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Happy New Year!

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Davin’s Quest – In Print Today!

It’s official! Davin’s Quest is in print as of today! If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, here are a few links:

MBAM – Amazon - B&N – Tower Books - Powell’s – BAMM

And here’s a bit about the book, in case you haven’t heard of it before:

Which man will Callie choose, the alien or the warrior? Or can she have both?

For each Alvian, there is one perfect match—a Resonance Mate whose soul blends in perfect harmony. Unlike the rest of his race, Davin has emotions and suffers for it. Without a mate, he is doomed to go mad. Searching for answers and understanding, he seeks out Callie O’Hara, a human woman with strong empathic gifts. Could this fragile human be his Resonance Mate?

Rick St. John is a tough-as-nails survivor of the Alvian occupation of Earth. He doesn’t believe in much, but when he sees Callie for the first time, he starts to believe in love at first sight.

The Governing Council is gunning for Davin, the upstart who dares to defy them. And they’ll kill anyone who gets in their way. Davin and Rick must come to terms with their feelings for Callie in order to keep her safe, while she has to find a way to save them both…with her love.

Goal Setting

I said I’d do a little research on goal setting, so here it is. A quick search brought me to a few different sites, which I’ll share with you here in condensed form. I’ll link to the sites so you can do further reconaissance, if you see fit. Here are the highlights:

TheGoalsGuy.com had a “Ten Commandments” of Goal Setting (explained here) that looked kind of interesting. Here are the 10, with my favorites in BOLD.

• Thou Shall Be Decisive
• Thou Shall Stay Focussed
• Thou Shall Welcome Failure
• Thou Shall Write Down Thy Goals -  If you write it down, it feels more real.
• Thou Shall Plan Thoroughly – Yup, I’m a plannner.
• Thou Shall Involve Others – That’s why we’re doing this here on the blog!
• Thou Shall Take Purposeful Action
• Thou Shall Reward Thyself – I LOVE this one!
• Thou Shall Inspect What Thy Expect – reexamine the goal once in a while, is what I think they mean by this.
• Thou Shall Maintain Personal Integrity – So no lying to us or to yourself. If you miss a day or don’t reach your goal one week, admit it and move on. Don’t lie about it. That can snowball on you real quick!

I really like this article about how important it is to write down your goals. Apparently, just the simple act of writing down your goals increases your odds of success something like 1000%. If you don’t believe me, read that article!

This short article might help you get specific and realistic with your goals. The gist of it is – set a goal that is actually achievable, not some pie-in-the-sky thing that’s impossible to achieve in the time you have to do it.

Remember, we’re doing this for the month of January. So pick something specific that you can realistically see yourself doing for the whole month. Consider the limitations of your daily life. Your schedule, your family’s schedule, other committments. Don’t say “I’m going to run a mile every day” when you know darn well the weather might interfere or you just don’t have time in your schedule to do it every single day – or worse yet – you CAN’T run a mile! LOL. You’d be better off saying something like “I’m going to walk a mile three times a week.” Then have contingency plans for bad weather, like walking in the mall or something.

Okay, so think hard about your goals for January and then get set to start on 01/01. Meet me back here on Jan. 1st with your goals firmly in mind and prepare to write them down!

Setting Goals for January

Back in NY now, after spending some time with the family over the holidays. I’m completely wiped out, but looking forward to starting on my goals with the New Year!

In fact, I’m going to host a little informal “challenge” here on this blog starting on January 1st. You can challenge yourself to whatever goal you like. I imagine a lot of writers will be challenging themselves to write more, but you could also challenge yourself to work out 2 or 3 times a week, too. You don’t have to be a writer to participate.

Check back on the 1st with your goal in mind. You can comment on that initial challenge post with your goal and then check in each week to tell us how you did. Think of this as your support group for the month of January. It’s likely that if you can meet your goal for a month, you’ll be able to continue with it.

So here’s some advice to start thinking about your goal for January:

1. Make it achievable – if it’s a big goal like “write a novel”, chop it down to a managable size for the time allotted. A series of smaller goals is easier to achieve than one giant one. Personally, my goal will be something like “write 2,000 words per day, 5 days per week”. If I do more, great. But in the meantime, I’ve given myself a minimum goal to work toward.

2. Timeline it – if your ultimate goal is “write a book” or even “fit into a size 9″, figure out realistically how long that might take to achieve. I do this so I get a “big picture” idea of what I’m facing. To do this, take your starting point and your end point. In the case of a book, you might already have a plot in mind, but no words written. Okay, so decide how long you need your book to be – just a ballpark figure. I’m going to aim for 90,000 words. It might be more, might be less, but 90k is a good place to aim. If I write 2k a day each week, that’s 10k per week. It should therefore take me 9 weeks to write the book. Add an extra week on for polishing and in roughly 2.5 months, I should have a first draft. Voila! So if I stick to my goal, by the end of January, I should have at least half a book written. Cool, huh? Seeing the big picture helps me. It makes it more realistic somehow.

