Another Successful Day in the Ville

Another good day of reading.  Got a lot of essays read.  I've greatly enjoyed getting to know my table-mates.  They are all good people and dedicated to doing a great job.  I hope to have a picture of them up soon.

This was another dinner out night, so I walked up and down 4th Street Live trying to decide where to eat.  I looked at menus in windows and finally settled on a place called Smashburger.  I ordered an avocado club burger and Nutter Butter Shake.  It was all amazing!  Healthy--of course--it had avocado on it!

This is 4th Street Live.  It used to be a place called The Galleria way back when I lived in Louisville.  It's like a pedestrian mall and they block off the street for concerts often.  Tons of restaurants.  

My shake came first.  It was so big it came in two cups!

About five minutes after this picture, the burger was replaced by about six napkins.  Delicious, yes.   Neat, no.

During lunchtime, many folks like to get out of the building--it's pretty intense work, so we need some sunshine and downtime.  There's a beautiful plaza across the street with fountains and a grassy area.  At lunch time it's solid people just soaking up the sun.

Our grassy sanctuary!

You can't see the fountains very well, but they're quite pretty.

This is a better view of one of the fountains.  There's a Panera, but we have  that at home, so I am venturing to eat at local places.

When I got back to the hotel this evening, I was greeted by calliope music from the Belle of Louisville, which was getting set to take folks on a dinner cruise.  It was quite festive.  Here's a picture from the atrium of her as she's pulling away from the dock.

The Belle of Louisville

It's hard to believe the reading ends tomorrow and I fly home day after.  It's been a great experience and I really hope they invite me back.

Baseball and Irish Pubs!

I've had a great time so far in Louisville.  Went to a Louisville Bats game last night.  Louisville Slugger Field is a top-notch facility and the Bats can really hit.  They had three dingers, including a grand slam that turned out to be the game winner.  It was also dog night, so I got to pet a bunch of adorable pooches.

Tonight we ate on our own.  I walked up the street to an Irish Pub called Ri Ra. No idea how to say it or what it means, but it was voted best Irish Pub in Louisville.  Don't know how significant that is, but the food was great.

I have posted other pictures, along with some of theses, on my Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/trainguy917

View from my seats.  I sat next to a lovely lady called Ms. Susie.  She's such a fixture at the ballpark that she actually has her name on her seat. 

Another picture from my seat.  I got in for $10 and it was dollar hot dog night.  Only in a minor league town could you get a ball game ticket and dinner for under $20. 

Homemade chicken pot pie from the Ri Ra Irish Pub.  It was so delicious!  It had a puff pastry topper that was so creamy that it was like it had cheese under it.  The dark bread was great dipped in it.

This is what's left of my appetizer.  Homemade potato cakes.  They  roll them in Panko bread crumbs before cooking so they had the best crust.  They were topped with a sour cream dressing of some kind and drizzled with reduced balsamic vinegar.  They were too good not to eat before I got my phone out for a picture.

I'm Surrounded By Smart People!

Arrived today in Louisville for the AP Literature and Composition reading.  Despite the horror stories I'd heard, my flights were uneventful.  And the leg from Cleveland to Louisville was filled with readers, so that added to the fun.  The hotel is quite nice, although, as with all tall buildings and large groups, the elevators take FOREVER.  I timed it and it took me 6 minutes to get from my room on the 21st floor to the 1st floor at dinner time.  I was considering taking my laptop downstairs to the AP lounge just to be around people, but I just couldn't face that wait again.

As I've talked to the other readers, I've gotten a little intimidated at how many smart people are here.  I mean I knew going in that the place would be littered with smarties, considering there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of AP teachers and college professors here.  But being here and listening to them talk makes it even more real.  I like to think I'm smart too, but, based on  the number of people who are hugging each other and talking like old friends, these are also mostly smart people with experience.

All I can do is my best.  I'm sure I'll be fine.  And as someone told me, it'll probably be the hardest professional development I'll ever love.

