blogging the day away

All right, don’t get too excited, but this is my second blog entry in 5 or 6 days. Unreal, right? Man, I feel like all I’ve been doing with my life is writing blogs! Two in one week? It’s definitely time for a vacation or something.

Could this be the Soul’s year?

What a game it was! What a finish! The Philadelphia Soul are hosting the division championship game for the first time ever. It should be quite the scene at the Center on Saturday. Whaddya mean you’ve never heard of the AFL? It’s football in the spring and summer. What more could you ask?

The Tipping Point

Now, you people know by now how late I am to so many different things. Could be cultural, could be historical, political, whatever. Could also be literary. I’m finally reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Mr. Gladwell already blew my mind when I read Blink, which was a great book, and he has done it again with The Tipping Point. It’s all about how little things can make a major difference and how things like ideas and behaviors can spread just like a virus would. Like an epidemic. And why.

Other current events

… but only the ones that center on ME. I am preparing for another round of submissions for Lilly Dances, my sort-of-picture-book-but-not-quite project. It’s more of a very short book with pictures. Actually, it has no pictures right now (I’m no artist), but it would be way better with pictures. Like a picture book would. Like a really long picture book.

but not quite.

The kids are doing fine on their summer break from school. I’m doing fine also, but I CAN tell you how many weeks until the school buses start rolling again.

seven.

Click the little triangle.

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deserve?

This really got me cranked up when I read it. Cynthia Leitich Smith has a website loaded with resources and advice for writers. So in the course of my exhaustive (minutes at a time!) research into the writing life and the publishing industry, I came across her site and read through much of what she has to say. A lot of it sounded like good advice and I was really glad that she collected all of that information and made it available to writers like me. Then I read,

You must read. You must read like you breathe, only more proactively. You must read so much that when anyone mentions a children’s or YA book, you are familiar with it or at least its author and/or editor, or you are jotting the title down to check it out. You must be better read than your independent bookseller and your public librarian (if you live in an amazing book city like Austin where this last goal is impossible, you must nevertheless still TRY). When someone announces the, say, Newbery winners, you should have read so much that there are no real surprises to you. You must study the books you read, the good ones and the bad, and be able to clearly articulate what does and doesn’t work and why. And if you think that you have no time or money to do this, get a different goal because you don’t deserve to make it. Libraries are a godsend.

I have a problem with that kind of thinking. Isn’t that like saying that I should have a P.H.D in food science or I don’t deserve to make a really good cheeseburger? Of course I don’t agree with that. Yes, it is good to know what you’re getting into when you write a particular kind of book. Yes, it is good to educate yourself about the market and what has been written and what has been successful and what hasn’t. I don’t think, however, that a thorough understanding of the whole market is absolutely necessary for a writer to create a great story. Cynthia Leitich Smith’s opinion that there are those who “deserve” success and those who don’t based on how much they have been involved in the Children’s and Young Adult book scene is really self-serving and exclusionary.

This is not me being defensive, either. The kind of involvement and research she claims is necessary is exactly what I like (and need) to do. That’s my personality. I don’t think it applies to everyone, though. There are many musicians who have created music that has changed people’s lives despite the musician being unable to read a note of music. Then there are other musicians who spend their whole lives studying and learning music history and theory. Everyone must find his or her own path.

It is possible that I’m just being nit-picky about the way C.L.S. has expressed her opinion, but I trust that a writer as accomplished and successful as she has chosen her words carefully and says what she means. I just don’t agree with that small part of it.

kind of busy, I guess.

Kind of a busy weekend here so far. We had a couple of baseball games (kids) to go to, we started prepping the pool for the season and we are still in the process of painting the porch. I haven’t had much writing time in a few days, but I have had a little reading time, so I guess that counts. I’m reading How to Write and Sell Your First Novel by Oscar Collier and Frances Spatz Leighton and I’m really enjoying it. It contains a lot of stuff I’ve read elsewhere, but I still like reading it. Whenever I do something for the first time, I tend to do a lot of research beforehand. That’s what this is.

At the beginning of June, I head out to Chicago for a little R&R with a few old friends. I’m really looking forward to it. That reminds me that I have to get the new essay up before I leave.

It figures

Well, here I am, thinking I’m all evolved and stuff. Then my new “friend from afar”, Cecil Castellucci, has a link on her blog to some sort of a personality test. I’m not usually interested in internet tests, since most of them seem to be written by 15-year-old boys who want to know if I’ve ever kissed a girl before or if I’ve ever been drunk. Not interested. However, the test Cecil linked to is part of the marketing for a movie called “The Golden Compass”, which I’ve never heard of, but it asks a bunch of questions about your personality and then shows you your “Daemon”, which is your soul in some sort of animal form.

Got all that?

Good.

Here is mine:

A GIBBON?? Come on! My soul has taken on the form of a small ape? That’s what I get for answering the questions truthfully.

