Alicia and I have wrapped up the loveliest visit. Great, productive energy during our meeting sessions, and lots of good gabbing and yummy meals between times. I have a lot of catch-up to manage, but I've already started sorting through the answers to the embellished sentence exercise, and I expect to be able to flesh that out later today. I hope!

In the meantime, here's a little funny a friend sent to me. (Hi, Angie!) It seems to belong on the front page of the blog. :D



On my 66th birthday, I got a gift certificate from my wife. The certificate paid for a visit to a medicine man living on a nearby reservation who was rumored to have a wonderful cure for ErectileDysfunction. After being persuaded, I drove to the reservation, handed my ticket to the medicine man and wondered what would happen next..

The old man slowly, methodically produced a potion, handed it to me, and with a grip on my shoulder, warned, "This is powerful medicine and it must be respected. You take only a teaspoonful and then say '1-2-3.'

'When you do that, you will become more manly than you have ever been in your life and you can perform as long as you want."

I was encouraged. As I walked away, I turned and asked, "How do I stop the medicine from working?" "Your partner must say '1-2-3-4,' he responded. "But when she does, the medicine will not work again until the next full moon."

I was very eager to see if it worked so I went home, showered, shaved, took a spoonful of the medicine, and then invited my wife to join me in the bedroom. When she came in, I took off my clothes and said, "1-2-3!"

Immediately, I was the manliest of men. My wife was excited and began throwing off her clothes. And then she asked, "What was the 1-2-3 for?"

And that, boys and girls, is why we should never end our sentences with a preposition. One could end up with a dangling, er, participle.

Right This Minute

Alicia and I are sitting across the table from each other. Bottle of red number two is open and ready for tasting. We're reading over some old blog posts, reminiscing and tossing around ideas as we sometimes do. She's currently declaiming on the pointlessness of italics for interior monologue, and she's not getting much argument from me. The word "bling" figures prominently in our conversation tonight.

Dinner was at a hole-in-the-wall Thai place on the corner. I think we stunned the other patrons in this tiny restaurant by giggling about comma wars. They didn't get the joke.

Real posts will resume once sobriety has been restored. Meantime, here's a question for you all. Do we think there's such a creature as the Bling Fairy? Some ditzy chick in a pink tutu with a basket full of dots and dashes, sprinkling punctuation like glitter wherever she goes?

I say yes.

Only cuz it would explain a lot.

Theresa

ETA: And now Alicia is googling for clip art of fairies. Clearly, we need a mascot for this blog. And we have decided with all due deliberation that if we can't find a suitable clip of a Bling Fairy, then John Hamm will have to do.

Blame Yourselves

Today on the sidebar, we're unveiling your choices for best blog posts over the past two years on edittorrent. Compiling this list was a task filled with surprising twists and turns, and as a result, we have two subsets to the list.

There is a top ten list linking to the posts most frequently named in your votes as reader favorites. That's pretty clear and easy.

But as we were sorting through the votes, it became apparent that many of you wanted to nominate batches of posts rather than single posts. So we created three "series" tags in our Super Deluxe Sidebar Labeling System (tm;) for the three most frequently nominated batches, and we included those in our Best Of Blog list.

It just happened to work out that we had three batches nominated very frequently, and that one was by Alicia (on line editing), one was by me (the Johnny and Drago series), and one is the ongoing discussion by both of us about PPPs. Very clever of you all to arrange it that way.

Thanks again to all of you who helped with the heavy lifting on this task. Now, when new readers find our blog, maybe they'll be able to use those sidebar links to read the same posts that all of you found most useful.

And if there is one glaring conclusion I've drawn from this process, it's that our post labels suck even harder than I suspected. I'll be trying to clean that mess over the next few weeks. Oy. (Note to Self: Do it right the first time, and save yourself this hassle later.)

So, whaddya think? Any surprises on the list?

Theresa,
who still hasn't edited her winner's sample pages, but will soon :)

25 and Holding!

Happy birthday, Alicia!
(My other gift for you is a pin.)

Love ya!
T

Alicia, Here it is--

(With apologies to those of you lacking ties to the great state of Indiana--)

I think I've told Alicia (and everyone else I know) about this gift at least three times this week. My brother and his family gave me this for Christmas. It's a 1935 program from the bucket game, beautifully mounted and framed. So here it is, Alicia and anyone else who's interested, in all its deco splendor.

This is totally going on the wall next to my desk. (Even though Purdue lost that year. S'ok, we still lead the series.)

To keep this vaguely tied to writing, I present to you the very minor poem which donated the name of the trophy.

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood,

When fond recollection presents them to view!

The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild-wood,

And every loved spot which my infancy knew!

...And e'en the rude bucket that hung in the well—

The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket,

The moss-covered bucket which hung in the well.

That's by Samuel Woodworth. I have no idea what else, if anything, he might have written. It reads like song lyrics, don't you think?

Theresa

We're #1!

Iapetus puts us number 1! (And please don't say "in no particular order." #1 is #1. :)

Alicia

Ah, Poetry

I'm not sure if this was penned by Murphy or Murray, but either way, it deserves a spot on the front page. From the comments --

Ode To ‘T’ The quasi Seussarian:D

Working Title: WTF in Publishing

Fakery - Fuckery,
What can I say?
People work hard to screw up my day.
There’s the agent who lies,
The author that denies -
with me in the middle all knowing and wise.:D

Fakery, fuckery what can I say?
If you pull it on me - I’ll fuck up YOUR day!


Thanks to the person in the burka.
Theresa

Great link

New archive on Shakespeare's time.
Article about it.



Archive shedding light on Shakespeare's times goes online

Tudor documents show the pulling power of Titus Andronicus, the cost of darning and fears about the plague

* Maev Kennedy
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 November 2009 11.21 GMT
A unique archive on the theatre of Shakespeare's times, revealing everything from the price of a ferry ticket across the Thames to the cost of a tumbler's breeches, becomes available free to the world today when the papers of the theatre owner and entrepreneur Philip Henslowe and his actor son-in-law Edward Alleyn go online.

Canada and Shakespeare

Tonight. tonight,
The world is full of light,
With suns and moons all over the place.
Tonight, tonight,
The world is wild and bright.
Going mad, shooting sparks into space.

Yeah, I'm in Stratford, Ontario. Theresa is responsible-- not for me being here, but actually for my going to West Side Story, which, duh, I saw the film, so why go to the play.
But she emailed me and told me that if I was stuck in Canada (long boring story, no arrest, however, but that wouldn't be boring) I should see plenty of plays-- you know, Stratford is worldclass theatre-- really-- better than Broadway, I swear, and if you're in New York or New England or the Midwest, it takes only eight hours and a passport --

Anyway, saw West Side Story with a theatre-full of high school students, and it was wonderful, and they were wonderful-- they laughed at the jokes and applauded every number and gave the cast a standing ovation and restored my faith in live theatre-- they cried at the end and I was amazed to find myself crying too-- I mean, really, a 50-year-old musical based on a 400-year-old play based on a 2500-year-old myth (remind me about Shakespeare parodying himself in Midsummer), and here are a bunch of cynical facebook teenagers, and they LOVED it. And so did I (though I have always thought the funny Officer Krupke song should have been in the first half rather than after the tragedy). It's wonderful seeing plays surrounded by teenagers-- they are so REACHABLE-- they care. But of course, this story was told for them. And live theatre is made for teenagers-- reckless and intemperate and in the moment.

Anyway, thanks to Theresa for the sage advice and the calming down (I was a little panicky, just a little, when I thought the only way home involved a bus dropping me at midnight in downtown Detroit...) (okay, REALLY panicky), and I will be home eventually (after Midsummer Night's Dream, A Funny Thing/Forum, Macbeth... really, this is just the best theatre in the world, and so close!).
And here for you is more reason that Youtube totally rules:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWRBtdrw88E&feature=related

Bernstein rehearsing Jose Carrera in Tonight. I can't help it... I love this song.

Alicia (still stuck in Canada-- did you know it's another country? You need a PASSPORT!!!) (Yes, I have a passport, but-- no, really, it's too boring to explain, and Theresa's already heard it all, and she's been really patient...)

College shouldn't be for-profit... except for students

I'm going to link to this article about a for-profit online college not because I agree with it (I don't), but because I want to give you a different, shall we say more practical, perspective. I think what he's writing is dangerous for students, because it's directing them to a prospect that probably won't pan out. If you have friends or young relatives who are thinking of alternative higher education, please have them think it through and really investigate the situation, and start NOT with for-profit but their own state schools.

There are plenty of reasons that prospective students might have to look beyond the traditional four-year public or private college. Maybe you live in a rural area. Maybe you screwed up in high school and barely graduated, or just have a GED. (Many soon-to-be great students, btw, weren't great successes in high school.) This is why most states have extensive community college systems, to provide an alternative track to education.

I'm a community college teacher (I also teach at a 4-year college, and I've taught at both state and private schools), and I know this: You can get a 2-year degree or two years of college, fully transferrable, fully accreditable, at most state community colleges, no funny stuff needed, for about $3000 a year (and most students qualify for federal and/or state aid, which makes it cheaper). You can take that $6000 first two years of college to most of the state's 4-years colleges and get full credit, and you'll pay more for the last 2 years, but you will still get a 4-year degree accepted as a real degree at any graduate school, the military, and any employer.

And most students don't need to go far for either in-person or online education. Most states have a community college system with transferrable credits and many, many campuses. (My own in a medium-sized state has 23 campuses.) And you can also take many of the lower-level (freshman) courses, the required ones, online either at a community college or a big state school (University of Maryland has a very extensive online system, used by many in the military-- full disclosure here-- I tutor online in their writing center). It's cheaper, of course, if you take the courses in the state where you reside (much cheaper). But there is extensive financial aid available, and extensive advice on all this, at the colleges themselves.

And when you finish, you have actual credits. I don't know if you get a great education-- though I teach online, I'm the first to say that in-person classes can be better -- but then, I think you can get a great education online at Podunk Comm College or a terrible education in-person at Harvard. It depends very much on the student's desire and willingness to work hard. I just hate to see those virtues exploited as they traditionally have been by the for-profit college education companies (I don't know if this one in the article is exploitative, but the history of the industry makes me pessimistic). Yes, non-profit colleges also engage in chicanery (I think they often make freshman classes onerous so that students will pay tuition and then drop out), but at least, if you persist, the degree is worth something. (I'm a firm believer that the purpose of all this is knowledge, wisdom, all that good stuff, but you know, my students aren't wrong to think that there should be a more pecuniary reward too. And, uh, I know from experience-- the only way they can be charging only $99 a class is by trimming teacher-student interaction to the barest minimum, which means probably there's not a lot of wisdom-transmission going on.)

The only profit that can be made from selling college education, I fear, comes by ripping off students in some way. Education isn't a profitable pursuit. It's not supposed to be, and it never has been, and it never will be.

If you know a prospective student who is unsure of how best to return to college, please suggest that he/she call the state community college and ask to speak to an admissions advisor. (They can email me, too-- arasley@ivytech.edu.) Most comm. colleges accept GED-- in fact, most have classes preparing you for that test-- and also help you get CLEP credit (which gets you college credit for life and occupational experience). And the advising is free, and so is the help to get financial aid. Every community college has had many thousands of students and the staff and faculty have a lot of experience working with non-traditional and returning students.

I just never want to talk to another despairing student like the young man I met last month. He'd taken 4 classes at a for-profit school. He was the first in his family to go to college and didn't have a lot of knowledge about it. He paid $4K, most of it financed by student loans. The courses couldn't be transferred. He never got the cushy job they'd suggested he would get, and he ended up defaulting on his loans... which means that he can't get any more student loans when he goes to an accredited school. He was so sad. And he felt betrayed, because here he'd tried hard to raise himself, to challenge himself, and someone exploited this to rip him off. He thought it was his own fault.

Say what you will about state universities and their monopolies and all that, and the terrible tuition increases every year (very little of which, btw, goes to teachers :). But the non-profit colleges and universities are filled with dedicated faculty and staff members. And they aren't in it to get a profit. Few of us would be working for such low pay if we didn't love students and want to help them. :)

Alicia

This Belongs on the Front Page

If you're not already reading the comments to our posts, you're missing out on some real gems.

Such as this from iapetus999, in response to my post about egregiously bad queries:

Uhh, these aren't misspellings, these are new words.

queery-Query for more "alternative" content
manuskript-A ms for a Vampire story
manuscrip-A very short ms.
novell-A story about a software company.
storey-A story with a higher elevation
storie-A story about Faerie
heero-A truly masculine hero
heroe-A pregnant fish hero
erottic-Watch out for bed bugs
aventure-A story about a sex business venture
sex seen-I've seen it already

Hope this helps.


Thanks, it does. Well, it helps my mood, anyway! LOL

Theresa

Best last words ever

John Palmer (this is via Olbermann) of Colorado died at 62 after a long battle with cancer. His last words are words that more and more baby boomers might echo:
"I can't believe Keith Richards outlived me!"

Alicia

For Genella

Introducing MOE, from February of last year. :)

I knew I had blogged that once upon a time. Took forever to find it. We need better sidebar labeling!

Theresa

Bittersweet

Here's a good example of a bittersweet ending.

(No, I don't mean the Magic playing above their ability the whole playoffs, only to lose so badly.)

