in on the fine details. You'll be glad you did.

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on the public domain with a story about Twilight that I thought was funny. I suspect in the process I probably alienated nine out of ten of my readers, though (and that's not a ratio, sadly enough, that's a direct accounting).

On Friday I discussed the difference between free speech and free beer, and it was all in the context of stealing a Dickens novel from Barnes and Noble. Wait, no, that's not right. I know it had something to do with the public domain. Go read it, and find out for yourself.

Then I wrapped up that discussion with today's article on how to use free art in your original creative works. It's not as complicated as you might think, and it can be incredibly valuable. If you haven't already, check out the Creative Writing Exercise and give it a try.

Around the Web

I also found an article or two online this week that you might find worth reading (in light of our current discussions).

I've been hanging onto this one for a while, because I knew I had an article in the works on free art, but Julie Roads (yes, that Julie Roads) posted an article at Geek Girl Camp with a great primer on Using Creative Commons to Add Media to Your Blog. And, y'know, I was just talking about that yesterday!
And I'd like to pretend that, like last week, I'm sharing this post as a valuable counter-point to some of the things I'm saying in support of self-publishing, but I mainly wanted to share literary agent Mary's post over at Kidlit in which she talks about Self-Publishing, Finally so that you can see the viciously condescending attitude the publishing industry has toward...well, most writers. It's painful to sit through.

The Week in Words (July 10)

2010-07-10T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

Wow! Thanks to the holiday and some clever use of vacation time I ended up with a six-day weekend this week...and I'm still exhausted. The world is moving in fascinating directions, though.

The Girl Who Stayed the Same

I've stumbled a little bit with The Girl Who Stayed the Same this week. Monday's post didn't actually go up until Wednesday (although, to be fair, I wrote it out longhand in its entirety before lunch on Tuesday). Thursday's is still waiting. I'll get it live before the new one comes due on Monday, but it might be close.

There was a bit of an exciting development there, though. When I finished Part I (with its entire last chapter taking place in Paris), I shared it with Andi Fisher, a friend of my blogger friend, who happens to be in love with Paris. She's now in love with The Girl Who Stayed the Same, too. (I think I'm allowed to repeat that....)

She gave me some fabulous feedback and valuable criticism, but mostly it helps to know that someone who has no real incentive to flatter me considers it a worthwhile project. And that's on just 20% of the book. And in a state barely better than rough draft.

So...yay.

New Book Idea

This one doesn't even have a working title. It's that new.

But yes, as you may have seen if you follow me on Twitter, I came up with a fantastic new story idea this week. I don't have time for a fantastic new story idea. I'm going to follow my own advice, though, and at least do a full prewriting package for it. That should be enough to capture the inspiration until such time as I can give it the attention it deserves.

Extraordinarily brief synopsis: the wizard Claighan, Master of the Sarian Academy of Wizardry, somehow gets banished to our universe where he finds the magic too erratic and feral for him to return home. Based on nothing but the preview of the Nicholas Cage movie, I'd say this story is like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but not dumb.

I've been wanting to do an action-packed urban fantasy for a little while now, I've been wanting to discuss "Science as the last magic" for a decade, and Courtney has gone and rekindled my love for my old fantasy stuff. This project is the result of all those forces.

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: Microsoft Word Styles, and copyright.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on Microsoft Word styles by telling a story of the time I used a well-styled document and created an automated Table of Contents in seconds. It blew their minds.

Then on Monday I backed away from the magic a little bit to show you the goings-on behind the curtain. After all, before you can make a Table of Contents in seconds, you've got to put in half an hour or so setting up and applying your custom styles. Once that's done, you're in business.

Then Tuesday I pretended to backpedal some more, admitting that there is a little bit of work to do to create a beautiful Table of Contents. I dove right into the illustrated tutorial, though, and it took all of four steps. So easy, they'll think you cheated somehow.

On Wednesday, Courtney served up some knowledge (and a tantalizing book description) with her high praise for Descent by Jeff Long. The lesson she shared was that as writers, we should all be adventurers. So get to it!

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on copyright with a story about the I got paid to write some fiction. Yes, "time," singular. Shut up.

On Friday I dove into some discussion of how you could get paid to be a writer, with a brief primer on how copyright works. It's not easy and it's not terribly reliable (and it might be a little bit easy), but that's the system we've got to work with. If you missed the article by Dean Wesley Smith in there, you're doing yourself a disservice. Go read it.

I wrapped that up today with some words that might get me in a little bit of trouble. I'll blame it on Courtney's WILAWriTWe, though. I was being adventurous. Frankly, though, I don't believe copyright is good -- for the public or for artists -- and I said as much in a detailed look at what it costs you to make money off of copyright.

Around the Web

I also read some fascinating articles this week that all did a pretty solid job challenging some of my positions. In the interest of fair play, I'll go ahead and share them with you.

First, I'm going to throw in Dean Wesley Smith's Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Can't Make Money in Fiction because I don't entirely trust you to have gone and looked it up again for yourself. I know it's long. You're a good reader, though. Make your way through it.
Then Joel Friedlander from The Book Designer went and undermined my advice that you write a serial novel with Top 5 Reasons Authors Shouldn't Blog Their Books. I don't consider either of these articles crushing blows, but it's worth your time to get both sides of the story.
Oh yeah! And this one doesn't defy me in the slightest. Thank you, internet! Iain Broome over at Write for Your Life wrote up a tutorial on How to Write Smarter in Microsoft Word with Document Map. That's a fantastic supplement to this week's Technical Writing series, and will let you take that well-styled document even further.

The Week in Words (July 3)

2010-07-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

Once again, I've had a remarkably busy week working on Consortium stuff, but the tidbits I've been doling out here just haven't been terribly enlightening. I've got a big reveal planned for the near future, so I'll just stop discussing it in my newsletter until then. Here's everything else I've been doing.

The Girl Who Stayed the Same

This week saw the end of part one (of five) of The Girl Who Stayed the Same. The book is over 25,000 words, and it's going as well as I ever hoped. It's incredibly exciting.

I'm also probably going to be running a contest on Twitter sometime this weekend for anyone interested in a free copy of How to Build an e-Book. So if you're not already following me on Twitter, click here to get started.

The e-Book Challenge

I've only just started on this one, but it's going to be in the news for the next eight weeks, probably.

It's time to start thinking about the e-Book Challenge, though -- a month-long event for bloggers interested in monetizing their blogs by building an e-Book. If it sounds vaguely familiar, it's the third in the Blog Challenge series that has consisted of Carlos Velez's Pre-Writing Challenge and Dave Doolin's Blog Maintenance Challenge.

I've had a lot longer than either of them did to make plans, so I feel like there's some pressure on me to get it right. Lucky for me, I've already got a guidebook written, in How to Build an e-Book.

Anyway, if it's something you're interested in, make sure to sign up for the e-Book Challenge newsletter now, because I'll be sending out a special opportunity for all its subscribers in the next week, before opening up the general enrollment in mid-July.

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: HTML styles in Google Docs, and the proper therapeutic approach to writing in drafts.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on HTML styles in Google Docs by telling the story of a simple little web-scraping script I wrote that evolved into a robust publication process for converting Google Docs into ePub e-Books.

Then on Monday I actually dug into that program, providing an illustrated tutorial on customizing paragraph styles in Google Docs. Of course, the tricky part isn't finding the editor, it's knowing what to do with the editor. The answer: Google.

Then Tuesday I had to answer some criticism from a submissions editor who saw Monday's post on Twitter, but it gave me a chance to point out the difference between formatting your text, and labeling it with styles (which is the whole point of this three-week series), and I provided a quick overview on making your Google Docs styles match a publisher's submissions policy.

On Wednesday, Courtney returned from her summer hiatus with an excellent excuse for her absence: a whirlwind of kitten food purchases, flea treatments, and frustrating discussions regarding the future fate of our furry foundling. She turned that into a phenomenal intro for the posts I had pending, discussing the need to protect, nurture, and de-worm your rough drafts.

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on writing in drafts by providing a follow-up to last week's story about my social anxiety. I'm getting it under control now, thanks to a rigorous workout schedule and my own personal marble statue metaphor.

On Friday I extended the behavioral therapy metaphor, with a glimpse into Narrative Therapy, a recognition of the desire for a perfect, healthy, balanced first draft, and a promise that when yours doesn't turn out quite that right, you can fix even the ugliest rough drafts with a few good habits, as long as you make them deliberate.

I wrapped that up today with some blindingly obvious writing advice: you should write every day. It's blindingly obvious in the same way "you should exercise more" is, but personal experience has taught me the powerful difference between trying to do something in pursuit of a long-term goal, and learning to recognize the immediate benefits. They can be much bigger than you think, but you can't really gain them unless you're already watching.

Around the Web

I do want to get back into the "Around the Web" game, but I've decided to ease into it. So this week I've only got two for you, and you'll be able to see the common link: self-publishing and trying to turn your writing into a paying business. That's more Consortium stuff bleeding through.

Jane Friedman at Writer's Digest talked about An Exciting Future for Authors (That Can Succeed Without Publishers or Agents) thanks to a new funding source for creative projects in the form of fan contributions. Read more about it or just pop over to Kickstarter.org to figure it out on your own.
Joanna Penn, who provides some great information on self-publishing, stayed true to form with these six Tips for Potential Self-Publishers

The Week in Words (June 26)

2010-06-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

This week I finally started on a novel I'd been talking about for ages. And I talked to many people for many hours. And I learned way more about CSS than I ever wanted to know.

The Consortium

After about a week of researching various art grants, I met with an accountant Wednesday to figure out what I need to do to get incorporated and registered as a nonprofit. Turns out what I need to do is "pay this dude $1,800 and have a lot of patience."
That's not stopping me, though. I also met with several of my artists about projects we can start on now to get things moving in the right direction, and I'm taking my first halting steps at playing Mr. Manager. I'll let you know how that turns out.

The Girl Who Stayed the Same

The Girl Who Stayed the Same is now one or two scenes away from the end of Act I, and it's been a pretty intense week in Paris. I had two very different scenes this week that were each challenging in very different ways. It was fun.
Once again, you can follow that story on my private series page at the Creative Copy Challenge, or just wait for the e-Book coming to digital purveyors near you in February 2011.

SEATAC

SEATAC, my new sci-fi title, finally has a Google Doc to call its own. Well...it's actually had a Doc for a while now, but that was prewriting. Now it's real.
Two days of work to come up with 400 words of real....

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: markup languages, and the blogstory style of Julie Roads.
Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on markup languages by telling the story of the college mission trip that crippled my faith. It was all about labels.
Then on Monday I took labels a step further, with a look into how markup languages (like HTML) can be used as document authoring tools.
Then Tuesday I got specific, telling you how to apply heading tags (and which tags to use) in WordPress. Blog better.
On Wednesday, Courtney learned another important lesson about trusting her brain when she forgot it was Wednesday already. See? That's why you need a scribblebook. If you're still craving the article you missed, just go back and reread last week's. It really was that good.
Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on the blogstory style by introducing the blogstory master (or...mistress?) Julie Roads. If you were reading along, you got to know that name quite well.
On Friday I told you why I thought she was so special. It's not just that she's a great blogger, but that brought the fundamental value of story her blog, and perfected the mix. If you're not already reading her blog, you should be.
I wrapped that up today by talking about you. Well...no, not really. I talked about Julie some more. And about me. But it applies to you! Because Julie got as good as she is by choosing a writing style she loved and practicing perfection. You can do the same thing, no matter what type of writing you do.

The Week in Words (June 19)

2010-06-19T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the Editor's Desk

Perhaps my biggest accomplishment this week has been the production of an email newsletter. It has taken me a hair shy of seven weeks to prepare.

I do apologize for the delay. I changed the blog posting schedule at the same time I took on three major new projects, and the newsletter fell through the cracks

I might have a thing or two to say about some of those projects, though.

The Consortium

That's right. After realizing I probably shouldn't be giving away my new genius business idea a full decade before I had the resources to pull it off, I have nonetheless continued in pursuit of that idea (and those resources). I've also discovered a handful of things that make me think maybe it won't take quite so long to make it real. And maybe I don't have to be quite so secret.

I'm not going to go into detail here, though, because that would rob me of a month's worth of blog post material. You can look forward to an interesting series throughout July, though, as I build the case for my right-brained brain trust.

The Girl Who Stayed the Same

I've also continued the serial novel I first announced in the debut Week in Words. This week I finished chapter four, and I dare say it's finally getting interesting.

You can follow that story on my private series page at the Creative Copy Challenge, or just wait for the e-Book coming to digital purveyors near you in February 2011.

On Unstressed Syllables

This week we covered two major topics: document outlines, and story structure.

Sunday I introduced the Technical Writing series on document outlines by telling about my own harrowing encounter with an outline-wielding high school debater.

I thought I was doomed, but it turned out I could easily get over the fear of failure by not trying to win. That's the happy ending to that story (although my debate partner didn't much appreciate it).

Then on Monday I got down to the nitty gritty, explaining why you actually need to understand and use document outlines. Turns out they're a fantastic way to visualize and improve your document's structure.

Then Tuesday I told you how to actually do one, with a detailed explanation (and examples) of the standard outline format. It was awesome.

On Wednesday, Courtney forgot what she was talking about, which made for a fantastic WILAWriTWe reminding you that you should get (and use) a scribblebook.

Thursday I introduced the Creative Writing series on story structure with the tale of a year when I wandered away from writing to focus on designing and drawing mazes.

On Friday I explained what that had to do with writing. If you look at it the right way, the structure of a story is just like a maze, and there are several principles of mazemaking that can help you improve your story structure. One of the most significant: solid structure doesn't have to be obvious structure.

I wrapped that up today by pointing out the big difference between mazemaking and storytelling. In this business, it's absolutely your job to make sure readers can follow the plot of your novel. If they get, ahem, lost somewhere in the middle, you've dropped the ball. And I'm going to be classy here and not mention the writers of Lost at all.

Across the Web

I do intend to include interesting writing-related links in these newsletters, as I was doing for the few short weeks that "The Week in Words" ran as a Saturday blog post. I don't have any for you this week, though. Maybe next week I'll manage my time a little better. One can always hope.

My 48 Hours

2010-05-25T09:02:00.001-07:00

Last Thursday, while I was still at work, T-- took the kids to Wichita to spend some time with her family there. The plan was to stay through a big birthday party Saturday evening, then drive home late Saturday night.

I intended, as I often do on these occasions, to take advantage of the peace and quiet to get some good work done. Mainly I had some computer stuff I wanted to do -- reviewing a blog for a new friend, getting caught up on my own blogging after a busy few weeks, and putting together some notes on a new project I'm working on (the Consortium). I figured I'd do a little lawn and house work, too, since our property got hit pretty hard with last week's apocalyptic hailstorm.

Anyway, when I got home from work to an empty house Thursday afternoon, the first thing I did was make a To Do list. (I estimated roughly that each item in the "Must Do" list should represent about 90 minutes of work).

Must Do

Thursday night

Write Sun/Mon/Tue blog posts for next week
Prepare newsletter for Saturday

Friday morning

Mow the lawn
Clean out the gutters

Friday afternoon

Write Thu/Fri/Sat blog posts for next week
Set up blog review spreadsheet on GDocs

Friday night

Review Julie's blog posts
Review Julie's blog posts

Saturday morning

Chainsaw some trees
Paint hall and bathrooms

Saturday afternoon

Review Julie's blog posts
Review Julie's blog posts

Saturday night

Edit and link next week's blog posts
Prepare next Saturday's newsletter

Sunday afternoon

Email Julie about the Consortium
Complete detailed descriptions of the Consortium in Wave

Sunday night

Write Sun/Mon/Tues blog posts for next week
Outline blog posts for June

Remember to Eat!

Lunch with D-- (discuss Consortium as non-profit)
Dinner with K-- and N-- (discuss Consortium network/software)
Lunch with Courtney (recruit her to the Consortium)
Dinner with B-- (discuss Consortium business plan)

Extra Credit (if I have free time)

Recruit Carlos to the Consortium
Social Writing
Help Toby program BookMaker utility
Get in touch with Doolin
Email Julie about blog review
Get Courtney her photos (from a Julie V shoot)
Design novel template in GDocs
Scan many things
Edit/link guest posts for Doolin
Make chapters for Carlos's e-Book
Review Carlos's other support requests
Call OU Admissions department
Email Shawn about the Consortium
Finish Ivanhoe
Email Courtney about her blog
Contact Schwinn customer support
Lowe's run
Fix exterior lights
Drop seed, weed killer, and fertilizer on lawn
Clean out garage work area
Put some stuff in the attic
Convert Becca's and Bryce's books to e-Book format
Read Becca's and Bryce's books
Check out Courtney's new WIP on GDocs
Write Thursday's Creative Copy Challenge post
Reply to many comments on my blog and Doolin's

Those were my 48 items in 48 hours (I mentioned them on Facebook). And...well, technically four of those items were scheduled for Sunday, but I'd have my whole family home on Sunday so I figured I'd need to get much of that done in advance.

Of course, I ended up adding to the list before I was done.

Added since Thursday afternoon (all extra credit)

Email Courtney about new photo policy at my blog
Update About Page photos in color
Clean up storm detritus on driveway, porch, and sidewalks
Replace shattered plastic house numbers over garage
Pick up a birthday gift for K--
Fix fallen A/C register and attach headboard to bedframe
Murder weeds growing in driveway, porch, and sidewalks
Patch busted wood trim around bathroom door
Caulk floor joints both bathroom
Organize tool chest drawers
Wash and put away three loads of laundry
Paint over garage hail damage
Take out the trash
Do the dishes
Email Cindy about the Consortium as a non-profit

And I made time for my 4.5-mile jog every morning, because with all that cerebral work going on, I needed some physical exertion to balance it out.

The problem, it turned out, was that 45 minutes jogging wasn't close to enough time to balance it out. I got started working on the lawn Friday morning, and found myself still working outside when it came time to go to dinner Friday night. Woke up Saturday, went for my jog, and figured since I was going to have to shower anyway, I should do a thing or two outside first.

By the end of the day Saturday (my forty-eight hours), I'd spent about fourteen hours sleeping, eight hours at business/social meals, and a hair over an hour (total) sitting at my computer. The other twenty-five hours I spent toiling -- repairing my house, cleaning, or working in the yard. And none of that was by choice or priority -- it just sort of happened. I was driven.

When everything was said and done, by the time I went to bed Sunday night, I'd completed 34 of the 62 items on my To Do list, including just half of the "Must Do" items. The finished list looked like this:

Must Do

Thursday night

Write Sun/Mon/Tue blog posts for next week
Prepare newsletter for Saturday

Friday morning

~~Mow the lawn~~
~~Clean out the gutters~~

Friday afternoon

Write Thu/Fri/Sat blog posts for next week
~~Set up blog review spreadsheet on GDocs~~

Friday night

Read Julie's blog posts
Read Julie's blog posts

Saturday morning

~~Chainsaw some trees~~
~~Paint hall and bathrooms~~

Saturday afternoon

Read Julie's blog posts
Read Julie's blog posts

Saturday night

Edit and link next week's blog posts
Prepare next Saturday's newsletter

Sunday afternoon

Email Julie about the Consortium
~~Complete detailed descriptions of the Consortium in Wave~~

Sunday night

Write Sun/Mon/Tues blog posts for next week
Outline blog posts for June

Remember to Eat!

~~Lunch with Dan (discuss Consortium as non-profit)~~
~~Dinner with Austins (discuss Consortium network/software)~~
~~Lunch with Courtney (recruit her to the Consortium)~~
~~Dinner with Bruce (discuss Consortium business plan)~~

Extra Credit (if I have free time)

~~Recruit Carlos to the Consortium~~
Social Writing
Help Toby program BookMaker utility
Get in touch with Doolin
Email Julie about blog review
~~Get Courtney her photos (from a Julie V shoot)~~
~~Design novel template in GDocs~~
Scan many things
Edit/Link guest posts for Doolin
Make chapters for Carlos's e-Book
Review Carlos's other support requests
~~Call OU Admissions department~~
Email Shawn about the Consortium
Finish Ivanhoe
~~Email Courtney about her blog~~
~~Contact Schwinn customer support~~
~~Lowe's run~~
~~Fix exterior lights~~
Drop seed, weed killer, and fertilizer on lawn
~~Clean out garage work area~~
Put some stuff in the attic
~~Convert Becca's and Bryce's books to e-Book format~~
Read Becca's and Bryce's books
Check out Courtney's new WIP on GDocs
Write Thursday's Creative Copy Challenge post
~~Reply to many comments on my blog and Doolin's~~
~~Email Courtney about new photo policy at my blog~~
~~Update About Page photos in color~~
~~Clean up storm detritus on driveway, porch, and sidewalks~~
~~Replace shattered plastic house numbers over garage~~
~~Pick up a birthday gift for Kris~~
~~Fix fallen A/C register and attach headboard to bedframe~~
~~Murder weeds growing in driveway, porch, and sidewalks~~
~~Patch busted wood trim around bathroom door~~
~~Caulk floor joints both bathroom~~
~~Organize tool chest drawers~~
~~Wash and put away three loads of laundry~~
Paint over garage hail damage
~~Take out the trash~~
~~Do the dishes~~
Email Cindy about the Consortium as a non-profit

Flying Ice

2010-02-05T08:31:00.000-08:00

Monday this week was a day made for disappointment. It always is, but this week was worse than most. After an ice storm lent me another four-day weekend, it was a real bummer to come back to the office. Nobody was in a great mood, and everybody had a lot of work that needed doing, to get caught up. I put in my nine miserable hours, packed up some extra reading to take home with me, and then called it a day.

The roads were pretty clear by then, except for the steep-walled piles of dirty gray slush spilling onto the sides, but the drive still posed some little risks. I felt my car slip a little turning onto MacArthur, and again as I pushed up the ramp onto the highway. It was nothing dangerous, really -- just little reminders that the road wasn't really dry.

I hardly needed them, though. My windshield was enough evidence of that, with the thin, semi-transparent patina of slush thrown up by the cars ahead of me. That got a lot worse when I got onto the highway, and I was leaning forward, waiting for another pass of my worn out wipers, when the car in front of me threw up more than just slush. A pebble the size of a BB flipped up and smashed against my windshield, inches from my nose.

The sound of it startled me -- surprisingly loud crack in the still of my car --and as I flinched back, I wondered if it had chipped the glass.

I first started driving in 1995, and I drove for fourteen years without ever getting a cracked windshield. I've certainly taken my share of pebble bombardment, but they make those suckers pretty strong. Still, the thought crossed my mind because, only a week earlier, gravel bouncing out of the back of a dump truck had put a big score in the driver's side glass right above the dashboard. First time in my life, and here came another pebble one week later.

And then the wipers blurred by, smearing away the muck, and they left behind a single glittering spot, ten inches above the week-old chip. I grunted in frustration, I rolled my eyes, I probably thought something mean about the driver of the dirty white Tercel.

But then a sarcastic smile twisted my lips. I shook my head and chuckled, and said, "I wonder if I constructed that." See, I believe in something called social constructionism, and one aspect of it is that the things we expect, the things we anticipate, are the things that are likely to show up in our reality. By worrying about my glass getting chipped, had I made it happen? It was a swift-passing thought. I sighed and let it go. Probably just coincidence. It's a funny old world, after all.

The words were still fresh in my mind, the smile still on my lips, when I heard the distant groan and rip just before a sheet of ice tore free from that same car. I'd seen it happen on my drive in that morning, and even once or twice already on my drive home, but this time it happened right in front of me. A blanket of ice and snow packed two-inches thick suddenly caught the wind, dancing like a kite up into the air for two seconds, three, and slashing back down to earth.

I was too close, though. I got in the way. The largest shard -- probably two feet across -- came stabbing straight down at me. I braked, I swerved, but there was no time. I caught a dozen pounds of ice dead center on the passenger side of my windshield, at sixty miles per hour. It boomed like an explosion, and the whole windshield shattered -- safety-glass holding the fractured bits in place, but ruined.

It was five o'clock on a Monday afternoon, northbound in the left-hand lane of one of the city's major thoroughfares, so I had sixty-MPH traffic right on my tail. As soon as I knew I was still alive, I put my foot back on the gas. My heart thundered, and I had to fight to catch my breath, but the windshield held. I had a small rectangle, maybe two feet by one, right at eye level on the driver's side where the glass was whole. It was enough to give me a clear view of the road, as long as I leaned forward. It was enough to get me home, anyway.

So I drove on, terrified every time another piece of ice flipped up into the air and wondering if the shattered windshield might give way yet. Ten miles still to go, and nobody else on the road cared how fragile my situation was. I just focused on breathing, focused on getting home safely.

And while I was at it, I tried my hardest to ignore that chip, right in front of my nose, marring the one bit of good glass left to me.

(I prepared this post according to the assignment description in this week's Creative Writing exercise over at UnstressedSyllables.com. I'd love any feedback you've got to give.)

Journal Entry: February 2, 2009

2010-02-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

We ended last year with an honest-to-goodness blizzard that rolled in on Christmas Eve. Mom and Dad were here in town, staying at our place for the week before heading out to Germany on Christmas morning, and that ended up being quite an adventure. They made it, though.

Anyway, we had a repeat of that foul weather last week, when heavy ice started coming down on Thursday afternoon, followed by a thick coat of snow all Thursday night. I did end up going in to work on Thursday, but they let us out early and closed the offices on Friday.

That gave us a nice long weekend, trapped in the house. T-- has been sick with a respiratory virus for nearly a week now, so it was a good thing I was home to take care of the kids (especially in the mornings). We had fun, though. AB and I played out in the snow for half an hour on Friday, we started testing out bedtime stories, and she learned how to control my warlock's flying carpet in WoW.

XP and I worked on enunciation and word choice, motor control, and screaming unreservedly for no reason whatsoever. That was a little less fun.

We watched a bunch of Berenstain Bears cartoons with AB, and the first season of 30 Rock when she wasn't looking. I also played a lot of WoW.

Saturday night, like Noah sending the dove out from the ark, we ordered a pizza and were delighted when it arrived in a reasonable amount of time. Sunday morning we finally ventured out, meeting my little sister and her family at IHOP for lunch.

We were not the only people in town with that idea. Alas.

Anyway, we had no real problems on the roads, and afterward T-- dropped me and AB back at the house, and then went to do some grocery shopping. Sunday evening we had sandwiches, and finished off the second season of our show.

Then Monday morning it was AB's turn to be sick, and she was hacking something awful when I had to head to work. T-- seems to be on the mend, though, and it was only really bad for three days or so. So maybe AB will be better before the weekend.

Oh! On the drive home from work I had some serious drama, but that probably deserves a post of its own. I'll get that up as soon as I can. I did end up running some errands in the evening, including a trip to Walgreens where I learned we might have another ice storm coming. Yay!

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

I Am a Writer

2010-02-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

I've been a writer all my life. I started inventing worlds and stories when I was in first grade, and I started learning the mechanics of it all even before that, when my granddad taught me touch-typing on a battered old typewriter.

The Prologue

I first started thinking of myself as a writer in a sixth-grade English class, when I was supposed to write a one-page story incorporating a least half of our vocabulary words, and I wrote eight pages and used them all. I made that the first in a series of absurd detective stories that I developed over the course of the year. When I was twelve my family moved to the big city, and I dealt with the frightening upheaval in my life by writing my first novel. I wrote my classmates into the story to make friends.

When I was in high school I spent an afternoon patiently explaining to my dad that I didn’t need to go to college. My only goal in life was to be a writer, and I already knew how to write. I was well into my second novel by then, and I was marking up my Creative Writing teacher’s noir mystery in my free time. My dad's wisdom prevailed, though, and when I got to college, I discovered not only the limits of my understanding but also the real value of others’ ideas. I chose Oklahoma Christian University for its creative writing program, and took a writing class every semester for four years.

In the process I learned the rules of the craft, I learned to develop my narrative voice, and I learned how powerful a diversity of styles can be. I’ve since had the opportunity to coach my dad in creative writing, and I was able to teach him using some of the same methods I learned in that college program I’d once assured him I would never need.

The Process

Those methods have become more and more important in my life. They include everything from the intensive character development and plot architecture that I've used to build my Ghost Targets series, to the minute attention to mechanics and detail that makes me such a good Technical Writer (and pays for my two houses).

When I first started in the industry, I hated that I was selling out and getting a day job, and I spent a lot of energy separating technical writing from creative writing in my head. All I got out of that was a lot of heartache, and a couple novels that languished as unfinished drafts for years. I've recently come to appreciate the similarities in the two disciplines, and learned how to play to my strengths in both fields. As a result, I've got pretty much the same writing process for both.

I start with as much prewriting as I can reasonably do, whether that's real-world research or rough scene lists, but I always limit the amount of time I dedicate to that. When I've got enough material to put together a draft, I stop researching and start writing. I do a first draft start to finish, with as little editing as possible. When I'm done, I take a quick pass through the document to smooth some of the roughest edges, then hand it off to one or two test readers to get feedback.

From there, I go through multiple stages of dedicated revisions. I've talked about that elsewhere, but it's critical to the process. It also usually takes two to three times as long as the prewriting and writing stages combined, so I've got to dedicate time and energy to the review process from the very first, or I'll find myself in a real bind when deadlines start looming.

The Products

Honestly, I end up applying that process in nearly every type of writing I do. That includes my journal entries here, emails to my friends and coworkers, and my articles on Unstressed Syllables. I've used some of my training to create some extremely effective tutorials, and to prepare business letters and queries for all my many projects. I end up doing a lot of editing work for friends and family, too. All of it is good practice, and all of it depends on my continued dedication to quality writing.

It's rewarding, too. Just last week I was skimming through an old draft of an unfinished novel, looking for an illustration for my blog, and I accidentally got caught up in the narrative. Half an hour and two chapters later, I remembered what I was supposed to be doing, but I came away from that with a determination to get that novel cleaned up and in the hands of some readers. That's an incredible experience, stumbling across some long-forgotten scene and rediscovering the magic and creativity that helped make it happen in the first place.

Currently, that's where most of my energy is focused: getting all my old, unfinished projects up to code, and getting them in the hands of readers. That has me working simultaneously on a utopian near-future sci-fi and a dystopian near-future sci-fi,on a dry political think-piece masquerading as traditional fantasy and on a juvenile emo romance masquerading as traditional fantasy. And, of course, through it all I'm constantly creating new stories. I have a fourth Ghost Targets in the works, and half a dozen story ideas spawned from dreams or debates. I have a handful of non-fiction works germinating, and a rather significant investment in UnstressedSyllables.com. Oh yeah, and then there's the full-time job. No question about it, I am a writer.

(I prepared this post according to the assignment description in this week's Technical Writing exercise over at UnstressedSyllables.com. I also posted a link in the discussion board there, so you can feel free to leave comments here or there, depending what you want to discuss. I'd love any feedback you've got to give, though.)

Unstressed Syllables

2010-01-04T14:24:00.001-08:00

This isn't really news to any of you, but I've spent most of the last month getting a new blog set up over at Unstressed Syllables.

I've told a couple people that I'd probably abandon my personal blog, but I don't think that'll actually happen. Not altogether, anyway. I've made the definite decision to give up on my efforts at daily blogging, but I still have a lousy memory and I still find much benefit in looking back on slices of my life from arm's distance, so I'll still be posting here as often as I reasonably can.

For the next month or so, as I get into the swing of things, I'd expect that to be a near-zero value. We'll see what actually happens.

In the meantime, come check out my blog. It's inspired by you, it's written for you, and it probably features some humorous and humiliating stories about things you've done in the past, so you'll need to show up from time to time to defend yourself. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 16)

2009-12-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Final Exam

Two weeks ago, I wrapped up my Technical Writing class with a final exam. It was a little experimental (Courtney said more than once, "I've certainly never had a final like that!"), but it went perfectly.

In case I didn't mention it before, Courtney joined us for the final exam period. I asked the class if they were cool with that back in Week 15, and they insisted they had no problem. She wanted to come out of idle curiosity, mainly as a result of reading this blog, and I had no objections.

So she showed up Thursday afternoon, a couple minutes before one o'clock, and the vast majority of my students were already there and in their seats. I was at the front of the class, by the computer station, getting things ready for the class session, and she came timidly into the classroom, crossed in front of the blackboard, and asked me where she should sit that would be unobtrusive and out of the way.

I'm mean sometimes. I sent her to the chair at the teacher's desk, front and center.

Cookie Platter

I wasn't trying to be mean. It was really the only place I had for her. The students were arrayed on the outside of their inverted-U of tables, and though there was a table tucked in the middle of the room (where I'd sat while observing the presentations), I had big plans for the middle of the room, so I couldn't really send her there.

I was also standing at the computer station and not starting class for a very particular reason. I was buying time, waiting for all of my students to arrive, and also deliberately standing so as to conceal a cookie platter T-- had made for my students. I didn't want to spoil the reveal by having someone walk in late and spot a half-hidden cookie platter, y'know?

Anyway, once the classroom was full, I turned on the overhead projector with just the empty desktop of my school-issued laptop showing, and that got everyone's attention. All eyes snapped to the screen, and then I stepped back, brought forth the cookie platter, and headed to the table in the middle of the room to set it down.

I was halfway there when someone said, "Are those cookies?"

I explained that T-- had wanted to send cookies for my students all semester, but I'd kept objecting because I thought it would be too distracting. Then I finally relented on the one day when their participation counted for 10% of their grade. Hardly fair. Nobody complained, though.

I was in the grip of la grippe, so I left the cookies wrapped in their plastic and stepped back to the front of the room. "I need somebody else to unwrap them," I said, and about two heartbeats later Sean -- seated in the middle of the back row, and as far from the cookies as possible -- leaped over the tables to take care of business. He got them unwrapped, then passed the tray around, which was quite calm and orderly.

Chaos and Disorder

The next step was the one that denied Courtney a seat in the middle of the room. I told them I had their graded semester projects ready to return, and I'd call out their names. After they came to retrieve their grade sheets, they were to remain standing in the center of the room instead of returning to their seats. (That was an important step that turned out to be totally useless.)

Once everyone was standing in the middle of the room (and they were sort of packed in like livestock), I explained that we were going to divide up for the day's activity. Unlike previous activities where each group worked on its own version of the assignment, today's activity would require three different groups, working on different aspects of one product. So I explained that the table on the right would be for the Documentation Group, the table on the back would be for the Software Group, and the table on the left would be for the Publishing Group. I told them to take their best guesses which group would most suit them, and go sit down.

Everyone sat down pretty much exactly where they'd been before.

The Assignment

Next, I explained to them the assignment. Just as I've said here before, my goal was to have the students create a wiki to demonstrate their ability to learn a new document type without my guiding hand. So I pointed to the screen at the front of the room, that showed my blank desktop, and told them my goal was for them to have a full-featured wiki including the contents of all of their weekly tutorials up on that monitor by the end of the class period. By that point, it was a little over an hour and a half.

Then...I sat down at the front of the room. And I looked at them. I may have given a little bit of an indication what each group should do, but it certainly wasn't anything that could be described as "directions." I did ask a couple of my students on the back row if they'd completed wikis of their projects for extra credit (Sean and Will, both of whom had asked for permission to do that, and both answered that they had), and that was meant to give them a nudge toward helping the rest of the class figure it out. It worked.

Not right away, though. The next ten minutes were brutal. I had about two minutes of deer-in-the-headlights from the whole classroom, and then my two with experience (both in the Software Group) leaned their heads together and started talking, and got a couple others from the Software Group chiming in before too long. I listened to their chatter for a little while, to get an idea where they were headed, and then gave them a nudge in the right direction, and listened for a little while more.

The Software Group and the Publication Group ended up both being composed primarily of technical people, so by that point the Publication Group was pretty involved in the conversation, too. The Documentation Group (my English Majors) were sitting off on the right still waiting to find out what they were supposed to do.

So I finally addressed that. I explained to them briefly what a wiki was -- a type of simplified markup language -- and that they would need to take the highly-formatted, styled Word documents I'd used for their weekly tutorials, and convert them into flat text files with some simple markup. I suggested they get to work downloading the tutorials from the class website, figure out how they were going to distribute the workload, and then start making guesses as to how they would do the conversion. They wouldn't know for sure until the Software Group settled on a wiki platform, but they could do some prep work while they waited.

In Production

Then I headed back over to the Software Group, and I said, "What you'll probably want to do, first, is choose which wiki platform you're going to use--"

And Will cut me off to say, "We just did that."

I went on, "And then this group is probably going to divide up, half of you going to support the Documentation Group as they convert the existing documents into the right format, and half of you going to support the Publication Group as they figure out how to get those documents up for us to see, within the next hour."

They nodded, then immediately got to their feet. Will went one way, Sean went the other, and they became Management. It was kind of awesome.

After that, I was done. It was their final exam, after all. I sat at the front of the room and chatted with Courtney, eavesdropping on their discussions, but most of the corrections I would have made ended up getting caught by Will or Sean before I had the chance.

It was only a few minutes into that (maybe ten or fifteen), when I asked Will what address they were using, and Courtney was able to pull it up on her laptop. From that point on, while we were discussing writing or Wil Wheaton, or whatever, we were also scrolling through the wiki as it was under construction. I was impressed with the draft version. I was really impressed with the changes they had in place by the half-hour mark. And at the end of the period, while they were still scrambling to get a couple of the more complicated chapters put together, I asked Will to step up to my laptop and present the finished product to me.

He shook his head. "It's not ready yet!"

I said, "That's okay. Show me what you've got." I didn't say it in a menacing way, either. I was prepared to grade them based on what they'd finished, not the page or two that were still undone.

He wasn't satisfied with that, though. He said, "Give us a few more minutes. It's almost done."

As he said that, from one end of the Publication Group table I heard, "Five's done!" and down at the other end, "Seven should be up now." And Will scurried off to oversee the finishing touches.

In the end they all stayed a little bit late, just to present a polished product. It was phenomenal. It was so much better than I'd hoped for, especially given the short time limit.

(If you're curious, you may be able to see a copy of it here. I have no idea how long that site will be live, but it's there for now.)

I'd had some closing words prepped, to finish off the semester, and after seeing their work I wanted to go into detail with praise, but there was no time. All I could tell them is, "Well done! You've earned a one hundred. Thank you guys for being awesome!" And then I sent them on their way.

Retrospective

Knowing what I know now, I could have made the final session go a little more smoothly. I don't think I could have possibly gotten any better results, but I could have left the students a little more comfortable with their role. Then again, that's pretty much true for the whole semester.

And I'm not beating myself up for that. This was my first time teaching. Wow.

Anyway, one thing I experimented with there in the final -- dividing them into purpose-based groups -- is something I think I'd like to do from the start if I ever teach the class again. On day one, I'd divide them into those groups -- with those titles -- and let them rearrange through the course of the semester if they wanted, and sometimes divide them up in support roles and sometimes combine them, based on the project, but give them a chance overall to develop some sort of consistent group identity, apart from "we're sitting within arm's reach."

I do wish I'd had another assignment or two in there, and I wish I'd had in-class activities for nearly every class I didn't have one for. I put that down to limited prep time from being a first-timer, though. Same goes for the uncertainty of their schedule (flip-flopping on due dates), but I think I could be a lot more confident about that on a second go-round.

Apart from that...I'm awesome. I know the class was satisfactory to the powers-that-be, I think the class was useful to the student, and I'm amazed how much I gained from the experience. My students were all amazing people, and I'm glad I got to meet them. And, y'know, I discovered I could do something I never would have thought possible. It was bigger and better than NaNoWriMo. I'd never have guessed.

And that's it. Hope you've enjoyed the updates. Let me know if you have any questions. I'll let you know if they ask me back for more.

The OC (Week 15)

2009-12-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Season Finale

We have officially left the regular season. Post-season takes place tomorrow. Or something like that. Whatever.

Week 15 marked the last week of regular classes for the semester, and we finished it by finishing up our presentations. Tuesday saw some technical difficulties, and Thursday saw some more, but the brightest minds in OC's IT department are in my class, so we got it all worked out.

A Polite Reminder

We finished up on Tuesday with fifteen minutes to spare, and I just let them out early. As I headed toward the podium to pack up my laptop I said offhand, over my shoulder, "See you Thursday."

Then I stopped, turned to glare them all in the eye (that's right, thirty-two eyes all at once, it's a professor thing), and I said with a dread pronunciation, "See you Thursday."

A chuckle went around the class, but I got numerous affirmations from those who'd missed the previous Thursday, and then they fled the room.

It worked. Thursday we had a full class, and I was able to give some last-minute clarification concerning the Final with the confidence of knowing everyone was there. That was nice.

Semester Projects

Thursday was also the due date for Semester Projects. They'd haggled a midnight deadline earlier in the semester, so that held and they had until the very last seconds of Thursday to get the document turned in for full credit. Someone else (I'll let you guess who) had worn me out with his arguments and convinced me to accept late work, too, but I instituted a 5% per day penalty for it.

There was some discussion whether that should be pro-rated, or lump sum, and the arguments on both sides of the debate were pretty compelling. I ended up pro-rating, because I like my students.

Anyway, I got all the projects over the weekend, and they're now all graded. They turned out awesome. I remember that being one of the things the class was most famous for when I took it, and at the beginning of the semester when I asked my students what they knew about the class they were signed up for, the project was the only bit any of them had any clear ideas on.

I had some concerns that the reputation of the semester project might fade with a new professor at the helm, but for now I think it's safe. They did some really cool stuff, and nearly all of the finished projects are going to be terribly useful. Several of them will even be useful to me.

Homework

I made that all sound like a lot of fun, but those four words up there -- "they're now all graded" -- actually represent a pretty miserable experience. Who knew semester projects could be such work for professors? Both of my parents are teachers, so I've heard grumbling and complaining about having stuff to grade all my life, but I didn't really get it, until I found myself with a mountain of stuff to grade.

It's no fun at all. Just horrible. I really don't recommend it. If you're teaching a class, go all California-hippie on them and don't do grades. Or quantum physicist and assign grades completely at random. That would have to be better than actual analytical numeration. Blech.

(I've also been coming down with a cold in the same days that I've been going through that process, so it could be having an impact on my attitude. Time will tell, I suppose.)

Anyway, it's done. It's done and it's done and it's done. I've got Finals on Thursday, and I'm confident everyone will show up, and the minute that's over, I should be able to turn in final grades and be done with the class. How cool is that?

More next week (or, conceivably, tomorrow).

The OC (Week 14)

2009-12-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Presentations
I mentioned it in the last post, but we're done with lectures and mostly done with the tutorials (more on that in a minute). That just leaves presentations, and the final.

We started the presentations this week, with four presentations a class period over four periods (in two weeks). Two of my four presenters on Tuesday had skipped the assignment that had them sign up for a presentation spot (on Google Docs), so they found out about it for the first time when I sent out a reminder email on Sunday.

To their credit, they both did surprisingly well.

Honestly, I haven't seen a presentation yet as bad as mine would have been (and, in fact, was, back when I took the class). They're farther along with their semester projects than I really expected, too, which is encouraging. I'm looking forward to seeing their finished products, so I'm glad to see it's not all going to be last-minute stuff.

Empty Seats
Thursday's lectures were a little better, really -- which is to be expected, given that they had more time to prepare, and got to learn from the presentations that went before. Unfortunately for the presenters, though, there weren't nearly as many people around to be impressed. We had right at half of our class show up.

That, too, shouldn't be much of a surprise. After all, it was the first time all semester that we'd met in class on a Thursday. To be fair, I warned them about that on the first day of class, and before Thanksgiving break, and then I sent out an email last Sunday (as I mentioned) reminding them about presentations this week.

I had a brief bout of guilt, worrying that my own attitude about the last couple weeks (being so much easier on me, since I'm just listening to presentations) had been conveyed to my students somehow, and they were slacking off because I was. Then I remembered the Thursday thing, though (and got emails from a couple of my students citing exactly that), and I let myself off the hook.

Textbook Execution
One thing I had been slacking off on was their final tutorial. All of the rest had to be done by specific dates, to match up with their assignments. There was one last one that I'd promised them, though, that didn't really map directly to any work they were doing. Way back in week 9, I did a big presentation showing them how to build an automated Table of Contents and generally take advantage of all the extra work we've been doing to build a powerful, long-form document. I flew through the process in class, though, and gave them no exercises or anything to reinforce it. Instead, I said, "This'll probably end up as a tutorial at some point."

I'd meant to get that to them the week before Thanksgiving, but it was the week before Thanksgiving, so I didn't. I kept thinking about doing it during Thanksgiving break, but I was on break, so I didn't. Whenever I started feeling guilty about that, I reminded myself that my students didn't really care.

Then Monday morning I got an email from one of them asking me how to make a Table of Contents, because she needed it for her semester project, and I immediately felt like a super jerk. I sent her a quick answer, and then got to work writing my tutorial.

It was a complicated one, though, because I had to walk through some of the more advanced tools in Word. Not only that, I had to handle some pretty nit-picky exceptions to make it come out perfect, but I was trying to express how simple the whole process really was, even while explaining why those exceptions were doing what they were doing. Then I needed screenshots to illustrate it, and I needed to put together all the resources they would need to follow along with the tutorial, and make those available on the website.

It was a real task, is what I'm getting at, but I finished it last night. The title for the tutorial was "How to Build a Book," and it took all the tutorials I've made all semester and bound them together in a single textbook. It ends up looking pretty nifty, and it tops 100 pages even without the lecture information and assignment descriptions (that I would definitely include in it, if I were making it a standalone book).

Anyway, I have no idea if that will actually be useful to any of my students (since the one who asked me about it presented her document yesterday, and she'd clearly figured the ToC out using just my quick email), but I'm glad to have it done.

Final Thoughts
The only other issue I've been dealing with this week is their Final Exam. I've been told I need to have a Final Exam period, but that a test isn't really necessary. I told them early in the semester that they would have an option of building a wiki instead of taking the Final Exam, just because a big ugly test doesn't really mesh at all with the way I've been teaching the class.

As I really started thinking through the logistics of it, though, the wiki alternative seemed unrealistically complicated, and any test I would have (for those who didn't want to take the alternative) would be just a huge waste of time. There has been no memorization in this class at all (it doesn't make sense in tech writing), so I would have just made them show up in class to read a bunch of questions, flip through their textbook for answers, write those answers down, and then go home. I wrote their textbook, and it's way too straightforward for any of that to be a useful experience.

So I finally decided to nix the original plan, and instead I told them all to show up for the Final Exam period, and we're going to build a single wiki as a group project. That should be a lot less stressful for those who would have built individual wikis, it should be a lot more useful for those who would have taken the test, and I think it could actually be a fun experience. We'll see.

Between now and then, though, I've got eight more presentations to grade, and about a bajillion pages of papers to grade.

More next week.

National Novel Writing Month 2009 Post Mortem

2009-12-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it's over.

I did finish NaNoWriMo. I'm a winner. I could post a JPEG proving it, but it doesn't really, so I won't.

I took a strange path to 50,000 words this year, cobbling together scenes from three different novels in two genres, an open-ended collaborative writing project, and a short story. In the past, I've done 50,000 consecutive words (or many, many more), and I've done them in a novel that I wrote start-to-finish during the month of November. Obviously that's more impressive, but with everything else I had going on, I'm glad to have produced anything at all this year.

Anything at all. Hah! I wrote the end of two different novels, one of them a long-languishing partial that needed closure. I've still got a lot of rewriting work to do, but I now have the foundation on which to do it.

In the end, that's what NaNoWriMo is about -- struggling to accomplish more than you should be able to given all the other demands in your life, and getting a rough draft down on paper, so you have something to work with in the rewrites. I did both of those things, and in a big way.

To keep myself honest (and to make things easier), I wrote all those eclectic scenes in a single Google Doc, copying and pasting them out to their appropriate parents periodically. That workspace, though, was a document that ended up with the title Ghost Kings: Sleeping Targets: Golden Restraint Age Shelter (and a short story). Here's how that came about:

I started off early doing my prewriting in October so I could work on a major rewrite of Royal Holiday in November, then scrapped that plan at some late hour.
I did another set of prewriting, this time on a major rewrite (and completion) of a Sleeping Kings sort-of-prequel called Golden Age. As part of the prewriting, I wrote a new first chapter (which doesn't count toward my November word count).
I showed up at our kickoff meeting all prepared to finally get Golden Age done, found myself blocked, and instead I wrote the next scene in my newest Ghost Targets novel, Restraint.
From there, I just went ahead and finished Restraint (book 3 in that series).
Then I started on its sequel, Ghost Targets: Shelter.
Then I started a new, and totally unplanned collaborative writing project with Courtney on Google Wave by writing the opening scene of a novel about wizards in Oklahoma City. It starts with a magical battle in a 7-11. Awesome.
Then I wrote a totally unplanned short story set in the fantasy universe D-- and I had been talking about years ago. It turned out surprisingly good (in my opinion, anyway).
Then I found myself totally blocked, unable to proceed past the middle of chapter 1 of Shelter, and instead started work on an unfinished scene in Golden Age.
Then I realized I'd written three consecutive chapters of Golden Age, without really realizing it, and I was about 6,000 words from the end of the book.
Then I finished the book. And NaNoWriMo. All with about an hour to spare.

I dunno. If you want to call that cheating, you're welcome to. I could say that I finished National Strange Hash of Various Fictional Prose Writing Month, but I don't have the time or energy for that sort of acronym. "Nooshvoofpwym," I would pronounce it. "During nooshvoofpwyn," I would say, "I wrote 50,000 words in gookstuhgraws (and a short story)."

Whatever.

In December, I'm going to do nothing. Hah! No, not really. In December I'm going to put the finishing touches on my new Tech Writing textbook, I'm going to lay the groundwork to launch a new commercial blog in January, and unless I'm prepared to face some real wrath from some surprisingly real fans, I'm going to do at least a quick touch-up on Restraint and share it out to some trusted reviewers.

I started 2009 with a pretty ambitious plan for my writing, and ended it in an entirely different place, but almost as impressive of one. I didn't rewrite Royal Holiday and I didn't start an entirely new sci-fi property premised on what turns out to be a total physical impossibility (in a bad way), but I did become a university professor and write a textbook. That's pretty cool. I got my old creative writing text dusted off, too, and it's ready to go.

So that's my plan for 2010. Not as much ambition for the new, but lots of rewrites. I do want to finish Ghost Targets: Shelter before the end of September, so I can devote October to prewriting and November to Ghost Targets: Faith (my first season finale). Two novels in a year is actually pretty tame for me.

Then I want to get Expectation cleaned up (I never did redo the ending), and I want to get Restraint totally rewritten, and expanded by at least 9,000 words. Same for SK: Golden Age, and once that's done I'll need to write a new first chapter for SK: The Wolf, and my first NaNoWriMo project, SK: The Shepherd, still needs its first real rewrite, too.

That's my order of priority. I've got more. King Jason's War still needs the first section reworked, and a polish everywhere else, and I've been talking for years about splitting Taming Fire in two, and it could use some touch-up while I'm at it. More and more I find myself thinking back on The Poet Alexander, too, wondering if there's some rough gem somewhere in the rambling, inarticulate beast that would be worth paring out. Who knows? I'd have to work miracles to ever get far enough down my list to find out, though.

Stay tuned. Maybe I actually will. I've spent three years now consistently accomplishing more than I ever thought I possibly could. And, in the end, that's what NaNoWriMo is all about.

Journal Entry: November 2009

2009-12-01T07:33:00.000-08:00

I survived.

I'm tempted to make those two words my whole journal entry, but so much happened in November that I don't want to forget. And so much happened in November that I'm going to forget it.

Even this post won't get it all, but I want to grab the highlights.

I started the month with a NaNoWriMo kickoff party at IHOP with my writing group, and that actually is documented already. I've also talked a little bit about my NaNoWriMo progress, and my class sessions. I'll do another post with a post mortem for NaNoWriMo, but here I wanted to talk about what else I did.

I finished a major manuscript for work on the 5th, and that freed up some of my attention and some of my creative energy, so I finally really got started writing on the 6th. I had a birthday lunch at P. F. Chang's on the 8th, and then a holiday (Veteran's Day) on the 11th that gave me a pretty easy work week, and a good opportunity to get caught up on my word count again. Then Saturday the 14th I had a great opportunity to get behind again.

Probably the big event of November (for me), T-- threw a big birthday party for my 30th, inviting my mom and dad, and all my friends. D--, of course, B-- and E--, K-- and N--, my little sister and her family, as well as Courtney and Ed (who were a real hit). T-- had everyone bring a bottle of wine, which was quite a treat, and she grilled up ribs for us as the main dish in a pretty extensive (and delicious) spread. We chatted and played Rock Band, and had a great time. Shawn and Liz showed up after most of the other guests had left, but stuck around to watch UHF with the Cantrells and me. That was fun. The whole night was incredible.

In WoW news, I got my Hunter to 80 (which marks the first time I've had a Hunter at the level cap). I also started a pair of Horde characters on Shawn's server, so I can chat with him from time to time. He's popped in on Dark Iron a time or two, too, and that's been fun.

I had a conversation with T--, and a conversation with my writing group, and a conversation with my dad over the phone on a drive home from work, and the end result of all that is that I'm finally going to try to get some treatment for my social anxiety. That's not really something I want to talk about in detail in this post, but it happened in November. So there you go.

Then last week was Thanksgiving week (which is always drama, and NaNoWriMo brings its own demons). T-- headed up to Wichita early, on Tuesday afternoon, and I had dinner with D-- at a new Mexican place downtown (Iguana Grill, and it's awesome), then went by Bruce's to borrow his ladder and ended up spending an hour and a half chatting with him, then went home and got started on Christmas preparations instead of going to bed.

I wanted to have the tree up (and ready for decoration) by the time T-- came home from Wichita. I decided to get all the decorations down from the attic, too, and somewhere in there I decided I should hang Christmas lights outside. Wal-Mart had LED lights at a reasonable price, so I picked up 8 strings and spent Wednesday afternoon crawling around on the roof of the house, getting everything set up. It proved to be more work than I anticipated, but the end result is stunning. (I'm sure T-- will have a photo up on her blog eventually.)

I'd barely gotten off the roof when D-- showed up to take me down to Chicasha to pick up his grandma, and then we all headed to Wichita. With that extra trip, a two-and-a-half-hour drive became something perilously close to five, but I spent most of it sleeping in the back seat, so who's complaining.

Then Thanksgiving was four straight days of Charboneaus. That's an amazing family, and they really know how to have a good time when they get together. T-- brought my XBox and Rock Band, and that was incredibly popular. The food was incredible. The Cowboys won convincingly, and then a disappointing Sooners team showed up on Saturday and totally shut out OSU in the Bedlam game, so that was pretty satisfying.

We got home Sunday afternoon, and as we turned the corner onto our street, AB called from the back seat, "Ooh, the house is ready for Christmas!" T--, of course, was thrilled. After watching her parents get all their Christmas decorations done Friday morning, she'd been left wondering when we could even get around to it, and here it was all ready for her.

AB couldn't wait to get started, and she and her mom got the tree all decorated before bedtime.

Then yesterday was the 30th, the end of my wonderful, grueling November, and I capped it with a write-in at Courtney's. We both made our official submissions to the NaNoWriMo website around 11:00, validated our winning word counts, and then stayed up far too late talking. All too often, in the midst of a conversation about this or that, one or the other of us would trail off, staring away into space, and then just say quietly, "I can't believe it's over."

