Ho, ho, ho

Just like a Yo-Yo.

I’m wondering where my Duncan Yo-Yo is. I bet my mother gave it away. Mother’s do things like that. They want to have room in their houses for their own stuff after decades of raising you. They have a little bit of sentimentality for the Barbie doll clothes your grandmother made and for those plaster handprints, but yo-yos don’t usually make the cut. There are garage sales and thrift stores and church bazaars, and suddenly your prized possessions–that you haven’t thought about in years–are gone.

Remember Duncan Yo-Yos?

I can’t even remember what grade it was, but every kid had one. We learned the Sleeper, Walked the Dog, and went Around the World. Surprisingly, we were very rarely hit in the head by some other kid’s errant spinner. Teachers, on the other hand, had drawers full of confiscated yo-yos.

It was fun.

I daresay we had more of a sense of accomplishment the first time the Butterfly came back to hand than any Temple Runner sliding under an arch. Maybe not. I’m terrible at Temple Run. My nephew sits by me coaching, “Jump! Turn! Slide, Aunt E, slide!” and still I lose. So, for all I know, the satisfaction might be as great. I’d have to actually have some small success at Temple Run to have any real basis for comparison. I’m just guessing, based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s theories of Flow and the idea that there has to be some hope of achieving the goal in order to really enjoy an endeavor.

Yo-yos offered that. We could practice, and we could get better at it. The improvement was noticeable–both to us and to our peers. In other words, we could show off!

Yo-yos had style. There was color and movement–and just a hint of danger. A person could get hit in the head by a flying yo-yo, and our yo-yo practice was usually done to accompanying cries of “Not in the house!” But it was just a hint. This study, in fact, shows that in a ten year period from 1993 to 2002 there were only 14 cases of yo-yo related injuries, and they were all minor.

Of course, 1993 to 2002 was not the heyday of yo-yos. (Oh, felicitous phrase!) The heyday was back in my giddy youth, almost forgotten. The only reason I remembered it now, was because of Hiroyuki Suzuki and this:

I wonder where my Duncan yo-yo is.

Healthy discontent. . .

. . .is the prelude to progress. *

Last week–was it only last week?–I posted about some of the organizational tools I have used to try to keep up with my Hydra-Headed To Do list. At that point, I suggested somebody remind me to talk about the progress bars I used recently with a group of friends. Well, y’all fell down on the job, and nobody reminded me, but I’m going to talk about them anyway! So there.

You know what I mean when I say, “progress bar,” don’t you?

Every time you load some software, you see one. If you’ve ever participated in a school fundraising drive, you’ve seen one. (That thermometer that rises as the money rolls in? That’s what I mean.)

Back in November, for about 3 months, I made the most incredible progress on a variety of fronts because of some progress bars.

I had a few tasks that could be quantified–like editing a certain number of pages, writing a couple of chapters of my upcoming book, accomplishing 12 tasks of tax preparation. Things like that.

I found some nifty HTML code that allowed me to create a progress bar, and then I noodled with it and changed the colors and added glittering animated gifs when the bar reached 100%.

They looked something like this, with a countdown timer to display how much time before the end of the month, and some progress bars to show how close I was getting to meeting the goals. (Please note: Any resemblance to any actual goals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

This is not a perfect implementation of this idea. For one thing, I have to manually calculate the percentage of progress as I go along and edit the page. But as a beginning pass at it, it was a whiz-bang!

Why was it a whiz-bang?

Because it was incredibly effective!

Stuff like editing, which I hate? I sailed through it. I’d do a couple of pages, and instead of quitting, I’d think, If I do a few more, I get to move the bar along a little more! And I’d keep going!

At one point, I had ten or fifteen progress bars going, and I was just watching those colors move farther and farther right and those glittery butterflies flutter. It was a game. Much more fun than checking things off or crossing them out.

If you’d like to add a similar progress bar to your own website, you can find a code generator here. If you prefer a vertical, fundraising thermometer-type thing, this might be a good jumping off point.

If you’re technically-challenged, there are always paper and stickers and crayons. The point is. . .a visual representation of your progress, interactive in some way, even if it’s just gold stars, can make a huge difference!

* Mahatma Gandhi

The Sound of Silence

…isn’t really so silent

This morning, I happened to wake up around 5 am. Unable to get back to sleep, for some reason, I got up to do my morning pages and read for a little while. (I’m reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. This fact has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post.)

Just as I was about to fall asleep again–because the new revelations, while actually quite fascinating, are not spell-binding (okay, so it has a little to do with the rest of this post)–I heard a heron.

Have you ever heard a heron?

It sounds like the worst violin lesson ever. (I should know. Once upon a time, I took violin lessons.) It sounds like Harpo Marx’s horn. It sounds like–well, not unlike–a donkey braying.

I thought to myself, This is the silence I moved 1000 miles to get. This caw. These croaks. These cicada songs and squirrel chirrings.

And then I thought to myself, It’s a miracle.

Because this is exactly the silence I moved 1000 miles to get. Even the distant traffic, the occasional shotgun blasts, the boat motors, pump motors, a/c motors–all of those are infinitely preferable to the shell shock of living beneath an undisciplined toddler.

The difference is I was awake by the time I heard the heron honk. It wouldn’t have startled me out of a sound sleep with a bang, a thud and the earthquake rattle of the walls. The battle fatigue of those days has abated.

I can wake up when I set my alarm clock. I can write this blog post in peace. I can anticipate an owl’s hoot or a heron’s honk instead of strain to block out the shake, rattle and roll.

I shouldn’t have had to move 1000 miles to get a few minutes of silence, but the miracle is –it worked.

Hope for Humanity – Pt. 2

Small steps, big changes.

I follow Shaun Usher’s blog, Letters of Note, where a fascinating letter is posted every day. Sometimes, the letter was written by someone famous. Sometimes, it is by someone for whom this posting of the letter is all the fame he or she will ever get. (The former slave writing to his master is one such.)

The hope for humanity to which I am referring does not lie in these letters.

It lies in Shaun. Or, Mr. Usher, I should say. (I am, by the skin of my teeth, of a generation that was taught a certain formality toward people one does not know, in spite of uneasy, although often delighted, co-existence with a less stately present. And don’t get me started wondering why I’ve somehow begun identifying myself as “of a generation.” I think it may be the beginning of the end!)

At any rate, I have a little extra hope for humanity today because Mr. Usher, last Wednesday, wrote a letter of his own to all his readers. In it, he noted that he had concluded that too few of the letters on his website were written by women. He had decided to “redress the balance” and was asking for recommendations. (He has since noted that he’s been inundated with letters as a result, so please don’t rush off and send him more. Yet. Let’s wait until he asks.)

This, to me, is a remarkable occurrence.

I’m a member of 50/50 in 2020 and the Women’s Initiative. I was involved in the mid-80’s with the Women’s Project. These are all organizations that seek to draw attention to an enormous inequality in the theatre industry in terms of opportunities for women. One of the biggest hurdles they all face is in having the current lack of gender parity even recognized. Data is difficult to gather, often ignored or explained away by factors having little to do with gender. As a result, more than half the world’s stories remain untold.

To have someone announce that he has come to the conclusion that he is only telling part of the story and intends to change that is, as I said, a remarkable occurrence.

It’s especially amazing if he came to that realization all on his own without nudging of wife, sister, mother, girlfriend, etc.

Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. And I don’t suppose it really matters. He has the power to take some action, and he’s taking it.

The two days immediately following this announcement and request featured wonderful letters by Clementine Churchill and the incomparable Katharine Hepburn. (There’s even a film clip of Hepburn reading her letter to Spencer Tracy.)

I look forward to all the days to come. In the meantime, here’s a letter:

Dear Mr. Usher,

Thank you!

Elaine

Not of much note–but definitely sincere!

Hope for Humanity

Or, at least the part counted in the latest Census.

In a story about the inappropriate and often ridiculous comments made about Olympian Gabby Douglas, CNN’s Erin Burnett mentioned that the last U.S. Census had an option under “Race” for people to check off “Some Other Race.”

Big deal, right? So what?

But here is where it gets interesting.

According to Burnett, the people who put the Census forms together considered removing that option. They didn’t think many people would check it.

It was the third most often checked box in that section!

Third!

I suppose the mundane explanation for this is that we are a nation of such mixed heritage that a lot of people with, say, an Hispanic father and Asian mother check this box rather than choose one parent’s ethnicity over another’s.

I prefer to think of it as a long overdue rebellion against the things that separate us.

There’s a picture that’s been making the rounds on Facebook of a T-shirt with Census-type checkboxes. It lists the usual: Asian, White, African American, Hispanic, Native American. They’re all crossed out, and at the bottom, there’s a write-in candidate checked off: Human!

I like to think that a lot of the people who checked “Some Other Race” on the Census this time around did so because they have realized all these labels just divide us. They’re sick of it, and they’re checking “Some Other Race” because they identify as Human.

If somebody has come up with data that disproves Erin Burnett’s statement and my interpretation, don’t tell me. This is one of those things that ought to be true. If you can endorse Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, you can let me have this one.

Discover the world.

