Month: March 2015

How to Introduce your Childhood to your Kids through Netflix

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My son watches some awful cartoons. I mean, really… terrible cartoons. I’m talking about your Animal Mechanicals (where every character is an idiotic robot… think about it… if you’re a robot, how can you be an idiot? At the very least, you’d be programmed with the intelligence of every creator who worked on your creation, unless your creators are evil overlords in their own right, in which case, hold on, I have to write down an idea for another short story), Color Crew (where the only spoken words are the names of colors, and in every episode one color gets all gung-ho about coloring the entire page in his color and all of a sudden you have BLUE SUNS and ORANGE COWS, and then the dictatorial eraser with his Stalin mustache swoops in and he’s all like “how dare you interrupt my schedule, now I have to clean up all this sharknado”… this is literally every episode), and then there’s this one on Youtube where they’ve animated all these nursery rhymes (cool) and rewritten them (not so cool) so that suddenly in the middle of London Bridge is Falling Down there’s a superhero pig who knocks the enormous green monstrosity (you know, the one knocking down the bridge) into the Thames. Suffice it to say that we’ve seen all these adventures in animation enough to memorize the high points. And yeah, I know, “why do you let your kids watch so much TV,” and yeah, I know, “puzzles and wood blocks and brainpower,” and to that I say, yeah, okay, you’re probably right. But Netflix puts all this awful entertainment a finger’s click away, and it’s kind of awesome and kind of awful for that.

See, in light of all the mind-anesthetizing programming we usually have to endure, I’ve been on the lookout for something that actually has value in the world to expose the boy to. Something that will expand his horizons, make him a better person. Something like Star Wars. Now, we have the movies, and I thought of that, but I can no more interest the boy in the original trilogy than order my cat to start tap-dancing. (Sure, he could do it, but there’s no interest there.) I even tried him on episode I, the one I don’t speak of, in the hopes that with its cartoonier nature and the canonical abortion of Jar-Jar Binks, it might appeal to his three-year-old sensibilities. No dice.

Fine, I thought. The boy isn’t ready for one of the prized gems of my formative film collection. We’ll try again in a few years. Tried a few other programs. There’s a Transformers series for little kids now, and he goes for that now and then if I turn it on while he’s out of the room. (He comes back from a bathroom break and he’s all, “oh, this? I guess that’s okay.”) But he won’t choose it. Which baffles me. He loves robots and he loves cars; how can he not love robots that turn into cars. He’d rather watch computer-animated documentaries about dinosaurs. And yeah, okay, that’s kind of cool, too. But I want him to have something of mine, to care about something that I cared about.

But then my wife — for reasons unknown (though probably for my benefit) — bought the boy a new toothbrush. One that’s red and translucent and, when you push the button on its side, lights up and makes lightsaber noises as you brush away. (Oh my god, I want one for myself.) And if there’s one thing my kid loves, it’s brushing his teeth. Seriously. We can ask him a hundred times if he wants to go to bed, clean his room, pick up his toys, and he will very eloquently respond “no thank you” or “not now, but later”. But, ask him if he wants to brush his teeth before bed, and he can barely shout out an “OKAY!” before he’s bolted up the stairs.

On day one, he thought the lightsaber toothbrush was weird. I explained to him what a lightsaber was and why it was awesome.

On day two, he reminded me to turn on the lightsaber noises before he brushed. All systems were go.

Then, Netflix offered up something awesome. Apparently, on Cartoon Network or something a few years back, they made a whole animated series. A whole, six-season, animated series. My wife pointed this out to me, and I turned it on, fast-forwarded to a scene with Yoda and his lightsaber flipping around, and showed it to the boy. Done deal. Now I can ask him if he wants to watch Yoda with his lightsaber, and I get the “YEAH!” that’s usually reserved for asking him whether he wants to take a bath. Granted, if Yoda isn’t in the scene it’s all “where’s Yogurt?” so there’s still a little bit of work to be done. Nevertheless, it’s time to start planning his exposure to the films. I figure he can handle the whole original trilogy by age five, and I can have him responding to his mom’s bedtime “I love you” with Han’s super-smug “I know” by age six.

But all this teaches me something. Something I already knew, but like all lessons with kids, a bit of redundancy is never a bad idea.

