Kurtis Scaletta's Blog, page 7

“The Things He Said Were Kind of Not Joking”

I’ve been thinking about this interview with a “friend” of Dylann Roof’s. (Not sure how close they were.)

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,” [his friend] added.

Children and teens, even college-aged people, have more power than adults to make their peers. Every decision and interaction has the power to nudge a person in a particular way, to set them on a path.

One benefit of age is seeing how those moments in the past helped shape you; seemingly tiny things that changed your trajectory. Certainly those moments include racist and sexist jokes, off-hand remarks that you can either react to or ignore.

In all honesty my own history is a mixed one: I’ve laughed at those jokes, I’ve let them slide, I’ve even made them. Other times I do react: hey, bruh, that ain’t cool. And I can recall times when the gentle admonishment of friends has changed me, or where the acceptance (even encouragement) of hateful remarks has nudged me the other way. Peer pressure is powerful.

Maybe Dylann could not have been nudged off his deadly path, but I feel like we are made of these moments of action or inaction, and I wonder if the friend is brooding now about what might be different if he had only responded differently. “Man, you sound really hateful.” “Are you sure you’re all right?” “Come one, don’t be a jerk.”

Later in the same story, another friend gives even more unsettling backstory.

Roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News that Roof was “planning something like that for six months.”

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

What did the roommate do? Recoil in horror? Warn people? Call the police, even? How did he end up in a place where someone could unfold their homicidal fantasies and he shrugged it off? Is that where you nudge yourself by letting racist jokes slide, then crazy rants and fringe conspiracy theories, to where you gently accommodate terroristic plots?

One reason for “lone wolf” and “extremist” labeling of killers like these is that they distance them from ourselves, rather than accept responsibility for our silent consent.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: charleston

Kurtis Scaletta, Chromebook Novelist

This is one of those blog posts written in service to my profession.

I recently got a $200 Chromebook because my MacBook Air, though much beloved, has become commandeered by my child. Other writers might be looking at this relatively low-cost option and wonder if it’ll work. My answer: sure. Sort of. Depends.

First, for the uninitiated: the Chromebook itself is a very cheap device that’s not quite a laptop; it’s more like a portable web browser. It comes with some hard drive storage, but pretty much all the apps run within the Chrome web browser. A Chromebook is practical if you just want something for surfing the Web, doing the occasional video chat (in google, not Skype), and a little light writing, etc. You can’t do page layout, graphic design, movie editing, or anything like that. Anything you might do, ask yourself if you can do it now in a web browser. If no, then you can’t do it on Chromebook.

I will henceforth refer to it as a “device” for lack of a better word. It is technically a computer, but doesn’t do what most computers do. In some ways it’s a big phone. But it doesn’t make calls, so…. device.

So how do you write and edit? Well, about ten years ago when Google acquired a program called Writely, and since then it has had an Office-like suite of web-based tools that keep getting quietly better: a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, and a drawing application. Those apps are integrated seamlessly with Google drive, a cloud-based file storage that synchs with all of your devices. Decoded this means: you can write in your web browser using a Microsoft-word like program, and although your files are saved to your device, they’re also saved on Google servers so even if you drop your device down the sewer you can retrieve the documents.

But could using the web app replace Microsoft Word? Word has never been perfect but has been way more than adequate for the last fifteen-to-twenty years. Word handles large files well (ask me about my first novel, when it didn’t), it automatically backs up files, it has a very efficient spellchecker, a reliable word counter, and can even deliver lexile scores in a few minutes. Also, Word is industry standard. Many editors have now switched to Word annotations to deliver edits to writers. I think Winter of the Robots was seen from conception to first pass pages without a single hard copy.

You can open a document in a Web browser on a Chromebook and start hammering away, but can you do all of that? This is what I’m finding out.

This is what I’ve learned so far.

First, stick with the native functionality of Chrome/Google.

Having been a contented Dropbox user for ages, I immediately installed that app and opened it to see my current documents. I clicked one and it opened in Microsoft Word. OK, it opened in a limited version of Word that runs online, but I had no idea that Dropbox had been acquired by Microsoft and was now fully integrated with a free version of Microsoft Office 365. Hooray!

This was really cool for about five minutes, but then I found out stuff like, navigating the document is really hard, the app doesn’t keep up with my typing, and every few minutes I get an error message that the document needs to reconnect to sync. This is likely to improve with time but at present the Word Online tool is pretty clunky. I spent more time swearing at it than actually writing/revising.

I mean, you get what you pay for and it’s pretty cool to get Word-like functionality for free, even with those issues and the mysterious proliferation of page breaks and the inability to work offline and the lack of a “Save as” option and the…. never mind. The more I think about it, the more I realize I lost a week of my writing life there.

Second, convert to Google Docs. 

Wouldn’t you know it, but Google Apps can also open Word documents (in “Word Compatibility Mode”) without converting them, and even lets you edit them — but unless you want to do really light editing, it’s a pretty painful way to work. Like Word Online, it’s not terribly responsive to keyboard interactions, and it doesn’t automatically save, and you don’t have a “Save as…” option. In fact, there’s not even a “Find/Replace” option, or much in the way of paragraph formatting.

If you had a perfectly formatted document you’re about to send out on submission and had one or two minor edits, this would work, because it never changes the .docx format of the original. But you have more tools and an easier time using them if you convert to .gdoc format (Open the file in compatibility mode, then go to File: convert to Google Docs).

 

Third, install Table of Contents and Document Explorer

I am revising, which requires me to move nimbly between chapters. And for this, I am very reliant on the Document Map feature in Word. This doesn’t exist in Word Online, or in the “Compatibility Mode” of Google Apps that lets you edit a native Word doc. But it does exist upon conversion. Go to Add-Ons, Get Add Ons and look for each tool.

Table of Contents simply gives you a clickable sidebar based on your headings — which, sigh, you will have to manually redo even if you already have headers in a document you’ve converted. But only once.

Document Explorer has additional navigation options, the most useful for me being the search pane — I can do things like search for the word “just” so I can then click from usage to usage and delete it as needed. It is also handy to create an ad-hoc table of contents (using the search term “chapter”) so you can make them official headers in the Google Doc.

Fourth, download backups

You may think you have emergency back up files on your device because you see the .gdoc sitting in your offline folder, but in fact these are basically links to the real document which lives… somewhere… else. Only Google knows.

One thing I have a hard time adjusting to is, I used to make a copy of my document in progress every day, change the file name to include the current date, and begin editing. All those back ups made me happy. Google Docs (and these other options) have a revision history, so in theory you can recover any past version, but it’s just very all-eggs-in-one-baskety for one file to have the entire labors of the last two years, or even the last two weeks, so I now (try to remember to) save a download as Word every day, but work in one document named “Working Document.”

Fifth, Move everything to Google Drive

I save those backups to my offline folder, but I found this transition easier once I dropped Dropbox. I moved all my working files to Google Drive and cleaned up the mess that had gathered there since I created the Google account in 2007 (If anyone needs the agenda from a U of M ETF from that year, sorry, I deleted it).

I forget what Google’s drive limit is but it’s ample for simple word processing documents. I don’t even think Isaac Asimov could have used up all the space with his writing projects. If you use your drive space for something else, consider swapping that to Dropbox or one of the many other free-tier cloud services, because Chromebook thrives when you stay in the Googleverse.

Sixth, stay in Google Docs

I drove myself crazy trying to keep Word in the picture. Word is better, so I think, while I am on my Mac, why not use Word? But whatever option I use, I end up cleaning up formatting stuff that got screwy in transition, and I know I could ignore but everything. has. to. be. just. so. I’ve been more productive on actual revisions since weaning myself completely from Word and staying in the active gdoc.

Seventh, I am not ready to drop Word completely. 

Spellchecking is available in Google Docs but not reliable. See where it suggested I change “Not” to “Nort”? Um.

Professional formatting touches like page breaks before headings, widow/orphan control, marking language for passages, are also not available in Google Docs. So I will have to download as Word and spellcheck/touch up before it’s ready to submit.

Finally, I know I can theoretically download as Word, send to Ms. Agent or Ms. Futureditor, but receive back with their comments/annotations, and open again in Google Docs. How well this will work in practice, I dunno.  Maybe I’ll even find, in time, that the industry has shifted so that it’s normal for writers to “share” rather than “deliver” documents, which is more how this is supposed to work. But it may turn out that once I am in editing I will have to use Word solely.

Verdict:

Using an optimized writing app like Writer might prove an interesting way to fast draft, and I think ultimately writing  and editing a full-length novel in Google Docs will be no worse (maybe slightly better) than my earliest word processing adventures in the early 1990s. But for now I will still need occasional access to Word and I expect that the Google Doc approach will only see me through submission and I will have to resume Word in editing (which, knock on wood, will be something I find out soon).

 

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: chromebook, dropbox, google docs, ms word, Writing

A great first line

If you spend any time reading about writing or going to writing conferences you know that, from time to time, people like to throw out “great first lines,” which often have yet unnamed heroes discovering severed heads in their glove compartment. The problem with such lessons is that they do you no good if your book isn’t about severed heads. Anyway, I find such first sentences wheeze of desperation, they are like the bespectacled kid in seventh grade who tries too hard to be your friend (I was that kid). And I can rarely think of “great first lines,” because I don’t think that way. I give a book a chance and don’t really need to be won over in the first sentence; I am won over gradually by character and plot and so forth. But next time the conversation does trend toward first lines, I want to remember this one, from Arnold Lobel’s Fables.

A crocodile became increasingly fond of the wallpaper in his bedroom.

This sentence does more than hook me. It promises to take me somewhere I have never been.

Of course to have a first line like this you must have a story that deserves it.

 

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Do the Gute: Helen Keller

Way back in the back then I had a series of posts recommending public domain books available from Gutenberg.org. I’m bringing it back today to recommend the remarkable writing of Helen Keller. Of course we all know who she is, but get past the feral child played rather wonderfully by Patty Duke and the tasteless jokes and you find a remarkable thinker and activist with a gift for crisp writing.

Find her major works here. Of course you should read her autobiography, The Story of My Life, which is the best known and most familiar, but The World I Live In is well worth looking into for a more mature author who captures the experience of being deafblind; it is not about the pain of darkness and silence but the wonder of being so tuned to physical sensations. And see her long essay, Optimism, where she writes about “happiness as faith.”

In my mind there is a list of short books that can change your life: Hesse’s Siddhartha, Dillards’s The Writing Life, Wiesel’s Night, or Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.  Any of these three books could be on that list.

I do not know her writing process, perhaps finger-spelling to a transcriptionist, and later poring over drafts with the secretary finger-spelling her own words back into her palm. In any case, it could not have been easy work. Keller’s writing is wonderful and important without these considerations, but as a writer I have to think about and wonder at her resolve. Maybe the effort for every line led to the precision and power in her writing.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: Do the Gute, helen keller

The Skye Saga

If you have a kid between three and seven and don’t have an utterly screenless existence, you probably know that the current rage is Paw Patrol, a TV show/toy franchise about a team of rescue pups who… well… let’s just say that whenever there is trouble around Adventure Bay, Ryder and his team of pups are there to save the day.

Our boy’s favorite non-Lego toys over the past few months have been Paw Patrol pups that come with badges and backpacks that open up and do stuff. One is Skye, the only girl in the original pup line-up of six (they’ve since added another to the show). We found that while the other pups weren’t too hard to find, Skye was nearly impossible to find. And the reason was obvious: Girls love Paw Patrol as much as boys. Girls want Skye.

But Byron also loves Skye. And he wanted use to round out the set. So for months we were regularly and fruitlessly checking the ransacked shelves at Target and Toys R Us, where, for reasons that can only be explained by recent news and public opinion, we would find only piles of unpurchased Chase toys (Chase is the police dog).

Byron also noted that most of the merchandise featuring all the pups never had Skye. She wasn’t on the shirts, or the party plates. He was confused, and the message must have started sinking in: Skye isn’t on my shirts because as a boy I’m not supposed to want her on my shirt. Skye isn’t on the paper plates because she is less important than the boy pups. And that’s where we have to intervene, affirming for Byron that it’s OK to like Skye and the companies are dumb for leaving her off.

Byron also likes Lego Friends and Lego Elves. He likes the unicorn girl minifigure almost as much as the alien trooper. He likes Shannon Hale’s Princess in Black and Bratz and some show about a fairy tale high school with mostly girl characters. But he isn’t a feminist superkid just yet. I can see the culture taking its toll, his occasional grimness when offered a book about a girl, especially if she’s not an animal. He will opt for the space robot action figure over the big-eyed kitty every time at McDonald’s, and the fact that eyes are on him and one is described by the cashier as a ‘boy toy’ certainly influences him. And he’s not even in school yet, where other boys will surely coach him on despising girls and things for girls.

The gender splitting I’ve complained about in books is extreme in toys and television, so appalling I really can’t believe how passively parents accept it. Why must any mixed-gender franchise be 5/6 boys? Why did all the superheroes from my childhood go on steroids? Why do all of the Lego girls come in slimmed down from the classic, sturdy, Lego minifig body? For that matter, why do you have to paint a six pack on the male figures, on top of their uniforms? I don’t mind that the girls in that fairy tale show talk about dating and dresses, but why can’t boy characters ever show a little vulnerability, be a little smitten, be a little concerned about how others perceive them?

There’s lots more I want to say here, so I’ll have to come back to it. Suffice to say that kids are sufficiently assaulted with gender role expectations before they reach Kindergarten, and it’s maddening. Books are the least of the problem. The bigger part of the problem is everything else: clothes, toys, movies, TV, even breakfast cereal boxes.

Incidentally, Byron did not want to be photographed with Skye, and seen playing with a girl toy, but his mother told him that it’s important for the world to see that boys can play with girl toys. That’s what convinced him. Good work, B.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: boy toys, girl toys, lego, paw patrol, skye

The Lazy Bee

A while back I blogged about an Ursula K. Le Guin story that injects ants with human consciousness and modern human values, and opined that I would like to see a story that didn’t see eusocialism as oppressive — I think we can learn from these little citizens. I have since (while doing immersion tasks on Duolingo) found exactly that story in the form of a fable by author Horacio Quiroga, which seems to be a testament to the responsibilities of an individual to her community above personal will. The ending seems dead serious, but the story seems to have an ironic bent, too, in its didacticism against intelligence (even as cleverness and learning saves the bee heroine).

This story is closer than the Le Guin, at least, to understanding the eusocial colony of insects. I particularly like the use of “sister” as greeting among bees in the hive, since they would be sisters, as well as carrying the flavor of fellow travelers in the early 20th Century, when the fable was written. I have not read enough Quiroga to know his intent but the era and the location make it more likely that he was sympathetic to socialism, having seen the hell foreign capitalists wrought on his continent.

It seems to be published as a picture book, in both Spanish and English, but minus it’s classic status I seriously doubt any publisher would do a children’s book with such a message against personal exceptionalism and individualism. Unwavering faith in these principles seem to cross all religious and political factions. The fable now would have to take the turn of Lionni’s Frederick, where the other bees come to love the lazy bee for her imaginative flights. For the record, I absolutely love Frederick and can barely read it without tearing up. But sometimes I feel only one side of the story is every told, and that such fables not only prevent us understanding the natural world, but from fully understanding ourselves.

What other fables about ants and bees (or other eusocial organisms) that seem to deal with the role of an individual in a society are out there?

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: bees, fables, lazy bee, quiroga

Planting for Pollinators

I was inspired by one of my own characters to plant a “bee garden,” this spring, and today planted the better part of my wife’s little pocket of prairie with beardtongue, salvia, bee balm, black-eyed susans, coneflowers, thymus, verbena, coreopsis, asclepias, and yarrow. There’s an empty spot for milkweed we’re getting from a neighbor. The stuff in back is prairie grass that’s (mostly) been there for years.

It doesn’t look like much now, but by mid-summer most of these guys will be 2-4 feet high, in bloom, humming with bees and crawling with caterpillars. My wife even supports this venture though she doesn’t like butterflies, but it will be hard not to be taken in by the potential magic of watching, with our bug-loving boy, a monarch nudging its way out of a chrysalis one late summer morning. Thanks to a book by a local author, he is also expecting bison.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: bees, gardening, monarchs, native grasses and forbs, phyllis root, plant a pocket of prairie, pollinators

Failure + Yoda + Me

Next up on our tour of failure is Erin Dionne, another “niner” and excellent writer of middle grade novels.

“Do or do not, there is no try.” – Yoda

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”- Samuel Beckett

I fail every day. Multiple times, actually. My life consists of parenting two small kids, teaching full time at a small college, and writing.

And always, every day, failure.

Teaching that night class? Missing bedtime. Papers to grade? The writing time gets ditched. Invited to write a blog post about failure? Blew the deadline. Taking the kids out on a Saturday afternoon? Well, no failure there—but I fight “I should be working” guilt, nonetheless.

People talk about finding “balance,” or “managing the writing life”. I have looked for the elusive balance—it doesn’t exist (at least, not when your kids are three and six). I’ve put systems in place to manage my life (implementing a bullet journal, being really careful about how I spend my time), and something always comes up to smash my carefully constructed house of cards.

But I still go for it.

Yoda’s quote has been my mantra for years. Cheesy, I know, but the distance between “trying” and “doing” is important to me.

Merriam-Webster defines “try” as “to make an effort to do something: to attempt to accomplish or complete something,” and “do” as “to bring to pass.”

Attempting to do something doesn’t cut it for me. I need to bring that book to pass. I need to complete what I start (which is why, when I took up knitting, I wanted to finish that sweater/scarf/hat in one sitting. It was a terrible hobby for me.). But “bringing something to pass” isn’t always pretty, especially the first time around. Pinterest fails are proof of that.

This is also why I’m not all over Pinterest.

Like all writers, I put a lot of effort into my work. I struggle over drafts, agonize over revisions, and stress about reviews, sales, and what comes next. Over and over, I remind myself that as long as I keep doing something, I’m doing something—even if all I’m doing is moving forward in small steps. I eke out those hours—or minutes—to work on my novel. I set aside time to grade those papers. I play with my kids.

Most of the time, I feel like I am failing at all of it: the writing is crappy, I can’t ever get to the bottom of the grading pile, my kids watch too much TV. That’s when Beckett comes in:

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I first saw his quote on poet January Gill O’Neil’s blog. As much as Yoda encourages me to keep going and keep doing, Beckett gives me the permission to do so badly. I don’t have to succeed every single time I do, I just have to suck a little less next time. For someone like me, who holds herself to unreasonable standards and sleeps very little, this is freeing.

This manuscript stinks? I can make it better with revision.

This class discussion bombed? Next time I’ll approach the topic differently.

Fed the kids leftover mac n cheese and pizza for dinner? Tomorrow we’ll have veggies.

Have I made my peace with failure? Not exactly; because once you do make peace with failure, you slip into the realm of “trying.” Yet accepting the tenets of Beckett’s failure allows me to follow Yoda’s advice. As long as I keep failing better, I keep doing. And that’s success.

Tomorrow, I’ll fail again. Without trying.

 

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: erin dionne, failure, there is no try, yoda

Happy 99th Birthday to Beverly Cleary

Happy birthday to a living legend.

In celebration of the day, here is a recap of all my posts about Saint of Yamhill from last year, when I re-read many of her books.

A Realization

Homesick for Klickitat Street and A postscript

Spunky Girls (Ramona), Ramona, Relatability, and Serendipity, Henry Huggins

Mr. Henshaw

 

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: 99, beverly cleary, birthday

On Failure

My next guest blogger is Jennifer R. Hubbard, author of three novels for young adults and a book on writing. I’m intrigued by Jennifer’s discussion of “failure narratives.” We’re conditioned by books and public speakers and various superstars and heroes to believe in ourselves, and to know we can do anything, which might inspire us but also prepares us poorly for other outcomes: ordinary, boring lives. I recall that the eponymous hero of Jude the Obscure was fixated for a time on the folktale of Dick Whittington; a favorite of mine, too, when I was a boy. Of course Jude is bound for a less fairy-tale existence. The minor classic, Stoner, by John “not-the-composer” Williams has a similar theme. Recommend your own in the comments, particularly those that perhaps celebrate the heroic struggles of those ragamuffin wanderers who never find a magic bottle.

You would think writers would talk more about failure, since it’s such an integral part of the job description. We fail a lot. We abandon manuscripts, collect rejections, have projects canceled. Most traditional books don’t earn out their advances, which means they don’t hit their sales goals. We hear “no” a lot more than we hear “yes.”

Failure especially comes as a shock if we’ve had some success first. We expect to fail at the beginning of our careers, when we’re inexperienced. And we love the narrative of failure as a precursor to success; we love an earned happy ending. We love when the earlier pain proves to have purpose and meaning. But we don’t think of success as temporary. Once we’ve arrived, we don’t expect to get kicked out of the party. Why we expect this, I don’t know. We’ve read the cautionary biographies; we’ve seen the biopics. We’ve all seen famous names fade from view. Few people stay on top forever.

While failure sometimes comes from not working hard enough or not knowing enough—the problems we can control and overcome—it also comes from dozens of other little factors we can’t control or even foresee, such as fashion and timing, illness and disaster, culture shifts and technological changes. For every person who follows a formula to success, thousands of others follow the same formula and fail.

The simple fact is that failure is more common and more likely.

I have searched for failure narratives where failure is not just a precursor to success. They are rare and powerful. There’s Susan Allen Toth’s “Summa,” a chapter in her memoir Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East, about ambition and perfectionism and loss, about what happens when you don’t live up to your potential, about how a couple of bad days can wipe out years’ worth of work. There is Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters, in which the “breaking” overwhelms the “making.”

In I Remember Nothing, Nora Ephron wrote one of the most honest essays about failure that I’ve ever read (“Flops”). She was referring to movies, but her main conclusions apply more widely. In short, failure is painful and unpredictable. We don’t necessarily learn from it, and we don’t necessarily forget it. Failure can scar. In short, all the things we fear about failure are true.

Even as I write this, I feel the pressure to steer toward a positive message. Which may be why we don’t discuss the bitterness of failure much: What a downer! But for me, there is comfort in a few of these truths. First, since failure is a lot more common than success, we have plenty of company when we fail. Second, most failures are not fatal. And third: You never know. If failure is unpredictable, so is success. Some people say that neither failure nor success is as important as trying. (A variation of that sentiment even appears in the Olympic ideal, as voiced by Pierre de Coubertin.) I don’t know that I’d go that far—yet here I am, trying still.

Jennifer R. Hubbard (www.jenniferhubbard.com) is the author of three novels for young adults and several short stories. Her most recent book, Loner in the Garret: A Writer’s Companion , discusses failure and success and everything in between. She lives near Philadelphia with an understanding husband, a pile of books and chocolate, and a melodramatic cat.

Filed under: How to Fail Tagged: failure, jennifer hubbard, success narratives