Grateful: Day Two

I'm grateful for my boys:

There's nothing I love more in the world than these three faces. And yes, they are sitting on a dinosaur at the zoo.  Aren't they awesome*?

*Speaking of awesome, my three-year-old made up a joke a while ago that goes something like this:

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Cow!
Cow who?
It ate you!!!

He told it three times tonight.  It cracks me up every time.

Grateful: Day One

There's lots of people posting about things they're grateful for every day this month, on Facebook and Twitter and such, so I decided to have themed week.  I've got lots to be grateful for, and I can't cover everything even if that's all I ever wrote about.  But I can try to say some of the big things.  And I will:

Monday

Today was the only day I have to work this week, because my students get Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off, and I teach every other day.  And I have to say: I am grateful for my job.

For those of you who don't know, I teach writing as an adjunct professor for the University of Utah.  I used to travel up to classes and hold lectures there, but they have a partnership with a nearby charter high school, and I've always loved teaching younger (freshman-aged) students.  Of course I volunteered, and it was the best decision of my career.

The students I get in my classes are generally smart, motivated, and super talented.  I love in-class discussions, and the questions I get from lectures, and watching how carefully and intelligently they review each others' essays.  I may not be especially fond of the grading process, but I do appreciate how my comments can help create a personalized dialogue between me and students, ultimately improving their writing and, in some cases, teaching me a thing or two as well.  I took a lot of science classes as an undergraduate, and I toyed with the idea of becoming a microbiology professor or something (chemistry professors get to blow stuff up!), but writers can tie anything in to their discipline.  Water polo rules? Woorari poison darts? Werewolves? You can write about anything you know (including explosions) and you can learn from students (I've learned tons!), so I'm pretty happy with my chosen subject.

I stayed at work late today to talk with a handful of students about Thanksgiving traditions, Ayn Rand, and fantasy villains.  I've worked a lot of jobs in my life, but I can tell you that I never stayed late at Dairy Queen during high school, or at the DoubleTree Inn in Seatac where I temped over summers between semesters.  I love my job now, though, and I know how lucky I am to spend time with such awesome people!

My handwriting on the board actually isn't that good, and most my classrooms have whiteboards.  Still, I can pretend this is something I wrote, blurs and all.

Game Night!

I'll post this morning, because last night my sister and her husband came over, so after the kids went to bed we played games.

Now we have a lot of games.  My dad loves games, and we grew up with whole closets full of games we could pick out and play.  Since we have many choices, we choose our game for the night by starting out with Mario Kart Wii.  Whoever wins the four-person race by earning the most points picks what we'll do next.

Yesterday we played Scribblish, which is super fun if you have the right group and completely deserves its own post.

So that's what I was doing instead of blogging.  Doodling kangaroos and mad scientists and zom-bees (terrible pun--I was tired).  Whee!

Lazy

Well, I wasn't lazy the rest of the day, but I'm feeling lazy now.  Earlier, I taught, finished a shot story, edited a critique partner's novel, took my three-year-old to the dentist, and (with my husband) watched three kids in addition to our two.  Now I am ready to sit back and watch something.  So here are my two favorite Kid History movies--the first because of the grapes, the second because the healthy eating reminds me of my own mother.  Watch with me, if you'd like!

(By the way, this really is the sort of thing you do in college when you're at Brigham Young University.  Make weird videos, tell stories, watch videos other people made in huge auditoriums while yelling things like "Yellow grapes!" and "Ninja vanish!" I recognize those auditoriums, by the way.  I'll have to write a post about a 'modern music' concert I went to in one of them...when I'm less lazy!)

Building a World

Information flow is a tricky beast for me.  I spent lots of time during my undergraduate and graduate degrees examining books with beautiful language, excellent characterization, timeless themes...and absolutely no magic.  Or, if there was magic, it was allegorical and in a seventeenth-century poem.  So I get out of school, and I write a book, and I find that I have strategies for characters.  And language.  And themes.  But I discover that there's also this thing called world building, where you have to explain how your magic works, where you have to set up rules in a careful way to make your book punchy-surprising at the end.

And it's something I never learned how to do.

For an example of my rewriting style, I'll share my strategy for characters: I highlight each main character with a single color, every line they speak, every action they do (sometimes I just draw lines down the side).  Then I take a page in my notebook and make a list of their goals, attributes, habits when they're nervous/angry/happy--anything I know about the character, including what I want the reader to feel at various points.  Sometimes I make (bad) sketches.  And then I go back through the manuscript with my colored markers and rewrite (or give a page in my notebook where I rewrite).  And it works.  Sometimes it takes me a few drafts, but it works!

I need something like that for world/magic building.  Ideas are welcome.  And I'll let you know what I end up doing, because if you're crazy enough to write fantasy, you've got to build those words into worlds!

Werewolves

I love games.  And I'm not all that picky--we've got board games and card games and computer games and Wii games...you get the idea.  But one of my favorite games, probably because I'm twisted, is the game of Werewolves.

Werewolves comes from a game called Mafia, which was made up by a psychology grad student in 1986.  The premise is fairly simple: you get a group of eight people or more, pass out roles that the players aren't allowed to share, and start playing based off of whatever character you get.  In the most basic game, you're either a werewolf or a villager--if you're a werewolf, you want to eat villagers until you rule the town, and if you're a villager, you want to execute all those vicious werewolves so you'll stop getting eaten.

Okay, so it sounds more complicated on paper than it does in my head.  Just trust me.  It's fun.  I play it every year with my class (I moderated it today, in fact!), and my students rush out and buy copies over the weekend to play with their friends.  And it really does help with writing!  Watching for people's tells while lying, and figuring out how to manipulate others when you're a werewolf--it's a play of charisma, rhetoric, and character study that I love.  In case I've confused you more than helped, there's a video below that explains the basics (although the included games are not nearly as good as the games I've played/moderated).  But werewolves is awesome!  You should try to play it, and tell me if you do!

Education

Tomorrow I teach.  In fact, tomorrow I pick up another batch of papers to grade--and lots of my students, this time, chose to write about education.  I come from the public school system.  I always loved school, except middle school, and even then I had some exceptional teachers.  But I know there are lots students who struggle, lots of brilliant people who just aren't "academic," and I've thought a lot about what can be done to help those students reach their full potential.

So here's an interesting video--with animation!--about how the school system works.  I'm especially fascinated about the changes that go on in out-of-the-box thinking between Kindergarten and High School and how that might have to do with the factory mentality of the current system.  Also, I wish I could draw such clear images!  It is a few minutes long, but it's worth the watch (did I mention drawings?).  Parents, kids, or anyone who wants to be treated by a smart doctor in 2030: I figure education should be important to all of us!