When introducing something to the child, it’s important that you don’t make a big deal of it. You can’t say, “Okay, son, how would you like to watch a movie that I loved as a kid? It’s full of spaceships and explosions and really neat swords made out of lasers, and I think you’ll love it.” Doesn’t work. He wants to watch the freakin’ Space Buddies again (a movie about the kids of the famous slam-dunkin’ dog, Air Bud. Except, you know, IN SPACE.) For a new idea to take root with the kid, it has to fall into one of two categories:

  1. It’s something he finds himself, be it on the aisle of the toy store, the front yard, underneath the back seat of the car.
  2. It’s just there when he walks into a familiar space, as if it’s already part of a routine he didn’t understand. We do this with dinner all the time. Ask him if he wants to try some spaghetti with meatballs, and we get “NO. Want macaRONI.” But if it’s just in his seat and we say, “Time for dinner!” and put him in front of it, most of the time, he’ll clean his plate.

Kinda like that movie, Inception, but with squash casserole instead of a multi-million dollar company. Or whatever that movie was about.

Eyes Up

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I think I said it at the end of last week, but I’m saying it again to convince myself.

The first edit is done. When I say “first edit” what I’m really talking about is the first series of edits, a smattering of various angles of refraction on this novel of mine that I’ve been alternately using and discarding over the past… god… seven months? Seriously, the time for this “first edit” has now handily outlasted the time it took me to draft the novel in the first place. That fact makes sense to me now, having gotten my hands and feet quite bloody along the way and having read a lot of advice in the interim, but if you’d told me at the outset that editing would take longer than writing the novel in the first place, I’d have had a good laugh at you.

I mean, the writing — spinning the tale out of the void — that’s the hard part, right?

Ha. Ha, ha ha ha ha. No.

But I’m not here to talk about the edit. I’m thinking about what comes next. Because it’s now time to cut the cord on this thing and release it into the wild. And then I’m going to have to play a waiting game in the meantime while it founders around out there, waiting to hear from actual real people what I need to do to actually really fix it and make it worth possibly sending to a for real editor, agent, publisher (seriously, I have no idea what to do from here).

To my way of thinking, there are basically two things I need to consider after I send this thing out for reading and do my best to put it out of mind for a month or two. 1) Figure out what my plans are, and my time frames for accomplishing said plans, for when I get some reviews back. 2) Decide what the next project is. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this whole writing process, it’s that momentum matters.

So, it’s time to get my eyes up on those two things. In fact, I took a break mid-post to take a step on the first thing, and reached out to a friend of mine whom I’ve been out of touch with for entirely too long. Sorry about that. But there’s no time like the present.

And nothing like a stream-of-consciousness post to kickstart my thinking and remind me there are things I should be doing.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Lingua Caca

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Today was a day of great pain and sorrow for me, because today I made a pass at cleaning up the language in my novel.

I really feel two ways about this. On the one hand the language, most of the time, feels natural and right and perfectly at home in the book where it was. On the other hand, I’m willing to accept that, perhaps, foul language is a crutch that I maybe lean on a little too much.

Want numbers? Here are numbers:

  • The novel as a whole is ~97,000 words in its current iteration. (It probably still needs trimming, but we’ll see what my first round of readers thinks.)
  • 37 were Fargos. (7 of those in my notes to myself. I’m a bit of a self-abuser in my own editing.)
  • 53 of those were Sharknados. (only 3 in my self-abuse notes. Also, and I’m rather proud of this, 7 of them came in one sentence. It was a good sentence.)
  • 1 Ash. Not a word I use a lot.
  • 48 Haberdasheries. This one makes me laugh a little, because its usage irks me in popular shows. If you watch Once Upon A Time critically, as I like to do (who am I kidding, it’s also a lot of fun), you might notice that they lean on the phrase “what the hell” or “who the hell” or “how the hell”. I can usually count 3 or 4 iterations per episode. Well, 90% of my offenses came in the same flavor. That old adage about the man in the mirror being a big, fat jerk comes to mind.
  • 7 Clams. Again, not one I overuse. 2 of them were directed at myself. This is within acceptable parameters.

So, after a few surgical strikes with the delete key, what did I accomplish?

