What your Friday needs is more rapping about knitting. Allow me to oblige you.
Link via Sara.
Month: March 2013
Accordion Update
It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about my accordion on the blog. That’s mostly because there hasn’t been much to report.
Periodically, I would get it out and noodle around on it, but not very often and increasingly less and less. Usually it was far enough between times that I was mostly just struggling to maintain what I knew, not really improving. It was obvious that what I needed was practice time, but learning anything (particularly an instrument) is an exercise in frustration and futility, and requires a lot of persistence.
Last Halloween, a friend introduced me to a neighbor who was also learning to play accordion. It seemed a shame that two accordion players would live so close together and not meet up. Through a series of mishaps, it took some time to actually make it happen, but eventually we did meet up a few times to play.
This was the motivation I needed.
As I suspected, what I really needed was practice time. Actually playing the accordion in front of someone else was very motivational to not suck. And even now, when we’re not meeting anymore, I’ve still managed to practice a good 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week. And it’s amazing how much of a difference that makes!
There’s really only one accordion book, the Palmer Hughes Accordion Course. I’ve had this book since day one, but I never got into it. The whole thing seems so cheesy, with stupid, childlike illustrations accompanying stupid, childlike songs. It’s sort of a shame, though, because now that I’m really going through it, it’s actually a really good course!
I think part of it, though, was hearing the songs played by someone who could actually play them properly made them seem less silly. Listening to him play, I was like, “Hey, that actually sounds like a real song.!”
Each song in the book adds an additional skill, and the difficulty increases pretty quickly. As soon as you master one song, the next one piles another level of difficulty on top. I’m not ashamed to admit that it took me awhile to get “Mary had a little lamb” since they used a jazzed-up version to work on your two hands doing two different things at the same time. So even though the song is simple, the concepts weren’t! It seems like each new song make me go, “Oh man, I can’t do that *at all*.”
Nothing is more motivational than actually seeing progress. I know playing the first 3 or 4 songs in an introductory book is nothing to brag about, but it’s a long shot better than nothing and getting easier all the time!
The Joys and Sorrows of an Apathetic Child
I don’t know if I’ve ever met a kid as easygoing as Ollie. Everybody always says, “Oh it must be so nice to have such an agreeable child!” Of course it is. But also some times it isn’t.
Ollie, do you want to eat this pickle dipped in sriracha? Sure. Do you want your sister to dress you up in girls clothes and conscript you into whatever game she wants to play? Why not. Did you just run face first in the wall? Honey Badger don’t care. Oliver, did you just pee your pants and sit in the urine for 30 minutes? ::shrug::
The problem with apathy is that if you are generally satisfied with everything, you don’t have much motivation. Sure, it’s nice not having to fight with him about eating veggies, or what clothes he’s going to wear, but it’s also frustrating when he’s happy to have you dress him every day, or doesn’t feel like learning what sounds animals make. He doesn’t have much of a drive to acquire new skills.
It’s often amazing to me that my two children are just the absolute photo-negative of each other. Evie has strong opinions about everything, and is very motivated to practice things until she gets them *exactly right*. She is always interested in doing things on her own and wants to know how to do everything, all the time. On the other hand, I have to fight with her every day because her clothes aren’t “beautiful enough” or “don’t feel right”.
When Oliver is older, I worry about people taking advantage of him. He’s so willing to give up what he has to make other people happy. If he and Evie are fighting over a toy, and they both end up crying, he will give the toy to Evie to help her feel better. He’s just such a big sweet ball of cuddles and self-sacrifice.
It’s not that he never wants to do things by himself, or learn something new, or have a toy all to himself without sharing, but by and large it’s not the norm. And considering he’s just going on 3, he’s probably in a stage where he’s about as selfish as he’s ever going to be.
An easygoing child is an embarrassment of riches, and complaining about it runs the risk of annoying all the other parents out there. I know there are worst problems to have. But it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.
Writing Year 4
My writing anniversary is March 1st. Every year on March 1st, I write a post about how the previous year went in terms of writing. I think it speaks to how well this year is going as far as writing is concerned that I just completely missed March 1st this year! So I’m writing this post as of March 1st (i.e. not counting rejections or new submissions since then), just to keep things consistent.
This year:
Stories Written: 3
Number of [Submission-Ready] Words: 12,700
Number of Story Submissions: 61
Number of Rejections: 50
Number of Acceptances: 2(!)
Postage Costs: $2.40
Revenue: $144.88
Total:
Stories Written: 18
Number of [Submission-Ready] Words: 86,000
Number of Story Submissions: 175
Number of Rejections: 165
Number of Acceptances: 2
Postage Costs: $116.59
Revenue: $144.88
The big news obviously is that I sold 2 stories this year, and came out of the closet (so to speak) about writing. After 3 years of toiling in obscurity with the rejections mounting up, this has been a phenomenally successful year for me. Of course, 2 acceptances to 165 rejections, that’s still only a 1.2% acceptance rate, lest my britches get too big.
You will notice that my lifetime revenue now exceeds my lifetime postage costs! Exciting. However, that’s postage only. Luckily I almost never need postage or ink these days, but I did donate $10 to Duotrope, and buy a $30 iPad bluetooth keyboard for writing. So I’m still net negative lifetime (even without considering ink). I’m no longer using Duotrope, but I’ll probably donate something to The Grinder this year instead.
My first thought on looking at the stats was, “Only 3 stories last year? That can’t be right!” Actually, I think it is, with a few caveats. First off, I put 20,000+ words into a novel, which is not counted there. Second, I had a story finished just before March last year, which I counted last year, and I actually have 2 stories I just finished in the last few weeks, which I’ll take credit for next year. So 3 might be technically correct, even though it doesn’t tell the whole story.
I also finally got around to trunking a few stories, and I think I’m about to trunk a bunch more. I don’t know if it’s because my writing has improved, and so my older stories look worse to me now, or if it’s just because I’m published and thus more snobby. But I start to think about certain stories that have been rejected everywhere and have mostly run through the list of markets I like, and I start to say, “If this does get published, would I still want people to see it? Is it up to the level of the other stuff I’ve published? Would I want this magazine on my “resume” of places I’ve published?” So yeah, I guess totally snobby.
I also joined Codex, an online writer’s group. This has been an amazing so far, for so many reasons. It’s very nice to have someone to talk to about writing (believe me, Sara hears about as much as she can handle). Also, I spent so long researching how to get started writing, and now that I’ve sold a few things, it’s really nice to tap into sort of the next level of research and talk to people who are more in a similar boat. Big thanks to David Steffen of Diabolical Plots for recommending it to me.
As usual, onward and upward. But it feels great to finally see a little bit of onward and upward progress!
Quote Monday is proud of itself
Ollie: “I used to have a stinky toot in my bottom.”
Me: “It’s not in there anymore?”
Ollie: “No. I stinked it out.”
An 8 year old girl: “The babies don’t like Mitt Romney anymore.”
Sara: “Why not?”
8 year old: “Because he wanted to cancel Sesame Street.”
8 year old: “Adults don’t like him anymore either.”
Sara: “Oh yeah? I guess not.”
8 year old: “He said the f-word.”
Ollie: “I don’t want to clean up, not anymore.”
Me: blah blah blah “responsibility” blah blah blah “value of hard work” blah blah “…and when you’re done, you’ll feel very proud of yourself.”
Ollie, not impressed: “I already feel proud of myself.”
Evie: “I’m pretending my Barbie is Shirley Jones.”
Sara: “Nobody’s said that for 40 years.”
Shane Halbach 