More progress

Not much, but two nights in a row for the first time in a looooong time. Makes me reconsider the number of essays I’ll be assigning next week. But, gotta get the students ready for that AP test.

Progress

I was determined to break that 40k mark yesterday on The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date, distractions be damned! Now, if I could just make the teen drama here at home stop I could get back to making serious progress.

Getting titles into book stores

I was in the Borders store in Norman, Okla., the other day, browsing the horror shelves like I always do and was thrilled to see my local store carrying Kim Paffenroth’s latest novel Dying to Live: Life Sentence. Then I saw another book from Permuted Press. And another. And another. In fact, that first shelf (of the three) dedicated to horror, the one where they put the trade paperbacks and hardcovers, was very liberally sprinkled with books from Permuted Press.

This is great, right?

Wellllll … yes. And no.

Because, you see, there was not one single title in the store from Scrybe Press, my main publisher. My werewolf books? Nope. Why? This is the question. I just sent an e-mail to my publisher to ask him why. I’m going to return to Borders, hopefully today, and see if they can tell me why.

You may recall some months ago I was in the Hasting’s store in Norman and saw they carried several titles from Eraserhead Press. I asked them about carrying my books and the manager told me she’d be glad to. On consignment. And she’d keep 30 percent of the sales. I’m not in the wholesale business.

Needless to say, the local Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million stores don’t carry my books, either.

Scrybe Press distributes through Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Scrybe takes returns and offers big discounts to retailers. So, I’m not sure what the problem is. Is there something Scrybe isn’t doing? Do you have to pay to get into the Ingram catalogue? Have a sales force that contacts individual stores? What? Does anybody know? Is there anything I can do to get local stores to carry my books?

Oh, the angst!

Being the father of a teenage girl is the hardest thing ever! I won’t go into detail about everything that’s gone on this week, but let’s just say my oldest daughter and I have … not been seeing eye to eye on some things. I know she doesn’t believe I have her best interests in mind. I’m sure she’s called me every name under the sun. She’s probably hated me most of the week. That is hard to accept. Very hard. I miss my little girl.

It’s snowing outside. A few days ago it was 85 degrees. Last weekend the above mentioned daughter put on a bikini and washed my truck. And now it’s snowing.

My AP classes are finished with The Grapes of Wrath. They took their final test and wrote their final essay on it on Thursday. I got a nice bell curve on the test. Most of the essays were pretty good. In most cases their writing has improved this year. With just over a month before the AP test we really need to focus on analyzing poetry, especially the older works, and time management. I think saving Shakespeare for the period right before the test will help us there. Right now they’re reading Grendel independently and we’ll read Burton Raffel’s translations of Beowulf together as a class. Then we’re doing Othello. After that (after the test) we’ll read The Exorcist. I got my copies of that one today. Anyway, I’m sorry to be leaving Grapes behind. It’s made me want to reread East of Eden this summer.

Because this is my first year teaching AP, and because the students are not as motivated as I’d hoped, we did not get to everything I had planned on my syllabus. In looking at it over the past couple of days, we had a real lack of diversity. The only non-white author we read was Chinua Achebe. We’ve read some poems by women and we read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” but we did not read a single novel by a woman. I have Ayn Rand, Charlotte Bronte and one other I can’t recall on the syllabus, but we didn’t get there. Many of them did choose female authors for their reading over the Christmas break. I’m not a big advocate of categorizing works by the gender or race of the author, but there are often some differences the kids should be able to identify. I hope this oversight on my part doesn’t bite them on the test. Next year we’re going from block schedule to a seven-period day and I’ll have the kids all year instead of just the last three 9-week periods, so we should have more time to cover more work.