It's over. And I survived.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Weeks 12 and 13)

2009-11-30T14:07:00.000-08:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Week 12
Back in August -- back when I had so much delicious free time on my hands that reactivating my WoW account seemed like a good idea -- I was just a bright-eyed kid all full of ideas. Those were the good old days, before bitter experience taught me the cynicism of reality. (In case you can't tell, I've been noveling.)

Anyway, back then I made up a course schedule to put in the syllabus, which included lecture topics for every week, and assignments for the students along the way. I mentioned the fallacy of that schedule in the week 11 post about technical writers as programmers, where I pretended a topic of actual interest to them was a topic I knew something about.

Week 12 featured a reversal of that, when I pretended a topic I knew something about was a topic of actual interest to them. The title for the lecture was "Writing to a Deadline and the Publication Process." I reversed the order for my presentation.

The Publication Process
By "the publication process" I meant the actual physical process that converts a Word file into a paper book. As a technical writer, that's a process that takes up a lot of my time. After I've finished writing a perfectly-crafted, error-free description of my topic, I then have to spend hours and days and weeks reshaping the beast to make it play nice with paper pages.

This reshaping takes two major forms: page design, and print options. Page design is stuff I can do in Word, like adding page breaks (and "Notes" pages, and "This page intentionally left blank." pages) to make sure new sections start on right-hand (front) pages, and adjusting space between paragraphs and illustration sizes to make nice full pages, and making sure every document's length (in pages) is a multiple of four.

I went to some effort to explain why that last bit matters. It has to do with printing on both sides of a double-wide sheet, and then folding it in half (producing a four-page fold called a "signature," which was a word I totally blanked on during the class). The reasons for this are complicated and partly apocryphal, but mostly they're just uninteresting. I won't bore you with the details.

Then there's print options, such as which print method you want to use. Offset printing (using big acid-etched copper plates and rolling rubber mats) is still far prettier than digital printing (using, y'know, lasers), but it's prohibitively expensive for small press runs (anything less than a hundred thousand copies), and it requires a lot of set-up time. As a technical writer, that's a really difficult balance to hit sometimes. As...anyone else, it doesn't matter. Offset printing is just outside the price range of the housewife putting together a cookbook, and printing contracts at most companies are handled by accounting or documentation departments, not the programmers and engineers who are taking my class.

Still, it's the technical process by which we make real things out of the documents they're building in Word, and I felt like I should go over it.

I also discussed the various binding methods -- from three-ring binders and spiral-bindings to the hardback ("case" binding) and paperback ("perfect" binding) you'll find on the shelves at B&N. I discussed the benefits and drawbacks of each, showed some samples, and then moved on.

Writing to a Deadline
Writing to a deadline is the biggest challenge of the technical writer (whether it's a job title or just a job requirement). The nature of the deadline varies from shop to shop, and I demonstrated that by talking about my personal experience again. At Lowrance, we typically received an assignment with three days to build a hundred-plus-page book. Sometimes we had to turn it overnight. At the FAA...the Maintenance Handbook project I just finished was one of my top priorities for most of the last year. Once it was officially given to me, the deadline was a vague "soon" for months before it became, all of a sudden, "Friday."

There's a commonality in both cases, though. In all technical writing, really, the information you're supposed to be putting into a document comes to you at a trickle -- an agonizingly slow trickle at times. At Lowrance, we knew what products were in the works for months, but it would be three days before packaging before we had a working model to test and grab screenshots on.

Your job as a technical writer is to get as much information on paper as you can, as early as you can, without wasting too much time. That last bit can be the tricky bit, because we could easily have built a bunch of documents at Lowrance using early emulators, and then had to scrap 90% of our work because of a single software change (and we often did).

The other difficulty you'll encounter when you're writing to a deadline, I told them, is that you'll get called into meetings, or have to attend training, or deal with any manner of pompous windbags who monopolize your time to tell you about something incredibly important to them, but that has no relevance to your project (or your life) whatsoever.

The best thing to do in those cases, I've found, is to have your laptop open on the table in front of you and just spend the whole lecture working on your project. (That got a laugh.)

Work Time
That whole lecture took forty minutes or so (as intended), and I left them the rest of the time to work on their projects and ask questions. They did, and some even hung around after the end of the period, so it was 2:30 before I headed home.

I sent out an email later that week to let them know the following Tuesday would be exclusively work time. I promised to be available (in class) if they had any questions or needed advice, but that I wouldn't have a lecture prepared, and I wouldn't be taking attendance. I also sent an email to several of the other professors inviting them to stop by and keep me company, because I didn't expect any of my students to actually show up.

Week 13
Some of them did. Three, actually, which doesn't sound very impressive, but it amounts to 20% of my class, so it's not too shabby. I barely broke 50% on Week 12, and I did take attendance that week. (That was my only low week, though, and they did know it was going to be partly a work period.)

Anyway, I had some great questions from the students who showed up, and I'm pretty confident they're going to have great projects to turn in. I also got to chat with one of my students about Google Wave for half an hour, which was both fun and educational.

Oh, and I got all my dailies done. So it was a productive period all around.

All I've got left now is presentations, evaluations, and the final exam. Oh, and the grading. I tremble at the thought of all the grading to be done. Still, the semester is mostly survived, and I think I've done some real good. Yay me.

More next week.

National Novel Writing Month 2009 Progress Report

2009-11-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

I'm fifteen days into NaNoWriMo, and doing terribly well.

Well, okay, sixteen days. I was going for the parallelism, though, so shut up!

I made a long post to my writing group's discussion board last week talking about goals -- specific, personal goals, and the impetus to reach them. The gist of it was that I had one: I wanted to finish Ghost Targets: Restraint (which I began back in June) by the 16th, when Julie and Carlos were coming by for a visit.

I did that. I actually finished the story last Friday afternoon, which put me at 29,000 words in November, and 55,000 words in the book. For those of you who are good at math (and know the rules of NaNoWriMo), you'll be wondering what I plan to do with my other 21,000 words in the next two weeks.

As of now, I'm undecided. In the last three days, I've written a couple pages of introduction for a totally new story idea (that's intended to be a collaborative project with Courtney), a couple pages of introduction for the next Ghost Targets book (which is currently laboring under the working title Shelter), and today, over lunch, four more pages that drive me a good distance into chapter one.

I'd spent the early part of the month thinking I was going to finish up my Sleeping Kings opener, Golden Age, and I'd still really like to do that. It's complicated, though. I was a different kind of writer when I wrote the SK books, and I don't think it would be worth the effort to rewrite the whole series to bring it more in line with my current writing style, but I don't know how well I can fake the old style to get a seamless introduction.

And, at the end of the day, I've got a lot more energy behind the Ghost Targets series now. I could end the month with a third of the fourth book done and soar past 50,000 for the month, and all of that would be pretty effortless. Or I could labor over every page, force out a passable introduction to Sleeping Kings, and barely hit my target even with all the extra effort. It would be awfully nice to have that done, but I don't know that I have the discipline or the motivation to make it happen.

Either way, I'm limping into my pre-class downtime today, so it'll be sometime Thursday before we know more. Well, before I know more. Chances are good this space won't be updated until the end of the month, though, and by then it'll be done, one way or another.

If you've got an opinion, feel free to cast your vote. Maybe you'll surprise me. Maybe you'll even motivate me.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 11)

2009-11-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Scary Professor Guy
I brought back Scary Professor Guy to open the class this week when, two or three minutes into our class period, one of my Juniors was still trying to get one of my Seniors to help her with her programming homework.

I barked, "Okay, okay, go sit down. We're not here to talk about programming, we're here to talk about technical writing." She blushed a little and went back to her seat, I had all eyes on me, and said, "Right. Today's class topic is 'Programming as a Technical Writer.'" That got a laugh.

Talking Points
Before we got to the lecture, though, I had them go around the room and everyone described his or her semester project. Briefly. I had a couple goals in mind with this, but the main one was just to force them to think about their semester projects. They did that three weeks ago when they wrote up their proposal, and probably not a moment since then. So I sent out an email last weekend letting them know they'd be responsible for talking about their projects during class on Tuesday.

Their assignment today (due next Tuesday) is a progress report, but I was hoping the threat of public speaking would drive them to get started a little sooner, so they'd actually have some progress to report.

I imagined it could take as much as half an hour to go around the room (leaving me forty-five minutes for my lecture) but I went ahead and prepared an hour's worth of material just in case. In reality, it took fifty minutes to go around the room, so I not only cut the disposable fifteen minutes, I had to do some major compression on my core lesson.

The presentations were useful, though. I'm sure the students were bored of it about halfway through, but most of them were encountering (or will encounter) similar problems and frustrations. Most of those problems are inherent aspects of technical writing, so it's not like I could give them advice to get around them, but at least they'll know they're not alone.

Programming as a Technical Writer
I'd sort of looked forward to this lecture ever since I found out just how many programmers I had in my class -- my opportunity to show them how useful programming can be in tech writing and (just in passing) how incredibly cool I am, as I've done all these things.

The better I got to know them, though, the more I realized that the stuff I had to tell them didn't merit a class (or two -- I'd originally scheduled another lecture on "HTML, XML, and Structured Documentation," in addition to this one). I've got three English majors who could all really benefit from a course in each of those topics, but I wasn't going to be able to teach them Python in seventy-five minutes, and I couldn't justify making all my programmers sit quietly while I tried.

So, instead, I adjust my focus. Instead of trying to teach when and how to use which tools, I converted my case studies into object lessons. That may seem like a pretty narrow distinction, but it's a matter of scale. I only had twenty minutes, anyway, so I briefly described several of my big projects (in terms of efficiency improvement), and then I leaned heavy on the take-away lesson.

The take-away lesson is this: automating tasks can be difficult to set up, but it makes those tasks easier every time you have to perform them afterward. Your job is to determine (and it's a matter of constant re-evaluation) if the set-up expense is worth the efficiency reward.

If you're a programmer, that expense is often just the amount of time it takes to make and refine your program. I have half a dozen examples ready to hand where I was able to save hours and hours off of every document we produced with just a couple hours of research and coding. If you're not a technical person, though, that expense can require weeks or months learning a new skillset, or days refreshing your understanding of one you haven't used in a while. Still, there are some projects large enough that a semester of training is worthwhile to write a script to process the thousands of pages of data you'll be dealing with.

I didn't try to teach them how to do anything specific. I would have, if the projector had worked like it's supposed to. I would have probably kept them late so I could show them how to put together a quick VBA macro in Word, but now I'll just save that for a Thursday tutorial later in the month. As it was, I just told them about a couple times in my experience where quick Python scripts or clumsy VBA macros made my life much, much easier.

Progress Report
Their assignment today, as I mentioned, is to write a progress report on their Semester Projects. I had them create Google Docs account last week, so I decided to make this week's assignment be a new Google Doc. In their tutorial I showed them how to set up and format a Google Doc from scratch, and then how to load and modify a Google Docs template to achieve a similar (but prettier) effect. Now they're supposed to fill in one of those two documents with the information required by their assignment, and then share it out to me.

I'm anxious to see how that goes. I'll let you know.

More next week.

Vanity Plate

2009-11-11T09:29:00.000-08:00

I talked about it a lot back when it happened, but I don't think I ever posted any of the photos Julie took when she came up to do the maternity shoot for Trish.

I asked her to get a couple of me for profile pics, and this is the one I'm using now.

Thanks again to Julie for her great work. She's said she wants to take another run at it, and that sounds like a blast. Until then, though, I'm perfectly happy with the work she did.

The OC (Week 10)

2009-11-09T14:05:00.000-08:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Pulling My Punchlines
Last week's class was disappointing. I think, of all the classes I've prepared this semester, the only one I was more excited about (beforehand) was the one with the band flyers. That time I was excited about the in-class activity, though. This time I was excited about the lecture.

Because I had good material. Dad told me before Week 2 that I had to focus on how I could make their lives better, and this class was all about that. I had so much good information to impart, I just knew it would be a great class.

And it was not, by any means, a bad class. The information was good, the students paid attention, I filled an hour but didn't keep them late. It was a good class, but it lacked punch. None of my excitement really got through, because (for the first time) I felt comfortable enough before class that I didn't invest much preparation in the presentation. Turns out, I'm still not a natural. I didn't have any punchlines, so I'd spend ten minutes telling them how cool this feature was, or how that program worked, but I failed to drive home how it would impact them. I guess a good activity could have served that purpose, but I had so much I wanted to cover that I didn't really have time for one.

Or...well, I did. It just wasn't in-class. I'll talk about that more later.

Markup
The class covered "Collaborative Writing and Editing Tools," and the most basic of those is markup. Markup, as I told them, is the process of providing feedback on a documentation product using a consistent, somewhat standard set of marks and symbols. You're probably familiar with the paragraph mark, which can be penned into the middle of a long paragraph to recommend a good spot to break it up. You might be familiar with the strikethrough line ending in a little swirl to indicate text that should be removed. If you don't do a lot of markup, you're more likely to just cross out text you think should go.

There are a bunch of standard marks, but there's also a bunch of standards, so it's hard to find one reliable set. Because of that, I stressed "consistent" more heavily than "standard," and showed them (very quickly) how to look up a set of editing marks online.

Before I got to that, I had a little slideshow ready, and I flashed hand-drawn samples of my personal markup on the screen, and asked them to identify the meaning. They've been getting markup from me all semester, so they had no trouble with that process.

The problem with markup is that it's slow. A document's author has to create a baseline document, get it to an editor, wait for the editor to suggest changes, and then incorporate those changes into his baseline. If the author tries to continue working while that's going on, he risks invalidating much of the feedback he'll get from the editor. If he wants several different people to review his document (without a lot of wasted effort) he has to go through the whole process separately (in order) with each editor.

Track Changes
Word makes things a little easier by allowing direct modification within documents. Instead of printing out a copy for my boss to mark up, I can email her a copy of a document I'm working on and she can make any recommended changes directly. To preserve author control, she can activate a tool called "Track Changes," which allows Word to keep track of every modification she makes to the document.

When I get that document back from her, I can change some view settings to see what the original looked like (my document), what the final looks like (her suggested version), or "Final with Markup." Turning on that last option shows me a visual record of every change she made, and I can right-click any one of those and choose "Accept Change" or "Reject Change." Once I do that, the markup goes away, and I'm left with the text I want, as the document's author.

That only eliminates one step in the markup process, but it speeds things up a lot, and it allows the editor to make much more detailed suggestions (in the form of actual changes). Word also offers a Comment which allows an editor to attach a note to a document he's reviewing without actually modifying the text any. Something like "Should we say more here?" maybe, or "Check this figure number."

The nice thing about all of this is that I can keep all of the markup available when I need it, but just change my viewing option to "Final" when I need to see (or print) a clean document.

Collaborative Writing
Still (you all knew this was coming), markup is just a clumsy process given the tools we have available now. After talking through the ways we can do markup, and get the most out of it, I opened up my Google Docs folder on the screen and started really preaching.

With tools like Google Docs, it's easy for multiple authors to work on a single document. By way of example, I opened some of the (many) documents in my folder. I showed them my Class Topics document, which I keep on Google Docs so I can update it from anywhere, whenever I have a moment and an idea. I showed them a spreadsheet I use to track some stuff I'm working on in WoW, just as a sort of virtual Post-It Note (to stress the simplicity of creating and maintaining documents). I showed them our NaNoWriMo spreadsheet, as an example of one that has a lot of editors viewing and modifying all the time.

When that one went up, I launched into my little speech. "This makes it easy for any of us to open it up at any time and update our word count--"

And someone said, "Yeah, and you can see just how bad you're doing." At that point I had about 1,100 words, which put me dead last among the people on that list, and around 1/5 of my target, so I didn't disagree.

Someone else said, "Wow, Courtney's really smoking!" She was a hair shy of 6,000 words.

So I came out from behind my podium, shaking a finger at them, and said, "Oh, yeah, sure. But she's a full time novelist. That's what she does. And me? I've got a day job. I've got two kids. Oh, and I've got to teach you guys." I put some venom in that, and they all laughed.

Real-time Feedback
Then I opened a couple more documents, copies of Gods Tomorrow that I'd shared with Carlos and Courtney, and showed them how they'd provided feedback right in the document -- Courtney with color-coded comments between paragraphs, and Carlos with footnotes, that behave just like the Comments in Word.

That's really my favorite use of Google Docs, because it lets me watch a reader reading my books. That has got to be the greatest thrill for a writer.

Change History
Of course, giving them the ability to change my documents creates a little bit of a security concern. Both of those documents were copies of my original, but to get the most out of collaborative writing, you're eventually going to have to relinquish some control, and that creates the possibility for a reckless editor to really mess up a document.

Google Docs (and, really, any modern collaborative writing software) handles that by tracking changes. I can open any of my Google Docs and view a list of every change that has ever been made to it, all the way back to the original blank page. Not only that, but I can see who made each change, I can compare versions, I can revert to an old copy. It's incredibly powerful.

So I talked through that process, and (really like everything I'd shown them in Google Docs) it was mostly showing how Google had implemented useful collaboration tools available elsewhere, because I'd started the class talking about version control software, and how to make the most of it. The real key is to keep on top of the changes being made to a document you're responsible for -- know who's working on it, what they're doing to it, and be sure to catch any serious problems early. As long as you're paying attention, it's easy enough to protect the quality of your document in a system like that.

The Punchline
To close the class, I opened a final document on the screen -- the instruction sheet from an AirSoft gun (which is to say, really terribly translated English with some cheap illustrations). You can see the original here, if you're curious. For the Google Doc, I just copied all the text over verbatim, and put it in a plain text document.

Then I told them that their assignment for the week was to fix that document. On Thursday, when they got their tutorial, I walked them through the process of setting up a Google Docs account, and then required them to send me a copy of the email they'd used. Once I had that, I invited each of them to collaborate on that document. I also set up a spreadsheet to use for presentation sign-up, instead of passing around a sheet of paper at the next class.

That, I think, will do more to sell them on the usefulness of this information than anything I did in class on Tuesday. They'll be able to see collaborative editing in action, they'll see their classmates modifying a document they have open in real-time, and at the end of the day they'll have a Google Docs account set up. It's another weapon in their arsenal. They're better able to handle real-world writing challenges this week than they were last week, and that's really all I was ever going for.

More next week.

National Novel Writing Month 2009 Kick-Off

2009-11-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

I'm five days into NaNoWriMo, and not doing terribly well. I'm right at 1/4 of my target word count. My writing group is on fire, though, and I'm taking a little bit of (probably undeserved) paternal pride in that.

We started things off in a big way last Saturday night (Halloween), when a bunch of us met at a local IHOP for a big kick-off party. I think I've seen differing counts, but I'm pretty sure there were seven of us writing (and an eighth writer who left before we actually started writing), and two visitors who came by just to spectate.

We met at 11:00 PM, so that we could socialize a bit before getting down to business. I spent most of that time talking with Shawn about World of Warcraft. That was, without question, an accurate indicator of what I should expect out of the night, and out of my November. Don't mistake that for me placing blame anywhere but on me, though.

Anyway, it was fun, and we all had a good time socializing. There was a real air of anticipation, too, as we got closer and closer to midnight. Somewhere in the midst of that, a young couple headed toward our tables -- one of the seven writers, and one of the two spectators. The latter of those was also one of my students in my Tech Writing class. He's a young man with considerable personality -- more than he can reasonably keep to himself.

It was my intention to get 2,500 words written. I was willing to leave as early as 1:00 if I managed to hit my word count by then, but I was expecting it to take until about 2:00. That's okay -- I've closed down bars in the not-too-distant past, so I figured I could handle 2:00. We had the advantage of Sunday morning being the end of Daylight Savings Time, too, so I'd get the extra hour of sleep.

Most of our writers had laptops -- no, check that, all of them did. Except me. I had a scribblebook, because that's how I roll. We'd picked IHOP for its late hours, but one of the major selling points had been the free WIFI. Unfortunately, when midnight rolled around and everyone opened up the laptops, we found ourselves unable to locate that free WIFI. I don't think anybody ever did. There wasn't easy access to electrical outlets, either, but I think everyone's batteries survived longer than their writing impetus, anyway.

Anyway. While they were wrestling with their network management utilities, I was scribbling in a cramped cursive at laughing at them all. Muah hahaha! I filled two and half pages (a hair over 500 words), and ran out of words. I spent the next thirty minutes or so forcing words one at a time to fill another page and a half, and then I gave up. Oh, what a shining example I am for my writing group!

About five minutes before I gave up, though, my oh-so-personable student Sean (no, not Shawn, that was someone else) gave up on his project to get ad hoc StarCraft going, and came to our tables to talk some more. I was able to pretend to humor him, and act all friendly as an excuse for closing my scribblebook, unclicking my Pilot G-2, and spending the rest of the night just emptying glass after glass of Coke.

That was one-ish, so I had an hour left before I was going to let myself leave. Fifteen to two, a hostess came by our table to warn us that the bars were about to let out, and the clientele would become considerably more boorish. Courtney proudly proclaimed that we were writers, and we delighted in observing vibrant characters in action.

We got more than we bargained for there, though. Just past two, a fistfight erupted in the parking lot which quickly ended up as four guys beating the hell out of a fifth guy down on the ground. Our table gave us an easy view of it, but everyone in the restaurant was quickly on their feet, watching the fight through the wall of windows. It was impossible to look away.

Courtney called the cops. A manager and some employees risked their lives to try to intervene (and quite possibly saved the fifth dude's life in the process). Fifteen minutes passed before the ambulance and firetruck showed up, forty-five before the cops. None of us really felt like setting foot outside until that happened.

So I stumbled in the door well after three in the morning, too buzzed on secondhand adrenaline and caffeine to fall asleep, and I spent half an hour lying in bed thinking, "Oh, the hangover tomorrow is going to suck." That was habit, because the only time I come home after two in the morning is when I've been out drinking (and, when I spend that long out drinking, the hangover tomorrow always sucks). I kept having to remind myself I hadn't actually had anything to drink.

And then tomorrow came, and the hangover was awful. I'm way too old for three in the morning.

I cleared eleven hundred words on day one, and then had to go to work on day two. I taught a class on day three. I've been swamped with a Maintenance Handbook on a Nov. 14th deadline, and too exhausted at the end of the day to do anything but log in and zone out. I ended yesterday at 2,485 words. Got another five hundred done today, though, and the weekend is looking shiny and full of promise.

Every novel I've ever written has had at least one 8,000-word day in it. Maybe this year's will come early.

Anyway, that's most of what's been on my mind. I'm off to a slow start, but I'm still a long way from out of the game.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The Golden Age (a poem)

2009-10-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

"She's got a rule. She never dates her friends."
"I know," he said. "I really hate that rule...."

She keeps it, though, and she is all alone.
Alone at home, at work when it gets bad.
There's trouble in the air, has been for years,
Then something breaks one quiet afternoon
At a presidential speech.
A kid is killed, and soon it's on the news
And riots follow, cities start to burn.
There's soldiers in the streets, and all too soon
There's bombs.
And she is all alone.

She goes back to a place she once called home,
To friends who all among them made her world
And quietly they watch this world burn down.
All huddled up, squeezed tight on that sad couch
In his tiny apartment, second floor,
And wonder what the future holds in store.

For days it's dazed and frightened disbelief.
At night their only light is CNN.
Then Dave hears that his boss has got a plan
The governor needs him to craft a speech
A bold address to set the city right
And bring back hope and reason, end the fight.
They go -- these four, these friends, these college buds.
They're kids, but they've been called to save the world
And only one has doubts -- in that, she's all alone.

More bombs in store, more death than they could guess
But through it all, he holds them to the course.
He's brave for her -- he saves the day for her --
But in the end they all are heroes true.
Here in the quiet Heartland, they wake up.
They face a dragon, slay a villain dark,
And live storybook lives in too-real life.

But then it's done. It's done, and they're all safe,
But her mother back home is so afraid.
Her dad is, too, and asks her to come back.
To leave her friends, and come back to her home.
And hero though he is, her friend, she's got a rule.
So she goes home, to grander stories yet....

And she is all alone.

Journal Entry: October 30, 2009

2009-10-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to pretend any of you are surprised at the lack of updates. I'm also not going to pretend there will be any rectification of that issue in the next thirty-one days. NaNoWriMo is here, and it gets my words. What I have to spare will end up in emails and FaceBook Discussion Board posts encouraging my other writers to stick with it.

That's what I've been busy with in the recent bloggish doldrums. Two years ago when I decided to bully Dad and Heather into writing their books, I put together a prewriting curriculum for them, and I've used some of those exercises with a couple other people since, but I never really nailed them down.

I've spent much of the last two weeks getting them sorted out, cleaned up, and properly annotated (the exercises are now two-parters: lessons on topics in story design, paired with specific assignments).

I also went through all the exercises and did them for my own NaNoWriMo project, to set a good example, but I ended up having to switch projects right in the middle of all that, so it was a real mess. As of yesterday I'm all done, though, and ready to get to work.

Of course, I've been playing a lot of WoW, and we've had several opportunities to get a whole group together, whether it was D-- and me and the brothers-in-law, or Mom and Dad and a nephew, we've had a lot of fun.

The kids are doing well, and T-- (as always) is a phenomenal wife and mother. It's amazing how much she gets accomplished, on so little sleep....

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 9)

2009-10-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Life is Funny
I started class today with story time. See, one of my students mentioned a couple weeks ago that he didn't need to do the Employment Packet assignments because he already had a job. The Employment Packet assignments require them to research job openings, and develop a resume (and practice their business letter writing skills a couple more times). While I'm at it I'm teaching them some advanced styling techniques in Word, but that's just an added bonus.

Anyway, today I started out by asking how many of them already had professional-level jobs or internships, and nearly all the hands went up. I wasn't surprised by that -- I've been getting information about their career status from them since the first assignment. Next I asked them how many really believed that would be the last job they ever needed, and only three or four left their hands up.

And, y'know, I've read their company profiles, and it's quite possible. Still, I said, life is funny.

See, when I took that class in my senior year, I had no idea I would be a technical writer. In fact, just a few weeks before I was a technical writer I had no idea I would be a technical writer. I'd spent college killing time in the emptiest of the computer labs as a lab technician, and then supplementing my income by playing Asheron's Call.

I told them that story, which was fun. I told them how I'd played AC and harvested singularity keys and sold them on eBay. Then, one day, Toby said he could probably write a program to handle that process for me, and we made the Damion bot. By the time it was done, I spent a few months making a couple hundred bucks a week off that.

Then I graduated, and a couple hundred bucks a week wasn't going to cut it, so I had to get a real job. I got lucky there, because our department chair put me in touch with Mark Lee at Lowrance, who was looking for a new technical writer. He needed a resume, though.

What was I going to put on my resume? I had the writing degree, but all my writing samples were poetry and chapters from a dragon-rider novel. I put down the lab tech job, and my only other work experience before that was as an assistant at a private elementary school. I probably included that. I didn't list "Professional video game player" as an occupation, but I'm sure I put video games under interests....

Then I went for the interview, and Mark listed all those things. Eyebrows raised in a question, "Says here you're interested in...video games?" And I nodded, feeling stupid, and he said, "Y'know, the problem with posting a technical writing job opening is that you get all these applicants who know how to write, but don't know anything about operating the devices. You sound like the kind of guy who could play with the gadgets we make, figure them out, and then explain them in a manual. That's exactly what we need."

Life is funny.

A little while later, Toby applied for a job there, too, and it happened to come just as our company was adding a new product to our development -- turn-by-turn GPS devices. In Toby's interview, he told them the story of designing the software that guided my character through dungeons to gather singularity keys for me while I slept, and that pretty much got him the job. Half a year later, he was in charge of developing the turn-by-turn software.

Life is funny.

Auto-generated Text
That whole bit was more mentoring than Tech Writing teaching, but it made a great introduction to my class lecture, which was on auto-generated text in Microsoft Word. I told them that when I got to Lowrance, Mark was still building Tables of Contents for the manuals by hand. It was dozens of hours of work tacked on to the end of every single project, and it was a huge source of errors (because it's so easy to leave in a mistake and never notice).

