Adam Holt's Blog, page 10

Costa Rica Snapshot #1: Take the Leopard for a Ride

Take the Leopard for a Ride

I'm finally settled on my surfboard with one hand resting on my leg, the other one stirring blue water for balance. Both arms feel a not so familiar burn, having paddled through a set of of waves that looked smaller from the shore.  You just can't replicate that beautiful burn anywhere but in a roiling ocean, which is deadset on throwing you and your 7-foot flotation device back up the beach before you reach blue waters again. 

The waves look small from the shore, but try to "duck dive" them and your perspective changes. It's the difference between seeing the leopard at the zoo and having a blur of claws, jaws, and fur pounce on you from a treebranch. 

So I ducked some wild waves. That's how I'm floating here comfortably for the moment, waiting for the next set to roll in.


 I won't bore you with the travel from Houston to Tamarindo, Costa Rica. Assume that there was mild adversity, a few cultural mishaps, and that I took a big plane, a small plane, maybe a taxi, certainly walked a rocky patch of concrete or three before I arrived on the beach with my two friends, but we don't have time for that now. I'm trying hard to get comfortable (or at least look comfortable) on this rented surfboard--ten bucks at the beachfront surf shop and not a bad Manual board by any means--but the last time I paddled out was several months ago in San Diego. I'm a little rusty. And breathless. My arms are cross-examining my life choices with each attempted duck dive, and several are merely attempts. Anything short of the right form or effort means another extra 30 seconds of paddling, an eternity that my body despises, but in the back of my mind, I don't begrudge the extra opportunity to pound the weakness out of my lungs and feeble limbs. Spending this much time away from the ocean will do that to a surfer's body, though I wouldn't dare call myself that.

Surfer.

I'm more of a paddler/stander. Sure, I can paddle onto a wave and stand up on a board, but there is a striking difference between what I do before on the deck of my Manual before I tumble back into the Pacific whitewash and what the surfers are doing around me. I can spot the leopard and grab him by the tail, but the surfer can tame the leopard and take him for a ride. Would that I could leopard-tame a word with half the skill of a surfer on the wave.

Tomorrow: snapblog two--Pura Vida in the Lineup

One hour left...

...to grab The Conspiracy Game for the price of a latte, or a Happy Meal, or four songs on iTunes. http://tinyurl.com/ordertully

Countdown Deal This Weekend

Dear Conspirators,
This weekend only, The Conspiracy Game is a Kindle Countdown Deal. Check it out! http://www.tinyurl.com/ordertully
Love and rockets,
Adam

Announcement: TCG on Goodreads and Giveaway!

Yes, that's right. The Conspiracy Game is listed on Goodreads. It's a great place to find new books, discuss old ones, and connect with authors and other fans. If you use Goodreads, please add or review the novel here. 
Currently three signed copies are available here through early June. Over two hundred people have entered the giveaway thus far, and you're welcome to do so, too. In June I have a MAJOR announcement about TCG on the Kindle, which will be posted here, as well as on http://www.facebook.com/theconspiracygame. 
In the meantime, I should probably get back to The Rathmore Chaos. The climax of the novel is in sight, and my editor will receive my first draft in late June, which she will lovingly rip to pieces to keep me busy.

Update for Conspirators!

DEAR CONSPIRATORS,

NEXT BIG EVENT

This Tuesday I will be at the Chick-Fil-A Brown Bag Concert Series. Several thousand people are scheduled to attend. The JJ Weeks Band will be in concert, and I will sell and sign books, as well as raffle off several signed copies of The Conspiracy Game. It should be a fun night of music, books, and waffles fries.
Signing books--yes, I will draw a pink heart in your book...
FOLLOWUP NOVEL IN THE WORKS!

  I'm hard at work on The Rathmore Chaos, which takes Tully deeper into space (and trouble) with some familiar company...but with one very important person still missing. If you read The Conspiracy Game, you know exactly who that is, but, like Tully, you're wondering how in the universe he will find her. You may also be wondering about the Ascendant and the Harper Device. Well, much will be revealed in The Rathmore Chaos, but not by me and now now. No covert art...yet. Look for a Christmas release. Earlier if I can manage it!

KEEP MOMENTUM GOING
buy The Conspiracy Game for yourself or a young adult friend here add/review the novel on Goodreads or Amazon (thanks for superfan Chris Powell for setting up the Goodreads info) recommend it on Facebook suggest me as a visiting author for a local school or event (grades 6 and 7 preferred) Much love to you all. Feel free to drop me a line anytime. I don't mind healthy interruptions!

-Adam

Unplanned Bonus Rounds

Last week was the first time I returned to Greenhill with a printed version of my efforts. A proud moment. I wanted my students to know that I did what I set out to do, that their comments guided some of my revisions, and I wanted to inspired them to read, write, and do brilliant things.

So I talked about writing, the writing process, character development, "writing territories," conflict, and, of course, taking risks.


It was, hopefully, a productive Thursday English class for 7th and 8th graders. A few students had read The Conspiracy Game, and I signed those. But the real breakthrough, at least for me, happened on Friday. The unplanned bonus round.

I spoke to the 6th graders. It was a spur of the moment decision. With only 15-30 minutes allotted for each class, I had to boil down my regular spiel. What would I cut? What would I keep? Tough choices. I practiced. Nothing felt complete.
What about my awesome iceberg analogy? I can't cut that!
So I took a rather long step back and asked myself, "What do you want to share?" Not , "What do you think they should hear?" Or, "What do their teachers want you to say?" So I kicked some ideas around, did no more preparation, and went to sleep without a care.

The next day I strolled into room, sat down, and told them the elevator pitch of my book. No PowerPoint, no notes, just me, my story, and 6th graders. And they were intrigued.

Then I did something I haven't done before: rather than tell them how to develop a character profile, I shared my characters. I started with Sunjay Chakravorty, Tully's best friend. How he is a blurter, a human question cannon in class. How he constantly flips his hair out of his eyes. How he practices martial arts and likes to practice on Tully. How he's obsessed with Queen Envy, the world's greatest pop star. And the students pointed at each other, punched one another in the arm, laughed. Why? Because they could see themselves--and each other--in Sunjay. They could relate. So I moved on to Tully, Tabitha, Little Bacon, and Commander Harper, and finally introduced the Harper Device (a character in itself), which brought me back to the plot--and Tully's reason for sneaking into space.

That whole bonus round. It just felt right. In teaching (and speaking to student) you have those moments, where the lesson plan comes together unexpectedly well, where you and the students rise to the occasion, where "God's in His Heaven--all's right with the world" as Robert Browning the poet said.

Shouldn't I know this by now? Students want to hear stories--not just the way those stories were constructed--and I like to tell them. I didn't get into writing just to teach others how to craft characters and conflicts. That's fun and useful, but there's greater joy to be had in sharing the story itself. So what's your story? Whether it's fiction, non-fiction, somewhere in between, share what inspires you. Your story matters, and it might inspire someone else to tell theirs.

I'll save the iceberg analogy for some other time.

"It matters."

"It matters."This quote + those sticky notes were on my classroom wall one year. The quote came first. We were struggling with some bullying issues at school at the time. We wanted to encourage students to be "upstanders" instead of "bystanders," but it was a hard sell. In fact, I didn't want to sell them anything at all. I wanted to encourage them, to commiserate with them, to listen to them. So we talked. It's hard enough to stand up for yourself sometime. To stand up for someone else? Why take the risk? After we talked about it for a while, a phrase came up. "It matters."


There are things that don't matter too much. People spend a lot of time on some of them. I won't give you the entire list that we discussed. Make up your own. But there are things that do matter, like loving your friends, being a good son/daughter, planning an awesome future, being grateful, making someone else's day, week, month, year, life a little easier. Those things matter, and they matter forever. Because you matter, and so do the people around you. And that's why I found all these "It matters" sticky notes around the quote the next day. They stayed there the rest of the year.


I'm headed back to Greenhill next week to speak at the school where I learned how to teach and coach. "It matters" will be on my mind. I'm looking forward to talking about writing and sharing the adventure of writing a novel, but more importantly, I'm trying to stay focused on what really matters. The people seated in those auditorium seats. #tbt

Observatory: A Poem About Starlight + Parenting

Good news! Three of my poems were selected as finalists for SMU's Writer's Feast. That simply means I may be reading one aloud at this year's feast, which would indeed be an honor. I read one of the poems, "Observatory," at my book launch party earlier this year. 
It's a poem about stars--how we see them in "past tense" because it takes their light so long to arrive. It's strange to think about: what we see in the present happened hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago. In the poem I am seven years old forever. This experience has bearing on the parent/child relationship, but I'd rather say too little than too much about a poem. I will let "Observatory" take it from here. I hope that it makes your mind wobble a little bit. 
Also, happy birthday, Dad. -Adam

FRIENDSWOOD LAUNCH PARTY!