Speaking of women authors, I tried listening to the audiobook of Toni Morrison reading Beloved a while back. I couldn’t get through it. I was in college when that old hag Oprah did her film version and a feminist professor I had required we go see it and write an essay on it. I wrote about how it (the movie) was not effective as a ghost story because it broke various rules, and she ripped me for not mentioning the feminist aspects of the story. Anyway, I wanted to see if the book was better than seeing Oprah pissing on screen. Good lord! The story just rambled from one place to another. It was like taking a trip from Oklahoma City to Tulsa by way of Phoenix, Austin, Omaha and Chicago. Morrison is not a professional reader, either. Like I said, I couldn’t get through it. I did find it interesting that Oprah left out the bit about the Sweet Home men having sex with cows. Have I mentioned how much I hated the professor who made me watch that film? Yeah. We got into an argument once over the title character in “A Rose for Emily” and I left class so mad that I forgot to pick up my bag containing several hundred dollars worth of camera equipment. She actually argued that Emily was a sympathetic character.

What else can I rant about? Oh hell, it’s after 1 a.m. I’m really just at the computer because I’m putting off reading Shakespeare. I’ve never read Othello. It’s on the table beside my bed, waiting on me. I. Do. Not. Like. Shakespeare.

There’s your problem

So, I have figured out part of what was keeping me from getting anything done on The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. I couldn’t remember who was who. So today I finished going through what I’ve written so far and recording names and short notes about each character. So far, at just about 34,000 words, there are 70 named characters, most of whom have lines. This isn’t counting unnamed extras, like the old couple in line in front of Ashlie at the football game. Sheesh! What was I thinking? Granted, this takes place mostly in a high school, but that’s a lot of people.

At least now I know who’s done what (and to whom) and am refreshed on the story. Maybe I can actually get a little real work done now.

Getting down to business

Three days of spring break are gone and I have not so much as opened the file for The Girls Nobody Wanted to Date. My goal of finishing it during the break is looking out of reach. However, as soon as this blog is posted I’m going to get back to work on that one. It’s like a thorn in my side now. I want it done and out of the way.

Until yesterday I’d completely forgotten about The Fetch, which is finished and just needs editing. Somehow it just dropped out of my thoughts. Senility? Maybe. But, it’s not like there’s a publisher waiting on it.

I watched a couple of movies over the past weekend. A friend recommended Idiocracy again so I rented it. I liked it, but it seemed like it could have been a lot better. I mean, I think it could have been on a level with Dogma, but it fell pretty well short of that. Great concept, though, and you can certainly see that the idiots of the world are out-breeding the smart people. I did what I could by having four smart ones, but, you know … Anyway, it was a decent movie and well worth the dollar I paid to rent it. I just wish it had been more fully developed.

I also watched The Orphanage (or El Orfanato) from first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona and producer Guillermo Del Toro (if you haven’t seen Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth you need to get it NOW). It’s a Spanish movie that apparently was released this past January, but I’d never heard of it. I just happened to see it on the shelf at the video store. The back cover sounded good, so I rented it. It is in Spanish, so I had to read subtitles, which is a bit distracting, but this was one of the best ghost stories — no, one of the best horror movies — I’ve seen in a good long time. Not a remake, not somebody chopping sombody up, not some half-nekkid teenagers in danger from their cell phone, digital camera or computer printer. This is an excellent film and I highly recommend it.

Why are Spanish horror movies suddenly so much better than the American drivel? How bad is the situation here? I saw some clip where somebody was interviewing Wes Craven at the opening of the new The Last House on the Left and he was talking about “originiality” as if that film was offering something new. WTF? Of course, I’ve never been a Craven fan, so I’m not surprised. I swear, though, with most of the mainstream American horror movies being remakes, poor sequels or just lame trash made for teenagers on dates, I may have to accept the subtitles and start looking at more foreign movies.

Warning: Political Rant ahead

I have been pinching this off for a long time now. Today, however, I made the mistake of reading the CNN Political Ticker blog, and many of the comment to this entry about Rep. Bill Posey’s (R-Fla.) proposal to require presidential candidates to submit their birth certificates when filing for office. The comments (read the morning after finally watchin Idiocracy) were just too much.

This is not a rant about President Barak Obama. Here’s a truth I have admitted to only a few people: I crossed party lines and voted for Obama. Not because I trust him, not because I thought he was an especially good candidate, but simply because he seemed a lot better than what my own party offered up. As to the job Obama has done so far, he hasn’t been at it long enough for me to form an opinion. I agree with some things he’s done and disagree with others. I voted for him because, like Hitler, he’s a great public speaker. (What do you do with a comment like that? hehehe)

This is a rant about Democrats who will stop at nothing to bash a Republican, but cannot stand for even a whiff of criticism toward a member of his/her own party.

