Tuesdays with Story

Tuesdays With Story
Writer’s Mail for July 8, 2010
by Greg Spry

Next Fifth Tuesday – August 31
Our next Fifth Tuesday feast and festival of writing is August 31. Where, we don’t know. But we do know what the writing challenge is: You’re late for work because you overslept. Your boss hates oversleepers, but he does love entertaining stories. Create the most outlandish excuse for why you were late . . . and do it in no more than 400 words.

Here are two things you should do now:
– Put our Fifth Tuesday event on your calendar. First-and-third hosts.
– Write your Fifth Tuesday mini-masterpiece now. There isn’t a good reason to put it off. Yah, right, I overslept. Who’s gonna believe that?

Who’s Up Next? 
July 13: Holly Bonnicksen-Jones (???), Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon), Ann Potter (chapter), Jack Freiburger (chapter, Return to Bray’s Head), Patrick Tomlinson (???), Andrea Kirchman (???), with Dan Hamre as alternate.

July 20: Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon), Nicole Rosario (???), Jen Wilcher (chapter, Memories Awakened), Judith McNeil (radio play/part 2, “South to Sunday”), Patrick Tomlinson (short story/part 2, “Downloading Death”), and Karl Bryan (short story, “Dubai Stopwatch”/part 2).

July 27: Terry Hoffman (chapter, The Journal), Karen Zethmayr (“Oak Arena”), and Karl Bryan (short story, “Dubai Stopwatch”/part 3).

August 3: Kim Simmons (chapters 41-42, James Hyde), Greg Spry (novella/part 3, Goodbye, Mars), Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon), Amber Boudreau (chapter 15), Clayton Gill (chapter 15, Fishing Derby), and Jerry Peterson (chapter 12, For Want of a Hand)

August 17: John Schneller (chapter 1, book 3), Millie Mader (poem), Patrick Tomlinson (???), Judith McNeil (???), and Aaron Boehm (???).

Special Event
TWS alumnae Leslie Huber will be here Thursday promoting her book, The Journey Takers. 

Come join us for dinner with Leslie at 5 p.m. at Cafe Porta Alba. That’s in the Hilldale Mall area. At 7 p.m., she will do an author talk and signing at the Sequoyah library.

For Our Short Story Writers
            Looking for a place where you can posts your stories and get some attention while you work on legit sales or finishing your novel? Check out Fiction Writers Platform, http://www.fictionwritersplatform.net/

            You can post here while keeping all publications rights to your stories. Hey, that’s all right.

Great Word
Courtesy of Word Spy Paul McFedries:
cradle-to-gate
n. The portion of a product’s life cycle from inception to the point where it leaves the manufacturer.

Example Citations: Salt Spring Coffee’s French Roast Nicaragua is carbon neutral from cradle to gate. This means that the company has bought enough carbon credits to offset all the carbon produced until the consumer buys the coffee. That’s only 37 percent of the carbon created by one bag of coffee. After that, it’s up to the consumer to pick up the slack.
– Rebecca Lindell, You want cream, sugar or carbon credits with that?, The Globe and Mail, June 29, 2010
This paper aims to identify and quantify the environmental impacts associated to Eucalyptus TCF pulp manufacture by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as an analytical tool. The system has been defined using a cradle-to-gate perspective, that is to say from forest activities to the exit gate of the pulp mill.
– Sara Gonzalez-Garcia et al., Environmental impact assessment of total chlorine free pulp from Eucalyptus globulus in Spain (PDF), Journal of Cleaner Production, February 13, 2009

Earliest Citation: Furthermore, environmental burdens of ‘upstream’ processes such as ammonia and electricity generation were included in the study, but downstream processes using nitric acid were not. The study was therefore ‘cradle-to-gate’, rather than the more comprehensive ‘cradle-to-grave’ analysis.
– Jack Eisenhauer, Shawna McQueen, Environmental Considerations In Process Design & Simulation, The Center, January 1, 1996 (approx)

Notes: The “gate” here is the factory (or farm or mill or whatever) gate (or door or loading dock or whatever), so cradle-to-gate refers to everything that happens with a product until it’s ready to ship. This means the usage in the Globe and Mail citation is slightly inaccurate because cradle-to-gate doesn’t include shipping to the retailer and retailer storage. The phrase cradle-to-gate is based on the much older phrase cradle-to-grave, which refers to a product’s entire life cycle, and which has been in the language since at least 1943.

 The Final Word
“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” —Orson Scott Card