True friends will italicize blog sections for you.

Well, I’ve already used the titles of “Bits and Pieces” and “Flotsam and Jetsam” so there’s no way I will use either of them for this post, even though that’s pretty much what this one will be.

Trip report

We just spent a long weekend in Washington D.C. and it was, overall, a really nice time. The hotel was nice, but the rooms were mediocre. We had connecting rooms with the other family that was traveling with us and it’s a good thing, since the toilet in one room only worked intermittently. Also, the hotel charged $25/day to park. That’s hard enough to swallow, but our vehicle is too large to fit into an indoor garage (which is where most hotel guests with cars park and is nice and secure) so we had to park in “oversized” parking which turned out to be an alley behind the hotel. I paid $50 to park in an alley! I think next time, we’ll stay outside the city. Maybe Arlingon. Anyway, we walked the kids’ legs off the first day, but we did see a lot. We adopted a much more relaxed pace for the rest of the weekend and had a really good trip.

What is with these geneology sites?

I’ve been kind of casually researching my family tree and the amount of information available on the internet is astounding. Even more astounding is the amount of money you have to pay to access it. You can get a sampling of info from Ancestry.com for a reasonable fee, but to really research you need full access, which costs almost the same as the Gross National Product of a country like Belgium. So imagine my glee when I discovered that my local library will give me access to all of the census data for free. They use a site called HeritageQuest and it comes with a decent search function. It seems, though, that the search function isn’t quite as decent as I’d hoped, since I have been unable to locate information that I know should be there based on my Ancestry.com research. Maybe I just need to tweak my search a bit. I’ll investigate that more in the coming days.

Overpriced Beverage Report

I had a really good Chai Latte at Starbucks while in D.C. A well made Chai is a true thing of beauty.

Where the #!*& did he get that?

My 4 year old son knows he’s not supposed to pick his nose, so last weekend he asked his grandmother if it would be ok for him to pick his eye. I don’t know, maybe he just HAD to pick SOMETHING.

It’s just time

Time, that is, to redesign my website. JPChambers.com has had the same layout since its inception and I think it’s time for a new look. Maybe something cleaner and easier to read. I definitely need to make more room for the writing and less room for the other design elements. I’m also probably going to finalize my conversion to an all Mac workflow. Until now, I’ve been using Frontpage (in Windows) for my website design and maintenance and the iBook for all of the writing and research. There are at least a couple of good options for me to investigate, so that’s what I’ll be doing.

That’s all for now.

More French and another bonus

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

More French and a bonus

Well, a guy can only learn so much French from a book, so I downloaded an audiobook of
French language instruction. It’s produced by Earworms MBT. It has music running through
the background while people speak words and phrases and the music is supposed to help you
remember. It’s actually pretty cool and enjoyable to listen to. The problem – the music is

well, it’s sort of …

sexy.

I feel like I’m listening to some sort of weird French porno movie.

bumchicka, bumchicka, bwowbwow

“Je voudrais un cafe au lait”.

bumchicka, bumchicka, bwowbwow

“I would like a coffee with milk.”

bumchicka, bumchicka

Mmmmm. Cafe!

It’s almost embarrassing listening to these people. However, this does confirm my suspicion
that French pornos probably do include coffee.

BONUS: two thoughts in one day!

My 3 year old son can count to five.

I did not sit down with him and teach him this skill. He knows how to count to five because
five is the number I count to before he gets in trouble. He’s pretty sure that the number that
comes after “five” is “That’s it, now you’re gonna get it.”

like this:
one
two
three
four
five
that’sitnowyou’regonnagetit

I can’t wait until he takes THAT knowledge with him to kindergarten.

Learning French and a bonus

Monday, May 08, 2006

Learning French

So I’ve decided to learn French. The French language seems to be a major player in the food and wine worlds, so I bought a book and have begun to teach myself how to speak and read in French, since I’m also interested in food and wine. The book starts with some basic sounds and words, so I’ve tried repeating them in my head to get used to the different pronunciations and accents. Once things have been bouncing around in my head for a while, they usually end up as a song and French words have suffered the same fate. Here is my first French song.

Ou est le fleur limoges?
Ou est le fleur limoges?
Qu’est-ce que c’est citron?

Ou est le taxi?
Je voudrais une toilette citron.
Je voudrais une toilette citron.

English translation:

Where is the flower dismiss?
Where is the flower dismiss?
What is that lemon?

Where is the taxi?
I would like a lemon toilet.
I would like a lemon toilet.

Sounds cooler in my head.

OH, LOOK. A bonus thought.

Chai Lattes really should be served hot. I tried an iced Chai the other day,
and it just didn’t work for me. Besides that, if you buy an iced Chai, you’re paying
a lot of money for a lot of ice. I can make ice myself. Now I feel silly for buying all that
expensive ice.