I attended this Cub Scout Leader training (called Akela’s Council) last year, and thought it was GREAT! It helped me learn so much (even after being a Cubmaster for 2 years) and helped me really get that scouting spirit.
I HEARTILY recommend it to anyone and everyone!
In fact, I am going to be on staff this year, and I am really looking forward to experiencing it again, from a different perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BErS6_6Ak7k
So, register today and come along! Just go to www.utahscouts.org
Tags: training, scouts, akela's council
I recently started a writing group in my area. We critiqued each other’s stuff for the first time earlier this month, and I have to say that it was a great experience. It got me moving on my writing and should make it so that I write more regularly (creatively, not necessarily on my blogs 
).
In February, a couple of us (the Founders) got together to come up with guidelines for our group.
Dave Farland had sent out several emails last year about writing groups, so I went through those again and pulled out the good nuggets of information.
In any case, we set up some rules about how we’re going to run the thing and our expectations. Basically, we expect people to write something new every month instead of just rehashing the same old thing again and again. We also don’t want critiques to get out of hand and so will use something similar to Orson Scott Card’s bootcamp method (which I believe is also used at Odyssey and/or Clarion). Everyone will get a turn and there will not be any cross-talking or commenting by the author.
We also decided to include a short writing exercise at the beginning of each one so that we can improve our craft and get our brains working.
Finally, we decided (for various reasons that I will not enumerate at the present time) to call our group The Point Writing Group.
We are open to anyone who is serious about writing and improving themselves.
So, if you live in northern Utah county or southern Salt Lake county (in Utah, of course), then we’d be happy to have you.
This is my first post using Wordbook. Should be nice to only have to post one place and have it go to Facebook (I already have a plugin for sending stuff to my LiveJournal account).
I had my classes do a lightning write activity this week, and I realized that I never shared the one I participated in at the Codex retreat (CoWW).
For this activity, you need a group (a group of 6 works pretty well). Each person has about a minute to write the beginning to a story. Then, the stories get passed around from one person to the next after a set limit of time (that gradually increases so as to allow people to read what has already been written). Finally, the original story starter gets their paper back and they get to finish the story.
See the story, after the break.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: writing exercise, lightning write
Today is the semi-annual conference for the LDS church. My family and I are watching it on tv. It is nice to live in Utah and to be able to stay in my pajamas all day while listening to our wonderful and inspiring leaders.
It is not easy to keep four kids quiet for 2 hours, though. To be fair, it is mostly the youngest two. Especially Bubba (he’s 4).
Tags: LDS, Mormon, family
After taking an unintentional break from this short story that I started at CoWW, I’ve come back to it within the past couple weeks (first, because it gave me something fun to do during class when I had the students doing peer reviews of each other’s papers; and second, because I keep telling myself to watch less TV (I don’t really watch much anyway) and get to writing).
In any case, I started by rereading the beginning, and editing as I went. I tightened up the prose by making it more immediate and action-y. I also decided to just do it from one point of view. I think two POVs is a bit of a stretch for this story. I liked the idea at the time, but the only reason was so I could get the reader in the head of the love interest so they’d fall in love with him too. I can do this by showing it from Liza’s (the protagonist) POV, just as well. The other reason I had done it is because I believe that you should tell the scene from the POV of the person in the most pain (or happiest, depending on mood being set) at that point. But, I think this works better for novels.
I didn’t have to throw away much, though, because it was easy to switch his POV over to Liza’s. Which is also how I really figured out that it would be OK.
It’s going to get a bit dicey towards the end of the story, but I’ll just have to have him tell her what happened.
Tags: writing, short story, Codex
I just got back from teaching my Writing for Digital Media class, and I went through Orson Scott Card’s 1001 ideas in an hour with them. It worked out really well. I’m not nearly as good as OSC at pulling more and more ideas out, but we came up with some doozies. Very cool ideas.
The main one was about an alien coming to earth to desroy it since she is the last surviving member of her species and world. But she falls in love with the president of the world, who is 96, but she gives him a treatment that makes him look 30. Then, they must contend with the destroyer alien coming to finish the job he started with her planet.
Yeah, they were in a weird mood today. But, it was fun, and we got out some good ideas as we learned about brainstorming and loglines.
I am really enjoying learning all this new lingo and style in the digital media world.
Tags: Brainstorming, 1001 ideas in an hour, Orson Scott Card
A couple weeks ago, I had my two composition classes do the old describe the steps for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich exercise.
It went very well, especially in the early morning class (they are just better, more engaged students overall).
We did it because we were talking about informative writing, speciifically instructions. It seemed like an easy way to bring the idea home to them that it is harder than you think and you really have to know who your audience is.
The fun part is when they switch papers with someone and then have to actually literally follow the instructions and make a sandwich for real (I went through a couple loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter and a jar of grape jelly).
Most people were really nice about interpreting the instructions, but I had a few who kept it real and did follow the instructions exactly, ending up with one slice of bread with jelly on top and then another slice of bread and then peanut butter on top of that, and such.
I’ll definitely use it again in future classes. But, what struck me was how important it is to define audience from the very beginning. I knew this, intellectually, from my study of rhetoric, but it never really hit home for me before.
As a writer of technical documents or of stories or novels, my very first step should be to define who I am writing for so I meet their needs. I think that is why poor writing like in Eragon, Eclipse, and Harry Potter have succeeded so well as books – because they are meeting a need with a specific audience (OK, so maybe not with Eragon, it’s just his publisher parents).
Tags: teaching, Audience
Codex Writer’s Workshop.
I anticipated this event for a long time.
The first few days were for critiques of novels and short stories, as well as some class sessions on writing and being a writer. We had the famous Ellen Datlow critique our short stories. She was very insightful and gave lots of comments to everyone. We also had David Coe come for dinner one night; after which we picked his brain with questions.
The last week or so was just a retreat time where we could relax and write and explore Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I’ll post more later about what happened and what I learned.
Tags: Ellen Datlow, Codex, retreat, workshop
I’ll integrate these in with the rest of the blog later, but I don’t want to lose them, so here they are:
