Reading _The Hobbit_ to my kids

This past Father's Day, I started reading _The Hobbit_ to my kids, at Tanya's suggestion. Tanya's dad read it to her when she was little, and we'd talked about it before, but I'd always sort of thought it would take too long to read it out loud.

But it's been a fantastic experience. The book reads well, and I've listened to the wonderful BBC version of it on tape many times, in addition to of course having read it many times, so I can put a little verve into it, and play with some voices. The kids ask for it (perhaps as much so that they can stay up a few minutes later as anything) and seem to enjoy it. It's been more than a month since we started, but we haven't managed to do it every day. We can usually manage to get through a chapter in one session.

Every darn chapter of this book is fun. I'd forgotten just how much fun it is. It's great to reread it with them, and see it through their eyes a little. We're getting near to the end now...we're probably three-quarters of the way through it, at least.

There's a hole in my story

So last night I was trying to tie up the narrative of "Elf and Troll" (stupid name, still need a better name for this story), when I realized that I had completely failed to write part of the middle of the story.

I'm trying to get this one finished so I can send the draft off to Tyson to review, as per our oft-amended agreement. :) We're doing a story challenge, to give each other a deadline.

At some point, while writing narrative merrily along in bits and pieces, I skipped ahead to the ending without providing the actual scenes that would introduce two key characters or explain how/why they would help the main character achieve the ending.

I think the strategy of skipping ahead is fine, but here it came back and bit me in the ass because of the way I've been working. I've simply done too little overall review of this story, and I thought it was more done than it is. The new scenes probably won't take all that long to write, but there are some possible plot problems in there, and I'm not really sure how to solve them. There doesn't seem to be enough time for the main character to go collect his helpers.

Got some writing done at my parents' house

I went to visit my parents this weekend. I like to complain about how early they go to bed, and how I end up with nothing to do after we put the kids in bed and then my parents go to bed and you can't really turn the TV on or anything. But they don't REALLY go to be all THAT early when my kids are there to play with: the grandparents and the kids both push the envelope a little. And I brought my laptop, and spent about an hour and a half...and got to the end of the climactic scene of my elf/troll story.

I still have to make the MIDDLE work out and support everything that's in the ending, but it's a big step forward, really.

Writing about elves and trolls

I worked on my elf/troll story last night. I actually got to the point where the troll attacks everybody, the final major confrontation of the story. I'm happy about that. Really, every time I seriously sit down to work on this thing I get good stuff done, which begs the question of why I don't spend more time on it and get the thing done.

Anyway, I wanted to mention here that I've noticed that I have several stories/story ideas that I work on that return to a concept of someone, especially a kid, meeting up with a large monster in the woods. It's a theme I have tried out in several different ways. And I see no problem with that...I'm kind of glad to have noticed it, actually. I have no idea where it comes from...probably a wish-fulfilment idea of wanting to be the special kid who has a dragon-friend-sort-of-thing.

In the current story, things turn out much darker. I hope I can pull it off. This month I thought I'd try to blog regularly about my progress on this story as I work toward the ending. I'm actually pretty far along in developing this story. It started out as an attempt to write a very short story, which I began at church one morning during the period when the kids are in Sunday school. In an hour I had hashed out the major components of the story.

The basic idea is that there's a troll attack and some kids are found, one of them killed, others scared or injured, and the adults have to try to figure out what happened. So it's initially structured as a mystery. The main character is a local teacher, whose star student is one of the survivors. It's not an accident these kids got attacked by a troll, and it's up to the teacher to figure things out.

Ah, but it's complicated by the fact that everything takes place in this elf/goblin world setting I've worked out, which doesn't really have a name yet other than "elf/goblin setting."

I've spent a fair amount of time talking about this story. :) I've laid out the whole plotline for some friends, and talked about all the various complications. Talking about it too much isn't necessarily good...it can eat up enthusiasm for writing it. Still, I'm having fun when I work on it. I've got a city filled with elves and goblines, living on the edge of a goblin revolt, sharing space with each other, and looking at each other with some suspicion, but needing to coexist all the same.

Software-company-like deadline slips...in writing

I've been engaging in a little writing challenge with my brother-in-law. We were trying to finish a story each in about two weeks...I think that's what it started with. Only we got to the first deadline and he asked for an extension...then we got to THAT deadline and I asked to extend it another two weeks. ;) Work has been busy and I haven't spent much time on the story. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to stick with it better in the near term, though.

The story I'm working on is called "Elf and Troll". It's a lousy title but it's my working title for a piece about a young elf kid who encounters a troll. Actually that's not much of what it's about, but I don't feel like getting into a long diatribe about what it's REALLY about right now...it would end up being half as long as the story.

