I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.
This video was filmed and edited by my good friend Josh (of JGills fame); everyone in it is a friend. A frightening number of them are related to me. The Nerdfest may or may not be happening in my house . . .
The kid in the red shirt who really can actually dance is my brother Jimmy.
Also, everyone in this video either is or has been homeschooled. Gather from that what you may.
“Because learning (and as a result, books) is at the heart of human consciousness and experience. Books connect us to the world. That’s the BIG picture, but ultimately finding and reading books is fun and the internet, despite all the doom and gloom talk, has made publishing more fun, more open and expansive. The web is bringing more people into the publishing process, redefining what publishing means and giving everybody new tools to write, publish and sell them. So what’s not to like? It’s a great time to be in book publishing, despite the fact that everything is changing.”
If you have much of a finger on the publishing industry (and you should, if you want to write for a living), you know that the electronic age has caused all kinds of panic in the hallowed halls of trade publishing (print books are going to become obsolete! people won’t read anything longer than two paragraphs! self-published trash is taking over! the sky is falling!). There are some good reasons to worry, but overall, I’m pretty optimistic.
Much of what we did in BC was perform as part of the Aha Concerts in Surrey and Vancouver. Put together by the marvelous Russ and Sandy Rosen, they were singing, moving, colorful mosaics of music and dance and culture :). We didn’t realize that 100 Huntley St had covered them until we stumbled across this online, so I will let video (and Sandy Rosen) speak.
(The poet who says “Are these chains?” in a pained voice is me. The dancer in blue and black is Carolyn. We were performing “Dream,” our piece on deliverance and getting “back to the garden.”)
You may be aware of the Christy Awards, the major award to recognize “excellence in Christian fiction” every year. Fantasy and other forms of speculative fiction can be entered in the “Visionary” category, but there’s no major award specifically to recognize these “fringe” genres — ironic, considering how many of the best fantasy writers have been Christians (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, George MacDonald . . . ).
Well, now Becky Miller of the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour, along with several others, are working to establish such an award. They’ve named it the “Clive Staples Award” (eminently suitable, although considering Clive’s own feelings about his name, maybe they should have called it the “Jack Award”). Do you read Christian fantasy or other spec fic? Want to air your opinion about this whole award business? Visit this link and leave your vote on whether this should be pursued: http://clivestaplesaward.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/thoughts-on-the-clive-staples-award/
Of all the thrills in the world, few compare with that instant when all the lights go dim, the crowd hushes, and for a breathless moment the theater hovers between the face of the deep and “Let there be light.”
Yet, the real miracles happen backstage — in the theatre and in life. My musings on the topic are in “The God Backstage” on Boundless.org.
(This was written and published just after we hosted Ballet Magnificat! Omega’s Hiding Place in early May — I’ve just been too busy to get the link up!)
A little while ago my friend and client Mark Turbett sent me a link to this article in the Globe and Mail, a piece by Philip Moscovitch on authors who are writing short fiction using Twitter, of all things. Quoting Arjun Basu, who has written over 500 Twitter stories:
He adds, “I expend a lot of creative capital on this now. It’s affecting the way I write. I’m thinking in these little snippets now. I was recently asked to write a short story for a magazine, and I had to wrap my head around it. It was long. Well, it wasn’t long — but it was longer than 140 characters.”
The article is worth reading, if only for the sheer weirdness of it all. But one commenter, Neon Cab from Canada, writes,
Kudos to the authors. Their work is great. They’re not short stories, though. These are germs of a story, snippets. A story requires character and plot development that is unattainable with the constraints of Twitter. Short story writers work very hard to achieve these developments while remaining as brief as possible. These authors, however, have not done the same work and their efforts, as emotive as they are, cannot be classed in the same category.
What do you think? What constitutes a real story? And while we’re talking about it, what is the shortest piece you’ve ever written? What genre did it belong to? And do you find that your work tends to be longer or shorter than you set out to make it?
If you love old books and believe in the power of stories with a message, you would probably enjoy the works produced by Lamplighter Publishing. A ministry and business run by Mark Hamby, Lamplighter produces gorgeous old books from earlier centuries, each one overtly Christian and strongly message-focused.
These days, Lamplighter is up to more than just publishing books. My “Defy the Darkness” post of several weeks ago featured their first short film. (Haven’t seen it yet? What are you waiting for?) And today, I want to share their newest venture: Christian radio drama. Did you enjoy the Narnia audio recordings? How about Adventures in Odyssey? Then you’ll definitely want to check this out!
Mark sent out an e-mail not long ago proclaiming,
They did it! The first broadcast for Lamplighter Theatre is complete! I talked with the producer, writer, and engineer tonight and they were all very excited. The producer said that it was the most powerful program he has ever produced. The first story is based on the book of Sir Malcolm and the Missing Prince. I know that people say after you hear or see a dramatic production, that you have to read the book! And though I want people to read the book, the audio is actually better! I can’t wait till everyone listens to this drama. There are so many golden nuggets of God’s truth woven throughout, yet at the same time, all ages will be captivated by the adventure and drama.
As I sit at the computer, watching the clock strike 11:01 when I meant to be in bed at 10:00, and think over the day’s events — the phone calls I muddled my way through, the little Dodge Neon I bought though all these years I’ve planned to buy a minivan, the schedule which continually remade itself with every passing minute — as I think, too, of the Book of Job and how hopefully confusing truth seemed to get for that righteous man –
Well, it occurs to me that if we could plan life all out the way we want to, it would have the precision of the finest orchestra playing the finest symphony. Not a note out of place. Every instrument doing just what it should.
But we can’t, and life is rarely like that. Instead, we go with the flow, get knocked over sometimes, laugh, and learn to enjoy the currents. Life is a lot like playing “You Are My Sunshine” on the guitar while wearing oven mitts.
And with that profound thought, here is the one-and-only Katie Rees, my friend and fellow homeschool graduate, doing exactly that:
