Just a reminder. The CONduit convention begins on Friday. I’ll be holding a 2-hour workshop on Saturday titled “The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories” from 2 PM - 4 PM.

The rest of the day on Saturday is loaded with a number of great panels featuring authors such as:

• Michael Stackpole
• Brandon Sanderson
• L.E. Modesitt Jr.
• Mette Harrison
• Eric James Stone
• James Dashner
• Julie Wright
• Dan Wells
• Ann Chamberlin
• And many more 

If you look at the schedule, you’ll see sessions on

• making your own chain mail
• iron-age celts
• drawing monsters
• writing
• jewelry making
• filking, which is just live music, which you can join in on 
• Ice cream social
• A masquerade
• And, for those of you who have been dying to learn, belly dancing (I don’t need to go to that one: my belly dances all by itself already, alas)  

You authors, remember there’s a writers/publishers/editors social Friday night at 10 PM at the hotel bar.

Hope to see you there!

I’ve posted two new writer’s lessons that discuss how emotion works and the essential parts of story.

If you’ve read my article on the Teachers section, you know I think a good portion of what we do in our public schools is a waste of time because it’s not driven by any natural motivation. The result is that  students are bored more than they need to be. They develop a distaste for many subjects that could provide them great joy. Finally, when they do learn, it’s for a test, not life. And so when the test is over the promptly forget what they’ve learned. 

This is not to say that I’m against testing or teaching to a test. Far from it. A good test demonstrates that you’ve learned what you’re supposed to have learned. A good test focuses on the main things you want to learn. Good tests (and there are many types of tests) are critical.  The problem is the objectives the tests are built on. If the objectives are idiotic then teaching to the test becomes idiotic.

Now Nellie just got a job (we’re so happy!) teaching 7th and 8th grade English. For some of you that will elicit groans. The memories of supreme boredom produced by endless grammar lessons and assigned readings with worksheets are still that strong. And Nellie and I had the same feelings. If her job was to teach grammar et al for nine months, she was going to shrivel and die.

Because grammar is bad? No, for heaven’s sake. Because grammar isn’t the point. Nor are assigned readings. Or iambic pentameter, rising action, theme, character, plot, induction, deduction, the six traits and all the rest of the usual suspects. The point is to enjoy writing and reading for the things writing and reading do.

So we’ve been working and disussin how she might still meet all the state requirements yet teach the practical joy. Becasue if she teaches the joy, then the students will become better readers and writers than they ever could be otherwise. Which means they’ll be able to do and enjoy the things that can be enjoyed and done when you know how to write and read.  Case in point: our girls. Nellie’s done such a good job teaching the joy of reading that we have to ground them from books every once in a while.

So anyway, I came up with some ideas, a first draft of a curriculum. Of course, starting from scratch is a huge project. There were issues with it. More importantly, would it work? You don’t want to risk your first year on the job. Luckily, Nellie is smarter than I am and found someone who already discovered this wheel. Nellie handed me Nancie Atwell’s In the Middle.

I began to read, and I didn’t stop until almost 1 AM. Everything I’ve learned about teaching in the last 20 years, everything I’ve learned about learning how to write in the last 20 years–it’s all there. The key principles are all there. And the implementation of those principles is simple and proven (they actually test results).

What are the principles? What is the program?

Read the book. Heck, just read the first chapter.

I cannot tell you how excited I am for Nellie. We ordered these books and can’t wait to devour them.

• In the Middle: New Understanding About Writing, Reading, and Learning
  
• The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers
  
• Lessons That Change Writers
  
• Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons
  
• Side by Side: Essays on Teaching to Learn

Nellie is also going to apply for a four-day intership at the Center for Teaching and Learning in Edgecomb, Maine. I hope she gets in. She’s also going to do a week-long writer’s workshop at BYU.

Stay tuned. I’m going to twist her arm and see if she won’t blog about her experience this first year.

Yes, a weapon in development. Add this to the fart bomb, the scream, and The Rods from God and you’ll see where the future of the military is going to be very interesting. Here’s a list of interesting weapons.

Yeah, watch this video. It would scare the crap out of me to do this. But, man, wouldn’t it be a ride?

The deer came through this morning and ate the peanuts and cheese.

The good news is it appears the crows actually heard the weird call mix yesterday and had been scoping the place out for some time. My oldest saw them on the east. I saw them on the west. Then yesterday evening after writing the last post the pair of crows returned and did some acrobatics down the hill maybe 50 yards from the house.

Today I found some calls from the Crow Busters site. I created a new playlist using the Rally, Attention, and Look Here calls. I set out a pie tin, a bit further from the house with a few Sun Chips and a handful of large bird seed (dried corn, sunflower, etc.) in it. Then I played the calls for about 20 minutes.

Results: Nellie said she wanted to throw herself off the balcony. I’m telling you, these birds would not get the golden ticket on Avian Idol.

