“I felt her absence. It was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. You wouldn’t need to run to the mirror to know they were gone.” – James Dashner, The Scorch Trials
Notes from May, Week 1, 2016
Apparently there was a meeting this week and I totally spaced it. Luckily, the rest of the group was on their game and provided these notes.
Amber: Pat had to ask if the main character had two arms as only the hair raised on one of them. Most of the group picked up the fact that Moira is of mixed race, half white and half black, but there were two in the group who didn’t get that right away. Shel liked one line in particular. Kashmira missed the previous interaction with Moira’s mother at the beginning of the novel as this is a rewrite and now totally different. The ending was good and made people want to read more (I think.)
Kashmira: Pat pointed out that it slowed down a bit and there was a discussion about how to make one of the scenes more compelling. There were several questions regarding the time period. John wondered about the policeman’s race.
John: The discussion focused on two significant concerns; 1) The motivation of the protagonist that drives him to intercede and take the whipping to protect the smaller child. Is cause necessary, and is this realistic in the tough survival world of an orphanage? 2) What is the world and time period? How can the reader be made aware early enough in the story? The interaction between DinSwiller and the kids was interpreted differently by some. Need to work on clarity in this. This was a great opportunity for me as some were aware of the story while for others it was new.
Jerry: Pat and others wanted to know what happened to the black family who were servants in the Brinkmann household. They disappeared before 1920 and Zigman did not try to find them or their descendants. Several thought Zigman should share the results of his investigation with the couple who unearthed the child’s casket in their garden, saying that needed to be addressed in the rewrite.
Other Odds and Ends
Like Charlie finding his golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a child finding the right book to read opens the door to hours of joy and wonderment…and sometimes Everlasting Gobstoppers! We all have our favorites—the books we read over and over again until the pages were falling out—but which books should be on every kid’s shelves? We ran the numbers on millions of titles to find the top 100 children’s books according to Goodreads members!
Too outline or not to outline . . .
Richard Palumbo, author of Phantom Limb, does not outline his books. “I don’t know who the villain is,” he told Wisconsin State Journal columnist Doug Moe in a recent interview. “I just start with a vision in my head.” That vision can lead to false turns in his first drafts. “But sometimes,” Palumbo said, “a false turn is where interesting things happen.”
Great word
From Word Spy Paul McFedreis:
zero-tasking
Meaning: (noun) Deliberately doing nothing.
Also Seen As: zero tasking, zerotasking
Other Forms: zero-task (verb), zero-tasker (noun)
Etymology: cf. multi-tasking
Examples
“What is zero-tasking? It means being, not doing. It means taking those 60 minutes and just doing nothing. Simply rest, relax, de-stress and de-load (the opposite of overload). It means just breathing – in and out, over and over – and marveling at the fact that you can breathe, that you are alive, that you are here.”
– Nancy Christie, Today is Zero-Tasking Day – Did you zero-task?, Make a Change Blog, November 3, 2013
“This reporter saw Jan Hill at Wal-Mart last week. She was proudly wearing a shirt that said ‘zero-tasking’ – the absolute opposite from the multi-tasking she’s done the last two decades as the Burlington Public School secretary.”
– Yvonne Miller, Jan Hill trades in multi-tasking for biking and grandkids’ activities, The Alva Review-Courier, July 17, 2013
Earliest
– Mick Stevens, “Zerotasking” (cartoon caption), The New Yorker, June 7, 2004
Notes
Every year on the day when Daylight Savings Time ends and we turn the clocks back an hour, we celebrate “Zero-Tasking Day.” Invented by the writer Nancy Christie in 2006,
Zero-Tasking Day is when we’re supposed to use the extra hour not to perform more chores or check more feeds or see more people, but instead to relax and simply do nothing.
Of course, in a recent experiment where some people got to choose between sitting and doing nothing and giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women chose the electric shocks. These were video-game-addled, thrill-seeking youngsters, right? Ah, you wish. No, according to the study’s authors, “even older people did not show any particular fondness for being alone thinking.”
And these were people being asked to do nothing for between six and 15 minutes. Who knows what they’d do to themselves if you asked them to be alone with their thoughts for a whole hour!
Maybe all this just proves that now we need Zero-Tasking Day more than ever.
(I’ve seem to make this a daily thing, lol)
Coming Soon…
May 10:
May 17: Mike Austin (chapter 4, Before I Leave), Millie Mader (poem), Hannah Marshall (poems), Kashmira Sheth (chapters, Journey to Swaraj), Judith McNeil (short story, part 2, “Just Visiting”), and Cindi Dyke (chapter 26, North Road).
May 24:
June 7: Pat Edwards (???), Bob Kralapp (short story, part 2, “Wings”), Amber Boudreau (chapter 2, The Dragoneer), Kashmira Sheth (YA novel, chapters, Journey to Swaraj), John Schneller (chapter 2, Broken Rising), Nora O’Reilly (chapter, novel), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 27-29, Killing Ham).
Look who’s editing Writers Mail . . .
This month, it’s Lisa McDougal-Pederson. Note: I’ll be on vacation from the next week, so the Newsletter might come late.
Tuesdays with Story 
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