That same spirit of poking around and figuring stuff out that Mark had thought would serve me well with the product documentation came into play with our documentation process, too. I got irritated trying to correct a broken ToC one time, and decided to see what sort of tools existed.

Turns out, Word has a pretty impressive ToC generator built right in. The trick is that you've got to use consistent, well-designed heading styles. That's some of the "advanced styling techniques" I talked about earlier. I've spent the last month telling them how to develop these styles, and requiring them to use section headings in all of their homework assignments just to get them ready for this.

All of those assignments have been accompanied with tutorials I developed -- six, so far -- and each of those tutorials has been structured using a single set of custom styles (chapter heading, section heading, paragraph heading, body text, bullets, block quote, image, and caption). By now the students know well enough how I made those styles that they were able to grasp the significance of each of them.

So I pulled up all six of their tutorials on the overhead, and copied and pasted them together into one big long document, the chapter heading style automatically separating the different tutorials into chapters. I had to make a couple little adjustments (give the heading styles appropriate Outline levels, and make a clone of the chapter heading for the ToC title), and I explained what I was doing as I did it, but about ten minutes into the presentation I was able to scroll to the top of the document, choose Insert | Quick Parts | Field | TOC, and hit OK.

A fully formatted, populated, beautiful Table of Contents appeared on the page. Someone in the back said, "That's awesome!" Somebody else said, "You cheated!"

Exactly the response I was looking for.

I showed them some more stuff along the same lines. We added automatic chapter numbers, and figure numbering in the captions, and then we built a Table of Illustrations to go with the ToC. We fixed the page numbering so the front matter had little roman numerals and the first page of chapter 1 was labeled 1 (instead of 5).

Then we went to the header and put in a field that shows the chapter title on the top of every page (so if you're in the middle of chapter 4, you know it's chapter 4). All of that took about forty minutes. Maybe a little less, and when we were done we had turned a handful of documents into a real book.

It was easy...but only because we'd done our work beforehand. Everything I did relied on the consistent use of well-designed styles. Because all of my chapters used Tutorial Chapter style, and every single section heading was Tutorial Section, and every caption was Tutorial Caption, I was able to do these things. That was really the main point of my lesson for the day. I don't expect any of them to be able to build a ToC or add a StyleRef field to a document on command. I do expect them to be able to build a document that could support those, though. And if they ever have to work with one that does, I expect them to be able to recognize what's going on, and use the built-in styles appropriately.

It was a pretty straightforward lecture day, divided evenly between story time and presentation, and when I got to the end of the presentation I let them go. I'd thought about having them build an Index as their in-class activity, but I'm pretty sure that would have taken hours. I filled fifty minutes as it was, and the lingerers and hangers-on kept me in the classroom, talking, until well past 2:15.

More next week.

The OC (Week 8)

2009-10-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

The Anxiety Persists
So, I've been through this often enough now that I can make a pretty good analysis of the situation. Early on it seemed like my pre-class anxiety was getting less and less as it moved from a weeklong problem to one that only took up a couple hours.

With only really one exception, though, I've realized that the total severity of the anxiety remains constant, regardless of the duration. That is to say, as my downtime has decreased, it has gotten worse and worse. I spent two hours before class today confident that I was about to die.

Then one o'clock rolled around, I cut off their chatter with a relatively quiet, "Okay," and I felt fine. Really every week since the first has gone like that. I don't have any trouble talking to them anymore, it's just waiting for class to start that gets to me.

National Novel Writing Month
Of course you knew I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to promote NaNoWriMo while teaching a writing class, but I refrained from offering extra credit. Enough of my students have expressed an interest in writing novels, though, that I felt pretty confident making the plug. I started the class out with that, and mentioned that it had "about as much to do with Tech Writing as that conversation about DeBord's grading practices."

Still, I recommended it and wrote the URL on the marker board. Incidentally, that's the first time I've used the marker board.

Information
From there I went to the lecture, and my big point for the day was that Tech Writing is about more than just writing down information. Information is more available than ever, but most people have trouble using information. The role of the Tech Writer is to convert existing information into a usable form -- and often to convert the same information into multiple forms.

On that last point, I titled the lecture "Repurposing Documentation," and I described my work environment to them, where every little change to the system requires us to document the status quo, the proposed change, and the predicted effect of the change according to a very specific standard. Well, no, seven very specific (and very different) standards. An Engineering Study requires all of that information in five to ten pages, whereas a Safety Risk Management memo requires it in one short paragraph.

And, I pointed out, until they hired me five years ago, it was the engineers and programmers on my team who were writing those seven different documents for every single project. That point probably hit home. My major focus for the last several assignments has been on finding best practices to minimize the effort of properly formatting documents, which really comes in helpful when trying to repurpose information from one project to the next.

Doing It with Style
I followed that up with a brief demonstration. I pulled up my tutorial for Thursday ("How to Write a Resume") with no real formatting to it. Everything was reduced to Word's Normal style. I asked them to identify it, and they said, "It's instructions on how to write a resume." I waited for a more specific answer, and someone said, "It's poorly-formatted instructions on how to write a resume." I didn't really get a better answer than that.

So after a moment I said, "This is actually your tutorial for Thursday--" and I got a wave of surprised realization from them. That...wasn't really how I expected that to go. I use exactly the same wording in the introductory paragraph of every tutorial, so even without the formatting it should have been pretty clear. I guess it made the point better that way (how much of an impact formatting has), but it wasn't what I expected.

I went ahead, though, and asked them to help me format it. They've seen five tutorials now, all with consistent styling, so they were able to tell me where I needed to add spaces between paragraphs, where I needed to bold or change font sizes or change font styles...and after a little while I revealed to them that the document already had custom styles in it, so I could show how easy it was to go through the document and apply those styles.

Then, in the end, I brought up the original, unformatted document and showed it side-by-side with the one we'd just styled for comparison. It was a pretty stark difference, and that worked well.

The whole demonstration didn't, though. I'm not sure if I failed to set it up properly, or if I misjudged how familiar they would be with my tutorials, or what. I didn't feel like they engaged with it, though. Something to remember for next time, if there's a next time.

Playing Games
It didn't take terribly long, though, which was entirely my intention. As I was pointing out the differences between the two documents, I mentioned that once I had the custom styles designed and once I knew my basic template, it became just as easy to make the good tutorial as it would have been to make a crappy, unstyled one -- and look how much better the results were!

And they all agreed. So I looked around the room, and said, "Hey, remember back in week two when you guys made tutorials?" Immediately I got good-natured groans.

That was the time I divided them kindergarten-style into three groups, so today I made them return to those groups. Then I showed them where to find my Tutorial template (with embedded styles), and where to find their week two tutorials on the class's BlackBoard page. Just as they were about to get started, though, I said, "Now, before we start, we're going to make a little change. This [pointing to group two] is now group one. That's two, and that's three." Essentially, each table got assigned the document produced by the next table to the right.

Someone said, humorously pathetic, "I don't like this game!" They did a fantastic job, though. It's remarkable how much different their tutorials look now, after just a few weeks of training.

Microsoft Word 2007 for Mac OS X
Most of the time they were working on their activity, I was working one-on-one with one of my English majors who has been having a lot of trouble with the tutorials. Turns out (and I learned this about a week ago, when I got a frantic email from another student) Word 2007 on Windows doesn't really look anything like Word 2007 on Mac.

That's a problem I should have foreseen, but absolutely didn't. In the last couple weeks, their tutorials have gotten increasingly involved in the nuts-and-bolts of how to make Word apply specific style formatting, and a lot of my advice was worthless to the Mac users.

Now, their laptops can all dual boot to either OS X or Windows Vista, and the girl who initially emailed me just ended up switching to Windows to do the assignments (which, she said, ended up making the projects a lot easier, so it was worth it). Still, that's something I'm going to have to keep in mind in future tutorials, and try to find some good solution for.

We started on time, and though I released them on time, I had students in the classroom for another fifteen minutes afterward -- most of them trying to finish their activity. I probably could have cut the on-screen demonstration entirely, and they would have had more time for rewriting and formatting. I'm not sure how well that would have flowed, though.

More next week.

Journal Entry: October 20, 2009

2009-10-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made a To Do list, but I didn't actually do anything.

I got home from work to find AB napping and XP about to, so I was all too happy to watch them while T-- ran to the store.

She brought home pizza for dinner. While I played WoW, we watched some Psych and some Law and Order. And I gave AB a bath before bedtime. It was a pretty quiet night, but I was glad to have them home.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: October 19, 2009

2009-10-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday was the big Charboneau family birthdays party for everyone with a birthday in October, and T-- felt the itch to be a part of that, so she ended up packing up the kids Friday morning and heading to Wichita. That left me with a weekend of bachelor freedom. I mostly spent it practicing poor sleeping and eating habits.

I did get my lesson plan for next week done on Friday, and yesterday I took care of some stuff around the house, but apart from that it was movies, football, and lots of WoW. Amazingly relaxing, but before it was over I was really missing my family.

Friday night I was home alone, Saturday I went over to K-- and N--'s for lunch and the OU/Texas game. Lunch was some incredible cheeseburgers K-- grilled. Then while I was there K-- offered to help me track down an electrical problem I'd been having with my car, but that sort of tracked itself down as soon as I popped the hood and we saw the mountain of corrosion sitting on my battery's positive terminal. So we cleaned that off, and I haven't had any problems since.

I got home from Edmond in time for D-- to pick me up for dinner at Belle Isle, then we went back to the house and played WoW until 3:30. We also watched a bunch of unwholesome movies, which was pretty fun.

Sunday D-- and I went to lunch with my sister's family up in Edmond, then came back to the house for more WoW (although, as I said, I also got some stuff accomplished). I had to call it a night a little bit earlier, so as to make it in to work this morning, but it was still a pretty similar night to the one before.

And now my family's home safe, and I'm looking forward to seeing them tonight.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: October 16, 2009

2009-10-16T08:33:00.001-07:00

Well, after all my angst yesterday over the NaNoWriMo prewriting stuff, I loaded up the rough draft of my novel-writing how-to, and discovered that it was already reformatted to work on two weeks of prep time (instead of the month I thought I'd used), and that all of the assignments were written out, and all but one of the lessons that go with them.

So, it turns out, I've got about one hour's worth of work to do over the next two weeks, to take care of all that stuff I was woeing over yesterday. That doesn't count my own prewriting, of course, but I can find time for that. It was the technical writing I was worried about. Turns out, that's done.

So I spent about an hour (off an on) on Facebook yesterday posting that material and chatting with my writing group, and there's some real excitement to get started. I can't wait.

In the evening we had the last of our monthly summer picnics for Britton Road. T-- was really looking forward to it (as she always does), and with them going out of town it seemed like a really good idea to go along and spend the evening with my family, away from my computer. Of course it didn't hurt that T-- was bringing two gallons of my chili recipe to compete in the chili cookoff, so I knew I'd get a great dinner out of it.

Turned out, I didn't do so well. Before I'd finished the short walk to bring the crockpot from our car to the picnic tables, I found myself struggling to breathe. I thought, "I'm not that out of shape" before I realized what it really was. Too many people. I ended up spending an hour and a half huddled over my little bowl of chili, trying not make eye contact with anyone but K-- or N--, and mostly just focusing on my breathing. It was a real waste of what could have been a fun evening.

I got through it, though, and when we got home there was a whole Thursday night's worth of comedy to watch, and we watched it all (quite in spite of the late hour). That was fun.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: October 15, 2009

2009-10-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got started on NaNoWriMo. Specifically, I sent out an email to everyone I know who's going to be participating with some prewriting instructions to help get them started thinking toward the writing that's going to be going on.

That's something I started doing two years ago, when I got Dad and Heather to do NaNoWriMo with me, and they were both deeply grateful for the October assignments sometime around the end of the first week of November. I put a lot of thought into crafting a curriculum to ease them into story creation, but build enough of a foundation to make the writing of a novel possible. It worked -- first time either of them had tried to write a novel, and they both finished NaNoWriMo in style.

Unfortunately, that sort of success creates pressure to follow it up, and now I'm part of a 17-person writer's group, and directly accountable to nine of them, and I somehow let myself wait until October was half done before I sent out my first email. So that's frustrating.

Anyway, I sent out my first email yesterday, and I have high hopes to get the rest of the curriculum put together into a fancy format before tomorrow, so I can send an overview along with the follow-up assignment.

Yesterday also found us at Mama Roja again (following an unforgivably long absence). D-- joined us for an early-ish dinner, but T-- had been wanting to go ever since last weekend, and it turns out she's going to be out of town this weekend, so it was last night or next week. We opted for last night and next week. So there you go.

Anyway, delicious as always. Afterward she took the kids to church, and D-- gave me a ride home, and then I spent the rest of the evening watching Christmas Vacation and playing WoW.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 7)

2009-10-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

After spending six hours or so on class prep Monday, I ended up canceling class yesterday with the following BlackBoard announcement:

Your professor has granted himself an excused absence for sickness today.

Thursday is Fall Break, so Week 7 will go down in the annals of history as one of the three least interesting weeks in this sixteen-week semester. Or maybe one of the five, depending how well the students do on their presentations....

More next week.

Journal Entry: October 14, 2009

2009-10-14T08:38:00.001-07:00

No, there is too much. Let me sum up....

It's terribly frustrating to me that, as times get more and more interesting, I write less and less about it on my blog. That's been true of every NaNoWriMo I've been through (and how many birthday parties and Thanksgivings have been lost because of it?), and it's been true of both of my babies.

Admittedly, XP isn't doing anything terribly newsworthy. He's adorable, but that doesn't make for great plain-text updates. It's a shame, though, that when I look back at now three years from now, I won't have a very detailed record of the semester I decided to work full time and teach a college course while participating in two different writer's groups, having a new baby, and maintaining a 30-hour-per-week WoW habit. Oh, and writing. A little bit.

It's not going to get any better, either, because in the midst of all that, a NaNoWriMo is looming. All I'll have to look back on are these occasional complaints, and a word count ticker. I guess that's something....

Anyway, I've spent the last two weeks with "blog journal" as the longstanding not-marked-out item on my rolling Post-It Note To Do list, and I decided to shed the guilt and stress of that unwritten post getting longer and longer, and just write a quick post about yesterday.

I made that decision three days ago. And here we are.

There's been lots worth mentioning in the recent past, but the most exciting among them is probably B--'s new job and the party that went with it. That's more than a week ago, though, so it's lost to history. Last Friday night AB spent the evening with Diana, so T-- and I could have a date night. We went to Texas Roadhouse and then watched some TV. It was awesome.

On Saturday D-- and I went over to B-- and E--'s, because he had missed the previous weekend's party with some vile disease. Conversation and martinis, and about seven minutes of The Empire Strikes Back with RiffTrax.

Sunday the Cowboys barely beat the miserable Chiefs, and that gave us our first winning weekend of the season -- or at least the first one where I got to watch both games. It was exhilarating.

Monday was Columbus Day, which is actually a holiday for people like me, so I went to the Science Museum with T-- and the kids, then spent the afternoon preparing materials for my class.

Yesterday I woke up sick, but I went to work anyway. I did end up canceling my class, though, which gives the students a full week off because Thursday is Fall Break. Wasn't the flu, though -- I was better by bedtime. And today I'm back at work.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Weeks 5 and 6)

2009-10-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Week 5
Week 5 doesn't get its own post, because it would be terribly uninteresting. I gave them the day off last Tuesday so that they could work on their semester projects. I did still require them to turn in their proposals before the class's regular start time (by email), and I did still give them document assignments on both Thursdays. The first was some practical instruction on building a rudimentary, styled layout, and then filling in the paragraphs with your actual content. The second took that concept a step farther and built an actual Word template with custom styles.

Anyway, since we didn't meet in class it apparently lifted the Curse of Mr. Pogue. I didn't hear news of any life-altering drama that afflicted my students during week 5.

Life-Altering Drama
Week 6 was another matter entirely. We got the Swine Flu! Or technically (as I'm told), Novel H1N1. Anyway, OC canceled chapel this week in an effort to stem the spread of the disease on campus, and still I had two students miss class because of it, and another who left early (sniffling) for a doctor's appointment.

As a deeply-concerned educator and a compassionate human being, I really hope these disruptions stop happening. As a storyteller, though, I'm anxious to see what's going to befall my class next week. I've got sixteen students, and the class is sixteen weeks long. So far I took the bullet on week 4 (when it was the early birth of my son that interrupted class), and week 5 was a bye, but week 6 hit three students at once. So we're still on track for the rest of them to get one event per week. I'll keep you posted.

Handbook of Technical Writing
So I started my class by stepping out from behind the computer station and holding up a magnificent reference text, Handbook of Technical Writing, vol. 9. I showed it to the class, and said, "How many of you recognize this book?"

I got three or four raised hands. In the back corner, someone asked timidly, "Wait...is that the textbook for this class?"

I showed my teeth, in something like a smile. I asked, "How many of you have read anything in it?" One of them said he'd glanced at the section on copyright, out of curiosity. I shook my head sadly, and then I laid down the law.

Every one of the tutorials I've provided starts out with a list of "related topics," which are section titles straight out of the handbook. It's usually 6-10 pages worth of material, and I always read through those sections before writing my tutorials, so that I'm not repeating information. That means there's some important technical information in there that's the students aren't getting if they're not reading it.

And, I pointed it, it's information that I'm going to expect in their papers when I grade them. If it comes to it -- if I find myself having to hand out Cs and Ds because nobody's reading their textbook, I'll start having weekly reading quizzes. I don't want to do that, because this isn't information that needs to be memorized -- rather, they need to know how to use the textbook as a reference. They need to get a feel for what's in it, and how it's organized, so they can go look stuff up when they need it. I deliberately picked a cheap reference book instead of a big expensive textbook so that they would keep it at the end of the semester, and have that info handy.

So I did my best to express that, and pointed out (by way of example) that none of the multi-page proposal memos they'd turned in had used a header on the second page -- something explicitly stressed in the textbook. I saw some sheepish faces at that, but I'm not grading that one against them, because I hadn't actually taught them how to do headers yet.

Document Headers, Page Headers, and Section Headings
One of the confusing aspects of technical writing, I admitted, is overlapping terminology. For an industry built on clarity of expression, technical writing certainly accepts its share of confusing expressions.

In their first tutorial, I introduced the students to the standard business letter header (which might be a stylized letterhead, or it might just be the sender's contact info). Then the next week I showed them the standard memo header (which consists of four fields: To, From, Date, and Subject). I also asked them to divide their first memo into several sections, each labeled with a heading. Then this week I started complaining that their documents didn't have headers.

For clarity, I refer to this last kind of header as a "page header" (since it essentially appears on every page in the document), and that first kind of header as a "document header," since it only appears once at the top of the document. Actually after business letters and memos, the document header is mostly replaced by title pages, so it doesn't matter.

Still, there's room for confusion. I apologized for that, spelled out in detail what each of these elements is, and told them the trick to keeping it straight is learning the purpose of each element rather than its name. Because they serve clearly distinct purposes, and in context it's almost always easy to recognize which one is under discussion at any given time.

Introductory Paragraphs
Context. That's a word that's come up again and again in the last few weeks. In their proposal memo assignment, I told them exactly which sections they needed to include: Introduction, Scope, Methods, Timetable, Qualifications, and Conclusion. I also reiterated from previous tutorials that every document should have an introductory paragraph. One of my students wrote me during the week to ask if I intended the section labeled "Introduction" to be the introductory paragraph (ah, these overlapping terms again...), and I wrote back that, in fact, no I didn't. I sent that reply as a general email to everyone in the class, but still I got proposals that went straight from the document header into the section heading "Introduction."

So I took the chance to clarify that for them. The purpose of an introductory paragraph is to introduce the document that follows. This blog post starts with the simple, "This post is part of an ongoing series." That's not terribly telling, but it gives you some context. If blogs weren't inherently sequential, I would feel a much stronger need to tell you, in each post, why I'm writing that post.

Memos aren't inherently sequential. Most technical documentation isn't. Emails can be (specifically when they're replies), but most written communication ends up living a life of its own as an independent document. And, most importantly, it doesn't die. Long after you've forgotten about it, long after you lose track of why you asked your boss for two hours' leave in the middle of the day, the document you used to request it is still readily accessible.

More than that, it's reusable. I left aside their proposal memo and turned to email, because it makes the point more effectively. Email is something we do so casually, every day. Half the time, even business emails are just a matter of the guy from the next cubicle asking you to send him something in writing so he can remember that thing you discussed at the water cooler. It doesn't need to be anything more than, "Hey, remember that you agreed to review that document before Friday. --Aaron." We all get in the habit of jotting off quick emails.

Documents that Live Forever
The problem is, even if you know this email only needs to get to the guy in the next cubicle, and only needs to live until Friday, it sticks around. And the Forward button becomes the easiest and most dangerous thing in the world. (That comment got a laugh.) I told them that I'd written hasty little reminders like that to my coworkers that came back to me, years later, and somewhere in the list of people who'd replied in the meantime was the Secretary of the Department of Transportation. Somebody needed my opinion to back up a claim they were sending to Washington, so he forwarded my email on up the chain and I got it back long after I'd forgotten all about the project under discussion (let alone that particular opinion).

I was in the clear, though. I did get brought back into the conversation, but I was able to participate because I'm a good technical writer. Even my quick reminder email included enough of an introduction, enough context that when it popped back into my inbox my own message brought me back up to speed.

Preserving Context
That's exactly what documenting code is for, so I wasn't surprised when the concept resonated with my class. It's not an obvious concept, though. When you sit down to write a document, that's all you're thinking about. Why you're writing this document is so abundantly clear, you can't imagine a time when you would look at this document and not know what it was for. Writers run into this all the time when they try to write the cover letter to submit a novel to an agent or publisher. If I -- a writer -- am writing a letter to a literary agent, isn't it obvious that I'm writing to ask him to represent me? Why do they want introductory paragraphs? Why do I need to come up with some clear way of saying, "I'm writing to ask you to represent my novel." Shouldn't that be obvious?

The thing is, that's all dependent on information I have. I am a writer, and I'm writing to this person as a literary agent. I could be a salesman. I could be an assistant at a major publishing house. I could even be a literary agent. I could be any of those things and a writer seeking representation, or I could be any of those things and writing an identical-looking business letter to discuss something entirely different from a novel query.

The whole purpose of the introductory paragraph in a document is to provide the reader with the same context the writer brings to the document. So it always feels redundant and overdone and silly because it's stating out loud exactly what you've been thinking about since the moment you first realized you needed to write this document. The thing is, especially the way we do things today, your reader could be anybody. It goes so far beyond the literary agent having to guess if you're a writer or an industry professional or somebody trying to sell him vinyl siding. The way we save data today, the reader could be the literary agent, or it could be his assistant, or his boss. It could be one of his students decades from now, when he's given up representation and become a professor. It could be a graduate student decades later researching how I got my start in writing. It could be me decades later, looking back on where I got my start.

I still have every submission letter I've ever written. Most of them have lousy introductions, by the way. I still have most of the business letters I've ever written, for whatever reason. And I've got technical documents that I open up, scroll through a long list of technical information, and have to wonder why I pulled this information together, what purpose it served. For me, as much as for my audience, I need to write clear introductory paragraphs to establish a document's context.

Some Technicalities
All of that took about fifteen minutes. I transitioned from that topic into a discussion of page headers, which we use more than anything to stamp the document's title (and sometimes author) on the top of every page. It does for the page what the introductory paragraph does for the document -- provides context. Footers mostly carry the page number, but sometimes other legal or contextual text gets stuffed down there, too.

I pulled up the class syllabus on the projector and showed them precisely that -- every page had my name, the class name, and "Syllabus" in the header, and "Oklahoma Christian University" and a page number in the footer. By way of another example, I opened a copy of Gods Tomorrow and showed them how I used my name and the document title in the header, as any literary agent or submissions editor would require.

(We diverted into a little discussion of whether or not I'd give extra credit to them for reading my novel, when I caught some of them paying more attention to the text on the screen than to the headers and footers I was pointing out. I said no, because I already have plenty of phenomenal reviewers among you, my loyal readership. They were most disappointed.)

From there, I opened up a document template I'd built over the weekend, which consisted of two pages, landscape, with three columns per page. I walked them through the process of how to do each of those things in Word. Along the way I tried to show them how to insert Section breaks (so I could explain how Word handles different sections), and discovered that the lower resolution my monitor automatically switched to when I plugged in the overhead had truncated my menu bars, and as a result I couldn't find the command to insert section breaks.

That severely interfered with some of the other stuff I wanted to show them, so I had to go on with the lecture describing how this document would behave hypothetically if I had inserted section breaks. Frustrating, but I didn't let it get me flustered.

In-Class Activity
The whole formatting lecture only ran twenty minutes or so. When I was done, I said, "Now we've discussed some of the most frustrating things to work with in Word (columns and section breaks). I've got them all packed together onto this two-page template. Does anyone recognize this particular layout?" The only guess I got was a newspaper, but I didn't wait too long. Instead I picked up a blank piece of paper, turned it sideways, and said, "What if those columns were filled with text, and I folded along the gaps between them?'

I did so, and immediately they recognized the shape of a tri-fold brochure. So then I told them they would get to experience the agony and frustration of working with columns and section breaks, because they were going to build a brochure.

First I had them divide into small groups (3-4 each), and everyone shared with the rest of the group what his or her semester project topic was. They're each developing a new document with a real-world use, so I figured one out of every three or four would be worth promoting. So each group picked the project they thought would best fill a brochure, and got to work.

What I liked about that activity, more than the experience of making a brochure, was the way it got the students discussing their projects among themselves. They're going to have to make a presentation to the class later in the semester, but this way they were able to practice discussing the project out loud in a much less formal environment. More than that, they were asking each other questions and expressing interest in each others' projects in ways that I think will really help them move forward. And, of course, it helped that I got to eavesdrop on all of that from my place at the front of the room.

The Next Forty Minutes
I set them to work for the rest of the class period, and they took all of it. I'd intended to spend that time marking up the last of their proposals and then have them come to my desk one at a time to go over them, but I didn't end up having enough time for that. In the end, I returned all but two of the proposals in the last few minutes of class, and those two I went home, marked up, and scanned in to return by email.

It wasn't just time management that got me, though. I spent a lot of time interacting with the various groups, and they really got into the brochure project. I still remember trying to build my brochure from when I took the class under Gail Nash, and several of my classmates that I talked to about the class said that's the only thing they remember from it.

Ten minutes into it, my class clown said to his groupmates, "To be honest, I'm not really a fan of the in-class activity."

I looked up from the document I was marking up to hit him with a glare, and the English-major who'd joined his group went all wide-eyed and said, "Ohmygosh, he heard you!" Somehow, I didn't laugh.

I shook my head and said, "Oh, he's not scared of me. But, then, I haven't picked his grade yet."

That got a low chorus of, "Oooh," but he immediately shrugged it off and said, "All I need in this class is a D. This is my last semester of my senior year, and I could get Ds in all my classes and still graduate, so there's not a lot of pressure."

Someone else jumped in to lament the fact that he was also in his last semester but he'd already hit his threshold of Ds, and from there the conversation turned to which classes had been cause Ds in the past -- the primary candidates being "Western Civ" and "anything taught by Cami Agan." That one made me smile.

Anwyay, in spite of his claim, he spent the full forty minutes putting together a great brochure, and I've seen no less effort on any of the papers he's turned in. He admitted himself that he's something of a perfectionist, so even if I don't have a real threat to keep him in line, he's still going to meet or exceed my expectations on all my documents.

In the end, I think his antics keep the rest of the students more engaged and casual, and ultimately I think that's worth the little disruptions I have to deal with.

In the end, it was a pretty successful class period. I introduced Headers, Footers and Section Breaks in Microsoft Word (a topic that'll also become a tutorial at some point later in the semester), and everybody practiced looking at their projects from a slightly different angle, which is going to be important moving forward.