There was old Bill Russell standing so tall to give the "Bill Russell MVP award". And I remember when it was announced they'd be naming it after him. It was a surprise to him, but he said that he'd been told that his wife (who had just died a month or so before) knew about it. That's bittersweet, first that he had to get this great honor without her, but also he knew now that she'd had that moment of joy before her death (and kept the secret from him, which is pretty impressive).

Next year, for sure, the Pacers. Stop laughing.
Alicia

She Shrieked Scurrilously

Go here and read the post on Editing Aids if you want a giggle.

I've been too busy to post, but help is on its way. I'm in the process of finalizing two new hires. Thank God, Praise Jeebus, Hallelujah and Amen. We'll do some log lines just as soon as my inbox stabilizes under the 100-pending-messages mark. I've been fighting for weeks to get it into the 90s, but then it shoots back up almost instantly. Just can't keep up right now. Sorry. Too much going on.

FYI, for those who are wondering about this sort of thing, I did pick up a new author from RT. This means I have a perfect record of finding new talent, at least one new author, at every RT I've attended. No other conference yields the same results.

Theresa

Character question

Okay, I need examples here.

When do you know it's deep, textured characterization, and not inconsistent characterization?

Like a woman leader who has been, up to this time, all for freedom of speech, suddenly engages in censorship. What would make it inconsistent characterization, and what would make it deep?

Examples?

Alicia

Housekeeping

A few small items--

Log Lines

We still have a few log lines in our inbox. I'm willing to keep going with them if you want me to. What say you?

Brenda Novak's Auction

Every year, author Brenda Novak runs an auction fundraiser for juvenile diabetes. This year again I've donated one evaluation of one complete manuscript. If you're interested in bidding on this fabulous prize, go here.

There are lots of goodies worth bidding on. I've got my eye on Jane Porter's Frog Prince Package (because Jane is wonderful and I love that shade of green), the Faerie Basket (feeding my new fairy obsession), and damn near all of the celebrity-autographed stuff (Johnny Depp, Heath Ledger, Harrison Ford -- however is a girl to choose???).


In other news, I was in a fender-bender Tuesday and am still nursing some aches. It wasn't a bad accident. Just bad enough to fuck up my week. Grr. It's slowing me down on things like email and editing because typing is a bit difficult. The silver lining is that I did get a lot of reading done, mainly because it was one of the few things I could still do! Now if I can just type for more than a few minutes at a stretch, I might be able to do something about all these manuscripts I've read.

Theresa,
who has decided that if you're too old to remember your phone number, hear the blare of car horns, or see six vehicles in oncoming lanes, then you're probably too old to drive

What Shakespeare advises writers

Rebecca sent me this--

William's Ten
Ten Things I Learned From Shakespeare About Being a Writer

He jests at scars that never felt a wound. (Romeo and Juliet.)

I scorn to change my state with kings. (Sonnet XXIX)

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow
and which will not. (Macbeth)

Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight. (Othello)

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is
winged Cupid painted blind. (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. (The Taming of the Shrew)

Not mad, but bound more than a mad-man is. (Romeo and Juliet)

To hold, as ’t were, the mirror up to nature. (Hamlet)

We must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. (Julius
Caesar)

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, haply I think on thee.
(Sonnet XXIX)

Limitation is Strength

I have lately become obsessed with the Bravo show Top Chef, where chefs compete in all sorts of cooking challenges. (Hey, no calories if the food stays on TV!)

Anyway, there is really an interesting dynamic evolving this season. Several episodes, one or two chefs faces some disaster that would seem to doom the effort. For example, one time, Hosea's food was kept in a broken refrigerator and spoiled overnight. So he had to deal with that handicap as he cooked for the challenge the next day... he had to improvise, start over, work around. And he won the challenge, over all the chefs who had a much easier time and could cook exactly what they'd prepared.

Last night, the incomparable Fabio, he of the adorable Italian accent, broke his finger while starting to cook. This obviously is a great handicap when you have to chop and mix. But he somehow managed, and... won the challenge.

The corollary too-- whenever a contestant says, "Oh, piece of cake," because this is a seafood dish and she's a seafood chef, she always loses. It's as if strengths are dangerous because you get complacent!

I'm sure this connects to writing somehow. :)

Note to Chris Eldin

Please email me at edittorrent@gmail.com.

Thanks!
Theresa

ps. Hi! *waves* to everyone else. Miss you guys! I have a long list of things to blog about when I can get ten minutes to blog something. January! Sheesh!

pps. The rest of you can also use the gmail address to contact Alicia and me, except we often forget to check that address, so please be patient! Really, it's faster through the comments.