I did want to record, though, that I had a nice little session today where I worked on a day in the life of one of my characters. I had a character whom I added to the story, who I didn't know much about yet, so I started working on her day from waking up. In the process I found I had to do a fair amount of worldbuilding...things like what kind of food she'd eat, some information on businesses in this world, and so on.

Another interesting (to me) thing about the world of this story is that I realized this weekend that it's probably the only major world-building exercise I've done that didn't get started from a map of the world. This story is set in my Elf/Goblin world setting, a world distinguished by having two major intelligent races who live in mixed communities...at least until the goblins rebel against elf oppression. (It sucks when The Man is an elf, doesn't it? :) )

Chloe and Ethan catch fish

Back in April, on a cub scout campout, Ethan and Chloe caught some fish...and here's some documentary evidence.

Ethan found a different closet to hide in

I thought about posting this to the weblog, and I find that my very last post was about this same problem, a month earlier. So here's what happened this morning: I get up, try to wake Ethan up, tell him he's got to take a shower because we've started doing that. He says he won't take
a shower. I tell him he can expect to lose Game Boy privileges if he doesn't, and go back to getting dressed. I don't hear any shower start up so I check on him. And I can't find him. He's not in his room. I finish getting dressed, go downstairs; no Ethan.

I make the circuit again, 'cause I really can't believe he's nowhere to be found, and because he's done this before. He's not in his room, not under his bed, not in his closet, not on the couch, not in the office on the computer...nowhere. I wake Tanya. In about 10 seconds, she finds him.

But the kicker is where he is: he's in the linen closet in the kids' bathroom, on the top shelf, wedged in with the blankets. Naked, with one foot sticking out. That's all you can see, the one foot.

We tell him to get down. He says he can't unless we close the door.

I leave Tanya to deal with it. She told me later he was scared getting down. I hope so. I got pretty scared when I realized I couldn't find him. I don't want to find his body somewhere because he holed up to avoid a shower. Think how THAT would smell.

Come out of the closet, children!

On Sunday I had the chance to make one of my favorite jokes, and on Monday morning I paid for it.

On Sunday I was in the kitchen and heard Ethan and Chloe rustling around in the hall, Ethan said something about Chloe refusing to leave the closet, so I hollered, "Come out of the closet, Chloe!" to make sure Tanya could hear. Yes, friends, that's the trouble with my kids, they won't come out of the closet.

So then this morning, I went to wake up the kids as usual...turned Ethan and Chloe's lights on and then went to get dressed. I went to check that they actually got up afterwards, and could not find Ethan. He wasn't in the pile of blankets on his bed, he wasn't responding to hails, he wasn't in the bathroom. The downstairs was dark. I went downstairs, checked the computer room, the living room...no sign of him starting breakfast in the kitchen. I was confused. I went back upstairs, checked his room again...under his bed, nothing. I toyed with checking the baby room. Checked Chloe's room. Nothing. I told Tanya I couldn't find him. Clearly, I was worried if I was willing to risk waking Tanya up.

Tanya suggested that maybe he was sitting somewhere playing with his Nintendo DS, as he often does...plants himself somewhere and turns off all senses outside the Sphere of Gaming. Nope. No sign of him. I went back to his room and saw that his closet door was ajar...it had not been, before. Went over there...find him waving at me from a quilt in the bottom of his closet. He'd climbed in their and gone back to sleep after I woke him. Or something. Maybe he was playing, I don't know. He accumulated 3 days of Nintendo privation for his troubles. It was a cold day out and I tried to make him walk to school as well -- but he couldn't find his jacket, which only infuriated me more, of course.

Oh, it's funny NOW.

The bananas are safe...or are they?

A year or two ago, I read an article that talked about how bananas are in danger of extinction from a fungus. That's because the bananas we eat so greedily here in the US are all of one variety, and so are vulnerable to being wiped out en masse. In fact, the bananas we eat are all clones of the same fruit; how weird is that?

I can't find the original article now, but here's one from Popular Science that takes a long look at the issue.

I post today, though, because I found a reference on the wonderful Ask a
Biologist site to some hope. In essence, it says that if bananas are wiped out, we'll find a new
variety that we can eat, and cultivate it....we've done it before.

Now maybe I can stop bugging my wife about how we need to eat bananas while they're still around. But it's hard to be sure we can stop worrying. According to the Popular Science article, we may be able to make a new banana, but it won't likely taste just like Cavendish we're so fond of, and it might not taste much like it at all. Many banana varieties taste more like apples. The soft, creamy fruit we're used to is something of an oddity.