  • There are no f-bombs left. It hurt me, but in every instance I was able to find a way to say what I was trying to say, only, y’know, with less fargoery.
  • There are 2 sharknados left. The ones still standing are really fargoing funny, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t find a phrasing any sharper than a well placed s-word.
  • The ash is gone. I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to fight my ego-writer for it. No great loss, there.
  • The clams stayed. I figure if a person can handle a couple of sharknados, they can clam sure handle a few clammits.
  • The haberdasheries… well, I’m addressing those tomorrow. I can probably cut most of them, but again, for emphasis, a little haberdashery is hard to beat.

So how do I feel about all of this? I’m conflicted. The Fargos and Sharknados were easy enough to trim out. Those are the biggies, that people really seem to take issue with. Higher on the hierarchy, if you will. In a novel of almost 100,000 words, I think a couple of profanities are well within reason.

Aren’t they?

My wife argues (probably rightly so) that my novel may lose some of its appeal for younger audiences with the profanity intact. To be more precise, with the profanity in place, the book could get labelled in such a way that might make it hard to sell parents on letting their children read it. (As a teacher, I can assure you that a stray f-word or worse does not bother the average whateverteen-year-old in the least.) And I guess that’s a consideration worth … considering. Then again, the language is as natural to me as breathing, and I think that removing it from my characters’ mouths (and rarely from the prose) is a little like the aliens taking the nose off the Sphinx. (What, you don’t think aliens built the Sphinx? LOOK AT THE FACTS.) Maybe it looks better that way, but still, it feels … off, somehow. Certainly it feels like adjusting my style for an external factor, regardless of how relevant that one factor may be. One character in particular was exceptionally foul-mouthed in the first draft. Like, it was an integral part of what made him unlikable (I thought). The character works without having a sailor’s vocabulary, but knowing what he was, he feels like, I dunno, maybe 80% of what he could be? 85%?

Then again, maybe my wife is right, and the language is a barrier to more readers than I think.

It’s weird; usually I can bring an issue here to my dumping ground, marinate on it for the forty-five minutes or so it takes me to pinch off a blarg post, and come away with some clarity and feeling a little lighter. But on this one I feel even more conflicted than when I started.

What to do? Leave the salty language intact and ask my beta readers how they feel about it? Or proceed with the edited-for-TV version and ask, at the finish, whether foul language would read better?

Is the language a part of my authorial voice? Or is it a crutch getting in the way of my voice?

Sharknado.

Bamboo Patience

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This is one I tossed off while I was guest-posting at LindaGHill’s site many moons ago. It’s a good one, though, and I wanted to have it on my site, too, because I’m greedy like that.

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I’ve just read a fascinating article (which is always dangerous) and I went and generalized it (which is always entirely justifiable… maybe not) and made it about me (which… come on, I’m a blogger, what do you expect).

An article about bamboo.

I’m not a gardener. In fact, if the word “gardener” has a polar opposite, then I’m that. (Blighter? Destroyer of things green? Seriously, you should see my front yard. By which I mean, my front collection of weeds.) But through the whimsy of the internet, I found myself reading this article about bamboo farmers and success. It’s worth five minutes of your time, but here’s the quickly-generalized, me-centric summation of the article.

Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It grows so quickly and so prolifically, and is so incredibly strong (it has a tensile strength close to that of steel) that…

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Double (Stroller) Trouble

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Running is hard, right?

I mean, it’s so hard that for a lot of people, the simple and straightforward difficulty of heaving air in and out of the lungs, hammering the legs one after another against the pavement, swinging the arms like disembodied chicken wings, and proceeding in that fashion for — what, five minutes? ten? twenty? — is enough to send them screaming from the prospect of ever running again. “Not for me,” they’ll say. “Maybe if I’m being chased,” they’ll say. “Bad for my knees anyway,” they’ll say.