There are lots of experts out there to help you set realistic goals. I’ll try to dig up some research on that kind of thing to share with you, but I find one of the most important things is accountability. Hence this public challenge. If I have to report back on my progress, I’m more likely to do something. How about you?

So think about your goal and come back on the 1st. I’ll probably come up with some fun graphics you can use to brag with and I’m considering holding a drawing at the end, just for fun. I’ve also invited some writers to guest blog during the month to cheer us all on and maybe some other surprises, so stay tuned!

Now – if you’ve made it this far – do you think this is a good idea? Leave me a comment and let me know if you’re interested in participating. I’m still brainstorming this idea, so I’m open to suggestions!

Merry Christmas!

Wallpaper Wednesdays

Merry Christmas
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Winter Solstice

The shortest day of the year… The longest night of the year… The turning of the season from Autumn to Winter…

All that and more happens today. Almost every ancient culture had a tradition associated with this event, marking the slow progression of more light every day until the Vernal Equinox marked the beginning of Spring.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, which according to Wiki, was: “Originally celebrated by the ancient Greeks as Kronia, the festival of Chronos, Saturnalia was the feast at which the Romans commemorated the dedication of the temple of Saturn…Saturnalia became one of the most popular Roman festivals which led to more tomfoolery, marked chiefly by having masters and slaves ostensibly switch places, temporarily reversing the social order.”

In the modern world, we’re used to the Solstice falling sometime around the 21st or 22nd, but I found it interesting to note that it was once assigned to the 25th – our traditional day for Christmas. Wiki has the following explanation:

“Since 45 BC, when the 25th was established in the Julian calendar as the winter solstice of Europe, the difference between the calendar year (365.2500 days) and the tropical year (365.2422 days) moved the day associated with the actual astronomical solstice forward approximately three days every four centuries until 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII changed the calendar bringing the northern winter solstice to around December 21. Yearly, in the Gregorian calendar the solstice still moves around a bit, but in the long term, only about one day per 3000 years.”

I never realized that Chirstmas was originally set to be on the Winter Solstice but because of math and some rotational difficulties, it wound up being a few days after for us modern-type folks. You learn something new every day.

Happy Solstice to all and welcome back the light that will be increasing each day from here forward!

Happy Holidays!

How Do You Get Kids to Read?

Apparently NOT by making them read award winning children’s books.

What? Okay, I’ll explain…

I recently read an article in the Washington Post about the Newbery Medal – a prestigious award for children’s literature. I have an interest in such things because, as some of you know, I am a librarian (among other things). Yet, as a child, I HATED to read!!!

You heard that right. I HATED to read… until… my 5th grade teacher gave us an assignment to do a book report. (I was down in the dumps over it.) The difference in this assignment was that WE got to choose the book from a list of about 50 books she’d selected. I trudged to the library and dutifully looked at all the books on the list and picked one that looked okay. It happened to be one of the Black Stallion books – not the first in the series, but somewhere near the beginning. I read that book, then HAD to go find the others. Over the next months I read every one of those books and let me tell you that is a LONG series!

Ever since then, I’ve been a voracious reader. But I still struggled through the assigned books in high school and I avoided college literature classes as much as possible. Being an honors program student and science major, I managed to place out of the writing classes and only had to take one or two honors college classes in literature. Sometimes I feel bad about that, but honestly, if I want to read more of the classics, I know where the library is.   And in my own defense, I have read many on my own.

I mention all this for a reason, and it relates to the controversey surrounding the Newbery Medal in a roundabout way. Apparently the books chosen by the Newbery committee in recent years haven’t been very accessible to their intended audience – children. They may have impressed the committee with their tough social issues (death, loss of a parent, diseases, etc, – sounds like a Lifetime movie of the week, doesn’t it?), but they’re not appealing to kids.

If the idea of children’s literature is to make kids into lifelong readers – which the Black Stallion, and later, The Lord of the Rings did for me – then the Newbery seems to be missing the mark. If, however, the committee is interested in advancing some kind of social agenda and promoting the careers of people who write such books, then it appears they are doing a fine job.

As The Post said:

“On the January day when the annual winner is announced, bookstores nationwide sell out, libraries clamor for copies and teachers add the work to lesson plans.”

“Winning books become instant bestsellers. Many bookstores and libraries have Newbery sections, and popular television shows interview the winners each year.”

So the award can turn an otherwise unknown book into an overnight sensation. And all the money and fame that goes along with it. That’s a lot of power to give a small committee of people.