More next week.

Sad Little Cloud (a poem)

2009-10-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

In perfect honesty there have been times
When I wanted to say, "That's it! I'm done."
Too tired, too exhausted by your grief,
And suffering in the shadow of your pain.
You've hurt, and yes I know that hurt was real
(And no, my happy life cannot compare)
But all your misery is wasted time --
A gift to grief, withheld from those you love.
You're so much more than tragedy.

You've never known a perfect life at home --
No gentle father-man to wrap you up,
No shining beacon Mom, so pure and true,
No happy Christmas photo family.
And then, your spirit's been betrayed by flesh --
When your own mind became the enemy,
When reason could not conquer cruel thoughts,
When friends and lovers could not understand.
You're so much more than tragedy.

I've seen you try and try to prove that true --
To live a normal life, to make it work
When whispered voices swear it's wasted time.
"You'll never live the picture postcard life."
They're right. But don't believe the worst of it.
You're destined to far more than normal gives.
I've seen you shine, seen miracles firsthand
But you lament the things you cannot do.
You're so much more than tragedy.

I know you want perfection and no less.
I know you've tasted bitter, cruel fate.
I know you've lost more dearly than you've made.
I know how hard you work so you won't cry.
But people fall in love with this sad cloud.
They gather to your dark like moths to flame.
Not for the shade, but for the light you hide --
Deprive to those who'd give their lives to you.
You're so much more than tragedy.

Be more. Be more. And every day be more.
Find paths that bring you out into the light,
Find dreams that make you smile, that make you hope,
Find friends who cheer, and tales that tell you truth.
And look for truth -- for happy truth no less.
Look for the shinning light that draws them in,
Look for the you that made me write this verse,
And get to know that person like I do.
You're so much more than tragedy.
Believe.

All Grown Up

2009-09-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

As I said in the journal entry for Saturday, I watched AB all morning, then took her to meet the rest of the family for lunch at Jason's Deli. She'd had enough fun playing with her daddy that she wasn't too happy when I said, "Okay, put on your shoes. It's time to go."

I finally got her out to the car, though, and as she was climbing into her seat she said, "I want my book!"

For a couple months now she's had a Baby Colors book kicking around the floorboards of my car, and on the rare occasions she'd ridden with me, she has read through it with relish. Sometime in the last week, though, my car go cleaned out. So I had to say, "Sorry, your book isn't out here. You can read the map, though!" I invested some artificial excitement in that and she bought it, so I gave her the Oklahoma State Roadways map, told her the blue lines were rivers, and then we hit the road.

She spent some time looking over the back page of it that was visible, then said, "What do the red lines mean?"

I glanced back and said, "Oh, those are highways. Big roads. And the black lines are regular roads."

She said, "Oh."

I drove about a mile, and she said, "I found letters! There's my name!" She'd turned it over and was looking at the front cover -- MAP in giant block red letters, and the A was what she was calling her name. I chuckled and spelled it out to her, told her the word, and went on driving.

She was quiet a while, then said, "Here's my house! And here's Sophy's house."

I said, "Can you find a path between them? Try to trace the black lines from one to the other...." I could tell that was a little too advanced for her, even as I said it, and she just didn't respond. After a moment, though, I heard the crinkle of her unfolding the map for the first time. And then silence, then another crinkle, and I glanced back to find her staring in fascination at the partly-unfolded map in her lap.

She poked the stiff paper, heard its crinkle, and tilted the still-folded edge to get a good look at it. I could see her thinking. Then she said, "Daddy! I want to show you something!"

While I watched in rearview glances, she unfolded the map all the way, then looked at it for a moment with a critical eye. She folded it back in half, longways, to get a tall rectangle, then held it up in front of her, hiding her face. Then she said, "Now say, 'Annabelle! Annabelle!'"

I did as instructed. All excited, I called, "Annabelle! Annabelle!"

With just her left hand, she bent down the top corner of the map so I could see the mildly exasperated look on her face, and she said, "What is it, Daddy? I'm reading the paper!"

Journal Entry: September 28, 2009

2009-09-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

Wednesday
Wednesday after work we met K-- and N-- at Johnny's Charcoal Broiler -- carrying on a tradition started the first time T-- took AB to church, and we ate there for lunch. The food was delicious, of course, and it was a fun time getting together with friends.

Afterward, everybody but K-- and me walked over to church for Wednesday night classes. K-- came over to my place to help me with T--'s broken computer. He had a hard drive caddy handy, with connections for all manner of hard drive, and in no time at all he had the data from T--'s laptop copied over to mine. That solved the biggest of T--'s fears (lost photos and work documents), but of course the laptop was still broken.

After church the family came back home, and we spent the evening watching TV while I played WoW.

Thursday
Thursday I had to prepare a tutorial/lecture for my students, and I spent a significant chunk of time after work reviewing it and getting it posted to the website. I also spent much of the day (and evening) reviewing the students' submissions for the first document packet, and fielding questions from them (by email, of course).

Karla made us some incredible quesadillas for dinner. D-- came over for that, and to play some WoW with me, but mostly to pick up T--'s dead computer and take it home with him. He spent the evening getting it resurrected (with the help of a spare hard drive he had sitting around, which probably saved me a hundred bucks), and getting the OS back on it.

Apart from that, Thursday night was more TV, and more WoW. We chilled, and caught our breath.

Friday
Friday I met Toby for lunch, and we discussed (among other things) a document conversion project I've got to get done for work. He had volunteered to help with that when they came to visit at the hospital, and this was my first opportunity to provide him with more detailed information. He sounded optimistic that he could get it done, and we made arrangements to meet at his place Sunday evening.

Then in the afternoon I got home from work a little bit early, so I was there when D-- brought T--'s laptop by, and I installed a few more programs for her, and now it's better than new.

D-- had to go back to work, but he agreed to meet us for dinner. Half an hours after he left, Mom and Dad got in from Little Rock. We introduced them to Alexander (or XP, as he'll be known hereabouts in the future), then spent some time socializing while we waited for my sister and her family to come over. A little after five we piled into a bunch of vehicles, and headed over to Mama Roja for dinner.

As we were waiting for our table, T-- turned to me and said with some surprise, "Can you believe it's been nine days since we've been here?" Her Mom rocked our world by pointing out it had actually been two whole weeks. Craziness.

Anyway, it was a crowded, busy table, but we all had delicious food and enjoyed the opportunity to talk. Afterward, T--'s parents left from the restaurant to head home, and everyone else came over to our place.

I took Mom up to Homeland to pick up the necessary supplies, then when we got back to the house I mixed up a pitcher of rum margaritas. They went over pretty well, but T-- and I had a hankering for the real thing, so as soon as the pitcher was empty I filled it up again, with tequila this time, and we had a grand ol' time.

Saturday
Saturday morning T-- and Mom headed up to Edmond (with XP in tow) for pedicures with my sister, and Dad headed to Edmond for a conference at Memorial Road Church of Christ on an educational framework called Journeylands. That left me at home with AB. We played in her room, we spent half an hour or so on my laptop playing the Memory game, we read from her books, and we practiced telling each other stories.

Then T-- called to tell me we were all supposed to meet Dad for lunch at Jason's Deli, so I had AB watch some TV while I got ready, and then we rapidly got her dressed (and I made a humorous attempt at putting her hair in a ponytail), and headed north.

Lunch was awesome, and afterward T-- and Mom took AB with them to go shopping for baby stuff. Dad headed back to his conference, so that left me alone. I ran home, took care of some stuff on my laptop, and then headed back out again for our monthly writer's group at Courtney's.

That probably deserves its own post (as it's gotten in the past), but I'm feeling lazy now and I was sleepy and distracted then, so I couldn't do it justice anyway. Shawn was missing, so it was just the three of us. We started out talking about dreams (and nightmares), and I told the story of my first nightmare (the killer shark in the apartment swimming pool), and my most recent (last week, when T-- walked away from our marriage because I left her to fend for herself when we found ourselves caught in a swamp surrounded by killer snakes and spiders).

Then from there we talked more about our creative influences, how we come up with titles, and how we cope with the constant temptation to jump to new projects -- leaving old ones unfinished. We also talked about another OKC writer's group we might try to crash sometime, and a potential addition to our group, and traditional versus non-traditional publishers. I also dragged the conversation toward magic in the real world for a bit, and we each seized that opportunity to feel a little bit foolish.

Then it was 4:30, and time to split up. I got home just after Dad, and Mom was still there with AB (who was taking a nap). T-- was already up at the church, getting ready for a crop, and she had XP with her.

So it was just me and Mom and Dad, and I took the opportunity to ask them for some advice and analysis on parenting. Specifically, I wanted to know how much change I should expect in AB in the coming years. I feel like we've weathered the differentiation called "the terrible twos" at this point -- we've seen it, we've found ways to address it, and at this point, though her rebellion can be frustrating at times, it isn't baffling. It's predictable, and addressable, and I feel like we both know who she is.

So my question was, how many more major change events are there, in early childhood development? I was relieved when Mom and Dad both agreed there really aren't any. We can reasonably expect AB to be pretty much the person she is now for most of the next nine years. I'm happy with that answer. I like the person she is.

They also had some good information about how to handle the challenges of her differentiation events in her teenage years, but I really didn't enjoy thinking about that. Not that I'm worried about the rebellion or family drama or anything...I just don't like thinking about her being a teenager. It feels far too close, and that's only a handful of years before she's gone. Miserable thought, that.

Anyway, that took up most of an hour, and then I went and woke AB up so she could go to the church with Mom. A few minutes later K-- came over, having dropped his baby off there, too. We ordered a couple pizzas and loaded up Beatles: Rock Band. An hour or so later, my brother-in-law called to ask if he could come join us, and we rocked out for two hours before he and K-- had to go pick up their little ones.

Right around then Mom and my older sister came home with AB, and after she went down to bed the rest of us played some more Rock Band. I mixed up a pitcher of strawberry daiquiris for us, too, and we all had a good time. By the time T-- got home my sister was gone (to stay at my little sister's place), and Mom and Dad were in bed, so it was just me still awake, playing WoW.

I didn't stay up too late, though. I was tired, so I went to bed around 11:30 with no regrets.

Sunday
Sunday morning we had a full house getting ready for church, and all of us running a little bit late, but we managed to get ourselves together somehow and showed up no more than five minutes later for service.

The sermon was on the various social values of hymns in a congregation, and before Rob was done Dad leaned over and said, "I want you to introduce me to your preach after church." Turned out that was a sermon Dad had been wanting to preach for years, and while he'd heard lots of sermons on the topic, he'd never heard anyone express the real benefits and perspective that Rob gave in his sermon.

So we caught Rob after church (after waiting through an impressive line), and Dad got to compliment and thanks Rob for his sermon, and Rob got invite Dad to come give a marriage and family seminar to Britton Road sometime -- something he's been wanting to talk with Dad about for a while. So that's pretty cool.

Then afterward we all went over my sister's place for an Italian-themed lunch of salad, chicken pasta, and cheesecake for dessert. Everyone agreed the food was incredibly good. AB and her older cousin weren't getting along terribly well, though -- probably because they were both in severe need of a nap -- so we split up and went back home to put AB to bed. Mom and Dad decided to head home around the same time, too, so we got them packed up and said our goodbyes.

And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the house was quiet. For the first time in ten days.

T-- watched some Law and Order, I played some WoW, and then AB woke up from her nap and the spell was broken. We grabbed some McDonalds for dinner, and then all too soon it was time for me to head down to Norman for my meeting with Toby.

I didn't want to go. I was tired and worn out, and it's not a short drive, but I had made a commitment. And, after all, Toby was doing a favor for me. I showed up, and found out he had, in fact, finished it. He walked me through the code, teaching me what it did (so I could make little modifications on my own), and it's one of those things where it's fascinating in its simplicity. He did a really fantastic job. And after a quick test run (and double-checking how the output looked in Word), I was able to put the work stuff aside and we had some time to just talk. That was fun. He's in the same boat I am -- having to work with a new baby at home -- but in spite of all the chaos, and petty problems at work, and weird happenings with rent houses in Tulsa...in spite of all that, we're both doing pretty well. It was fun to get to hear that, and say that, and just to talk programming with my programming teacher for an hour or so.

Then I drove back home, in the weary dark, and crawled into bed and said good night to my weekend.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

September Seventeen (a poem)

2009-09-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

You're Alexander, son.
You're born, you're named, you're blessed to be a king.
It's up to you to choose where you end up,
But already you've conquered hearts, and bent some lives to you--
At two weeks old.

You're Alexander, son.
You're stronger than you ought to be, but only just begun.
There's power in your name and mighty destiny bestowed,
And world enough for you to shape your dreams
And make them real.

You're Alexander, son.
I've known your name for decades. Since I was a boy myself
I've known I'd shake your hand, and look you in the eye
And teach you how to cope, or hope -- to break or make the world,
And trust in God.

You're Alexander, son.
With riches already in store, the wealth of nations at your hand
In all the loving wisdom of your friends -- a hundred friends
All waiting, all breathless, on that first day when you were born.
Yours to the end.

You're Alexander, son.
And you could conquer states, or you could light unrighteous dark,
Could tame some scary wilderness we don't yet know exists,
Or live a quiet, happy life at home. It matters not.
We will love you.

My Tens of Thousands

2009-09-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm an observant person. I'm introspective and extrapolative. I spend a lot of time thinking about how the world really is, and how that information should affect my decisions. I call this careful consideration my "governing intellect" -- not that it does a ton of governing. It ends up being more a source of guilt (that I don't follow my reason) than a helpful tutor. But still, I sometimes heed its advice -- and sometimes to my own detriment.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Lord said to my governing intellect, "Come and sit by my side." I'm not a proud man. I went and I sat. The man had some interesting things to say.

I have always lived a charmed life. This has manifested in mundane ways (a happy, prosperous family environment, an upbringing with a strong emphasis on education, and an inborn talent with the written word), and in ways mystical (I've never lost real money in a game of poker).

I've long recognized this effect in my life, and rarely taken it for granted. I remember reading the Odyssey early in high school and recognizing an easy familiarity with Odysseus, beloved of Athene. He was clever and careful, but even so, he had help. Things ever fell his way. So also with me.

In our own lore there's another like him, and I've also often compared myself to King David. Chosen and blessed, set apart to do great things, I had nothing to fear from even the mightiest of enemies. That became my refrain. I can't count the times I've whispered under my breath, "Lord, let me pass unseen through the camp of my enemies."

He took me aside recently, though, and reprimanded me. That has been too much my attitude. When a university-level teaching job fell into my lap -- money we sorely needed and an opportunity many people invest years of their lives just to apply for -- I spent days and weeks and months just worrying, just hoping that I could survive. I just wanted to get through it, hopefully without drawing any attention to myself, and make it to December in one piece.

Oh humble yes, he said, but humble son of God!

There is so much more to David than the slinking thief, discreetly hemming his king's old cape. An heir is made not just to survive, but to reign. I've spent years hiding in my dirty cave, with nary an adversary on the plains below. Anointed and appointed, spending all my gracious charms on nervous getting by, when my role is so much greater. I should be capturing cities to swell my empire. I should be conquering to preserve my name, and to lift up the names of my sons. I've spent long enough as a shepherd, I should long since have become a king.

That failing is on me. The opportunities to rise up are always there -- served up to me on royal finery, and squandered in my timidity even as I proclaim that I'm trembling in fear of the Parable of the Talents. The Lord said to my governing intellect, "Come and sit by my side, and we'll make cautious reason our footstool, because there are far more interesting things going on than your boring old reality."

I can't wait to see my Jerusalem.

Journal Entry: September 23, 2009

2009-09-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

On Monday I told a lot of people, "Oh, it's so much easier with the second baby. With Annabelle we were up all night, every night, startling awake at every tiny sound. With Alexander, we're a lot more relaxed. I'm actually getting a lot of sleep."

On Monday night, he proved me a liar. Bigtime.

So, as a result, I woke up late yesterday and I was dragging. I went in to work anyway, and stumbled through the morning's responsibilities, and then spent my lunch break grading papers, and then darted out to OC for my fourth week of class. I will, of course, tell that tale elsewhere.

I had several students hang around after class to talk with me, as I'll mention in my recap. That was awesome, in the sense of making a connection with my students, but it was draining in the sense described in detail in last week's link, Caring for Your Introvert. On top of that, everyone I interacted with at work all day wanted to talk about the baby (and, frankly, I did too...but it's still tiring). Then I got home to a full house -- T--, two babies, and two in-laws.

It's nothing but whining about blessings, but all that interaction got to me yesterday. After three weeks of getting crippled before my classes by anxiety -- for days on end -- I managed to get away with fewer than three hours of anxiety problems this week, and they could be gone altogether by the next time we meet for class. But my night was still shot just from interaction exhaustion.

T-- let me hold Alexander as soon as I got home, and I took him to the couch and AB came running up to see him, and I asked her all about her day. At the same time, T--'s mom and dad got home from some shopping they asked me all about my day, and it was all perfectly nice but for some reason I just wanted to cry.

So I handed the baby off to his Papa, and then when no one was looking I slipped off to the bedroom to hide in the dark.

Karla and John naturally picked up that something was wrong, and they know me well enough that they were able to guess what, and they said they'd be willing to head home early if I needed a little alone time before my family showed up this weekend. I replied to that with an emphatic no, because they're doing so much to make our lives easier. I really, really appreciate all their help. I've just got my own crazies, and the demands of the situation don't really allow for any good outlets. It's a pretty short-term problem, though, and one I've weathered countless times before. I'm not going to go turning away good help just because I'm feeling a little uncomfortable.

Anyway, there was bacon on the griddle and brisket in the crockpot, so I didn't stay in hiding for too terribly long. I came out for dinner and then took sanctuary behind my laptop for the rest of the evening hours, while we watched Word World and Lie to Me. Then, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, I stayed up a little longer in the still silence and finished off Newsradio. Such a great show.

Ah. I did have one actual problem yesterday. T--'s laptop is dying. It takes forever to boot into Windows (if it does at all, before locking up), and then when it loads it gives a complaint about accessing the user profile and loads a temporary profile instead. It seems pretty clear that it's a hard drive problem -- probably from AB knocking the laptop off an end-table last week while she was watching videos -- but there's a lot of photos and T--'s work stuff on that hard drive that we're going to be incredibly frustrated to lose. And, y'know, no laptop. I don't cherish the idea of sharing mine with T-- and AB. We all have very different ideas about what a computer should be doing, and how it should be handled.

So, y'know, that's going to be a mess. Probably an expensive one, but sometimes we're saved by hand-me-downs and free IT services from friends we're all-too-happy to take advantage of. So I'll let you know how that turns out.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 4)

2009-09-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Technical Difficulties
I had 13 of my 16 students at 1:00. I waited a couple minutes and a couple more showed up, but the rest were in full chatterbox mode by then. I'd spent the last ten minutes at the podium, getting my visual aids ready for the day's discussion, but I figured if I waited too long, things would get out of hand.

So around 1:02 I stepped to the center of the room and said harshly, "Okay, okay, okay! Enough chit chat. It's time to stop gossiping and talking about your other classes, and focus on this class! I'm going to start the lecture now."

Then I stepped behind my laptop, and plugged in the cable to project my monitor onto the overhead. Nothing happened. I had my visuals all ready, but the screen kept displaying a blank screen. Some wiseguy in the back row said, "He probably just wants to show us pictures of his baby." I unplugged it and plugged it back in. I punched buttons.

Finally I sighed and said, "Well, yes, that was the whole joke. But this thing won't work."

Just as I said it, half the class (I'll let you guess which half) went, "Awwwwww!'

My first visual aid was this:

Someone immediately said, "Wow, she was born big."

I smiled, let the laughter die down, and said, "This is a picture of my beautiful, happy family about a week ago. I call it 'Before.'" Then I showed a couple I'd tacked together in Photoshop.

And I said, "And here's a picture of my beautiful but oh-so-tired family now." And then I said, "Of course, you can see the baby in both those pictures, but in case that's not quite enough....

Schedule Changes
I've had three real classes so far (not counting day one, when we just went over the syllabus and the class schedule), and in each of those classes I've had to dedicate some portion of the lecture to changes to the class schedule. This week, no surprise, was no different.

I moved straight from the baby photos to business. I pulled up the revised syllabus, and explained that I had rearranged the schedule so I could talk to them about their Semester Project today and then give them a work period next week. In the process, we lost the Promotional Brochure (something Gail had already cut in between the time I took the class and the last time she taught it, but I'd added it back in). Now, instead, I think I'm going to use it as an in-class activity on the day we talk about templates.

Anyway, their job is now to come up with a proposal for their Semester Project, and then once that's done we'll move on to the Employment Packet.

Subject Matter Experts
From there, I transitioned (weakly) (deliberately) to a mini-lecture on the topic of Subject Matter Experts -- a phrase (I explained) that they would encounter much in the business world. It's a vague sort of title, but refers to the person you'd go to for clarification on any given topic. Here at the FAA, I explained, we all work on radars, but if I need to talk to somebody about the antenna sail for the ARSR-3, there's one engineer I'd go to. He's the expert on that subject matter. I'd go to someone else if I needed information on the air conditioner, and someone else still for details on the speed controller.

And I explained that there's not really a scale to these things. For any given topic, someone either is a Subject Matter Expert, or he's not. The interesting thing about Technical Writers, though, is that they almost always start out not, and end up Subject Matter Experts. It's just part of the job.

By way of illustration, I pointed out some specific topics for which I've gone through that process:

Industrial depthfinders
Commercial fishfinders
All manner of nautical and aviation sensors and gauges
GPS satnav (straight-line navigation)
Hiking and hunting personal GPS receivers
Nautical GPS receivers
Aviation GPS receivers
Nautical vessel data networks (more on that later)
Turn-by-turn navigation (driving directions)
Automotive GPS receivers
Automotive mp3 players (and audio interfaces)

And that, I said, was all at my first job.

I took a moment to point out some of the distinctions -- how some of those might look like they overlap, but there's a big difference between understanding how GPS satellites and receivers know where you are, and understanding how to operate the menus and screens of a particular type of GPS receiver.

I had another, similar list for my work at the FAA (8 items), and then listed three topics on which I've become a Subject Matter Expert in my free time: Novel-writing, Python programming for XBMC (I just rattled off that phrase and then held up a finger and said, "More on that later"), and Technical Writing (for this class).

Learn by Teaching
I said I knew they'd all heard, somewhere along the way, that teaching a topic is the best way to learn about it. I've certainly experienced that in preparing this class. I pulled up one of their weekly document-writing tutorials on the overhead and pointed it out as an example. I said that my group at work has to prepare a specific type of memo for every single project we release (the Safety Risk Management Decision Memo), and that we deal with lots of memos regularly. So when I wrote up my tutorial "How to Write Memos and Emails," I shared it with my boss -- Irene, our Documentation Team Lead -- and asked her for feedback, knowing she was familiar with the topic.

She responded to say she was amazed how much she learned about memos from it, even though she deals with them everyday. I stressed her job title when relaying that to the students, and they were suitably impressed with the comment.

Python Programming for XBMC
As a better example, I told them about Python Programming for XBMC. I had to start out by explaining to them what XBMC was, although I had one student raise his hand to interject that his XBox had it on there. Anyway, I have a pretty technical group, so it didn't take much to explain what XBMC was.

So then I told them how I'd first installed XBMC wanting to use it to stream media to my TV, but I was excited to learn it could run Python scripts -- simple add-ons written in a programming language I was already learning. I went online to find out how to do that, and everyone pointed me to this one resource -- a tutorial written by a French Canadian (that got a laugh), with no formatting whatsoever, and a lame attempt at humor (that got a laugh). So, in order to learn what I needed to know, I had to take this tutorial and translate it from English into English. (That got a big laugh.)

And I was only six months out from taking my own Technical Writing class at the time, so I decided that while I was doing the mental conversion anyway, I might as well fix the document for everyone else. And I had it up on the overhead so I was able to point out the specific formatting elements I'd used that I had already taught them in class (just last week).

Then I stepped away, and said, "I know it's a pretty niche community, but if you go to Google and search for 'XBMC Python,' you'll get my website." That got some impressed nods. "Because of this document," I explained. "It's not great technical writing...it's not even accurate anymore, because I haven't touched it in six years. But it's still the number-one-recommended, go-to source for information on this topic. Because of the research I did."

That's a certain kind of celebrity. It's not a huge deal and (I pointed out) it's not the biggest reward for doing this. The big reward is that, in the process of fixing that document, I learned what I wanted to know. I learned how to do everything with XBMC Python programming that I wanted to know.

Because I had to fully understand the material the original author was using, in order to translate it correctly -- from English to English (that got a laugh again). Not only that, but when I took the time to format it properly, to set the information in a structured framework, it became clear what was missing, what was underrepresented, what was excess. I was able to see what extra information was needed, and research that on my own.

The NMEA Bible
Then I brought up a third example -- the "nautical vessel data network" mentioned in my list of topics above. When I was working at Lowrance, big news came down from the head honcho that all of our products were going to become NMEA 2000 compatible. (It's pronounced "nee-muh," and don't ask me to defend that. Actually, I said the same to the class and followed up with, "The pronunciation was picked by boat people," no real emphasis, and it got a laugh.) But, yeah, our products were going to be NMEA 2000 compatible, and we needed a blurb in the front of each of our manuals expressing that and pointing the customer toward the sales department for more information.

We didn't have the first clue how to word that, though, because the whole phrase was nonsense to us (the tech writers). Turns out NMEA 2000 was a hardware standard that created an information bus for boats. I asked what that meant and I was told it was "like a LAN for a boat." Except that it had nothing to do with computers. After much investigation, I learned that it was used to connect sensors and monitors on a boat, so you could get a GPS signal at the front of the boat and share it to GPS monitors in three different places, or copy fish echoes from one transducer to multiple depthfinders -- that sort of thing.

But it was more complicated than that, because the network cable could be split and coupled and daisychained and all manner of nonsense, and you had to have exactly the right cable for each device that you wanted to attach for each possible configuration of what you had on your boat.

So I went to the Subject Matter Expert -- the one engineer in our company who really understood NMEA 2000 -- and asked him to explain it briefly so we could come up with this one-paragraph blurb.

Three hours later we left his office so we could move to a conference room with a whiteboard. Three weeks later, I finally understood it well enough to write that one paragraph.

But, while I was at it, I wrote down everything he'd explained to me in a way that I could still comprehend six months after our conversations. I went ahead and put it into our manual format, because that was what I was familiar with. When I was done, it came to around eight to ten pages, all formatted and illustrated, and it explained exactly what a NMEA 2000 network was, and how to configure one. I saved a copy on my desktop, printed off a copy for Mark, and went on with my life.

Then six months later there was a big meeting going on, that involved all the senior engineers and the CEO of the company, and they were arguing about something in design and two of our senior engineers couldn't agree on exactly how it was supposed to work, so somebody said, "Wait. Where's the NMEA Bible?"

And somebody else pulled out a copy of my pamphlet. The NMEA Bible. That had become the in-house nickname for my personal cheat sheet. The engineers -- the people who were designing these systems every day for years -- were going to my little pamphlet for reference.

And that was my point. I started out as someone who knew nothing about the system, and in the process of filling out my document, I became the reference. I took the information that one person had, and translated it from English to English, and made it available to all the people who needed it. That's what Technical Writing does.

The Semester Project
From there, I moved on to discuss their Semester Project. After all, I said, the purpose of the project was to take them through the same process I'd been through in each of those cases, and turn them into Subject Matter Experts through the process of documentation. I'd asked them last week (after the baby was born) to scrap their earlier assignment and instead read over a brief description of the Semester Project, and come to class with three possible topics that they could work on.

So after my mini-lecture, I said, "How many of you read the assignment?" and got all hands. Then, "How many of you understood it?" and got significantly fewer. "How many of you had trouble coming up with three topics?" got pretty much everyone. I paused a moment and said, "How many of you had trouble coming up with one?" That got more than I was hoping for.