Here’s one sample response to the article: This is the typical crap you see from the GOP. They don’t deserve to function as an opposition party they are a band of sore looser and cry babies. Grow up and get serious our country needs a truly loyal opposition and not a talk show radio mentality.

For suggesting that a law be clarified, the Republican party does not “deserve” to function as “an opposition party.” What the hell does that even mean? Does the Green party deserve to function? The Libertarians? Do Mormons deserve to function as a religion? Does GM deserve to function as a company? Who makes this determination? Oh yeah, some jackass with a computer and an Internet connection but without the ability to spell or write in standard English sentences.

Here’s an excerpt of another gem: What they [Republicans] really mean is that everyday when they wake up, they have to see a black man running the country and they just can’t stomach it. After nearly 400 years in bondage on these shores, an African American is at the top position and these idiots are having a hard time living. It’s ugly, but it’s the truth about why they are in such a frenzy over this.

Raise your hand if you remember which party produced the president who freed the slaves.

Now, granted, there are racist people in America. White and black and yellow and red and brown and … You know, like the minister who preached at the church the Obama family attended for years. But this douchebag has decided that every Republican is a racist and that our only problem with Obama is his skin color. I’m thankful for this, as I was unaware Obama’s race was supposed to matter to me. Now that I have my directive from this Democratic brain trust, I will immediatly don my white sheet and hood, light up a cross and march on the White House. Please forgive me for not doing so sooner, but, as this genius points out, I am an idiot.

As to being in a frenzy, if this guy had read the CNN article without his filter of hate he would have seen that Posey submitted his bill “without fanfare.” I actually wasn’t aware that Obama’s place of birth was an issue, but apparently it is. Posey says he simply wanted to avoid having citizenship be an issue in the future. He says, “This bill, by simply requiring such documentation for future candidates for President will remove this issue as a reason for questioning the legitimacy of a candidate elected as President.” Maybe he’s being honest there, maybe he is motivated by some anti-Obama sentiment. I don’t know the man and lack the ability to see into his heart.

Here’s my favorite comment, though:  Posey is simply one more narcissistic repub who wishes to nullify the will of the majority by use of worn-out and moronic propoganda techniques.

Based on that, I’m sure this Dem is fine with the states that passed legislation to ban gay marriage. Hey, it was majority rule. We should also roll back a lot of the Civil Rights legislation because, you know, it did not have majority support in most Southern states.

There are irrational, rabid people in both political parties. They all need to be called out, not that logic means anything to them, but just to show the quiet bystanders that there are some calmer voices out there. Ten or twelve years ago I would have been all over this kind of stuff. Now, I usually just don’t care. I firmly believe as Robert E. Howard did, that the barbarians will always be there, hammering away until civilization falls. Like Rome, America will crumble from the inside out and when we are too paralyzed by in-fighting to do anything else we will be overrun by outsiders. Probably outsiders we have allowed to illegally enter our country, but maybe that’s a rant for another time.

Hmm. This isn’t even what was really eating at me. But, I think I’ve gone on long enough. I’ll talk about Newsweek some other time.

Horror World reviews Little Graveyard

I almost forgot about this review at Horror World since I got to read it pretty far in advance. It’s a really nice one. Here’s a little snippet to entice you to read all of it. Oh yeah, and buy the book.

Little Graveyard on the Prairie flat-out ground my soul into a fine powder and left it to blow across the desert. My first taste of this author left me wondering why newer writers can’t be this literate, insightful, original and fresh. Wedel opens his imagination and lets it softly tiptoe into your mind with an ice-cube-down-the-spine first chapter and never lets the reader off the hook until the shattering conclusion. I was reminded of a Braunbeck or a John Little tale and if any of you good people have read these two writers you know what a high compliment that is.

Many thanks to Mark Tyree for reading and reviewing Little Graveyard on the Prairie.

Bam!

