Writer’s Mail for July 6, 2011
by Jen Wilcher
“We’re shy, needy, driven to distraction, full of grandiose ideas and hopelessly creative, extroverted, reclusive, irritable, joyful, marginalized, and common. Like Walt Whitman, we are cameras and we are the cosmos. But mostly, we’re lonely.” ~ Alvaro Rodriguez
AT THE BOOKSTORE TUESDAY NIGHT
About ten gathered upstairs at Barnes & Noble on Tuesday night with only thre readers as Pat Edwards did a workshop on some secrets of MS Word.
Judith McNeil:
My piece was a 3-page script for animation called, “Beauty Needs A Beast”. Randy caught an error in a description, I had called “Samurai Tummy”, meaning “Sumo Tummy”. Greg thought that image of the beast could be unified, if Dr. Whazat wore a mask/costume that was the same as image, Beauty sees, as well as the Beast neighbor.
Greg Spry: The group felt that Professor Kevin Sommerfield could take another puff from his nanoinhaler to calm himself during the speech. The chapter doesn’t need the first scene break. Kevin’s geeky talk of science and Albert the monkey was good for the most part, although at least one person felt overwhelmed by it. The part beginning with “Punctures space-time…” was particularly troublesome. When rephrasing, make sure the high level concepts are clear. At the same time, perhaps the professor could “geek-out” even more so. He could act confused about why everyone else doesn’t get the science even though it’s simple to him. Furthermore, more of the audience needs to be shown rather than telling the reader about their actions. CTEC needs justification for sending Marie beyond Marie’s begging of her editor (would CTEC not send their science reporter?). Marie’s actions were consistent with the airhead character established in chapter 4. When the professor exits the offices, where does the rest of his team come from? And most importantly, what’s the United Nation’s purpose behind holding the press conference. It’s an announcement that manned FTL spaceflight is possible, but they should still have an agenda. Their PR people will want to mold public opinion.
Jerry Peterson: Chapter 12, from his novel “Thou Shalt Not Murder”, received kind treatment. “I recognized the McCosky story,” Millie Mader said. “That happened in Texas, a woman running over her husband three time.” Jerry said he had read it,
that it’s a ‘ripped from the headlines’ story that the old Law & Order series also picked up for one episode. Pat Edwards asked that the state police investigator be more polite in his interview of the banker. “In the place and time period of the story – Tennessee in the 1960s – it would be appropriate . . . ‘yes, sir’, ‘may I ask, sir’.”
Who’s up next . . .
July 12: Kim Simmons (short story, “4020 Galactic Century”), Carol Hornung (scene), Jack Freiburger (chapter, Path to Brays Head), and Cole Ruby (???).
July 19: John Schneller (chapter, Final Stronghold), Eileen Flanagan (???), Aaron Boehm (screenplay/part 9, Hell Cage), Jennifer Hansen (???), Rebecca Rettenmund (journal entry), and Amanda Myers (short short story, “Nightmare”).
August 2:, Jim Cue (???), Greg Spry (chapter 8, Beyond Cloud Nine), Clayton Gill (chapter 17, Fishing Derby), Millie Mader (chapter 27, Life on Hold), Liam Wilbur (chapter, Scott & Rory), and Kim Simmons (chapter, City of Summer).
Keeping up on the old hands . . .
Jaime Nelson was a member of TWS all through her high school and college years, though in college she could be with us only during breaks and the summers. Now she works in the Big Apple.
“Since I moved to New York City in June 2009, I have graduated from NYU, interned for two book publishers, gotten a part-time job, gotten a full-time job, moved to New Jersey, visited both San Francisco and Atlanta on business trips, joined a writers group in Manhattan, and started my own business. I was also the victim of pneumonia, shingles, and identity theft in that time. I had to throw in that part lest you think I made all this up.
“Hal Leonard Performing Arts Publishing Group (http://www.facebook.com/l/ae00caY1P7AsGEOB4cHPCGCWFQw and www.halleonardbooks.com) is a great book publisher to work for because it’s small enough – 10 of us – where we have a lot of freedom to experiment, but it’s backed by a big corporate office in Milwaukee. As the publicity and marketing assistant, I personally publicize 40 performing arts books a year, plus I do the marketing for the theater books and help all of our authors with social media. Just this month, I’ve been put in charge of creating Hal Leonard’s first blogs and podcast. I was also told to pick out a video camera because we are going to start to shoot our own book trailers. It’s never been a more exciting time to be a part of a company.
“This year, I also started a web comedy production company called Plain Ketchup with my friend Lindsey. Right now, you can watch animated interviews with special guests on http://www.facebook.com/l/ae00cIbPriFvCfXWd9fK7rtHr1g and www.plainketchuppodcast.com, but in the fall we’ll also begin to include web comics, audio interviews, video horoscopes, and old radio dramas. So stay tuned for that!
“Come join me on Facebook…http://www.facebook.com/plainketchup
http://www.facebook.com/HalleonardBooks
http://www.facebook.com/ApplauseBooks
http://www.facebook.com/AmadeusPress
http://www.facebook.com/limelighteditions
http://www.facebook.com/BackbeatBooks
“If you’re on Twitter…
@plainketchup, @halleonardbooks, @applausebooks, @amadeuspress, @limelightbooks, @backbeatbooks”
Word Spy . . .
teacup
n. A college student with a fragile, easily shattered psyche. Also: teacup kid.
Example Citations:
Toughen up, teacup. No matter how brilliant you think you (and your argument) may be, the day will come when you will be told in no uncertain terms that you are laughably wrong. Will you cry? …
It’s bad enough that the teacups think, feel and act as they do. That the rules of the lawprof game are
to encourage this teacup behavior is absurd. —Scott H. Greenfield, “Law School Lessons: The Teacup Rule,” Simple Justice, May 4, 2010
In the US, Skenazy says helicopter parenting has led to a generation of young adults so fragile they
are known as “teacup kids’. —Judy Skatssoon, “The perils of parenting,” The Telegraph, October 1, 2010
Earliest Citation:
Bright college freshmen arrive on campus as …”teacups”—sophisticated but overprotected … says Wendy Mogel, author of “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee,” which is among the best-selling of a wave of new books about pressure.
“The teacups break because they literally don’t know when to eat, and what to eat and when to sleep,”
says Mogel, a Los Angeles psychologist. —Jennifer Sinco Kelleher et al., “Lessons in How to Chill Out,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2002
Related Words:
free-range kid
freshmore
helicopter parent
lawnmower parent
Wikipedia kid
Permalink: http://www.wordspy.com/words/teacup.asp
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