AND it’s hard making the time to do it. Even just starting out, you have to budget a solid thirty minutes to each and every run (walk-run, walk-walk-run, twenty minutes of walking with two minutes of running, and every other permutation included). Add to that a few minutes of stretching (you are stretching, right?) and a few minutes of warm-up. Then, of course, unless you’ve somehow mastered the leaking of pain and suffering out through your pores, there’s a requisite cool-down and shower when you get back. Personally, I can attest that if I neglect the post-run shower, my wife will maintain a ten-foot bubble around her person at all times until I get around to it. So round up and call it an hour. That’s an hour. Each and every time you step out the door, that’s an hour of your life down the drain, until you really catch the bug, and then the hour can easily turn into two or more on the weekend. But let’s be conservative and call it three hours a week. That’s a Law & Order marathon. That’s a hellagood nap. That’s a Lord of the Rings movie, which you’re watching again instead of exercising because help, Legolas is so dreamy.

So it’s hard to do and it’s hard to make time for. And that’s before you’re married. And before you have kids. Once you check those little boxes on your triplicate form of life, running gets even harder — because you’re more tired all the time — and tougher to make time for — because you have no time left! So if you want to keep it going, you make sacrifices.

What form do those sacrifices take? Well, you can give up sleep and start running at 4 in the morning. If you live close enough to work, you can run there and back, although you might run into some interesting difficulties caused by your hygiene. Or you can find ways to double up and do two things at once.

That’s what my wife and I did not long after our son was born — we bought one of those jogging strollers. And I loved it. And I hated it. Loved it because suddenly I could get my runs in when it was convenient, get the boy out of the house and into some fresh air, and give my wife some time to herself. Hated it because it makes the run into a full-body workout about twice as intense as the run itself. But the sprout loved riding in the stroller, so it was all good.

Then we had sprout #2. And suddenly all the headaches and impracticalities of parenting get magnified — not doubled, as you might expect, but exponentially more difficult. Time is even harder to come by. Luckily, the same solution presented itself anew: my sister and her husband were generous enough to get us a double jogging stroller.

I’ve written before about the singular experience of being a dad pushing around a double stroller. The reactions I’ve had are universally positive, and I get a lot of reactions, because this thing is hard to miss. While the single stroller is a somewhat odd-looking variation of a well-known accoutrement of family life, the double stroller is a whole different animal. It’s massive. It’s unwieldy. It doesn’t fit down the aisles of some grocery stores.

Knowing all that, I’ve been tentative about the prospect of actually using it for its designed purpose — to load the kids up in it (both of them, simultaneously) and go for a run. It’s a damn sight heavier than the single, partially because it’s so massive in its own right, and also, obviously, because it carries two sprouts instead of one. It’s harder to steer, by dint of being heavier — with the single you can just press down on the handle a little bit and the front wheel will lever up off the ground, making steering a breeze. With the double, the same mechanic works, but the lever is not nearly so responsive, and really requires two hands to accomplish gracefully. “Next time,” I routinely promised myself, or, “when the weather gets nicer.”

Well, this weekend, the weather got nicer than it’s been since October, and the wife had to work, and well, I had some miles to make up, so — into the stroller the kids went. And you know what? It wasn’t nearly so bad as I had feared.

Yes, the stroller is heavier, but that cuts both ways. It’s harder to get it moving, but it carries a momentum all its own. Once I got up to a good trot, all I really had to do was steer the thing, and that was accomplished easily enough with a bit of pressure on the handle. Uphills were a bear, there’s no sugarcoating it; but downhills make up for that. Sprout the second fell asleep in about fifteen minutes, and sprout the first sat merrily watching the streetlights and bushes drifting by for the duration. I’d feared that the double would be about 50% harder to wrangle than the single, but in practice, it felt more like 10%; there, but hardly noticeable. The uphills were the only place where I really felt a difference.

But oh, the pain that would come after. If pushing the single stroller turns a run into a whole body workout, then pushing the double is like doing p90x at 3x speed. Okay, maybe not, but the subtle trick of the stroller is that it works entirely different muscles on the run than running by your lonesome. The shoulders and core get a share. The forearms feel the burn. The glutes… my god, the glutes get hammered. And of course the effect is exacerbated by the fact that we’re just coming out of hibernation, and I haven’t pushed a stroller at length since September.

But summer is coming.

And summer means daddy at home with the kids, and when daddy is at home with the kids, daddy needs to get out of the house with the kids. So the stroller is going to be a staple around here.

Luckily, with cargo like this, I think I can get used to the extra workload…

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