Still, it was anticipated. I moved to the center of the room, and said, "The goal of this project is for you to make something of real-world use. That's actually a requirement. So, to make that possible, I have to leave it a little bit vague. You don't have a solid minimum or maximum word count, you don't have a specific document type (although I want some sort of long-form document). You don't even have a specified audience. You have to find an audience and then convince me they're legitimate."

I nodded, and said, "I understand all that. And I understand that's not fair to you. The solution is for you to talk with me. Ask questions when you're unsure, schedule an appointment if you need more time, email me, call me. Whatever. I'm deliberately leaving room in the schedule for you to request clarification, because you're going to need it. And that's what the rest of today is."

Q and A
That was at 1:40. Frankly, I'd expected 1:30. Still, they could have gotten up and walked out, but I guess there was enough uncertainty that I had them scared. I said, "So...any questions?"

Five hands went up, and I turned to the first girl on my right. She said, "Umm...what are we supposed to do?" That was not a positive start. Before I could formulate an answer, she said, "I mean, what are we supposed to write about? I get the feeling it's supposed to be technical, but I am so not a technical person."

So I asked her, "What are you interested in?"

"Books," she said, right away, and I froze. My mind started working frantically, trying to come up with something associated with books that could have a real client, and really match the framework of the document. Before I came up with anything remotely close, she said, "Oh, and baking."

And I lit up at that. So much easier, because baking is a technical process. As soon as she said it, I thought cookbook. After a little discussion, I suggested she could find a ladies' group for an area church that wanted to put together a cookbook for a fundraiser. That's a pretty common thing. Her client could be the woman organizing the effort, her research could be the gathering of recipes (and any follow-up necessary to translate scribbled notecards into useable information). She'd have less writing to do than some other possible projects, but she'd have a whole lot more formatting than some projects would require.

She was perfectly happy with that. She loved the idea, and it gave the rest of the class some idea of what I was looking for.

Musicians
Another girl in the back corner raised her hand to ask, "Can it be something for a musician?" I must have looked pretty blank at the question, because she clarified before I could ask her to. "I mean, like maybe a musician could use some sort of promotional material or something...."

I figured she was talking about a classmate or a roommate, some music major looking to strike it big, but that didn't worry me. I ducked my head and said, "The problem you're going to run into there is that promotional material is usually shorter, bite-sized. I want something that will generate a single, long-form document. That said," and I addressed this more generally to the class, "you can always ask what they actually need. Because everyone has some technical writing that they need done, and there's a chance you'll find something that will work. I assume you can talk to...him?"

She shrugged, a little uncomfortable, and said, "Well...it's Hanson. So I thought maybe--"

She didn't get to finish her comment because someone across the room shouted, "You know Hanson? Like, Hanson?"

She nodded and said, "I grew up with them."

(They're a boy band from five to ten years ago who you may remember as the perpetrators of "Mmm Bop." They're also Tulsa natives if I remember right, so there's no huge surprise there. Still, she got a moment of celebrity there in the class.)

I said, "I can't give you an A for cool factor alone, but I'd be interested to see what you could come up with for them."

Plenty of Need
One of the grading criteria for the project, though, is that it meets a real need. I could tell that was bothering some of them, so I went back to that point. I said, "If you're having trouble coming up with something to work on, find someone who could be a client and just ask them what they need. There's always work to be done, and nobody wants to do it. Talk to your boss, if you have one. Talk to your church secretary."

The problem with talking to your church secretary, I said, is that she's going to have a list eighty items long of things she needs done, and most of them aren't going to fit the shape of this semester's project. Then I hesitated as a thought struck me, and I said ruefully, "Well, no, the real problem of talking to your church secretary is that once you do -- especially if you do a good job -- she is never going to stop talking to you." That got a little chuckle, and I shrugged and said, "And...well, that's your service to God." That got a big laugh.

For those who just can't come up with anything -- or those who want to do something genuinely helpful -- I pointed out that I have some extra options. This class has been doing this assignment for so long, that most of the churches and charitable organizations in town know about it. As a result, the school pretty regularly gets requests for student assistance with documentation projects, and those are now getting passed along to me. I let the students know about that, but I didn't push it too hard. It's enough of a challenge to put together a big document, I would prefer for them to work on topics they're already interested in.

Although, to the girl who asked about promotional material for a musician (before she named the band), I did point out that once they'd finished this class, all of the students would be qualified and able to prepare and clean up documents -- promotional material, resumes, business letters, whatever -- even when it wasn't for a class assignment. They could do it as a favor, or as a hobby (like I did with the XBMC Python tutorial).

Hangers On
There were a few more questions, mostly looking for clarification on the project -- and a lot of them sort of unanswerable without specifics. I stressed again and again the need for them to maintain a line of communication with me, and I've already gotten a couple of emails from them since class on the topic.

Still, the questions trailed off around 2:00, and I dismissed them then. While they were packing up their stuff I distributed their graded memos from last week, and then went and sat down at my desk again, so I could address any last-minute discussion or help anyone who wanted to ask something face-to-face.

Turned out, there were a lot of them. Out of a class of fourteen (two never did show up), I had six or seven linger. Each of them had at least one question for me, but for the most part they stuck around and chatted even after their questions were answered. That caught me off-guard. I mentioned back in Week One that when I was panicking over time passing too quickly, all the veteran teachers I spoke with said that would get a lot easier once I had the students actually talking to me. They also all said that would probably happen sometime in November. I figured that was sort of an exaggeration, but I didn't expect to be hosting a salon by the end of the fourth week.

Of those six or seven that hung around after 2:00, four of them were still there at 2:30 when my real life demands forced me to leave. That was pretty cool.

Real Progress
While I was packing up, one of those four (who had already chosen his own project topic), asked in idle curiosity, "What are some of the coolest projects people have done before?"

And I hesitated (mind racing again), trying to decide whether to admit to my inexperience. I decided relatively quickly, shrugged, and said, "Actually, this is the first time I've taught the class, so I couldn't tell you."

His eyes shot wide, and he said, "Oh really?" Genuine surprise. That caught me off-guard.

I can only really think of one other time in my life when two words meant so much to me. I said out loud, "Yay!" Four weeks ago I was standing in front of them, paralyzed with fear, and today they're telling me I'm unrecognizable from a real professor. I call that real progress.

More next week.

Annabelle

2009-09-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

Two short stories. Here's the first.

Sunday night, as kickoff time for the (highly disappointing) Cowboys game approached, T--'s mom was trying to get AB psyched up for the game. (She needn't have bothered -- as soon as the pregame footage started and they showed a quick pan past Romo, AB screamed at the top of her lungs, in sheer excitement, "That's Tony!") Anyway, Karla offered to teach AB a football cheer. AB accepted the offer with bemused enthusiasm.

So Karla said, with appropriate vigor, "Move to the left! Move to the right! Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!"

AB cocked her head to the side for a moment, thinking, then brightened and said, "You wanna fight me?"

It caught us off-guard, but it shouldn't have. She'd been saying that all weekend to her Papa. Seemingly every time he stood up she'd back to the far end of the room (right in front of the TV), stand facing him, stomp each of her feet once, and say, "Hey Papa! You wanna fight? I'm gonna knock you down!" It was entirely adorable.

She did that again Monday morning while I was getting ready for work, and I looked at her and said, "Annabelle, where did you learn about knocking people down? Was that on Word World or Dinosaur Train?" Those are two of her favorite shows, and most of the time when she comes up with something outlandish, it's something she picked up from one of her shows (like this weird interest in eating celery).

Karla imagined that AB was about to lose some of her TV privileges, so she said ominously, "You better think carefully before you answer that question."

But AB just shook her head, confused by the question. I thought about it some more as I continued getting ready, then at some point I stepped into the living room, my eyes fell on my laptop, and I said, "Oh."

See...AB likes to watch me play WoW. It's a game where I spend hours at a time slaughtering people and monsters of all shapes and sizes -- many of them recognizable. There are these undead spider monsters that AB always recognizes as needing an exterminating, so she cheers when I knock them down. She gets a little frustrated when she catches me knocking down the polar bears, though. She likes polar bears.

That's the expression we use when she's watching, though. When she asks why I'm running quests, I tell her I'm doing a favor for that guy over there. When she asks what I'm doing now, I tell her these monsters scared somebody so I'm knocking them down so they'll go away. We fight, I knock them down, and that's pretty much the whole game.

So she adopted that. She wanted to play it in real life with her Papa. Once I knew what she was thinking of, I agreed to play it with her for a little while. We fought, and I knocked her down a time or two. Then she said, "Okay, now I get to knock you down." So we fought again, I took a dive, and she jumped up, hands high in the air, and shouted, "I did it! I did it! I won!" Three or four takedowns later, she was still just as exuberant about it.

Then I took a moment to talk with her about the difference between pretend fighting, and expressed that it's only okay to knock people down when they're willing participants. I think she got it. I've never seen her actually pick a fight, just ask her Papa to play in one. Still, she's got to be careful who she issues that challenge to, because it's not at all meek. "Hey, you wanna fight? I'm gonna knock you down!"

And here's the second.

We had a long night last night, with baby Alexander waking up several times and screaming before, during, and after his feeding. Naturally T-- caught the worst of that, but I didn't get a lot of sleep, either. At one point (around 2:30), T-- was feeding him when AB started yelling from the other room, so I went and took care of her before crawling miserably back into bed.

Then at 7:00 the alarm went off, unconcerned with our pathetic night's sleep, so I crawled miserably out of bed and got ready for work. Before I left, though, T-- was feeding Alexander again, and we heard AB yelling from her room.

She's got a childproof lock on her bedroom door so she can't get out in the morning. These days she doesn't even try -- she just sits in the middle of her bed and yells until someone comes and gets her. I knew T-- would be tied up for a while, so I went to talk with AB before leaving for work.

As soon as I walked in the door she pointed to the window, where a tiny gap in the blinds gave view to the gray dawn outside, and said, "It's not dark anymore, Daddy. It's not dark anymore."

We taught her that she has to go to sleep when it's dark outside, so she takes the reverse of that as a solid, legal defense. I came and sat down on the edge of the bed with her and after a few failed attempts to convince her she was still tired, I said, "Annabelle, I know you want to get up, but there's nobody to watch you right now, so it's not safe for you to leave your room. If you want, I can turn on the light and you can play with your toys in here, or you can read some of your books, but you can't go in the other room."

That's not the first time we've had that conversation. I waited patiently for her answer, and after a moment she shook her head. "But I want to watch something on Mommy's computer."

Half of the shows she watches are on the TiVo, and the other half are free videos on the Nick Jr. website. We usually keep T--'s laptop over in one corner of the living room, and when T-- isn't using it (or we need the TV), we'll often set AB up in front of the laptop and let her watch those videos.

I let my head fall back against the wall. I was exhausted, and just didn't have the energy to fight with her. I stood up, took a step toward the bedroom door, then sank back down at the foot of her bed -- trying to decide between making my daughter scream with frustration, and being a little bit late for work.

AB looked at me there on the foot of her bed, and she pointed past me. "You need to get the brown chair."

I looked, and she has a little wooden chair that's usually over by her bedside table, where she sits when she's reading or playing tea party. I smiled and shook my head. "That's too little for me." She just looked confused.

After another moment's hesitation, I decided to just be late for work. I stood up and headed toward the bedroom door, expecting her to follow right on my heels. She didn't. She stayed in bed, but as I got out the door she yelled, all frantic, "Daddy, wait!"

I went back, and as I stepped into her room she climbed down out of bed and pushed a bunch of the toys on her table out of the way, clearing a space. Then she looked back over her shoulder at me, and said, "You have to get the brown chair first."

She wanted a space at her table, so I could bring T--'s laptop in there. She was willing to stay in her room, she just wanted to watch videos while she did it. A perfect compromise. We'd done that once before, months ago, but I'd forgotten all about it.

She's an amazing little girl.

Alexander

2009-09-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

We need a web nickname for him. AB is AB, but really only in writing. I don't know anyone who calls her that out loud.

I think X would be legitimate, since we don't know anybody sporting an X in their names, but it needs widespread usage before it makes any sense, and I don't have the energy for a big branding campaign.

I guess we could go with X&r....

Journal Entry: September 22, 2009

2009-09-22T06:57:00.001-07:00

Yesterday evening I left a rain-soaked work and headed home to find it sunny and dry. I found the womenfolk out back, watching AB play and letting Alexander get some sun (following a "mildly jaundiced" prognosis from his doctor). AB and I played kickball for a little while, then I left her in the care of her Nana and went inside to collapse on the couch. Outside is exhausting.

We had a delicious lasagna for dinner, courtesy B-- and E--, and then watched Lie to Me and Dinosaur Train and some more Lie to Me while I played WoW.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: September 21, 2009

2009-09-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a little behind. Sorry about that.

Wednesday
Last Wednesday after work we got together with D--, K-- and N--, and my sister's family at Senor Tequila up in Edmond. I'm sure I've been to one before (the name is really familiar), but I don't remember when. The food was really good, though (especially the salsa), and of course the fellowship was exceptional.

While we were there, I told a little story about two startlingly dramatic events in the lives of my students that have (in small ways) disrupted each of my last two classes. We wondered idly what would happen to disrupt my next class. We didn't come up with anything.

After dinner T-- took AB to church, and I went home to finish up some prep work for the Formatting Tutorial I needed to write for my students on Thursday. Got it outlined, got all my stuff together, and then spent the rest of the evening playing WoW.

Thursday
Thursday morning I woke up early, got ready for work, then asked T-- how she was doing before I headed out the door. Turned out, she was having a baby. So I spent a couple hours coaching her through contractions, making preparations, and alerting the internets that we were having a baby.

It turned out to be true. I've written up a detailed account of how the day went, but I feel like T-- should get some of that attention, so I've given it to her. Watch her blog for more details.

Needless to say, though, we had a busy day. Alexander Lewis Pogue was born at 12:03 PM, and we all three spent the rest of the day recovering. We had a ton of visitors Thursday afternoon and evening, and every one of them asked, "Do you need us to bring anything?" before showing up. We were well taken care of.

Just like last time, I had my laptop and WoW to get me through the long, quiet hours at the hospital. So don't feel too sorry for me. T--, of course, had a baby to serve the same purpose.

Friday
Friday morning I realized I had a bunch of unfinished work at work, so I slipped away around ten in the morning, when T-- had a sister-in-law there to help her out and friends and parents on their way. I ran home to grab a shower and get cleaned up, then headed to work. I was only there for about an hour, but I got what I needed (to work on at home), signed my timesheet, and told Irene and Laveta a little bit about the baby.

Then I grabbed some lunch at Subway, picked up 17 Again so T-- would have some entertainment for the afternoon, and headed back to the hospital. I spent some time in the afternoon writing up my account of Thursday for T-- (see above), and then some more time agonizing over how to handle my class.

I'd told T-- on Tuesday, "You have to wait at least two weeks before you have the baby." The reason for that was a particular lecture I had scheduled for Tuesday, September 24: "Technical Writers as Subject Matter Experts." The plan was to briefly lecture on the topic, then spend the rest of the class discussing their Semester Projects (which will require them to become Subject Matter Experts, but I'll discuss that more tomorrow). Anyway, I'd always intended to have a work day sometime after the baby was born, so I could skip class and they could work on their projects. That doesn't work if they don't know anything about the project yet.

So I sent out a harried email Thursday afternoon warning them to expect a change to the schedule, then I sent out a new email Friday afternoon telling them to disregard their assignment for the week and instead read over a brief overview of the Semester Project assignment, and come to class Tuesday with three possible project topics.

I'm moving the S. M. E. speech up to tomorrow, and I'll give them next Tuesday off. But, as I said, more on that tomorrow.

Friday evening was more like Thursday evening. My sister brought me Taco Bell for dinner, and John and Karla brought AB up to visit us. She'd spent twenty-four hours with her Nana and Papa, and she was sorely missing her Mommy and Daddy, so we kept her for a few hours, then I took her home at nine so we could go through her regular bedtime routine. I think that went pretty well.

And then I was back up at the hospital, and it was another night of talk shows and commercials and the gentle, soothing glow of WoW.

Saturday
Saturday morning we got up early and got ready, then cooled our heels for hours and hours. Nurses and pediatricians made their visits, approving us to leave. They brought all manner of forms for us to sign, and lectured us on all sorts of terrors that could befall our baby, and then took him away for a discreet procedure that seemed to take forever. He seems to have come through it well, though.

Then, at last, around ten our nurse came by to discharge us. Except, she said that she wanted us to hang around another forty-five minutes after his procedure to make sure everything was okay. Forty-five minutes later she dropped by to say she was sorry, but another family needed to discharge too, and the father had tickets for the OU game, and he was frantic to get out. So we gave her permission to go take care of him, and waited some more.

I spent a lot of that waiting time moving all of our possessions out to the car. It took six or seven trips, not counting the one with the baby. When I wasn't doing that, I was playing WoW while T-- watched Food TV.

Then, at last, a little before noon our nurse came by to discharge us, and actually did. We got home to the delicious smells of a fresh-baked pizza, and with many helping hands got the car unloaded much, much faster than it was loaded. Then AB helped me put some stuff away (and got tickled for her efforts), and then we finally settled down to the serious business of lunch.

In the afternoon AB went down for a nap, and I settled down to get back to my real life -- playing WoW -- and turned on the OU game around three. Unfortunately, though my TiVo claimed to have access to the game, our cable package doesn't actually include the channel it was on, so all I had was four hours of solid-black screen. In HD.

I didn't feel like leaving the house, though, so I abandoned all hope of watching the game. Instead we turned on an episode of Lie to Me. A little while later AB woke up from her nap, and then T--, AB, Karla, and John all went for a shopping trip to Wal-Mart. Alexander was forbidden from going by his pediatrician, so I had the arduous task of watching him sleep while I played WoW. He was delightful.

Karla made us dinner, and we spent the evening watching TV and (me) playing WoW. The only difference from last weekend was the squeaky little baby in the room, and T-- complaining less. It was a pretty pleasant day.

Overnight, the baby woke up a few times for feedings, and T-- (of course) woke up with him, but the experience was radically different from our first night home with AB. Then we'd both been wide awake, all the lights on, frantically checking to make sure she was okay, any time she made the smallest noise in the night. This time T-- waited until he was actually ready to eat, fed him, then put him back to bed and went back to sleep. Most of the time she didn't even wake me up when that happened. It was, altogether, significantly less stressful.

Sunday
Even so, at pretty much everyone's recommendation, we skipped church on Sunday. John and Karla took AB, so T-- and I had a pretty quiet morning at home. Then the in-laws brought us lunch from Taco Cabana, and afterward we watched an episode of Dinosaur Train with AB before her nap. Once she was down, we switched the TV to the Vikings game, which was awesome.

Then around 4:30 we had an accidental repeat of Saturday. AB got up from her nap, then went with T-- and her parents up to the mall to do some shopping, leaving me home with the baby. I got a visit from B-- (generously bringing us a lasagna to dine on sometime this week), and called up K-- and N-- to see if they could join us for the Cowboys game at eight.

When T-- et alia got home, we had some incredible stew for dinner (beef broth, carrot, potatoes, and cubed brisket leftover from last weekend's birthday party). I had a little bit of an argument with AB over that, because she didn't want to sit in her chair -- she wanted to sit on the floor and stare at Baby Alexander. After much discussion, we reached a compromise that essentially consisted of her sitting on the floor and staring at Baby Alexander. She's a very persuasive orator.

Then we had guests, and we watched the disappointing first half of what turned out to be an even more disappointing football game. It was fun to have K-- and N-- over, though. We also made a start on a cheesecake and pumpkin pie that had come into our possession, but there is still much more work to be done on that front. So give us a call, and drop by for a visit. You won't leave disappointed.

I went to bed pretty quickly after the game was over, though, because I had work in the morning.

More on that tomorrow. Everything's going well, though. Mother and baby are both happy and healthy, and the rest of the family is ticking along nicely.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

News Alert!

2009-09-17T08:25:00.001-07:00

We are preparing to make a surprise trip to the hospital!

That means you should be preparing to do some surprise babysitting!

More later.

Caring for Your Introvert

2009-09-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

I found this article amusing, but it probably comes across as combative and haughty. Still, there's good information in there.

Journal Entry: September 16, 2009

2009-09-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

I tipped my hand a little bit, with yesterday's blog posts, but I wanted to get the information out. But, yeah, I had a late start on the day, came to work for a few hours, then headed to OC to teach my class. I decided to skip lunch (because I never have any appetite for hours leading up to my class), but then I got to Edmond too early so I stopped at Taco Bell for a quesadilla. How offensive could a quesadilla be?

I never got to find out. The kind folks at Taco Bell resolved my excess time problem by backing up the drive-through line long enough that I eventually bailed and headed to school, entirely unfooded.

Then, as I said yesterday, class went really well. My activity was awesome, and the students expressed that. Yay.

And after class, for the first time, I actually returned to work. I did debate whether I was actually up to it because even after a successful class I still have to deal with the physiological crash that follows any high stress episode. But, y'know, after both of my last two classes (which both left me crashing hard), T-- had me babysit AB while she went grocery shopping. And I survived that somehow. Going back to work, by comparison, was restful.

So I put in a few more hours, got home around six, and T-- made us street tacos using some of the brisket. They were incredible. Such a good dinner. I want more.

Then after that I got my laptop, sat on the couch, and played WoW. It was a good night.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

A Present for the Baby

2009-09-16T06:59:00.001-07:00

In case you weren't able to make it to the baby shower, or just want to get something nice for little Alexander, I recommend picking up this.

The OC (Week 3)

2009-09-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Video Lectures
I got to class about ten minutes early today, and spent that time setting up my laptop while the students filed in. I turned on the projector and got it ready to go, but I didn't hook anything up yet because I didn't want the distraction.

While I was getting that ready, though, one of my students spoke up from the back of the room and said, "Oh, hey, I tried to watch your video lecture online, but it wouldn't work on my computer." It's a class full of Computer Science and Information Science majors, so of course suggestions were offered back and forth, but in the end I told him I'd been having trouble with it, too, so I'd keep looking into it and get back to him.

He said, "Well, anyway, it's a good thing you also provided the written transcript. Keep doing that. Because that was really helpful."

And I said, "Umm...I'm a Technical Writer. That's my job. So, yes, I will."

Opening Questions
Five minutes later I had all the students I was going to have (two shy of a full roster), so I turned to my outline. The first item on it was, "Video lecture vs. written tutorial." Half of the class had already heard the conversation, but I went ahead and revisited it, bringing the other half in. Turned out only two or three students had tried to use the video lecture, and only one of them had gotten it to work (and that one happens to work for the North Institute which is the non-profit group that designed and maintains the software all the rest of us are having trouble with). I promised the students I'd keep working on it, and let them know what I learned, and reiterated that the text tutorials will be available, and will be higher quality than my narrated slideshows anyway.

Partway through that, my helpful inside man piped up to tell me how to workaround the problems the others were having, and I made notes to myself to send out more detailed, step-by-step instructions later in the week. So my video lectures problem might be solved. We'll see.

Syllabus Issues
I moved on from there to a discussion of the syllabus, which I opened up on the projector. We'd gone over it on the first day, briefly, but when we talked last week about due dates, I realized it was completely messed up. So I told them the new dates were available on the version of the syllabus online (and went over them in class).

I'd also forgotten to give them Fall Break -- a fact which came to my attention while rearranging due dates, so I told them, "Oh. I've also graciously decided to let you to take Fall Break along with your fellow students." That got a bigger laugh than it probably deserved, and then spawned some contention over one of the new due dates falling on Fall Break. Apparently they're not happy with just getting out of a lecture and assignment. I told them I'd consider the issue and render my verdict next week.

Stand-up
One unexpected development in today's class is that I stood up for most of my lecture(s). I'd decided after my first week that standing in front of the class was causing me anxiety issues (and then later Dad explained to me what was really causing it, but I didn't think to correct my earlier assumption). Anyway, after that I decided to just sit at the teacher's desk -- front and center in the class -- and deliver my lectures on eye-level with all my students.

Today, though, I was using my laptop on the overhead projector, which means I had to set it on the raised lectern off to the side, and I had to stand behind it to control the screen. I had been doing that while we discussed the syllabus -- effectively hiding behind my laptop, which is precisely how I handle the anxiety at most family functions -- but when I moved on to the mini-lecture I didn't have any overhead material to back it up (at first).

So, without thinking about it, I stepped away from the computer, halfway between the lectern and my desk, and started talking to my students. It didn't make sense to cross all the way to my desk, sit down and talk to them, just to jump up again two bullet points down so I could bring up my illustrations.

About midway between the first and second bullet point I noticed that I was standing up and lecturing, but I didn't let myself dwell on it. When it came time for the big ugly main lecture at the end of the class period, though, I did the same thing deliberately, and I had no trouble with it. At least, not with the standing up part.

The Mini-Lecture
As I may have mentioned before, the course consists of Tuesday lectures on Topics in Tech Writing, and then Thursday tutorials and assignments that require the students to prepare specific document types (business letter, memo, resume, that sort of thing).

So today I brought that up -- brought up that we'd been talking for two weeks about "document types," and I said the reason that matters is because certain document types have an impact just by being that document type. In fact, I'd hinted at that in the tutorials for each of the documents types they'd done so far. Formatting a business communique as a recognizable Business Letter creates a certain expectation and context for your reader, before you ever convey the first word of your content. The same goes for a memo. I told them a good way to think of document types is by their "shape" -- that is, the visual impact of a document that matches a particular style, and the response that style creates in a reader.

Haiku?
By way of illustration, I put some words up on the projector. It was a text document, in Notepad, so there was no formatting whatsoever. I'd even reduced everything to lower-case, at great personal pain. The first document looked like this:

schumann's resonance
headgear for grasshoppers
eyes like headlights
friday
october 5
9:00 pm
p. j.'s
manhattan

I said, "Anyone know what this is?"

One of my Computer Science majors said, "A haiku?" I almost laughed at that. I'd actually had, "Gibberish? A poem?" in my own notes for possible student guesses.

I just said, "What about this?" and opened the second document.

the jackpot
10:00 pm
$5.00
eyes like headlights
daleria
the remember
january 5, 2008

Somebody said, "An advertisement, maybe?" I heard whispery voices treading dangerously close to the right guess, so I went ahead and put up the third document.

www.myspace.com/eyeslikeheadlights
eyes like headlights
cd release party
debut album
there's no us in evolution
5909 johnson drive
mission, kansas
with left on northwood and rettig
friday, october 26
the mission theatre
all ages 21 to drink

That third line gave it away, and I said, "What I've got here is the text from a bunch of band flyers. That first one looked like complete nonsense when I showed you just the unformatted words, but you'd recognize the information instantly if I showed you this."

"So," I said, "what you can see here is that the words that go on a band flyer are totally meaningless until you put them in the shape of a band flyer." And I hesitated for a beat, and smiled, and said, "So you're going to put them in the shape of band flyer."

The Band Flyer
I told them to divide into three groups -- that I wasn't playing the elementary school counting game this week -- and none of them apparently learned from that last week because they opted to just stay divided up by their tables. So group one consisted of three English majors and a couple technical people, and then groups two and three were entirely technical people. It was incredibly lopsided, but it made for good teaching in the end.

I told them they could probably find the original flyer if they looked hard enough online, but that I didn't want them to recreate the original. I wanted them to make their own. Each group quickly picked which software they were going to use to design the document (Picnic, Paint, and Word, respectively), and then selected one designer to actually build it.

Groups two and three mostly left their designers to do the design work single-handedly, while they went searching online -- first for suitable background art, and then (out of sheer, perverse curiosity) for sordid details about the band Eyes Like Headlights (which, in case you're curious, is one of Carlos's old bands).