So, I’ve mentioned wanting to write a novel about Bigfoot, right? (Yes. Yes, I have.) Other than a lack of time, part of my problem was a lack of plot. Since I’m not in Hollywood, a plot is necessary. Today, as I drove home from a late day at work, the whole thing just hit me. It was like I slammed my truck right into a Bigfoot on those back roads. Everything from the opening chapter to the final scenes just fell into place. It was a beautiful thing. I have written down all my thoughts and outlined the first several chapters. I still need names for most of my characters, but the story, along with their back stories, is there now.

Oh yeah, and I still need the time to write it.

So, how does a miracle like this happen? In this case, it seems to have come from my recent readings of Beowulf, Grendel, The Great Gatsby and relating a couple of past personal stories to a student. Various elements from all this stuff just filled the gaps in my languishing desire to write about Bigfoot, and now I have a solid plot to go with a situation and some hazy characters.

In other news, I’m still not sick. My wife, however, ended up at the doctor today and can’t go back to work until Friday.

I gave benchmark tests in three of my four classes today, including both my AP classes. For the most part, it wasn’t pretty. Some of that was my fault and it took me a couple of hours to fix my mistakes. That made the picture a little prettier, but it’s still not so good. The next month and a half before the AP test will see my students doing a lot more practice multiple choice tests. Oh! And there was sooo much drama over my essay prompt as kids in 5th period tried to get kids from 1st period to tell them what it was. Most of the essay were middlin’, with a few really good ones and a couple of real stinkers.

Feelin’ lucky?

I’m feelin’ lucky. So far. You may recall how, last week, my three youngest young’uns were sick. Early Sunday morning the bug got my wife, then my oldest son a few hours later. Wifey was really bad off for a while. She doesn’t like me talking about her here, so I won’t go into details, but let’s just say it was nasty and at one point painful for her.

Me? I’ve been fighting a cold for the past few days, but no flu symptoms yet. I’m pretty worried about it, though. I mean, this is benchmark test week at school. Today was a review day. Tomorrow my AP classes do their essay, then the rest of the week is all testing. If I get sick, a sub has to give my test. That seldom works out well. At the moment, all systems are go. Just lots and lots of snot and sneezing and snot and some coughing and snot, scratchy throat and, umm … a lot of snot. Did I mention the snot? Buckets of the stuff!

I learned today that a few more of my students have signed up for the Marines after high school. I am very conflicted about this. I believe military service is an extremely noble thing. It’s necessary and I’m thankful to those who do it. On the other hand, the various military branches recruit heavily from our school because it is a poor inner city school where taking a job in which people will shoot at you isn’t much different than a Saturday evening at home for a lot of these kids. One of these students, a very polite and gentle Hispanic guy, told me he chose the Marines over college so he can get insurance for his mom and brothers. That’s a hell of a reason to choose such a potentially dangerous career objective. Ten more weeks of high school, then these kids will take all their potential into boot camp, and then …

As we wrap up The Grapes of Wrath in my AP classes, my 5th hour had a decent conversation about colloquialisms today. Reading the book has made them more aware of their own Okieonics and, in some cases, made them relapse into using words like “worsh” for “wash.” We discussed various other things we say that are unique to Oklahoma, or at least the South. Like when you’re preparing to do something, you’re “fixin’ to do it.” Or, as one girl pointed out, you’re “fi’in’ to do it.” My personal favorite is “Jeet?” It took some of them a minute to realize I was saying something unusual. What does it mean? you Yankees ask. “Did you eat?” Yup. Shorten that to “Didcha eat?” And then again to simply “Jeet?” We actually understand that and accept it as common speech.

Another girl talked about a friend from the Northeast who calls the water fountain a “bubbly.” I had never heard that one.

What are some of your favorite colloquialisms? What do you and your friends say that you think people elsewhere in the country wouldn’t understand? (At least we’re not Canadians, eh?) haha

The few students who have actually finished Grapes have been appropriately shocked and confused by the ending. It’s amazing to see them thinking it over when they see the symbolism behind Rose of Sharon’s act there at the end. Seeing that light come on is what teaching is all about. And then they say, “It’s still gross!”

I swear, all this bleeding heart stuff about kids in the military and fanboy adoration of Steinbeck … the GOP’s gonna come and revoke my Republican voter registration card pretty soon.