The lobby of the Galt House

The view from my window :)

Things Are Rarely As Bad As I Think They'll Be

I finally sat down to tackle the chapter of my manuscript that I was scared to work on.  As I said in a previous entry, my editor was asking me to make some pretty extensive changes and I was afraid I didn't want to make them and also that I couldn't make them without making a mess of the whole chapter.  I felt like it was going too far from my original image of my main character.

As I can't seem to remember from incident to incident, it's almost never as bad as my worry-prone mind makes it out to to be.  First of all, she told me I needed to expand the action in one scene.  That wasn't hard at all.  It was the opposite of what I normally get asked to do, which is cut, cut, cut.  But what I need to cut is the stuff in between the action scenes.  I'm being asked, to quote the great philosopher, Elvis Presley, "[a] little less conversation, a little more action please..."  So I took a paragraph of barely implied action and turned it into 2+ pages of explicit action.

The other issue was the harder one.  I like the action, but I like to bloviate too.  I'm learning--very slowly--that I can't keep both.  The reader apparently wants the narration to be economical and straight to the point but the action should be as developed and as detailed as possible.  They want to feel like they're in the room or the car or wherever the shootout or chase takes place.

So I just did it.  I didn't want to, but I started cutting and suddenly it was almost the end of the school day (I just supervise credit recovery and in-school suspension students now that my seniors are gone) and I was a full seven chapters past the scary part.  What's more, I began keeping track and cut more than 500 words in those chapters, and made the story flow at a much better pace than it had before.

So I'm almost halfway there; I think I'll be ready to shop this puppy before the end of the month, so maybe I'll have an agent by the end of the summer.  I can't properly explain how much I want that.  I can't remember anything I've wanted this badly since I became a grown-up.

Editing Gets Scary

Yesterday was kind of crazy, what with last second preparations for graduation and a variety of students in my room for in-school suspension (the bane of every senior teacher's existence) and credit recovery, so I didn't get any editing done, but I did the day before.  I stopped at a pivotal chapter where my editor wants me to make some rather substantive changes and I'm not sure I'm ready to make them yet.

I've tried to set aside my ego up to now, allowing her to lead me in terms of what is best for making my book saleable, despite some misgivings--about the process, not about my editor, who is a lovely, brilliant woman.  But she has asked me to take out some things that I feel are pivotal to knowing who my main characters are.  The pace things and the spots where I'm simply not following the rules of formatting are a non-issue.  I can definitely see where my prose is tighter and smoother than it was.  But there's one early scene where Harry makes his breakfast.  Harry is a foodie.  The process of cooking and enjoying food are significant to knowing who he is.  But she says that this drags the pace down and that readers want action.  I'll give her that, to a point, but Harry's a gourmand because I think of myself as one and one of the things I love about my hero, Robert B. Parker's, Spenser books is how much love he gives to the food.  It's integral.  But I cut that scene to the bone, just as she suggested.  Maybe I have to earn the right to go into such detail.  Like J. K. Rowling earned the right to write long, dizzyingly detailed books by writing compact, efficient ones that got her readers hooked enough not just to stand for, but even clamor for more and more in each book.  Again, I make no comparisons between Ms. Rowling and myself in terms of skill or potential success.  Just illustrating a concept.

But that leads to the spot in the book where I'm a little scared to go on.  Part of her comments are perfectly sensible--well, all of them are.  But she says we spend too much time in Harry's head.  That kind of hits home for me.  That's me as a writer.  Harry is a thoughtful guy.  He's even a bit of a worrier.  He overthinks things and his mind wanders around an issue for a while before he figures things out.  If spending too much time in his head is a fatal flaw, I fear I am just fatally flawed as a writer.  At what point do I say this is who I am and I will either get my book sold writing this way or I won't, but I'm not changing the essence of who I am as a writer just to sell a book.  Or is there a point where I do that?

I guess I need to stop and think about what I want to do with my writing.  Do I want to write for myself and hold to a high-minded (which probably means unreasonable) standard and not budge even if it means I'm a commercial failure?  Is it possible to write for myself but find a way to still succeed in selling to the public?  Do I need to "give in to the man" to start in order to gain the right to be myself with subsequent works?  The short answer is I don't know.  But I think that what I'm going to do is, for the most part, trust my editor and make the changes she suggests.  I may decide once in awhile that something is just too important to knowing Harry and/or Dee and the readers are just going to have wait a little longer to get to the next shootout and believe that they will appreciate them a bit more when they know my heroes a little more fully.

I Really Am Still Alive

For the handful of folks who actually follow this blog, it may have seemed that I had fallen into a sinkhole or stepped in front of a bus, considering how long it's been since I've made an entry.  But it's nothing so dire.  My absence has been occasioned by two major time-eating events, one of which is actually a number of smaller events.

The first was the end of the school year for my seniors, who make up pretty much all of my students.  That's the one that's several smaller events combined.  My students had three major projects due over the last two weeks, which meant I was busy helping with last-minute issues, grading papers, answering literally hundreds of emails, watching and scoring presentations, recording grades, fixing grades--the list goes on. In my role as senior class advisor, it's mostly been preparation for Color Day, which, despite the fact that we felt like we were temporarily relocated to the Arctic Circle, went very well.  The cleanup is finished and all the bills are paid; all that's left for me is working with the commencement speakers and attending functions, which requires no preparation on my part.

The second, probably more stressful, time-eater was my National Board renewal.  As hard as it is for me to believe, it's been ten years since I completed work on my NBCT and nine years since I received certification.  So I had to submit a renewal portfolio this year.  The process was not nearly as daunting as the first time around, but still required a good deal of reflecting, video-recording, writing, and gathering of materials.  Somehow adding to and simultaneously subtracting from the stress was the fact that the whole process was online this time around.  Rather than mailing in a box of items in various envelopes behind various cover sheets, it was all uploaded to a website.  It was less stressful in that the deadline was extended an entire month, something of which I took full advantage.  It was more stressful, however, in that this was a completely new process--this is the first year they are doing the e-portfolio-- and it was so simple that it seemed like I must have missed something.  But all of the items were uploaded, reviewed, re-uploaded ,sometimes three and four times before I was happy with the final product, and I am excited, though trepidatious, that I clicked, "Submit For Approval" early this afternoon.  Pass or fail, it's now over.

So now I have a short window before the merry-go-round starts up again.  I leave for the AP reading on June 8, so for a few days I get to do crazy things like read for pleasure and actually edit my book.  I'll have to re-introduce myself to Harry and Dee.  They'll have forgotten who I am it's been so long.  

And I might even have some time to write on here once in awhile. :)

SLEEP!

The bulb in my giant TV blew out last week.  I was in the middle of an episode of Castle when it just went, "POP!"  The sound continued to work for a minute but then it just quit altogether.  The good news is that I found a replacement from a website at a much lower price than I was told it would cost when I first bought the television.  But that only makes sense; projector bulb prices in general have plummeted and this is basically a really fancy rear projection TV.  The bad news, or so I thought at first, is that it will take 5-7 business days from the day they processed my order.  It's our only TV, so I've been without for the better part of the week.

But something has happened.  I've found I don't miss it.  Last night Andrea and I ate supper together.  Often, though not always, I would go downstairs and watch TV in my recliner while she ate upstairs in her recliner.  We would shout back and forth, but the reality is we were on opposite ends of the house.  But last night, we were in the same room and we carried on a conversation.  After dinner I read some Sherlock Holmes adventures--one of my favorites--and then cleaned up the dinner dishes and got the coffee ready for this morning.  And it wasn't even 9:00PM yet.  So I read some more, then went to bed.

That's when the really crazy thing happened.  I SLEPT!  I mean I fell asleep quickly, slept through my alarm, and barely got up in time to have breakfast and get to work.  Luckily I had run yesterday and showered before dinner and there is food provided today for Teacher Appreciation Week, so I just had to eat and get dressed.  But the key concept here is that I SLEPT ALL NIGHT.  I may be reading too much into it, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the entire evening involved no technological stimulation.  Well, technically speaking, I was reading on my Kindle, but it was still just a book, after all.  I was relaxed, my mind was clear, and I went to bed without it going a thousand miles an hour.  And I feel awake today.  People who don't have sleep issues have no idea how significant that is.

I know that the bulb will be coming soon, but I may not install it right away.