Time Management
I probably should have obfuscated my information before presenting it to the students. Some of the antics and lyrics associated with Eyes Like Headlights probably isn't something I should be sharing with my students -- at least from the Dean of Students's point of view. They certainly didn't mind. They found it hilarious.

I gave them twenty minutes, and group two dashed something off in Paint and were done in fifteen minutes (and that was just the designer -- most of the rest of his group had tuned out around seven to eight minutes in, when they were confident in his work). Group three's designer had a little more artistic input, and they took right up until the twenty-minute mark to submit their design. Group one, which boasted fully four designers overflowing with artistic vision, took most of thirty minutes to get their document submitted.

Sometime around minute twenty-seven, one of the girls looked up and said, "Wait, what kind of band are they?"

Everyone else already knew, because they'd been listening to tracks on myspace, but I looked at my cherished English major and said, "They're progressive death metal."

Her eyes shot wide, and she said, "Umm...well, we're pretending that they're Folk, for ours. Okay?"

Presentation and Discussion
So we finally got all three flyers in, and I put them up on the projector in order. Everyone was really impressed with group one's heavily designed document, and no amount of prompting could get them to express what was wrong with it (apart from a couple elements that they'd forgotten). I had to point out that they got the band wrong. That, while they'd been determinedly working on the good design, good layout, good formatting that group two had just casually dashed off, group two had actually (goofing off) figured out what style the document should be. That's research, and that's a real, important part of Technical Writing.

Of course, the other groups caught on that group one's flyer was beautifully designed. Ultimately, we decided group three had the best one for the band in question.

Object Lesson
One of the best lessons learned, though, came from a specific mistake the hasty group two had made. One of the lines on the poster, "with left on northwood and rettig," referred to a couple other bands that were performing at the same show. Group two mistook that "left on northwood" bit as directions, and threw that line in the upper left corner with the address and the name of the venue. Same font, same style, and as soon as I put the flyer up on the overhead, someone from group three pointed out their mistake.

Honestly, when we got into the discussion stage, the designer for group two started looking a little sheepish, and I felt a little bad about that. Then we finished up the discussion and I launched into my big ugly lecture, where I was just trying to dump specific formatting rules on them.

One of the first points I made was that technical documents generally contain several discrete chunks of information, bundled together, and part of the purpose of formatting is to create a recognizable hierarchy to help readers quickly and accurately figure out which information belongs to which bundle, and to locate the bundle the reader actually needs.

And I'd said some words on the topic, then I pulled that group two flyer back up, and darted over to the screen, and said, "That's what we saw right here. That's what the flyers do, grouping all these individual sentences into sections, formatting them to show what is related, and how. And we saw that on this flyer. We all knew instantly that group two had gotten this wrong -- had mistaken these two other bands for driving directions -- because of nothing but the font and the position on the page. He grouped this line with these other lines, and that told us what he thought it meant."

That was an excellent object lesson, that I could never have made up on my own. Even more importantly, though, the guy who had designed that document, who had been looking sheepish through all the ribbing over it, was nodding right along to my point. He got it, and that was awesome.

The Big Ugly Lecture
Dad told me not to do lectures -- to focus on mini-lectures instead -- and Gail said I'd done really well in the first week to focus on stories because students really connect to stories (and that's great news, because I'm naturally a storyteller).

But in today's class I needed to do an infodump. I needed to deliver certain rules, certain information, for them to use in all future classes. So after we'd finished our discussion of the class activity (which, I think, they really enjoyed), I stepped away from the lectern, turned to my notes, and told them how to format documents.

It was twenty minutes long, and I used their tutorial from last week for examples of every point I had to make. Apart from that one example harking back to their activity, though, I lost them for the lecture. They zoned out, and I could see it happen. I didn't get panicky or anything -- and I certainly didn't get offended or deeply disappointed -- but it was a little sad to see that happen when I'd spent so much of the last two class periods engaging them.

Still, lesson learned. I'm not exactly sure how I'll address it in the future, but at the very worst, it was just a lecture. The sort of boring lecture every one of them has been through hundreds of times, in dozens of other classes. That's not something I'm going to beat myself up over.

Names
I ended the lecture at 2:12, and started to dismiss them before I realized I hadn't returned their marked-up assignments from last week. Then I said, "Look, I'm terrible with names. I've tried to learn all of yours, but just in case, I'm going to call them out as I hand out your letters." And I did, and they dutifully raised their hands, but I realized pretty quickly I needn't have done that. I knew them all. That's something I'd been worried about, and I managed to get them all down with about ten minutes' effort today, using their student ID photos and the Introduction Letters they'd turned in as their assignments last week.

So that was a positive experience. Really, the whole class was. Another great week. And, not only that, but a source of real confidence. Because now I know last week's success wasn't because of the material, or because of the activity, but because of the method. I repeated the same method to design my class this week, and it went pretty much the same way. That's good news for future efforts.

Awesome. Awesome.

More next week.

Journal Entry: September 15, 2009

2009-09-15T09:38:00.001-07:00

Yesterday sucked.

I mean, actually, I had a pretty pleasant chat with Julie, and one with N--, too. That was nice. And I got a call from B-- that was news-packed, and at least half of it was good! That was nice.

But really I wasted most of the day (and significant parts of each of those conversations) feeling sick about my class today. I've got to get over that.

On the drive home from work, I cranked up some inspirational music, and made plans to work out when I got home. AB wanted to play with her daddy, though, and that wasn't something I could turn down. So we talked and read a book and watched TV for a while.

Then D-- brought over leftover brisket from last Saturday's birthday party. T-- made up some homemade mashed potatoes for a side, and it was a phenomenal dinner. After that I moved to the couch and played WoW for three hours, hoping to distract myself. It didn't really work, but I got a lot done in WoW. We also watched a new Leverage and a new Psych, both of which were great.

Then around ten D-- went home, and I went to the office to do a little more prep work for my class. I spent about half an hour on that, then headed to bed.

And lay there. And did not fall asleep. My mind was racing, fixated on class and everything that could go wrong.

So after about half an hour of that I jumped up and went back to the office. I read through all my students' business letters again, I watched Gail Nash's online lecture on document layout and design again, I reworked my class notes extensively, and I prepped some exercise materials for class today. All told, it was well after midnight when I went back to bed.

And lay there. And did not fall asleep. I wasn't really worried by that point -- over the course of that last hour in the office, I'd completely worked through every minute of today's class, and I knew I was thoroughly prepared. I'd go so far as to say scripted. But I couldn't stop thinking about it -- about which words to put with certain ideas, which ideas to cut if I ran out of time, and which ones to abbreviate, what sections of the discussion could (and should) be moved around and where, whether I'd captured all the necessary changes to the syllabus, and how to get that information across clearly.

Not just that, but I also found myself cutting material from today's lecture and moving it forward to future lectures, and when I was working on how to adapt that material to the other lecture's topic, I started working on those lectures, building them up. It was all useful work, but not at one thirty in the morning.

By that point, I wasn't worrying about today's class anymore. I was just wishing I could go ahead and give the class so I could get on with my life. Instead, I kept on obsessing.

I knew it, too. I kept trying to put it away, to stop thinking about it, and I kept failing at that. At two o'clock, AB cried out in her sleep and I went to check on her, thinking she'd woken up. At three, frustrated, I sat up in bed just to see how late it really was, and then lay back down. My alarm went off at seven, and I was already awake, but I got up and turned it off and went back to bed. Not to sleep, just to get a few more minutes of rest. Soon enough AB came to jump on the bed, and T-- was getting ready to leave for a doctor's appointment, and I was late enough for work that I couldn't justify waiting any longer. So I got up, and I went to work.

I'll let you guess what I've been thinking about all morning.

Other than that, though, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: September 14, 2009

2009-09-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

Friday
Friday night T--'s parents came in from Wichita, and after unloading the newly refurbished dining table and chairs that John had brought down, we took them out to dinner at Mama Roja (of course). It was delicious. Other than that, it was just WoW.

Saturday
Saturday around noon we went to Mayfair Church of Christ for D--'s grandma's birthday party. It was about forty people, mostly D--'s family, and only a couple people I knew, but for some reason (and completely unexpectedly) that place hit my social anxiety something awful. We were there for two hours. The brisket was good.

Afterward we went home, and brought my niece Lola with us. We watched her for a couple hours, then when my sister came to pick her up, T-- and her family went up to Hobby Lobby for some fabric shopping.

John and I had talked about going out to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner to catch the OU game (since it was only showing on pay per view), but I still felt bad from the afternoon's activity so I stayed home and made us all chili instead. Then I played WoW for the rest of the night while John watched the race and the rest of us watched an episode of Lie to Me.

Sunday
Sunday morning I skipped church, and spent some time coming up with a list of adjectives to describe little Alexander. That...didn't turn out to be useful. I had fun with it, though.

T-- made barbecue sandwiches for lunch, then she and her parents headed to my sister's place for a baby shower while my brother-in-law brought his two girls over to play. They watched Word World with AB while Jeff and I talked for an hour or so. Then I took AB up to the shower.

Now, T-- had told me she wasn't expecting much of a turnout at the shower, since all of my family had all canceled and several of the ladies from church had said they wouldn't be there. So I was somewhat astonished to walk into my sister's house and find it packed full of people.

They had brought so many gifts, and while I was there the guests read out blessings for Alexander and T-- and me, that they'd written earlier. That was precious.

Afterward, we came home and said goodbyes to T--'s parents, then I played WoW and waited for D-- to become available. He called around six, and we both headed up to Edmond to watch the Cowboys game with K-- and N--.

It was an excellent game. I left at half time so I could watch some of the game with T-- (who'd been too exhausted to go with me). We enjoyed that so much that we watched the end of the Bears / Packers game, too.

Sort of an erratic weekend, and exhausting, but a lot of fun. And, y'know, the Cowboys won. Awesome.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: September 11, 2009

2009-09-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning we woke up to a little scare. T-- was having trouble with her stomach and pain in her lower back, and at bleary-eyed seven in the morning, it seemed a little too much like labor pains. So she curled up on the bed trying to find a comfortable position, and I called my boss and told him I'd be out for a while -- a couple of hours or a couple of days, depending how things turned out.

Things turned out to be a stomach bug, but it incapacitated T-- pretty bad for the day. I hung around the house long enough to see her feeling a little better, and then drove AB out to the babysitter's so T-- could take the day off. Then I went from there to work, and shortly after I got in, I got a call from T-- saying she was really starting to feel better. By noon, we were sure there was nothing to worry about.

Still, a tense morning.

Then in the afternoon I got home from work and locked myself in the office to put finishing touches on my class lecture. I'm still wrestling with technical issues, since last week, but I got the podcast recorded and saved, at least, and I'll post it to the website sometime this afternoon. I was able to get them a text tutorial on time, though, and I've already had a couple students finish and submit their assignment (due next Tuesday) based off the material there.

I gave up on the podcast at 6:30, because I had social writing plans for the evening, and I hadn't eaten dinner yet. I gulped down some chicken fried rice that T-- made (which was delicious), and finished it just before D-- showed up to give me a ride to Full Circle.

When we got there, we found the coffee shop packed. At first we assumed it was a book signing, but several people were wearing name tags, and as we lingered in the other room we heard frequent bursts of applause. That doesn't sound like any book signing I've been to. Probably some sort of...I don't know, corporate event.

Anyway, it was a nuisance, but we found reading chairs elsewhere in the bookstore, and D-- spent his time working on a project for the weekend, and I spent mine working on Ghost Targets: Restraint. In the first fifteen minutes I filled two pages of my scribblebook (or about 500 words), and I turned to D-- and said, "I just doubled my word count for the week." That was more a sad commentary on my week than a boast about my productivity.

Before the night was over, though, I had two thousand words, and was well into chapter eight. That's a boast. It was a great night, and I'm climbing into the part of the novel that I'm really excited about, so I expect it to get a little easier from here on out.

We got back to the house at 10:00, and T-- had the Steelers game on, so D-- hung around to see how that turned out. It was a tense game (and just fun to be watching real NFL football again, even if it wasn't one of my teams). Definitely a good time.

That took us past eleven o'clock, though, and then when I stopped in the office to check my email before bed, I had a message about my podcast and realized what I'd done wrong earlier in the afternoon. So I stayed up for another hour wrestling with that, fixed my earlier error (re-recording the whole lecture in the process), and then discovered I still didn't know how to make it available to my students.

So, as I said earlier, that remains unresolved. And I was up late last night, and the RDO I should've had today got split so I could have time off for my Tuesday classes. So I'm at work, and tired, and ready to be home.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: September 10, 2009

2009-09-10T13:29:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was relatively quiet -- at least, the way my life goes now. A year ago, yesterday's events would have seemed positively newsworthy.

Anyway, I had a busy day at work, I wrote 600 words on Restraint over my lunch break, I got a call from my mom and we talked about teaching, I wrote a detailed blog post about Tuesday's experience, I played some WoW, and then I mixed up some of my famous salsa to go with the fantastic quesadillas T-- made for dinner.

And all of that was before D-- showed up with his own copy of the new The Beatles: Rock Band. We got the instruments set up, figured out how T-- and D-- could both do vocals (and me playing Ringo front and center), and then we played that for two hours. Then AB went to bed to sleep, T-- went to bed to read, and D-- sang all his favorite songs while I logged back into WoW to play a couple battlegrounds before bed.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 2)

2009-09-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

Someday, one of my students is going to call me "Professor Pogue" (or maybe someone who really hasn't been paying attention will even call me "Doctor Pogue"), and I'll say, "No, please, call me Mister Pogue. Professor Pogue is my father."

I'll be the only one who laughs at that, but I will find it hilarious.

Seventy-five Minutes
As I mentioned before, my first week of classes probably felt like a wild success to my students, but I came out of there shocked and terrified about how I was going to fill seventy-five minutes with lecture every week.

And, of course, the answer I got repeatedly from seasoned professionals was, "Don't." Gail Nash recommended a short twenty-minute lecture to start the class, a half-hour in-class assignment, and then another twenty minutes at the end of class to discuss it. Dad recommended mini-lectures, no longer than fifteen minutes each, broken up with other activities and discussions.

One thing everyone told me, when I was panicking about how poorly that first class went, was that it would get easier once I got the students talking back to me. The problem I was running into was lecturing. It's always difficult to deliver a message to a silent, unresponsive crowd, and especially so for somebody with no experience in public speaking whatsoever. One and all, they told me that if I could get the students to talk to me, it would be a breeze.

Getting Them Talking
Dad even told me how. Drawing on years of experience and a nuanced understanding of the student psyche, he said to start off your class by asking, "Okay, how do you guys feel about last week's assignment (or lecture)? What didn't you like about it?" That gets them talking, because everyone is more interested in complaining about something than in praising it. Give them a chance to vent (and provide what will be useful feedback to you as the teacher), and then follow up with, "Okay, and what did you like about it?" Then the students who had a positive experience with the assignment (or lecture) but otherwise would have remained quiet will chime in, partly because they've spent the last however many minutes listening to their classmates bash on it, and they feel a need to defend it. By that point, though, you've got everyone in your class talking, and comfortable with each other, and you can launch into new material and get good responses.

That advice struck me as so sound that it directly increased my confidence going into that class. I bragged about my dad's genius to several people, for days before the class started. Then I showed up, put it into practice, and got...nothing. Not a word. No complaint, no praise. Nothing.

So I looked around the room, shook my head sadly, and said, "Guys, you're going to have to talk to me. Otherwise it's just me sitting up here at the front of the class, lecturing you about writing for seventy-five minutes. And you don't want that. You know why? [Brief pause.] Because it's seventy-five minutes." That got a laugh, and it worked. After that, I got answers when I asked questions.

Business Letters
For their first assignment, they were to write me a Letter of Introduction, telling me a little bit about themselves and following the standard business letter format. To facilitate that, I prepared an online lecture (that ended up being just an illustrated tutorial, for technical reasons) going into detail on how to design a business letter.

So I started out the class lecture by talking to them about business letters, and why they're useful. One of the things I discovered last week is that none of my students (not a one) has any intention of becoming a professional tech writer. That doesn't bother me, but it means I've got to spend the semester demonstrating to them why this material matters to them.

For a first stab at that, I led off with three short stories, from my personal experience. I told them about the time I bought my first house, and along with it came the high pressure sales pitch to renew the security system that the previous owners had used. We'd initially agreed, but when we looked at our budget and saw how much they actually wanted per month, we called up to cancel it. The person on the other end of the line said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need that in writing."

So I wrote a business letter.

Then, a few months after we moved to Tulsa, someone stole a bill for our Best Buy credit card out of our mail, and used it to ring up several thousand dollars in fraudulent claims. Freaking out, we called up Best Buy's customer service and said, "Hey, someone's stealing your stuff and trying to charge it to us, and you've got put a stop to it!" and the guy on the phone said, "I'm sorry, but we're going to need that in writing."

Then I told the students a little bit about the writing experience, the process of trying to make it as a novelist, and the unending string of query letters -- every one an invitation for rejection. I told them about the importance of presenting the richness and beauty of a lovingly-crafted work of art in a sterile, one-page business letter. And then I told them how I'd finally landed a literary agent, and then had to fire her a year later, and when I contacted her to let her know I was no longer interested in working with her, she said, "I'm sorry, but I'm going to need that in writing."

That got a big laugh. I really think it got my point across well, too. I told them that in each of those situations, in different ways, I was stressed out, and needed to communicate specific information clearly and quickly. And already having a set format, an easy template that just required me to fill in the blanks, made it far easier for me to do exactly that, and save my energy for the other things I needed to be worrying about.

Due Dates
We talked briefly about our class schedule -- my plans for Thursdays and Tuesdays, and how the individual documents they're producing fit into the document packets that I'm going to be grading. In the process of that, I discovered my timetable doesn't work at all. I stumbled over that a little bit, thinking out loud, and that got some laughs. I think that's a good thing. I do need to get the details worked out before next class, though....

Group Work
Next we moved into the in-class assignment. I said, "Okay, we're going to work in groups now, and to divide up, I think we'll use a method that I found to be very effective in grade school." That got groans and chuckles, but they obediently counted off in threes, and then divided up into three groups per my instructions. Then I had everyone (for the first time) introduce themselves with name and major. Then I admitted why I'd had them count off in three -- because my three English majors were all sitting right next to each other. As a result, I had three groups with each one consisting of four Computer Science or Information Science majors, and one English major. Or, in other words, four technical people and one writer person.

Not entirely fair to the English majors, but that's how technical writing goes. I don't think I've ever worked with another English major. I told them as much, and paused to double-check myself, and then nodded and said, "I've worked with a Journalism major, but never an English major. Don't work with a Journalism major!" That got a laugh.

Technical Writing
Their assignment was deliberately vague. Every student at OC is issued a laptop, so I told them, "You've got twenty minutes. I want you to write me step-by-step instructions for how to do something useful on your student laptops."

Then something amazing happened. I'd guess that half of my students probably work with OC IT, and most of the rest of them are computer people. So in each of the three groups I heard the computer people tossing ideas out. "We could do this." "We could do that." And in each group, I heard the English major say, "Wait, what? What is that?" And then the computer people explained it to them.

And then the English majors wrote it down.

Or, in other words, Tech Writing happened. It was a thing of beauty.

Graded by the Ridicule of Their Peers
I did warn them, just after they'd divided up into groups, "We're going to go over these once you're done, so you'll be graded by the ridicule of your peers." That got a laugh (which was a very good thing), but we all followed through on it. As they finished, they emailed their tutorials to me, and I put them up on the overhead.

We briefly analyzed each one, pointing out what was done well, and what needed work. I talked a little bit about audiences, and I told them about Mark at my first job starting off every software manual with a section explaining how to use a mouse and what "click" and "double-click" meant. That got astonished, disbelieving stares, and I think I was able to make a good point there.

Out of Time
I had a lot more to say about the usefulness of written tutorials, with some heavy emphasis on all these computer people who had to give family and friends instructions on simple tasks all the time. By the time we were done critiquing, though, I was down to five minutes left in class, so I rushed through that material and let them go.

What I didn't get to was another personal anecdote, a story demonstrating the popularity and usefulness of tutorials, especially online. I was all prepared to tell them how I achieved some level of fame because of a short tutorial online. (If you search Google for "Alexpoet," my onetime web moniker, my website is the top of the list because of a tutorial I wrote for XBMC Python scripting -- which is another phrase that points directly to my page on Google.) I didn't get to that, but next week's class is about formatting technical documents, and most of what I did with that tutorial was take a flat text tutorial some Canadian dude had written, clean up the English, and apply the formatting rules I'd learned in my Tech Writing class. So, in other words, the material I didn't get to this week becomes the object lesson next week.

The Teaching Experience
When I talked to Dad about my rough experience last week, one of the things he pointed out was that my sheer terror when I stepped up to the podium was caused by an acute awareness of myself. He said that would happen to anybody -- even the most experienced public speaker, the most outgoing teacher -- if he stepped in front of a crowd and spent the whole time paying close attention to what he was doing right or wrong and analyzing it. We're too good at recognizing our own faults, we blow them out of proportion, and if that's what you're thinking about, you're going to shut yourself down.

Dad said everything I described about my first experience fell perfectly into that condition, and I couldn't argue with him. He said the way to fix it is to think about the students instead. Think about what they need to know, what I can tell them to make their lives better, and focus on their responses. I had my doubts about how easy it would be to follow through on that, but I spent the whole class trying to put it into practice, and it worked.

And I think it worked for everyone, not just for me. I mentioned the laughs I got, as often as I could, because they weren't nervous laughter. I can be a funny guy, and when I made a sarcastic comment and the students laughed at it, I could tell they were at their ease. I think that happened as a direct result of my being more at ease, and it built on itself, so by the end of the class we really were just talking back and forth. I spent two days before the class wrestling with intense anxiety, and it was brutal right up until I cleared my throat and stammered awkwardly, "Umm, okay, I guess we should get started." Then I took a breath, started with Dad's question, "What didn't you like about last week's lecture?" and instead of feeling nervous that I'd asked a question they couldn't answer, I just got irritated at them for not speaking up.

And from there on, I was fine. It was a great class period, and I think the lives of everyone involved are better for it.

More next week.

Journal Entry: September 9, 2009

2009-09-09T11:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, before my first day of class, I mistook a respiratory virus for anxiety.

This week, there was no mistake. Anxiety shut me down. I didn't sleep Monday night, and I didn't eat anything yesterday until hours after the class. It was a miserable experience.

Also, as anxiety tends to be, it proved irrational and unfounded. My class went really well, but I'll wait to go into real detail in a separate post. The good news is that, after exhausting my prepared comments within the first fifteen minutes of class last week (and panicking about it afterward), I managed to run out of time yesterday. And, even better, the (significant amount of) material I had to skip works perfectly in next week's lecture, too.

Anyway, I took the afternoon off yesterday, and it proved to be a good thing. I went home for lunch and instead spent forty minutes lying on the bed in a dark room, trying to calm down. Then I packed up my laptop, hugged AB goodbye, and drove up to the school.

Class went really well, and afterward I headed to the offices to report as much to Cami, and found her speaking with Peggy Gipson -- my creative writing teacher when I was at OC, and easily one of my mentors. Apart from emails, though, we hadn't spoken since I got back from Tulsa, so we dismissed Cami and I took a seat in Peggy's office, and we caught up. For more than an hour. It was awesome.

I got home around 3:30, and T-- asked me to watch AB while she went grocery shopping. We watched part of a Sesame Street, then I suggested we got play outside and while AB played on her slide and climbed on her house, I mowed the back lawn. AB behaved really well for me while I did that, so when I finished I pushed her in her swing for a while.

We were still doing that when T-- got home, so she took over for me and I went around front to finish mowing. It was almost three weeks of growth, after the Velezes' visit two weeks ago and my sickness this last weekend, so the front yard especially was a lot of effort, but we've got guests coming in for a baby shower this weekend, and it needed to be done.

Once that was finished I grabbed a quick shower, and it was already six o'clock. T-- told me her friend Becca was coming over, and I owed Becca a character design worksheet (that I'd discussed at one of our earlier writing groups), so I spent half an hour searching through my old high school Creative Writing notebooks, but it was nowhere to be found. I settled for copying her a Dungeons and Dragons character record sheet, and a copy of the custom ones D-- and I made up for our fantasy project.

Then I emerged from the office for a much-needed dinner, which consisted of some Dominos pizza I paid for out of my allowance (because I'd had a rough day, and I deserved a treat). I just finished eating before Becca showed up with her two boys, and we talked shop for half an hour or so, going over some sticking points in her novel as she rushes toward its climax. Once she felt more comfortable with that, I left her to talk with T--, and went to play WoW.

That took the rest of my night, but it wasn't really as much night as I'd hoped for it to have. Maybe two hours, and then I was in bed so I could make it to work on time this morning.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: September 8, 2009

2009-09-08T07:34:00.000-07:00

Friday
In my blog post last Friday I went into great detail concerning a slow-build head cold I'd spent a week developing, but then never really talked about it. I talked about how I confused it with social anxiety for a couple days, but never said how I knew that was a misdiagnosis.

I knew by Thursday, though. It hit me hard on Thursday, and then kept me home from work on Friday. I went in in the morning to pick up my school laptop that I'd left behind on Thursday, and then went back in for a short teleconference in the afternoon, but apart from that I stayed home and convalesced.

Between medication and lots of rest, I felt up to going over to K-- and N--'s for dinner Friday night. We had hotdogs and watched the last preseason Cowboys game. It was entertaining, but mostly just left us wanting the regular season to start.

Saturday
Saturday morning I watched AB while T-- went shopping. Just before she got home, I got a phone call from a guy selling a $2,500 camera on eBay letting me know I'd won and asking me about shipping and payment arrangements.

This entire phone call came as a complete shock to me, of course, and I got to spend the rest of the morning dealing with eBay's fraud department and getting my account re-secured. Turns out somebody had figured out my login credentials and made purchases in excess of eleven thousand dollars. Luckily (hah!) the check card associated with the account was stolen when we were robbed last December, so it had been canceled and no money changed hands.

Then around eleven T-- went out again to go shopping with my little sister, and took AB with her that time, because I headed up to Vintage coffeehouse for some social writing with Courtney before T-- planned to be home. Between worry over the eBay thing and a growing fuzziness from my lingering cold, I didn't actually get any writing done. I chatted with Courtney and ate a remarkable turkey sandwich, and then begged off early and headed home.

I deteriorated from there, so when six o'clock rolled around and we were supposed to head out for some OU football at K-- and N--'s place, I decided I just couldn't handle it. I called and offered my apologies, and then went to my room and took a nap. T-- went over to hang out at my sister's place and scrapbook, and I eventually woke up to grab some dinner and play some WoW. From what I heard, it was probably a more pleasant experience than watching the game would have been.

Sunday
I wasn't up terribly late Saturday night, even with the mid-evening nap, but I still managed to sleep through church Sunday for no other reason than that I forgot to set an alarm on my clock. I was up and dressed when T-- got out of service, though, and we went to Taco Cabana with D-- and my sister's family for lunch. Then I took AB home for a nap and T-- went over to my sister's place for more scrapbooking and some maternity photos.

AB woke up a couple hours before T-- got home, but we entertained ourselves with books and puzzles and counting poker chips. Then I spent most of the evening worrying about my class on Tuesday and playing WoW.

T-- picked up some Chinese takeout for us for dinner, and after AB went to bed we spent a couple mostly-depressing hours watching Sunshine Cleaning. It's got a happy ending, but it takes a pretty miserable path to get there. It's like Uncorked for girls. Anyway, after that T-- headed to bed, but I stayed up and watched I Love You, Man to cleanse the palate.

Monday
Monday morning we woke up early for a date! D-- came over to watch AB, and T-- and I grabbed some breakfast at Sonic before heading up to the mall for All About Steve at 10:05. The movie was...fascinating. It was good. It was Joe Dirt for girls. We had fun.