“The public library is one of the great strongholds of democracy. Who doesn’t love a library? It is a place you can go in any town and discover the world.”*

My grandmother was a librarian.

She didn’t have a degree in Library Science, and at the end of her career, those who did had been hired and placed in supervisory positions over her. The final days of her working life (at the age of 89, by the way) were spent entering new acquisitions and affixing the cards to them in the back room of the headquarters branch of the county library system for which she was the earliest employee. Along the way, she had run a library on a Naval base, opened the first library in Clay County, FL, shelved countless books, traveled miles of country road in a bookmobile, shushed I don’t know how many children, and provided me with most of the books that are in my personal library today.

She didn’t have a degree or, in the end, the official title, but my grandmother was a librarian.

Today’s Friday Find is devoted to something about which I suspect she never knew, even though it began nearly 20 years before her death, but of which I know–know–she would have heartily approved.

Project Gutenberg.

Not much of a find, you say, since it’s been around since 1971?

Okay. But how many of you have really looked at it? How many of you have really thought about what it means?

For those of you who haven’t heard of Project Gutenberg, it’s a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works–i.e., books. As of July 2012, there were over 40,000 items in its collection with about fifty new eBooks being added every week. (More history here.)

All of the works are available on the Project Gutenberg website for reading and/or download, usually in multiple formats. Most are in English, although they do have some works in other languages. They are all, also, all free to users in the United States where their copyrights have expired. International users should check the laws of their own country before downloading.

The project is named after Johannes Gutenberg, who invented movable type and launched a revolution in 1439 by making knowledge and learning available to the masses.

That’s what a library does, and the heritage that Project Gutenberg, as the next logical extension of the library system, carries forward.

It’s been said, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Show him how to catch a fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I say: Give people a library and you not only show them how to catch fish but how to clean it, cook it, sell it, paint a picture of it, mount it, raise it and do seventy million other things having nothing to do with fish!

A library should be the last funding cut in a free society.

Meanwhile. . .Project Gutenberg! Discover the world.

* Pat MacEnulty

A Thespian Thursday

Twisting your tongue into tangles

A little something for the actors in the group or teachers or anyone who has to do any public speaking.

Any time you have to get up in front of people and talk, it is a good idea to wake up your tongue. A little “Peter Piper,” a little “woodchuck chucking wood” in advance and your performance will be better.

(I saw Rachel Maddow the other day. I love Rachel Maddow–but on this particular day, she’d skipped the warm-up, I think.)

Avoid the stumbles and fumbles. Try a few tongue twisters. Say each one 3 times fast, and you’ll be ready for anything.

Alice asks for axes

Bad black bran bread

Betty Bocker bought some butter, but she said “This butter’s bitter!
If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter!”
So she bought some better butter and she put it in her batter
And it made her bitter batter better.

The big black bug bit the big black bear and the big black bear bled blood

Bluebeard’s blue bluebird

Bland Bea Blinks Back

Cinnamon Aluminium Linoleum

Cheap sheep soup

Friendly fleas and huffy fruitflies

A fat-free fruit float

Greek grapes

Gig-whip

The hare’s ear heard ere the hair heeded

Ike ships ice chips in ice chips ships

June sheep sleep soundly

Keenity cleaning copper kettles

Lemon lime liniment

Much mashed mushrooms

Norse myths

Nine nice night nymphs

Awful old ollie oils oily autos

Under the mother otter uttered the other otter

A pack of pesky pixies

Poor pure Pierre

The queen coined quick clipped quips

Red leather yellow leather

Rigid rugged rubber baby buggy bumpers

Round and round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran their rural races

Strange strategic statistics

The sea ceaseth seething

Six sick shorn sheep

The sixth Sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick

Such a shapeless sash

The swan swam over the swell, swim swan swim
The swan swam back again, well swum swan

A ghost’s sheets would soon shrink in such suds

Thrash the thickset thug

Three free through trains

Tea for the thin twin tinsmith

What a to do to die today, at a minute or two to two.
A distinctly difficult thing to say, but harder still to do.
For they’ll beat a tattoo at twenty to two
With a rat-a-tattoo at two
And the dragon will come when he hears the drum
At a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.

You know New York, you need New York, you know you need unique New York

Valuable valley villas

Real wristwatch straps

War weary warriors

Ex disk jockey

Local yokel jokes

Zithers slither slowly south

Trip over your tongue a lot? I bet, if you did, you laughed–and that’s another benefit. Laughter wakes up your diaphragm. Your voice will have more support.

There you go. All warmed up now? Knock ’em dead.

Most of these came from my work with the American Globe Theatre and Pulse Ensemble Theatre–but I’ve checked, and they all seem to be widely available elsewhere on the ‘net, so feel free to use and share.

It matters how you finish

Try again – “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.“*

Instead of wondering on this Wondering Wednesday, I’m going to show you a Wonder. Check out this video of motivational speaker, Nick Vujicic.

How many of us get a rejection letter and give up?

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.“– Calvin Coolidge

Maybe you want to get that play or novel out of the drawer and try again?

DIY publishing

Step Two

Yesterday, I was talking about using Calibre to convert documents into the appropriate formats (ePub, Mobi, etc.) for eReaders. The conversion process was easy to figure out and is astonishingly simple. The only drawback is that there are some formatting glitches that occur.

Occasionally, you lose your paragraphs. They get merged together or broken into two ‘graphs at odd places. All those nifty Microsoft Word features like “smart quotes” and em dashes don’t translate well. (You can turn that stuff off in Word, but if you forgot to do it before you converted in Calibre, you’ll have a mess.) In addition, images don’t always end up where you intended.

There is, almost certainly, software you can buy that will allow you to edit an ePub or a Mobi file. There may even be some freeware that will let you do it. Tuesday’s Tip, however, is my discovery over the weekend that an ePub file is really just a bunch of HTML files and associated style sheets and image files all zipped up together into one file with the ePub extension.

If you have any kind of zip software and some knowledge of HTML, you can easily fix any problems with your ePub file. (Note: I said “easily,” not “quickly.” It can take some time.)

The first thing to do is convert the document using Calibre. Then, locate the resulting ePub file on your hard drive. At this point, I recommend storing a copy of that file in some other location until you’ve finished tinkering. It’s always good to be able to go back to where you started if/when you get hopelessly stuck.

Once you’ve made the backup copy–(Seriously. I mean it. You can never have too many backups.)–right-click on it and open it with your zip software (WinZip, 7Zip, jZip, IZArc–whatever your chosen utility is).

You should see a list of files–several of which have the extension .html. These are now editable in any text editor. (I think I mentioned, previously, that I like Notepad++.)

Make your changes (this is where you need that working knowledge of HTML) and check them by viewing each file in your browser.

When you are finished tinkering, select all the files (make sure you get all of them — the html files, the image files, the css files, the opf files and anything else that you unzipped from the ePub file) and use your zip software to re-create the archive.

Rename the new archive to the original name including the ePub extension.

You should now be able to view it on Calibre’s eBook viewer or on your ePub-compatible eReader.

If you’re trying to edit a MOBI file, it seems the simplest thing to do is convert it to ePub, edit, and then convert it back.

Now, one caveat to all of this is I haven’t yet figured out how DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected files work. I’m talking here about unprotected files. If you’re looking for info on DRM, you’ll either have to Google for yourself or wait until I’ve climbed that bit of the learning curve.

Gate crashing

“No fate but what we make for ourselves.”*

Thanks to the Internet and to technology, we are getting closer and closer to those words being true. Where once upon a time it was extremely difficult to get your work–by which I mean, for the most part, your art–out where people could see it, it is becoming easier and easier. The gatekeepers have less power. If you are willing to take the chance and invest a little sweat equity, you can bypass them.

It’s not always a good idea. Perceptions change more slowly than technology, and the seal of approval provided by being selected by a reputable publishing house or signed by an A-list agent still has value. I’m not advocating “going rogue” entirely.

What I am saying is that the delivery channels are not as narrowly held as they once were. If you think you have something to offer, there are ways to offer it without waiting for the over-worked and over-solicited gatekeeper to realize its value and pluck you out of obscurity.

I’ve been considering self-publishing for some time, and this Monday’s Miracle is that I have made some significant progress in that direction. Like the builders of the Six Million Dollar Man, I “have the technology.”

And I’m a little closer to making it work now that I’ve figured out how to turn a standard word processed bit of writing into something that can be delivered in the formats used by the all the major eReaders.

If you want to to the same, you can check out Calibre–a terrific free software for eBook management. It’s not all I’m going to need. There are some limitations to its conversion processes, but I’ve solved one of the major difficulties. I’ll be talking about that tomorrow in Tuesday’s Tips.

Meanwhile, this is a big step forward in what is shaping up to be a major project. The goal is to take much of my writing and make it available for purchase and download at the bookstore on this website. Instead of spending my energy trying to attract the attention of literary managers, agents and publishers’ assistants, I can spend it on making the work as good as I can and making it available as quickly as I can.

There are many, many hurdles to overcome before I get there–but getting past the gatekeeper isn’t going to be one of them!

* James Cameron, Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants