Writer’s Mud

To the best of my knowledge/memory, I have never had writer’s block. Not the way I’ve heard it described, at least. Manuscript at a standstill, unable to move forward one word, let alone one sentence.

Never had that—of course, I haven’t been at this too long yet. What I have done is slog through the writer’s mud. Have you been there? The forward momentum doesn’t stop; it just slows down. There’s a little more thinking going on, a little more letting the scene play out in my head before I attempt writing the words.

I don’t see this as a particularly bad thing (as long as the whole manuscript doesn’t go that way). It’s kind of the bridge that joins the planning part of me and the “pantsing” part. (For the uninitiated, that’s the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants concept.) I frequently have some broad plot points outlined (roughly) when I start, even some details noted, but I don’t have the specifics of how those major landmarks will be connected. Basically, I know the characters will start at A, stop by E, L, and T on the way, and end up at Z. The rest of the alphabet kind of unfolds as I go.

Generally, I like how this works. I have those big points in mind, so I know what I need to point toward. As I slog through the mud, my brain is sifting through possibilities, everything marinating and percolating to get those connections made.

Since I spent the majority of my life convinced I wasn’t creative at all, I’m happy to find a creative process that works (or seems to). I just have to make sure I keep moving, or that mud might suck me down to where I can’t get the momentum going again.

Have you experienced the mud? Or have you experienced writer’s block? What do you do to put a positive spin on it and get moving again?

How Do You Measure Up?

I have a math-teacher confession. (Again.) It’s not something I’m proud of. Not something I like to admit.

I’m not very good at estimating measurements.

Oh, I’m okay at the small stuff, particularly with length. I can say, “This is about two inches,” or even, “That’s about fifteen centimeters.” But if you go much beyond something I can hold in my hands, I’m pretty hopeless.

This drove me nuts in driver’s ed. Rules like, “When parking on the street, you must be X feet from the corner,” were useless for me. Thirty feet, fifty feet, doesn’t matter. I have no mental gauge for a distance like that.

Weights are even worse. Give me something and ask me if it’s closer to five pounds or ten, and I’ll be straight-up guessing. I know the fifty-pound bags of salt are pretty close to the limit of what I can comfortably lug around, so if something else is close to that, my guesstimate will be okay.

You know what this all has in common? Experience.

I can estimate lengths of things smaller than a breadbox because I’ve done a lot of measuring with a 12-inch ruler. I can tell when things are close to that fifty-pound mark because lugging those salt bags down to the basement is a memorable experience. I don’t have a lot of experience measuring and knowing larger distances.

I bet if I played football, I’d have a pretty good feel for five yards vs. ten yards vs. twenty.

Except … I have students who play football and don’t know what a yard is.

*headdesk*

As much as I’m not great with measurement, it’s a much weaker area for many of my students. (Oh, if I could tell you how many times I’ve asked, “How many inches are in a foot?” or even, “How many months in a year?” and gotten blank stares!) Some of it’s a language issue, and some is that it hasn’t been prioritized in their previous years of math education. Mostly, it’s a combination of both.

So, students in some of my math classes will be attacking objects with rulers and yardsticks and tape measures and scales. I will throw lots of questions at them like, “If you were measuring the water to fill up a bathtub, would you use gallons or cups?” And I will hope some of it sinks in.

What mad measurement skills do you have? What areas trip you up? Any tips or tricks? I’d love to hear ’em.

Deceptive Appearances

My lovely friend Tracy Jorgensen has beta-read two of my manuscripts for me (so far), and both times has included fan-art sketches with her feedback. I won’t post the one for Significantly Other because it’s slightly spoilerish (kinda-sorta). More recently, she did this sketch for Fingerprints, my much beloved ms #1.

There are the twins, Taz on the left, Raina on the right. Taz has a bowl of yummy, fudgy goodness. Raina (poor thing) got a stinky pile of dog poop.

Think about it. From a distance (and especially from an image so your nose isn’t involved), the two might look kind of similar, right? Tracy had a whole analogy about the ms to go with it. Maybe I’ll share it sometime.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your interpretation. What are two things that look very similar on the surface, but upon closer inspection, one is awesome and the other … not so much?

Come on, creative types! What’s the best you can come up with? (Or maybe just a silly caption for the picture?)

Call It What It Is … So What Is It?

I am sure I’ve referred to myself as an aspiring writer before. Maybe even frequently. Chuck Wendig says I shouldn’t call myself that. (Good article on the other end of that link, but fair warning—coarse language therein as well.) I understand his point. You either write or you don’t. If you do, you’re a writer; if you don’t, you’re not. Very Yoda.

With respect to Mr. Wendig, however, sometimes that’s the clearest, most concise label for the type of writer I’m referring to. There are many types, and I have friends among all of them. Published writers, writers with publishing contracts who’ve not yet been published (would that be pre-published?), agented writers, self-published and/or indie writers.

Then there’s me (and my friends rowing along in the same boat).

I suppose I could call myself an aspiring-to-be-published writer. Accurate, but kind of a mouthful. If I wanted to be really accurate about my status at this very moment, I should call myself an aspiring-to-be-agented writer. That’s even more awkward.

Sometimes (maybe even most of the time), it’s fine to say “writers,” all-inclusive. Then there are times when I need to specify a more specific group, and if I say “aspiring writers,” most people will know what I mean.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with a colleague at school a few years ago. She’d been in a discussion where some teachers stated vehemently that we shouldn’t refer to some students as hard-of-hearing. It’s a school for the deaf, call them all deaf (or Deaf, more accurately), and leave it at that.

Again, that’s all well and good much of the time, but there are occasions when I need to refer to a particular subset of students. I joked with my friend that I’d call them Students Having Access To Sound Adequate For Acquiring Spoken English—the SHATSAFASEs. (Try saying that aloud. Yeah.)

The hard-of-hearing label has pretty much stuck. Sometimes I call them “Talkers.” We all know it isn’t meant to put them above or below the deaf kids—it just means speaking to them isn’t a waste of breath.

So, my apologies. I’m going to continue to use “aspiring writer” when necessary for clarity.

Have you run into this type of “labelling” issue before? (Does anyone seriously use the term “vertically challenged”?)

Gender Wars, Math-Style

This isn’t a war so much as an observation. Not even a highly scientific observation. It’s not based on a fancy statistical study or anything, just my own observations in my classroom over the years. The conclusion isn’t anything like 100%, but the vast majority in my small sample seems to follow the pattern.

Because I’ve taught in the same small school for several years, I’ve often followed the same group of students from Algebra 1 on up, some of them all the way to Calculus. I’ve kept an eye on what students liked and didn’t like, what methods they chose when given a choice, and where their strengths and weaknesses were.

By and large (again, in my relatively small sample), girls prefer the analytical and algebraic. They’d rather have an equation to manipulate and solve, going step by step to isolate the variable. Boys prefer more visual approaches—geometry over algebra, analyzing a graph over an equation. There have been a couple of exceptions, but every year I’ve had more kids split down the expected line.

I’ve found this particularly interesting since these are all deaf and hard-of-hearing students, so you might expect they’d all lean toward the visual approach. Is it something in how males and females are respectively wired that makes us tend to lean toward one or the other? I remember reading things in school about how girls tend to be stronger in verbal-linguistic areas, while boys are stronger in logical-mathematical areas. (Again, these are just tendencies and obviously not true across the board.) Perhaps this is something similar.

Or maybe my students are just strange. 🙂

Do you fall into my expected categories or defy them? Have you noticed other unexpected (non-stereotypical) areas where divisions tend to fall along gender lines?

The Springing of Spring

Yes, I know the “official” start of spring isn’t for a few more weeks, but spring weather has definitely arrived. And by that I mean, the insane meteorological roller coaster has launched at full speed.

That wonderful time of year when I’m freezing as I walk from the parking lot to the school in the morning … and the air conditioner kicks on my classroom in the afternoon. (It’s still only low-to-mid 50s outside … but my room appears to share some characteristics with a solar-powered brick oven.) This is great, because during the same class, Student X will think it’s a refrigerator while Student Y thinks it’s a sauna.

The commute home nearly every day this week has made me think, “There’s no way Chicago has more wind than this. If they’re the Windy City, we’re the Windier STATE.”

And you know what? This state is full of something else: SAND. Wind plus sand. Do the math.

Spring also brings about that characteristic rise in the hormone levels of my teenage students. Oh, boy.

Speaking of which (yeah, that’s a smooth segue), there’s one good thing about spring. Several of my writer-friends have put together an anthology of short stories titled Spring Fevers. (I don’t have a story in there, but I did the formatting—yay, tech-head!) It’s available for free on Smashwords in a variety of electronic formats, or for 99 cents at Amazon. (Any proceeds from sales on Amazon will go to charity.) The stories are all about relationships in some form, with wide variety in topic and tone. If you like short stories, take a look and see what you think.

(My birthday’s in spring. I guess that’s another good thing. But not until next month.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, all that dust and sand in the air means I need to do some sneezing.