A writing year in review

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I can’t believe it has ONLY been 1 year since I began writing in earnest. It seems like much longer. How’d I do? Let’s look at the stats.

Stories Written: 7
Number of 1st Draft Words: 44,200
Number of Story Submissions: 29
Number of Rejections: 23
Number of Acceptances: 0

All in all, not that bad really! I think 7 stories is fairly respectable. That’s no where near what a full time writer could put out (44,200 words is far short of a novel), but I don’t think it is too bad given the amount of time left after you take out my job, my kid, my marriage and my other hobbies.

I will admit, it is hard to keep putting the pen to the paper sometimes. But then again, on the other hand, I think of stories a lot faster than I write them. Sometimes I am desperate to finish a story, just so I can start work on the next new idea that’s burning in my head. And I’ve clearly improved quite a bit (well, at least I think so). Practice makes perfect.

I also just want to say that the rejections don’t bother me that much, don’t get me down. It is true, however, that sometimes they get harder, not easier. I know my first story is crap, so I am not surprised when it gets rejected. But when a really good story gets rejected…that can be tougher. On the other hand, I had one pretty sweet rejection. A signed rejection from the editor of my favorite magazine. So far, in my short writing career, that rejection is the best thing that’s happened to me!

So here’s to another year of keeping the nose to the grindstone. Good things are bound to happen eventually! The hard part is putting one foot in front of the other. But then again, I’m nothing if I’m not persistent.

Nature is disgusting

/ Shane / 2 Comments

We all know that regular things can evolve into really bizarre things in order to survive. I mean, you gotta do what you gotta do, right? But sometimes I wonder if mother nature has gone too far. Case in point, I present to you the “toilet plant“:

Pitcher plants are carnivorous and usually eat insects for nutrients and nitrogen. But in the highlands of Borneo there are not enough for it to survive on insects alone, so the pitcher plant evolved into a toilet plant, complete with standing lid that serves an unusual purpose.

Basically, the lid contains a nectar that these little rodents like to eat. The plant is positioned such that, while the animal is eating the nectar it is positioned to do its business, into (for lack of a better phrase) the plant’s mouth. But the plant doesn’t just stop there, oh no.

There is even some thought that the nectar might have laxative properties

How far would you go to survive? What I don’t understand is, why couldn’t the plant just evolve to eat the shrew?

Potty Tickets

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Overnight and during naps, Evie got the brilliant idea to start taking her diaper off before falling asleep, which inevitably led to a wet bed. Washing her bed-clothes multiple times a day started to get pretty old. In an attempt to fix this problem, I told her if she needed to go potty, she could call me, and I would come help her. This was one of those instances where the cure was worse than the affliction. Pretty soon she was calling me down every few hours, all night long, even though she hardly ever really had to go. The frustration with this situation led me to utter a statement that I immediately recognized as a mistake:

“Evie, I’m not coming back down here again.”
“What if I have to go potty?”
“Well then, I guess you’ll just have to go on your own.”

Hoo boy.

After that, she was coming out of her room constantly, always taking off her clothes, always crying when she got her shirt stuck on her head or dropped her pajamas in the toilet. In other words, this was the worst, least manageable stage of all.

I should say that all of this was combined with (and/or responsible for) Evie starting to not take a nap anymore. She’s in sort of the awkward, in-between stage where she sometimes goes without a nap, but then has an extremely cranky, sleepy, rest of the day.

I have a theory on parenting. Lets call it the “sine wave of parenting difficulty”.

Basically, every 6 months your child goes from reasonably easy to parent, to reasonably difficult. Not necessarily naughty, though. It could be they change their sleeping habits, start teething, reach a stage where they are whining, or pushing boundaries, or potty training, whatever it is. The tricky part is to remember to appreciate the peaks, so you can get through the lows.

So anyway, a perfect storm of not sleeping, mischief, potty issues and a push for independence is sort of making this one of those parenting troughs. I wasn’t sure what to do. On the one hand, both Evie and I were losing sleep for no particular reason. On the other hand, I didn’t want to tell her NOT to go to the potty, because I would eventually like her to be able to go the night without a diaper. So how to break the habit while simultaneously not encouraging and not discouraging?

Finally, Sara came up with the answer – potty tickets! Evie gets two potty tickets per night (one for naps) which she can use to go to the potty. When she’s out of tickets, she has to go in her diaper.

Evie loves it. She is so excited to use the tickets. By the time I get down there, she’s dancing on the bed, waving her ticket around and saying, “Daddy, take my ticket!”

At first, the tickets were just little scraps of paper. Sara had a second stroke of inspiration when we were on the train the other day, and now the potty tickets are actually old Metra tickets

It’s still not ideal. She uses the first potty ticket within 5 seconds of being put to bed. After I put her into bed I close the door and wait, so I can go back in immediately. She rarely has to go that soon, so she’s still stalling there. Consequently, we have had to move her bedtime up to compensate for this.

Other than that, though, it works out pretty well. It’s a tolerable balance between what I would optimally like to have and where we were just a few days ago.

And that’s all you can really ask for, isn’t it?

Bad Guys

/ Shane / Leave a comment

As an addendum to the Playing Pretend post, Evie lately has forced Sara into playing the “bad guys” from Pinocchio (both of them). This means that she insists that every thing that Sara says, should be mean. If Sara is not growling commands at her, Evie gets upset. If Sara is growling commands at her angrily, she quietly does whatever Sara wants.

It’s starting to get really creepy.

Winter Olympics 2010

/ Shane / 2 Comments

It would be a grave disservice to not have a post about the thing I am spending most of my time on these days: the Olympics.

It is only fitting, considering the amount of coverage I got on my last Olympic post.

Let me first start by saying that I haven’t seen ANY curling this year, which is the sport I was most looking forward to. If you haven’t seen curling, you are missing out. The part you don’t think about is the strategy involved with precisely placing stones to block your opponent.

In general, I think the sports that actually pit one person or team against another directly, as opposed to those that are against the clock or scored by judges, are far and away the best. That is why short track speed skating = AWESOME. The luge, however = not awesome. At first it seems cool to see guys hurling down at 80 mph, ready to sacrifice their body. Unfortunately, it gets old fast. If you’ve seen one luge run, you’ve seen them all. There’s not much difference to see between a good run and a bad run (other than crashes and falls, of course, which they don’t mind playing over and over again, in all their glory).

I’m not a big fan of figure skating. I don’t really mind it all that much. It turns out I just like competition. There’s something about watching people compete for a medal, when everything is on the line, that can make virtually anything exciting. I would watch Olympic paint drying if there was such a thing.

The real reason I don’t like figure skating is because they fall down. ALL THE TIME. It just seems like we ought to be able to find 3 people in the entire world that can skate on ice and not fall down. I really hate to see someone who fell during their routine end up getting a medal. It just doesn’t feel right. Maybe the penalty needs to be a little stiffer for a fall. Like execution. I bet after a few of those, people would stop falling.

Another thing that really bothers me about the games is the somewhat mercenary nature of citizenship. I’m all about rooting for the U.S.A., but I’m constantly hearing about how this one or that one just got their citizenship less than a year ago. And it works the other way too, with Mr. Italy, 10 time Italian champion who was born in Rome and eats nothing but spaghetti day and night, and he happens to live in rural Pennsylvania. It’s one thing if it’s the whole immigrant story, with some kid coming over to the U.S. and climbing his way out of poverty to eventually win the gold in the Olympics. However, it doesn’t strike me as what’s happening. Instead, it just seems like people are switching allegiances to any convenient country where they can compete. So how am I supposed to feel good about the medals the U.S. is winning with these ringers from other countries? Am I crazy that I want my athletes to be super patriots?

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not all complaining. If everything was so awful, I wouldn’t spend 6 hours a night, every night, watching it. For every bad thing, there are two good things. Snowboard Cross. Short Track Speed Skating. Snowboard Half Pipe. And nothing can beat watching those Canadians belt out the national anthem after winning the gold in Ice Dancing. If you have to lose a medal to another country, it sure makes you feel good to see them really enjoying it.