Tully Harper would NOT have enjoyed the rain and cold, but we packed Dunn Brothers anyway to celebrate the release of The Conspiracy Game. It was an amazingly diverse crowd, as the photos suggest. (More posted on https://www.facebook.com/theconspiracygame)

He may be a bit young for the book, but the world's cutest astronaut showed up anyway...--is he more of a Commander Harper, Buckshot Lewis, or Redshirt Anderson? You make the call. 

Reading aloud was tough because of the size of the crowd and space of the room. Probably should have read a bit less and done more Q&A, but hey, this was my first rodeo. It was nice to have home field advantage.


It was amazing to see so many people who influenced me in one room. My 6th grade English teacher was there (bless her saintly heart!), as were my parents, cousins, and family friends. Some of my Kickstarters were there as well.


A number of high school students showed up: free Dunn Bros. coffee and extra credit for attending an author reading proved too tempting, I guess. I talked to one of them for quite some time about having the guts to take oneself seriously as a writer early in life. Hopefully that encouraged him to "Go, and do not delay," as someone once whispered into Tully Harper's life.


So many things I wanted to say but didn't at the time. Most importantly, I hope this book inspires a new generation to explore the solar system in ways that amaze us all. It's so easy for these "digital natives"--and the "digital immigrants" like my generation--to live in the confines of a 3-inch wide iPhone screen when above us hang the unexplored territories, the handiwork of God.


But I will let The Conspiracy Game speak those hopes for me. Because a novel speaks our language more beautifully than a blog ever can.

Grace and peace, Adam

Through a Window Through a Poem (Upon a Friend's Wedding)

For Steven and Ally.
Through a Window Through A Poem (Upon a Friend's Wedding)
The Bayou City drizzle-glazesanother century’s windows.The drooping glass tenuously holdsthe rain at bay from drenching the concrete floor of a warehouse,where metal beams cross the ceiling
and drive holes into bare brick walls.  This is not how a poem about a wedding should begin—Is this a happy place?At the bones of it, no.Just a teardown under an overpassvalued for its proximity to the least of these, not its inherent aesthetics.
Nevertheless,here we see our poemtip-toed upon rain-shined pallets and boxes peering in upon the wedding partygathered in their Sunday best beneath exposed lightbulbs.She cannot give herself to this moment.Not here. Not yet.
But hear this now. Voice and guitar spin chords that curve the edges
of this rough hewn spacebefore the bride sets foot upon the aisle.Music has that quality,improvising its own architectureover decayed forms with no beauty of their own,and in this warehouse,music is magic:she erects an arching cathedral,stains the glass,frescoes the walls,marbles the floor,cleans up the groom with an admirable hand.On a cloudblack night she serves her better Master.See the poem with light fingers tracing notes upon the glass.Music, the poem observes,wraps the weighted truth of a momentin levity.
Now the woman in white and man in blacktake music’s cues:the bride passes between rows of folding chairsbedecked with clefs and notes and dots and tiesall set on stained concrete floors.Congregants rise. The warehouse levitatesabove blueprints rewritten by the handof almighty God. Bride and groom smile.Music has vanished:its renovations remain.The cathedral, once constructed,retains virtue in shafts of light,horizontal and eternal,that bear the heart to Heaven.Amen.
The poem hops onto the mud-lovely ground.Sometimes she stays to hear the pastor’s words,but tonight she shakes the rain from her hair,grabs chicken and waffles from a food truck,washes them down with a pentameter.
Oh, my poem, whose sharp eyes pierce dripping corrupted glass, wonder at the chapel a warehouse can become—
a civilized place where rings given as symbols resound,where people say vows and mean them,where the power invested in matrimonyrenovates both the architecture of placeand the architecture of the heart.Love, resurrected in a warehouse,
kisses the world,
rekindles its sodden longings.
Most fitting place for a marriage—most lovely to view through a window through a poem—
a discarded shell reanimated in musicby faith, hope, and love.
Oh, my poem, say that, or say nothing at all.
-Adam Holt @adamholtwrites


*I invoked poetic license for a few of the descriptive elements of Ecclesia in this poem, particularly the glass.