Some people must think I’m nuts. It appears crows can cause quite a bit of damage and have in other parts of the country. The folks at Crow Busters have listed their litany of reasons for hunting the birds. But they’re scarce where I live, so I’m not too worried.

Results of today’s efforts: nothing.

Now here’s something cool I didn’t know: lightening apparently shows up above volcanoes when they’re erupting. How cool is that?

Here’s a picture of the Chaiten volcano in Southern Chile.

Here’s a
bit more.

I decided to put my money where my mouth is. Or at least some peanuts and cheese. I want to make some friends with a couple of crows or ravens.

I’m a little hesitant. One or two buddies, okay. A freaking tribe swirling around the house, pooping on man and beast, or, horrors, tormenting the cats and demanding food–well, that’s something to write about, isn’t it?

Zing.

Besides, I’ve only ever seen a pair. How many friends can they have?

So I braved my fears and gathered six raven and crow calls from the internet. Then I put them in a play list, stuck my speakers in my office window, and began broadcasting crow. The mixture probably said something like, “Hey, there sweet momma, get off my branch you hawk turd!, can somebody pass me a napkin?” It’s got to pique their curiosity at least.

With the calls running I set out some cheese and peanuts at the edge of the lawn out our basement door. It appears these folks eat anything and tend to like fatty food. When I go to Logan next I’ll get some potato chips.

Results: 

1. Three buzzards swooped up the slope and passed by.

2. The herd of cattle down the hill and across the street all stood and stared up at the house.

3. One of the cats came around to see what the commotion was all about.  Stuck its head through the deck railings to get a look down where the sounds were coming from.  

I played the calls all during lunch. Nothin. So I turned them off.

At about 3:40 PM I set out for my hike. Put out the speakers again and departed. On my way back down the hill at about 4:40 PM I saw the crow pair (or maybe they’re ravens) flying up the hill about 200 yards south of the house. They were dinking around in the air not trying to get anywhere fast.

Hustled down and checked out the peanuts and cheese. Nothin. No sign of any visitors coming to investigate. Will try again tomorrow.

After watching two of Roslings’ presentations at TED, I had to find his website. Or at least the gapminder website. You’re going to love noodling around with the free tools out there.

I just downloaded a 1024×768 version of this today. What a fabulous wallpaper from tor.com that I can cycle through my screen saver image program!

Watch an interesting Borders interview with Meyer about Host and Twilight. The thing I keep seeing in her interviews is that this woman follows her passion. She follows the story that wows her. It’s nice, of course, that millions of fans want to share that wow with her. But I don’t know that a writer can be successful doing anything else.

Here’s Orson Card’s blurb about Meyer in Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People

Nobody was looking for Twilight. A Mormon housewife writes a young-adult novel about a love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire?

Is this Anne Rice lite? Not in the eyes of the teenagers—and their mothers—who have embraced the book.

But Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight does raise some questions, and I’ve asked them. “You really want your teenage daughter to live inside the story of a girl who lies to her parents, invites a boy to sleep in her bed and trusts him not to take advantage of her?”

These women look at me as if I’m insane. “But she can trust him. He really loves her. He’s…perfect.”

In an era when much of the romance genre has been given over to soft porn, and dark fantasy is peopled with one-dimensional characters bent on grim violence, many readers have become hungry for pure romantic fantasy—lots of sexual tension, but as decorous as Jane Austen.

Meyer, 34, did not calculatedly reach for that audience. Instead, she wrote the story she believed in and cared about. She writes with luminous clarity, never standing between the reader and the dream they share. She’s the real thing. Still, who’d have thought it? Today Mr. Darcy is a vampire.

Card is author of Ender’s Game, Empire and Women of Genesis

Iron Man was wonderful, every bit of what the trailers promised–adventure, humor, and a huge dose of gosh-wow. Of course, the idea of military exoskeletons are not new. It’s been in science fiction for a long time. More recently, Dan Brown used the idea in his thriller Act of War. In fact, if you think about it, it becomes clear that airplanes, ships, and tanks are all exoskeletons. So this is all old hat. But when did we ever need a brand-spanking new idea to have a wonderful and new story? What’s important is what the do with the idea–the characters, problem, plot, and setting. And Iron Man does a wonderful job of imagining new twists on all these parts of story.

*

In other news, it appears the future is not so far away. The military is going to be using robot bugs for recon.

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby.

Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets.

Then they would swarm into the building and relay images back to the soldiers’ hand-held or wrist-mounted computers, warning them of any threats inside.

I’m all for saving lives and projecting power while we’re doing it. And robo spies are just cool. Except, of course, when they’re used against you…

Humm, zing!

Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit 

Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008

Time: 2 PM - 4 PM

I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.

For more information go to the CONduit website.

Get free e-books and wallpapers of great books. You can get a cool Bob Eggelton right now. Go here: http://www.tor.com/

I just did.

BTW, here’s some cool stuff on how covers are chosen and what makes them work.

Part 1

Part 2