Then we stopped by Sears on the way to the car, and ended up buying my birthday present from T-- a little bit early. She got me new shoes and a new watch (both badly needed), and I walked out of there looking dapper.

We picked up D-- and AB for lunch at Chilis, then T-- dropped D-- and me at Best Buy to pick up some XBox games on sale while she ran to my sister's place to drop off some stuff. Turned out there was no sale, though, so D-- and I ended up wandering the aisles aimlessly until T-- got back. It wasn't too long, though.

After that D-- went home, and AB went down for a nap. I settled in to play some WoW, and T-- took advantage of my babysitting to go do some grocery shopping. She got back just as AB woke up, and we all watched TV for a couple hours. AB watched Nick Jr. videos on T-- laptop, and T-- and I watched a homemade marathon of season 4 of Newsradio.

T-- heated up a frozen pizza for dinner, and other than that our evening looked exactly like our afternoon. At nine AB went to bed, and then I put away the computer and T-- and I watched a Leverage. As soon as that was done I headed to bed, sick with anxiety over class tomorrow.

Which is to say, today. I've over the cold, but not the anxiety. It shouldn't last much longer than five hours, though. So at least there's that.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

The OC (Week 1)

2009-09-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

Class Begins
I got to the school half an hour early. That gave me time to figure out how the projector worked before I got around to realizing I didn't really have anything to project. My students started filing in fifteen minutes early, and kept on filing until about ten minutes into the class.

Ten minutes into the class....

Public Speaking
Okay, as a long-time Tech Writer and successful co-host of a couple Writer's Groups (forgive me, Courtney, for bestowing the title on myself, but it was a source of some confidence), I was confident I could just show up and talk, and that would fill up the class. Whenever we get together for one of our Writer's Groups, I try to come up with a topic or two worth discussing, and somehow two hours disappear and I've barely even gotten started!

Technical writing isn't quite the same, as far as discussion goes, and I wanted to come off professional so I felt like I needed a little bit of organization to it. To that end, I drew up a list of topics I wanted to hit. Just a little outline. So one o'clock rolled around, and I stood up at the front of the class, and my well-behaved students immediately fell silent....

And I discovered that nothing has changed since college, as far as my public speaking goes. And, no, being the professor made no difference whatsoever. My heart raced, I couldn't form a coherent sentence, and every third word out of my mouth was "umm." Dad would've been mortified.

Introduction to Technical Writing
Somehow I got through that, though. I gripped my outline for dear life, and launched into my first topic. I asked them about their majors -- three English, four Computer Science, and six Other. I asked how many of them thought they might want to be Tech Writers someday, and the answer to that was an easy zero. I told them a little bit about myself, my time at OC, my experience in Tech Writing class, the sudden, desperate realization on graduation day that I'd never thought about getting a job, and then my two jobs (and seven years' experience) in Tech Writing.

I told them a little bit about what Tech Writing is like -- interacting with engineers and programmers, constantly working behind deadline, researching things you know nothing about in a desperate effort to make the inscrutable make sense. At one point, trying to stress the collaborative challenges of Tech Writing, I told them that one of the hardest parts is that you're always trying to get information from a programmer or an engineer, but everywhere I've ever worked the engineers are just constantly hammered.

And then I stopped, and said, "And by hammered, I mean busy. Not drunk."

That got a good laugh.

I got nods from the CS students when I said that software isn't finished until it's documented. I got nods from the English students when I said most of all the writing they'd ever done so far was either creative or academic, and (except for hobbies) that mostly ended at graduation. I got nods all around when I suggested, offhand, that most of them probably had no idea what Tech Writing was, or why they were in this class.

Scheduling Issues
So I was trucking along through my outline, doing pretty well, and all I had left to do was go over the syllabus (including the homework schedule). Curious, I glanced up at the clock to see how much time I had left in my seventy-five minute class session.

And the answer was sixty-five minutes. Give or take one. I'd never intended to keep them for the full class on the first day (nobody does that), but I sure thought I had more than ten minutes' worth of material!

So I started doing what I could to stretch it out, borrowing desperately from topics I intended to discuss later in the semester, expounding on things that didn't need expounding on, and making my already-flustered speech even more so. I somehow dragged the class out to twenty-five minutes, and then I let them go. Of course, none of them complained.

Post-Mortem
As I was packing up my stuff, I spotted Gail out in the hall -- the professor who'd taught my Tech Writing class way back when, and a friend of ours from church. She asked me how it had gone, so I ducked into her office and told her all about it.

She was sympathetic. She later told me the first day of teaching is always BRUTAL, and she had some good, specific suggestions for dealing with the big block of time. After that I seriously considered slipping out and going home, but I'd spoken with Dr. Agan (the department chair, and the one who'd hired me) before class, and I was pretty sure she was expecting me to stop by again. So I slunk up to her office, and she asked, "Well, how was it?"

And I said, "About a third as long as I expected it to be."

She was just as encouraging as Gail had been, but I still drove home feeling miserable. Partly it was my physical response to standing up at the front of the class -- I'd somehow convinced myself it wouldn't be like that, so when it was...that was devastating. Not just for those ten minutes, but because it means I have that to look forward to for the rest of the semester. That's daunting.

Then...well, to fill time, I'm going to have to do a lot more work than I'd realized. That's not a terrible thing on its own, but I've been dreading how busy this fall was going to be for months, and that was before I learned how much more effort I'm going to have to put into my classes. I spent my drive home trying to figure out how I was going to even manage it, let alone find the time for my writing, for catching some football games, for playing a little WoW to unwind....

More next week.

Journal Entry: September 4, 2009

2009-09-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

Big week for me, so yeah I should have been posting regularly. But, then, it was a big week for me, so I had other stuff to do.

Starting with getting sick.

Sunday
(Yes, I already did Sunday, just bear with me.)

Sunday morning I woke up with the sniffles and a severe, sinus-related headache -- harkening back to the Sunday only two weeks before, when I went through the same thing. That one was short-lived, though....

This one has lingered. And grown.

Monday
So, yeah, Monday morning I woke up feeling pretty out-of-it and miserable, but I just assumed (with my big first day of school looming) that it was a social anxiety thing. Every now and then I'd stop and think, "Wait, this feels more like a head cold than an anxiety attack," but then I'd just call myself silly because, after all, I had a big terrifying Event looming. Of course it was anxiety!

I went to work Monday, and then got home to an empty house because T-- had AB at the grocery store with her. D-- came over, and T-- brought a pizza home with her, and we all had a pleasant dinner. Then T-- took AB to go shopping with my little sister, and D-- drove me up to Full Circle Bookstore for social writing.

It was just the two of us this time, and we both got a lot done. We wrote about a thousand words each, in two hours at the coffee shop, then headed down to the restaurant for an hour of good conversation. I got home a little after ten, and went straight to bed.

Tuesday
Tuesday morning I went in to work, and spent most of my time there answering coworkers who started conversations with, "Today's the big day, huh? Are you ready?" And my answer was always, "Sure I'm ready! I've been doing this for seven years. All I have to do is show up, and start talking. I'll fill an hour like that!"

Noon rolled around, and I headed home. I took the afternoon off, so I wouldn't have to rush hither and thither on my first day of classes. Had lunch with T-- and AB, grabbed my laptop, and headed up to the school. I'll tell you all about my first class session in a separate post.

In brief, though, it didn't go well. And, on top of all that, I was sick. I still suspected at the time that it was a response to the stress of the day, but that certainly didn't lessen after class was over. I drove home, desperately glad I wasn't supposed to go back to work, and crashed on the couch, and did nothing else for the rest of the day. I did watch AB while T-- went grocery shopping, but that consisted mostly of stretching out on the couch, one arm over my eyes, and half-heartedly saying, "Don't make a mess" while she watched TV and played with her puzzles.

Wednesday
Wednesday morning I woke up early and went to work, then slipped out halfway through the morning to see my doctor for my annual physical. I haven't gotten any of the lab results back yet, but for the most part everything's good. He's got me back on Benicar for my blood pressure, but even that is much better than it was a year ago. He said if I can get my diastolic down by ten points, I can probably go off it altogether. So that's my six-month goal.

Anyway, after that I went right back to work. Mid-afternoon I was chatting with T-- and asked her about dinner plans and she reminded me that she was going out with Becca, and I was watching AB. So that was that.

I got home, and she left, and AB and I played in the living room for an hour or so before D-- showed up. Then the three of us ran up to Taco Bueno to grab some dinner. Afterward AB crawled up next to me on the couch while I was poking around on Facebook, and she jabbed a finger at the screen, at my little profile photo, and said, "That's you, Daddy!"

And I said, "It is!" and opened the photo up larger so she could see it. Then she started looking through all the little thumbnails on the screen, trying to spot people she recognized, and we played that game for fifteen minutes or so.

When she got bored of that, I set her up on T--'s laptop watching really, really old episodes of Sesame Street, and D-- and I played WoW. That carried us through to AB's bedtime.

Then D-- left and T-- and I watched some Lie to Me, and then it was tomorrow.

Thursday
My Tuesday-Thursday class is what we're calling a "hybrid online course," which means we're meeting in class on Tuesdays, and then on Thursdays the students go to the school's e-classroom website and watch a recorded lecture, get an assignment, and work on that over the weekend. Next Tuesday when we meet for class, we'll go over the assignment before I launch into my lecture.

Anyway, that meant I didn't have to go out to the school on Thursday, but I did have to get the online lecture put together. That...didn't end up happening, for technical reasons. I posted the assignment, and I put together a heavily-illustrated tutorial (How to Write a Business Letter) that I made available, and I sent them an email saying, "Sorry, but I'm having technical problems so your lecture won't be available until tomorrow. If you're in a hurry to get started, check out the tutorial posted online."

Not the best way to get started. In the process, though, I came up with a really great process for developing my online lectures. I was able to convert the illustrations in my tutorial directly into PowerPoint slides for the lecture, and use the text as a script for my voiceover. That lets me develop the lecture to my strengths (that is, tech writing), produce a useful lecture, and also have a well-made tutorial document left over when I'm done. That seems like a good thing all around.

Anyway, I took care of that yesterday, finishing it up in the early evening. T-- made sloppy joes for dinner, I played WoW, and after AB went to bed we watched the last episode of Lie to Me. It was intense.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: August 31, 2009

2009-08-31T10:47:00.001-07:00

Two days behind, and a busy weekend to cover, so brace yourselves.

Wednesday
Wednesday night we had dinner at Taco Bueno, with my sister's family, K-- and N--, and D--. The girls ran amok, we ate cheap Mexican food, and we discussed idle frustrations. Then, in perfect consensus, we all decided not to go to church.

I spent the evening in the office, scanning paperwork to throw away and rearranging the closet so I could store some crates and file folders that had been sitting out next to my desk ever since we swapped the office and the nursery.

That took all night, but it left me with the cleanest-looking office I've had in forever, which is something we did in anticipation of guests living there for a weekend.

Thursday
Thursday I took a late lunch, planning for it to be a little bit of a long one, because I had a training session out at OC for using their online classroom tool, Blackboard. When I double-checked the schedule, though (after I'd left work and gone home to pick up my laptop), I discovered the class was an hour later than I'd thought. So I called in to work, had lunch with T-- at T. G. I. Friday's, and then spent a leisurely afternoon up at the university.

D-- brought us dinner -- Buffalo Wild Wings -- then he headed home relatively early to work on a project for his mom, and T-- and I spent the evening watching TV shows.

Friday
Friday was my RDO, so Friday morning when T-- woke up early to run the garage sale again, I stayed in bed. I finally got up just in time to go grab some Little Caesar's for lunch. I took AB up there with me, and then we ate together while T-- was still manning the sales position outside. A few minutes before one she finally closed the sale down and came in to eat, and I headed out for a haircut.

When I got back home AB was taking a nap, so T-- and I took the opportunity to work out in the garage, cleaning and rearranging all the stuff that had been used for the sale so that we could park both cars in the garage again. Then I brought my XBox and laptop out of the office (in anticipation of it being occupied for the weekend), and played some Magic while T-- napped, and then switched to WoW on my laptop when AB woke up and needed the TV.

The thing about WoW...after being out of the game for six month, none of my characters are specced anymore. "Specced," in this sense, means I haven't spent the skill points acquired through the leveling process to customize them (choosing from among the talents that make your characters the most powerful). It's a complicated process, and an unspecced character is essentially worthless. I've got three characters at 80 (maximum level), and unspecced they're about as tough as 70s. The point of all this is that I logged into WoW Friday night, and discovered that I couldn't really play it. To get my specs right would require literally hours of research into the newest changes to the skill trees and the most effective ways to spec to fit my playstyle. I looked around some, I logged in each of my characters just to see where they were, and then I spent about half an hour mining. That's like logging into WoW to do chores.

So that was sobering and disappointing, after a week I'd spent gradually getting more and more excited about playing WoW again. It was not indicative of my evening, though.

T-- made some fantastic barbecue chicken sandwiches for dinner. We watched some Lie to Me, and then just after we put AB to bed at nine, Julie and Carlos got in from Topeka!

Julie had a boxful of youth group photos (which I just realized I never actually looked through! Ack!), so she and T-- went through those and commented while I chatted with Carlos. They'd also brought with them a couple bottles of wine from their recent trip to Napa, and we managed to empty both of those Friday night.

We got a late start, and though T-- went to bed relatively early (albeit after midnight), the rest of us were up talking until after four.

Saturday
Saturday morning T-- got up early and discovered some of the veggies she'd bought for her special brunch dish had frozen in their drawer, so she had to go buy replacements. She took AB with her, ran up to Homeland, did some shopping, and got back to the house before any of the rest of us woke up. Then she made a goat cheese tart which tempted Carlos and Julie enough to wake them up, but I slept right through it. By all accounts, it was incredible.

I got up around noon, then ran up to McDonalds to grab some lunch for AB and me. I know, so tragic. The chicken sandwich was good, the fries weren't. AB really enjoyed the Lego race car that came with her Happy Meal, though.

Then she went down for a nap, and T-- and Julie went out in the back yard to shoot some cute maternity photos, and I showed off the XBox Magic game to Carlos. Or...used it to bore Carlos. Whatever.

When AB woke up, we all packed into the car and headed up to Guthrie for our big photoshoot. Julie's in the process of becoming a professional photographer (although that "in the process" bit is something you'd have a hard time believing from the quality of her work), and the excuse we'd all used for their trip was to have her come shoot some maternity photos of T-- and some profile photos of me for my website.

T-- had recently found an old trainyard in Guthrie with some old, abandoned-looking buildings nearby that she thought might work as a good backdrop. When we got there, Julie fell instantly in love. She took three hundred photos of the three of us in just a couple hours. The settings were great, the lighting was good, and AB was remarkably cooperative. She and I finally started getting restless as the afternoon wore on, though, and between the two of us we convinced T-- to take a dinner break.

We headed back to town, and took our guests to our new favorite restaurant -- Mama Roja on the lake! So, yeah, that's three times in nine days. What of it? It was fabulous, and everyone left happy.

Julie was able to point out to us the perfect lighting for photography that occurs just around dusk. That is, she was able to point it out through the window next to our booth, because there'd been something of a wait to be seated. So we watched the sun set, and didn't get any more shots on Saturday night.

As soon as we got back to the house, Julie pulled out her laptop and got started editing. While she did that, we played them an episode of Lie to Me, and then T-- regretfully admitted she was too tired to stay up, and she headed to bed.

Carlos and I spent a while talking band stuff, writing stuff, and whatnot. Then we broke into the scotch he'd brought along, and ended up sitting out on the porch sipping scotch and smoking cigars for several hours. Julie put away the laptop for a while to join us. We talked some about old times (as we'd done pretty much constantly up until that point), and then Carlos asked casually if I ever wrote any lyrics.

That became a proposition. He's just started playing bass in a new band, and they perform only original stuff, but they don't have a lot of songs written yet, so he was wondering if I would supply some material. By utter coincidence, I've been thinking much recently about trying my hand at writing songs again. So we talked about what sort of stuff he's looking for and what sort of stuff I can do, and then I brought my laptop out on the porch and he showed me some videos of bands he's been in and I showed him some of my best (and worst) material. When all was said and done, we both ended up incredibly excited about the opportunity to work together.

Then it got cold, and the laptop battery died, and Julie felt the itch to get back to work, so we went back inside. I put on Uncorked (or At Satchem Farm), which neither of them had seen, and fell in love with that movie all over again. Carlos was impressed with the guitar work.

It was after two when the movie ended and we went to bed. An improvement on the night before, but nothing approaching reasonable.

Sunday
Sunday morning T-- and AB went to church, but the rest of us slept through it.

We were all awake by the time she got home, though. She started working on lunch -- her famous Tuscan chicken ring -- and I ran up to the grocery store to grab some soda. By the time I got back, food was on the table.

We ate, and then we had plans to watch Nacho Libre (which our guests had never seen), but while we were waiting for T-- to load the dishwasher I turned on the Rifftrax version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, just so Julie and Carlos could see how funny it was, and then by common consent we ended up watching all of that.

By the time that was done, Julie was finished with her marathon editing session, and we got to check out the photos on the TV. So good! You can see a bunch of them on T--'s Facebook album. Julie will also do a blog post on her portfolio site sometime soon, and of course I'll provide a link when that happens.

Anyway, we watched a slideshow of all 83 pictures (to a terribly appropriate soundtrack by Sting), and then T-- decided to show Julie how Smugmug works (using my sister's site as an example), so I put on the Cowboys preseason game from Saturday night and watched Romo tear up San Francisco.

I'm so ready for football season.

Around six we started decorating our French bread pizzas for dinner, and as soon as we were done eating we performed a quick costume change, and then headed back out to the lake for another photoshoot -- this one in the prime dusk light. It went really well, and I think AB adored getting to spend so much time outside this weekend. It shows in all her smiles.

After that we drove back home and said lots of goodbyes, then Julie and Carlos got on the road back to Topeka, T-- and I crashed on the couches, and we watched Psych and Leverage and Lie to Me while I tried to play WoW again. This time I focused on my Warlock, specced him on guesses (but I know my Warlock best, so they were probably pretty good guesses), and actually had a lot of fun. I ran a couple dungeons, checked out the new castle-defense battleground (way cool), and then picked up where I'd left off in questing. In that last, I remembered just how great the storyline is in Northrend (the most recent expansion), and I got excited about playing again all over again.

I finally tore myself out of that as midnight crept close, and I lay in bed for another hour before I fell asleep. This morning came too soon, and work with it, but even with the weird hours and the packed schedule, it was an awesome weekend. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: August 26, 2009

2009-08-26T14:09:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we had an appointment to go out to a Wells Fargo office on Northwest Expressway and MacArthur to talk about refinancing a couple of our loans that are in a bad way. We'd arranged that appointment last week sometime, when the loan agent cold-called me, and then she called back yesterday morning confirm.

The appointment was for 5:30, so I left work at 4:30, drove half an hour home, picked up T-- and AB, drove half an hour out to the Wells Fargo office, and learned that when she'd run the numbers on the loan (presumably right after our phone call last week), she'd found that we weren't really qualified for anything that would be useful for us. So, in other words, we'd wasted our time. She tried to sell us a new credit card, we said no, and drove half an hour home.

So my evening started at 6:00. I did get a free can of Diet Dr Pepper out of it, though.

We had leftovers for dinner, and I began the process of surrendering my life back to the monster that is World of Warcraft (which is to say, I started copying 12 gigs of data to my new laptop). Then while that ran, I played with AB and read her a couple books.

After she went to bed, we watched Lie to Me. Then we went to bed. It wasn't much of a night. I had fun playing with AB, though.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Watching Dreams Die

2009-08-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

Another article worth reading.

Some psychologists investigated what it takes to get people (students) to give up on their dream job and pursue some crappy day job to pay the bills.

The Placebo Effect

2009-08-25T09:02:00.001-07:00

Found this article through Digg, and thought it was worth sharing.

The headline claims that placebos are getting stronger, but the real situation is a little more complicated than that. Still, it's a great review of the placebo effect in general and a fascinating look at how major pharmaceuticals are addressing it right now.

Journal Entry: August 25, 2009

2009-08-25T08:53:00.001-07:00

Shortly after I got home from work yesterday, I was trying to into our bedroom when Pastis felt a sudden, urgent need to get out of it, and she sprinted across my feet to achieve that goal. I had no shoes on, and she had her claws out, and now the big toe on my right foot is shredded.

That, however, is neither here nor there. I had a great night in spite of it.

I took T-- and AB out to dinner at Mama Roja again, and this time we shared the enchilada platter and tried out their complimentary-but-you-have-to-ask-for-it avocado salsa, and both proved delicious.

Then afterward T-- dropped me off at 50 Penn Place for our social writing. I took a seat in the Full Circle Bookstore coffee shop, and got about four hundred words written before D-- showed up. We talked some, and he got started on his short story, and I got back to writing, and got maybe another hundred done before Courtney showed up at eight.

I'm working on a conversation now where both parties come to it thinking they know what the other party is thinking, and both are wrong. I write way too many of those conversations into my stories, and they take a lot of work to get right. Over the course of three hours writing last night, I think I got six hundred words total.

We had some great conversation, though. We talked about the different roles of fantasy and science fiction, about genre conventions in general and the paltry number of authentic plots in specific. Also, D-- suggested rewriting the original Star Wars trilogy as a fantasy series, and we realized it would be the most boring fantasy series in the history of the world.

They kicked us out of Full Circle at nine, so we moved down to the Belle Isle restaurant to carry on our conversation, but they kicked us out of there at ten. We were still talking all the way to the parking lot.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: August 24, 2009

2009-08-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

Friday
Friday afternoon I got home in a bad mood from work, walked into the kitchen to pour myself a Coke and after a quick, "Welcome home!" T-- told me a little about her day, and then said, "Oh, and I've got all my stuff ready."

And the words, "Ready for what?" died on my lips. She had a crop Friday night. I'd known about it for a month. I was not in any mood to watch AB, though.

I had about half an hour to change that. Luckily, AB woke up and ran to me with a big, "Daddddy!" that did a lot to make the transition easier. Then right after T-- headed to the church, D-- called and asked if I wanted a snowcone, so that (and his company for the evening) helped a lot, too.

Actually, it ended up being a pretty fun night. We went up to McDonalds so AB could play in the play area, then came back home and I set her up watching videos on T--'s laptop while D-- and I broke out the Rock Band. She'd periodically throw off the headphones to come dance to our music. That was fun.

Then around bedtime I played with her a bit, put her to sleep, and then got back to rocking with D-- until T-- got home. At that point I seriously considered going out and wrecking another weekend with poor decision-making, but somehow overwhelmed that impulse. I watched an episode of Lie to Me with T--, and then went to bed elevenish.

Saturday
Saturday morning I woke up late and mowed the lawn, and suddenly it was 1:00. I had some leftover barbecue and it was as good as new, then poked around on the computer for a few minutes, and then it was time to go.

"Time to go" because we had our second monthly Britton Road writer's group on Saturday. I threw in a bunch of modifiers there, because this was a sequel to our writer's group last month, not to the social writing at the coffee shop last Tuesday. The follow-up to that event takes place tonight, at Full Circle Bookstore, and will likely feature many of the same people who were at the thing on Saturday. I know it's confusing. I'll try to come up with clear distinctions of the two things (or convince both groups to merge them into a seamless whole), but for now, you'll have to wade through explanatory paragraphs like this one.

But, yeah, "time to go" because we had our second monthly Britton Road writer's group on Saturday. Courtney hosted again, and I showed up a few minutes after J. T., and Shawn showed up a few minutes later. We had German Iced Tea, and gave feedback on each others' submitted works. J. T. submitted a couple short-form poems, Courtney submitted a truly chilling short story, and Shawn submitted a one-act play that clocked in right around seven pages. Oh, and I submitted all 200-plus pages of Gods Tomorrow. Don't judge me. That's just who I am.

We had some great discussion, though. We talked about structured writing, and longhand drafts, and early efforts, and then spent about half our time on psychological disorders. We had an expert among us (of the "trained professional" variety, not simply "longtime sufferer"), and we ended up with some really great information.

We were done with that by 4:30, but T-- had taken AB over to my little sister's place, so I had some free time in the afternoon. I spent it playing Magic on the XBox, and pretty much stuck with that until T-- put AB down for bed. Then we watched a little TV, and she went to bed, and I stayed up to play a bunch more Magic on the XBox.

Sunday
Sunday morning T-- took AB to a special event (along with my little sister and her girls). Unwilling to face the adversity that is Christian fellowship without the protective barrier of my perfect little family, I decided to skip church. Around 11:30 I called D-- up, and we headed to Edmond to meet the girls at Jason's Deli for lunch. It was delicious.

Then D-- took me home, and I spent much of the afternoon playing Magic on the XBox. I finally had to put it away when T-- invited my sister's family over for dinner (she grilled hotdogs). While we were waiting for them to show up, I set up the Rock Band stuff, and after a quick dinner we sent the little ones to AB's room to play, and then we spent a couple hours rocking out. That was pretty fun.

After the guests left, T-- and I watched an episode of Psych, and discussed watching something else serious, but we weren't in the mood for serious. It was late, anyway, so we gave up and went to bed.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: August 21, 2009

2009-08-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after work I headed over to the hospital where Toby and Gwyn are staying so T-- and I could see the new baby. There's a new baby! With much tininess! T-- held him, and we talked with Gwyn for a while, but I spent most of my time keeping AB occupied so the girls could talk without too much interruption.

Toby was at home handling emergencies. If he'd been around, I probably wouldn't have been quite so helpful.

Afterward T-- asked if we could go somewhere for Mexican food, and I recommended we hit the new place on Lake Hefner, where Bahama Breeze used to be. Mama Roja.

It is phenomenal.

Probably my new favorite Mexican place. It's not cheap, but the prices are reasonable (ten to twelve bucks for a dinner platter), and the food is amazing. Their salsa is top notch, too, which is probably my highest priority. They provide both a Mexican-style salsa and a Tex-Mex-style salsa as part of the default set-up, and both of them are good. Go there.

After dinner T-- headed to Wal-Mart to do some shopping, so I took AB home. She watched some silly videos on T--'s laptop while I played Magic on the XBox, and we kept that up pretty much until bedtime. Then I took the XBox back into the office to play some more while T-- took care of some stuff on the computer, and then we went back to the living room to watch an episode of Lie to Me.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Journal Entry: August 20, 2009

2009-08-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

We had our Wednesday night meal yesterday, but K-- was feeling sick so we had to get by without him and N--. My little sister requested barbecue, but we're a pretty picky family when it comes to what barbecue we'll eat, and the only place currently high in our esteem (Steve's Rib) is miles and miles away.

Not far from my little sister's house.

So she graciously offered to pick up a family pack and bring it to our place, and we had an awesome dinner. D-- joined us for that, and after we'd cleared our plates D-- and I got to work unpacking his newly-arrived Rock Band 2 set, including (for the first time) the wireless instruments. I also took another stab at repairing my incredibly cool drum pedal, but didn't end up testing it last night because I wanted to give the glue lots of time to set up.

Anyway, around eight we had everything put together, and then we spent another half hour scrolling through the list of downloadable content sorting the I-love-that-song set from the I-must-have-that-song-right-this-moment set. Then D-- bought all the must-haves, including something by Journey for T--.

Then we played. AB wasn't too happy being excluded and ignored, but it's been nine months since we've really played Rock Band, and we got into it. We did set up the old, wired drum set in front of the TV, lowered down to knee-height, and placed AB's rocking chair in front of it so she could play along with us. That was pretty cute.

But yeah, that was all we did for the rest of the night. Next thing we knew, it was 10:30, and we had to make ourselves quit. Much of the conversation throughout was anticipation of the Beatles Rock Band coming out early next month. That...should be interesting.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.

Today's Poem

2009-08-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

"Baby Nance" by Aaron Pogue

Baby Nance
Potato salad
Sent from my iPhone