Write Early, Write Often…Write Something!

Teresa Fannin, reader, writer, gardener, chocolate fan & tea drinker

Author: teresafannin (Page 23 of 56)

Babies and grands…

09/09/2014 /

Awesome. This week we met our grandchild. The first one. A part of me says I’m not old enough to have grandchildren (I definitely am), another part says, wow, finally.

As usual most friends already have grands. And they say they love them. Love getting them. Love having them. Love giving them back.

We, the all purpose universal we, not the royal we, are always ready to dispense advice based on our own experience. I get that. Guilty as charged, I am a great one for sharing. I’d like to say I do it in parable form, but still. And since we announced the inevitability of arrival, we have been told how great this is, how wonderful to be a grand parent. The wonders, apparently are unceasing.

I agree. The wonders if having a child is unceasing. This life that you created is so small, so helpless, so present, the baby comes out screaming, hopefully healthy, with all the parts required.

And, yes, I’d do it all over again. Give the option would mean the unthinkable for my daughter and her husband which is horrific and unthinkable, I’d take this grand, with all the jazzy stuff they have these days. Yes, it would be hard, but it wasn’t easy when we had our own. The up early, go all day, come home exhausted, the day care, the schools, the relationship building. Life.

A part of me misses that. Life. It was happening all around us. Now we get to be support staff, we get to watch our daughter and husband, we get to be there for the next life.

It is an awe-some thing!

Kill him off…

09/01/2014 /

Oh, please, just let him die.

Let the Doctor get the TARDIS, sans a companion, into some unimaginable confluence of positive and negative energy, or, let there be some huge mashup of time and space, or, take him back to the beginning of the universe [because you’ve already done the end of it] or plop him in the middle and have there be no way out.

And let it be the end! Kill him off. Let him die. Please.

I know there are rants about the fans, their slavish devotion to quoting the Doctor in any real life situation. Or, their need to constantly proclaim that he is the BEST character in fifty years. Google search whovians are stupid and you’ll be amazed at what you get. They can rant all they want, either as fans or as non-fans, that’s not my point.

Peter Capaldi do a good job in the role, such as it is, god <small g, of course> help him! Just as I’m sure that the fans will go gonzo over him, such as they are, and there is no god, <capital or small g> that can help them. But that’s just the point. The fans, on both sides of the telly screen are daft, cockeyed, hair brained.

Watching the Before debut of the twelfth, or really the thirteenth, if you count John Hurt, I realized what truly annoyed me was the obsession with detail of the particulars of the Doctors’ lives by those who are writing the show. To me, that’s the problem. The writers [huge fans themselves] are abusing the Doctor’s legacy. It is with them that I am most put out. I mean, come on, could they not come up with something that was new, [I’m sure 90% of the fans watched this episode and knew immediately that they were on the inside. Posh!] something that was not was a recast of the Doctor #10 or #11 [sigh, again with the counting thing and poor John] adventure on the Madam de Pompadour?   Did Doctor #12 or #13, depending on whether or not you want to count old John. have to refer back to the original set and the round things on the wall of the TARDIS?

When I first started to watch it, yes it was the early/mid seventies, it was hokey and the special effects were considerably less than amazing, and I loved it. The quirkiness, the élan of the Doctor, on a channel not often watched, was exciting and different. Who every heard of someone regenerating, not reincarnating, not being immortal, but re-generating. Who ever would have thought?

I have a mug, and the TARDIS disappears when hot water is poured into it, probably dates back to the late seventies. I bought it at a fund raiser for the PBS station in LA. My enchantment and delight with Dr. Who started before that time. I have the books too!

Wait. I don’t need to qualify. Whether I have watched it for a short time or a long time, I am here to simply state, I am done with the Doctor. Yes, that’s it, he’s off my DVR, I won’t Goggle the episodes. Done. No recording and watching later. Finito!  Why? Because once you break that fourth wall, once you have the character in on the joke [probably THE most annoying part], once you keep a character going simply because, because he’s fifty years old [don’t be pushy, the character is not fifty, but the show is], because you think you can write cool stuff and actors can act cool, well, then, that’s when you know you’ve let him live too long.

Don’t even get me started on the companions. Sheez!  Really? The Impossible Girl? Leave it, just leave it.

And, please stop calling them Whovians. Sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss!

face blind

08/19/2014 /

Standing at the registration table at a writing conference I overhear famous author #1 say to famous author #2, “I’m face blind. I can’t remember a person to save my soul.”

Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is an impairment in the recognition of faces.  According to FaceBlind.org  with research centers at Dartmouth College, Harvard and University College London, this is a real thing. [They even have a newsletter!] To quote further: It is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments (place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, etc.) though sometimes it appears to be restricted to facial identity. Not surprisingly, prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves. They often use alternative routes to recognition, but these routes are not as effective as recognition via the face.

When ever anyone, famous or infamous, makes a statement like the famous author #1, I always have to wonder if it is a real diagnosis, or an excuse of sorts, “I am so busy I can’t remember who you are, you all are a blur, so I am face blind.” As in, I looked it up in Google and it’s a real thing so I’ll just use that. In a Google Search, this even excuses Brad Pitt, who, according to the article, is undiagnosed, but uses this term.

I don’t. Have face blindness, that is. If anything I have the opposite, ‘super-recognizers’ a study called it, maybe almost total face recognition, like a program. It is annoying, to remember and acknowledge people who have no idea who you are.

There are all these quirky, legitimate and yes, maybe undiagnosed disabilities.  Akin but perhaps not as invasive as a learning disability like dyslexia.  I don’t want to call them aliments, or illnesses, because people with Prosopagnosia have perfectly wonderful full lives. More than likely they are excused by their friends and ignored by others who are offended by their unknowable, unseeable disability. That a serious diagnosis of Prosopagnosics can often involve difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves, is scary. Imagine not being able to recognize yourself? 

I think the part of the conversation between famous author #1 and famous author #2 that was somewhat annoying was the sort of flip, offhand, casual way the diagnosis was put into the public place, more as an excuse than a significant disability.

I sometime wonder about the things we worry about now, face blindness being one of them. And I can’t help but wonder about a character with other, different, but still significant cognitive disorders. Hmm…off to write!

make every word count

08/14/2014 /

In HOW I LIVE NOW, Meg Rosoff does that. The book is sparse, stark, and so is the topic and detail. Yet, without fail, we are in the moment. It is a stunning accomplishment that. And, that it is about dystopian times when we have not only long stories but trilogies filling the booksellers shelves, is part of the attraction of the book.

At the  LA SCBWI Conference, in her keynote address, THE HOW OF IT Linda Sue Park talked about exactly that, making every word count. Maxing out words. Ripping away the words that do not bring full weight to the manuscript.

She counsels us to put away our work, and bring it out after a month [not the first time I heard this in this conference]. And when we do, we can be amazed at how it looks now. She provided tools, remember this was a keynote, in the ballroom, twelve hundred people, and it worked like a small workshop.

  • Some rules included watching for orphans in paragraphs
  • take out all the narrative in a dialogue and reinsert only where needed
  • read aloud
  • think of each paragraph as a ‘thought unit’.

But most of all, remember we are bombarded with words. They are cheap currency. We are not paid like Dickens. Make words special.

LA SCBWI WowZer!

08/12/2014 /

What I love about the international SCBWI conferences:

  • I can attend. Just attend. I can go to all the keynotes, panels, breakouts, socials and extras I want. I AM NOT IN CHARGE! And that is awesome.
  • I look for craft based presentations and wowzer! just sit and listen to keynotes.
  • THEN
  • I can also line up ‘acts’ from the big show to play in the sticks, i.e., in the Carolinas region 🙂  This is an opportunity to meet, greet, have a conversation, float an idea about an intensive or conference participation and try to get a commitment.

It’s a tricky thing, being in LA or in NYC, for that matter. There are thousands, well not really, but sometimes the red-lanyard club does seem highly ubiquitous. We talk a lot on our list, exchange ideas, complain, share problems, seek solutions and just generally give support. But, well, there is nothing like face to face to give the added boost to community building. And, we aren’t all even there. We have eighty (?) regions, international and domestic, in SCBWI and a regional team for each one.

These international conferences give time to interact with the home office staff and get to know them. This year, a lot of that interaction time went to the back end of the new website, specifically the registration program which many of us have been turning gray over. Alright, so I was already there, but you get the idea!

This year was a WowZer of a year, actually the years build and they are all WowZer years.  Meg Rosoff, who writes YA like a picture book, making every single solitary word count. Judy Schachner, an author/ illustrator, although those are such limited word choices for her. Stephen Chbosky who gave us a view of classic, Justin Chanda confirming Picture Books are not dead, and the life cycle of children book genres is circular, Aaron Becker, yes, illustrators do some of the best keynotes and even sing, and I could go on and on. And we aren’t even into the breakouts yet.

IMG_0804

Teresa Fannin, Diandra Mae & Bonnie Adamson

I had a special project this year. My sidekick was not able to travel to LA for all the right reasons, which means she was working on finishing up a books with Atheneum. #inlawithoutbonnie was the hashtag on my Facebook account. Bonnie actually went to a lot of places from the registration desk, to telling jokes with Chelsea, to conversations with agents, the illustrator social, the non-fiction social and the international social. Here’s Bonnie with Diandra Mae and me at the illustrator social. 

The opportunity to go is beyond wonderful. The red-lanyard advantage to approach industry professional [writers, illustrators, editors, agents] for the region is exciting. And, the ability to live my writing life at this conference is a gift.

 

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