Critical

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

The critiques were pretty painless last night.  I made a “joke” about being nervous to our leader and so she “let me off the hook” early by making me first.  I’m actually grateful for that.  I was able to get it out of the way and relax about it the rest of the night.

I wasn’t bothered by any of what they said, in fact I anticipated some of it.  There are some areas in The Teacher that are entirely too detailed and serve no purpose for the story.  What I now have to decide is whether to cut them down, or to make them serve a purpose.  While I personally kind of like some of the details, there was a consensus among the group that a few specific areas needed to be “condensed” and what the leader told us the first night was, “take what you want and ignore what you don’t, but if there’s some consistency in a particular area, you should probably revisit it,”  so I guess I will.

A lot of the other comments were about wanting to know more about certain things that are actually already addressed in other areas of the book.  That’s one of the downfalls in the way this works.  I get to submit 25 double spaced pages, three separate times.  They do not have to be the same pages, so I can have up to 75 pages critiqued.  But the first draft of The Teacher is 418 pages.  You can’t expect to know everything about the story and the characters and their backgrounds in 25 or even 75 pages of a 400 page novel.

So all in all, I feel pretty good about the feedback.  I agree with a lot of the comments that require changes and feel good about what I covered in other places that they asked for.  While I may not be as close to Book-Deal ready as I had thought/hoped, I do feel good about what I’ve done and what I can do to improve it.

So…  full speed ahead!

Wish Me Luck

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

By the way, tonight is the night.  In two and a half hours I’ll be at my writing workshop thingamajig and I’ll be getting my first, formal critique/feedback on my manuscript.

The tension mounts by the minute.  I’ll be taking some Ativan later (yes the anxiety is that real).  I want to take it now, but I’m afraid if I take it too early, it’ll wear off too early and that would be bad.

In the end it will all be fine, but that doesn’t really help me much right now, so…

Wish me luck!

It Pays To Be Regular

~ riggledo ~ 3 Comments

… er– A Regular.

There’s a deli across the street from my office.  It doesn’t offer a whole lot of food, but what they do have is generally pretty good.  I’m actually more partial to them in the morning when I want breakfast.  They make croissant breakfast sandwiches and coffee drinks that are pretty tasty and only a little bit over-priced.  It’s a small location, however, and they can’t cook or bake things there, so all their bakery goods come from their sister location three blocks away where they do make everything fresh… as far as I know.

Because they don’t bake anything on site, there is a limited number of things, like for instance, the croissants.  If you don’t get there early enough, they run out and you either have to get something far more fattening, or you get nothing at all.

When I walked in at 9:40 this morning the platter in the display case which should hold the croissants was empty.  I was disappointed that I got there too late… again!  I was looking in the display case to see what else I would get and a gentleman walked in and stood behind me to wait his turn.  I turned to him and told him he could go ahead since I was still looking in the case and just as I turned away from him the cashier looked at me and said, “Ham, egg and cheese.  Right?”

I said, “Yes, but you don’t have any more croissants.”

She told me they had one last one, and then the person who prepares the food started assembling my sandwich.

The cashier turned to the gentleman I had waived pasted me, as he approached, and asked him for his order.  He said, “I’d like a ham, egg and cheese croissant, please?”

It pays to be a regular

Holy Hectic, Batman

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

What a day this has been.  After all those comments I made last week about not putting off the critiques until the last minute, I haven’t been able to get around to doing them until today, even though I got the samples earlier than last week.  And I’ve only been able to do one.  The other one I haven’t even cracked open yet.

I admit I’ve really been putting off doing it because it’s just so tough.  I want to be helpful, but fair, but honest, but constructive, but nice.  This does not come to me naturally, y’all! (I can’t believe I just used that word.)

I noticed last week that a lot of people did their critiques and comments electronically, using the review options (track changes and comments) in Microsoft Word and then printing out the hard copies for the writers.  The first of the two samples and the only one I’ve touched so far, the writer asked us to do it that way.  I’m not sure if that slowed me down or if it would have taken me a long time anyway, but it took me three and a half hours to do my critique and comments on an 18 page sample.  And that’s after having read the story last night.

There were a lot of technical problems with the story and some confusing points that slowed me down and I had to figure out how to comment on those in a positive and constructive way that still said, “You need to change these things.”  It’s not easy!

In addition to that, I had actual work to do today and errands to run at lunch, and blogs piling up in my reader and my own mental blocks against doing this in the first place, all standing in the way, holding me back.

I just don’t want to do them.  Not because I’m being lazy.  I just don’t want to tell people I don’t even know what I think of their writing…  but I want them to do it for me.  And I want them to like what I’ve done and have only great things to say (which is probably too much to expect) and I want them to be supportive and encouraging.  I don’t really believe in karma or good juju, or whatever.  I just don’t.  And yet, I do believe you get what you deserve.  You get what you give. (That’s different, right?)  So I’m doing the critiques and trying to be genuinely helpful in spite of my own insecurity and my fear of coming across more harshly than I mean to and hoping that they won’t, or that I won’t take it that way.

And so here we are on Tuesday night.  I’ve done one critique and have another one to go and yet, twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes from now, I will already be in the work shop, either listening to what they thought of my sample, or telling them what I thought of theirs, and I haven’t even started on the last sample, yet.

No pressure here…

Hands

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

Tonight was my bi-weekly dinner with Lil’B.  When I picked him up, he was bundled up in more layers than I ever remember seeing him in; with a fleece hoodie over his shirt, a thick puffy vest over that and a knit cap on his head, he looked like a longshoremen on his way to the docks.  I was informed he had been sick and was still getting over it. He told me he didn’t go to school on Thursday and Friday while he was sick and I asked him what he did during that time.  He, of course said, “I don’t know.”  I asked him if he played video games and he said no. Then he told me that he watched movies.

I said, “That’s a good way to pass the time while you’re sick.  What did you watch?”

“On Thursday I watched Elmo in Grouchland,” he told me, ” and on Friday, I watched Rio.”  The boy has watched Rio a thousand times so I didn’t spend any energy on that, but I was amused because he watched Elmo.

I told him, “That sounds like fun! I really like Elmo.”

“Me too.”

We went to this little restaurant in Alameda, called The Red Onion (It claims to be “The Original The Red Onion”), which sadly didn’t turn out very well.  The food wasn’t too bad, but the service, location, service, ambiance, service, and prices… and service, were not great.  Plus they don’t take credit cards which I didn’t know until we were already seated and looking at the menu.  They take cash or ATM (with a $.75 service charge.)  That’s just ridiculous.  And Shifty.  Anyway, we had a lot of downtime while we were waiting for anyone to notice that we were in need of some sort of service or other.  (It happened multiple times.)

There was a plasma screen TV on the wall which was showing Space Jam and he was entranced.  This is the reason I enjoy hanging out with Lil’B.  I like kids movies and with him, I get to watch them.

Lil’B had spaghetti which, for a while, he was eating one noodle at a time, getting the end in his mouth and then slurping in Lady and the Tramp style.  I watched him do this a couple of times and chuckled.  I’m pretty sure that, as an adult influence, I was supposed to tell him to stop and eat the spaghetti properly, but, you know, I fail at adult influence…  At least I do when the kid is being funny.  The thing is though, as I watched him slurp the noodles, I also noticed that they were hitting the front of his hoodie.  There wasn’t nearly enough sauce on the noodles for my taste and the noodles were fairly clean, but I spoke up anyway, telling him that he was going to get his shirt dirty.

He put his fork down, picked up a napkin and looked down at his shirt front.  He couldn’t see any sauce, so he pulled the front of the vest apart more so he could get a better look.  Then he pulled the front of the hoodie, where the zipper was, apart so he could look at the metal.

And that’s when I saw it.  Something I hadn’t watched for.  Something I hadn’t anticipated, though, I should have because it was inevitable.  This little boy, who watched Elmo and Rio while he was sick and was so engrossed in Space Jam while we ate…  This little kid who still doesn’t ask for what he wants and just goes with the flow…  The spritely young thing that doesn’t even stand as tall as my chest…  Has grown up hands.  I don’t know when I last really paid attention to his hands, but I know they were tiny little things with bad hang nails and gnawed, ragged edges; scrawny, clumsy, short little things.  And now, his fingers are long and slender, controlled and strong. His hands are grown up hands and it seems like it happened over night.  It’s just one more sign that his “little boy” days are numbered and before long he’ll be a young man.  I can’t believe it!