The award is given by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association (ALA). I’ve had issues in the past with the way the ALA gets involved in political issues. It’s the main reason I am no longer a member of the ALA. I don’t like my dues money going to support political ideas with which I vehemently disagree. I mistakenly thought the ALA was supposed to be about supporting libraries and librarians, but instead it’s turned into some sort of political action committee involving itself in things better left to politicians. Not librarians. But I digress…

The Post goes on to say report:

“John Beach, associate professor of literacy education at St. John’s University in New York, studied 30 years of book lists… Books prized by children had stories and characters “accessible” to their lives, Beach’s report concluded. “The Newbery has probably done far more to turn kids off to reading than any other book award in children’s publishing,” he said.”

“Richard Allington, an education professor at the University of Tennessee and a literacy expert, wonders why adults seem to identify literature with books that are sad and difficult.”

Huzzah! I’ve always wondered the same thing. Why are “happy” books not considered “literature” for any age level? I don’t think it was this way in times past. If so, Shakespeare would have never written a single comedy!

Of course, what we now consider classics of literature were often the popular “pulp fiction” if you will, of their day. I wonder if the award winners of today will go on to be the classics of tomorrow? I’m pretty sure wildly popular books, like the Harry Potter series, will have some longevity, but what about the Newbery Medal winners? I’m not so sure about that.

Worse, if kids are made to read them and come to detest reading, what does that do for our future generations? If only we had more teachers like my 5th grade teacher. She let us pick the books we wanted to read – within reason, of course – and never commented negatively on our choices. As far as she was concerned, if we were reading, it was a good thing. That, after all, was the goal – to allow us to be independent thinkers who knew how to read, and who therefore would be able to find and digest information we’d need in the future.

She wasn’t trying to force-feed us some “hard facts” about life, death, parent loss, or diseases by making us do book reports on movie-of-the-week books. If we wanted to read happy books about horses, she was all for it. If some of the boys wanted to read biographies of famous generals or books about race cars, she didn’t criticize them for it. As far as she was concerned, we were reading and finding out what WE liked to read. She wasn’t forcing us to learn about some pet social issue of hers.

Let kids be kids. They’ll have to face the world’s social problems soon enough.

(Note: The book pictured above is a Newbery winner and has been criticized as being “inaccesible to young readers” in the Post article. I really like the cover (shallow, I know) and as an adult the book might appeal to me, but I’m not so sure a series of monologues is something kids would flock to.)

Went to See John Edward

(Note: I posted this on my Yahoo group yesterday, but decided it was worth sharing on the blog as well.)

I wanted to mention this before, but it was a last minute kind of thing and I wasn’t sure what I was letting myself in for. I got tickets last week to see the famous psychic, John Edward, at a local theatre last night. He’s doing a whole week of “shows” (which he calls “events” for lack of a better word) here on Long Island, which is his home base and mine as well. All the shows were sold out except last night, which I think was probably added to the schedule after all the others had sold out.

Anyway, I had no idea what to expect of this event. It was listed as a “seminar” not a “group reading” but actually, the group reading was exactly what we got. It was AMAZING!!! I’ve seen his TV shows from time to time and actually remember listening to him when he would make appearances (usually at Halloween) on WPLJ’s morning show, going on 15-20 years ago now. The guy says things that are so specific, there’s no way he’s not the real deal, though I am usually skeptical of people who claim to be psychic and want your money to prove it. LOL.

The theatre held about 3,000 people and is situated in the round. In other words, the stage is at the bottom center of the ampitheatre with seating all around in pie-slice configuration with aisles going down to the stage at about 8 different points so people can get to their seats. My seats were about halfway up. Maybe a little higher. But I could see everything really easily and was only maybe 20 yards from the actual stage.

First off, I have to tell you, I did not get a reading. But the people who did really touched my heart. There was so much tragedy – including 3 young boys who were killed in separate car crashes just a few weeks apart. The families didn’t come to the event together, but knew each other and were seated in different parts of the theatre. One led John to the next and the next. It was freaky. There was also a woman who’d lost her husband in a work related accident. He had worked for her father’s fencing company and sitting two sections over there were people “connected” to them – they’d had a fence installed by the father’s company. They didn’t know each other, but John jumped from the husband to the people who’d had the fence put up by the father’s company. It was
so weird. You had to be there to appreciate the way it all happened, but I really was amazed at the way John works.

I always sort of assumed that there were lots of “outtakes” on his TV show – times when he was wrong and they cut it. But I have to tell you, after seeing him last night… this guy just goes. There was no hesitation, no insecurity. He got argumentative (not in a bad way) with some people until they responded with “oh, yeah, that means this” and it was so obvious – you should’ve heard the audience. NY’ers are not shy about razzing slow people! LOL. But it was all in a good spirit of fellowship. We may sound mean to outsiders, but we all know we love each other.

He “read” for close to 2.5 hours straight. Boom boom boom. He just kept going. By the end of the evening, I was EXHAUSTED! It was such an intense experience. I’m one who firmly believes in the “energy” of a room filled with people. If you’ve never experienced it, go walk through the hall of the Javits Center when people are taking the bar exam. If
you can get out of there without feeling anxious, tired and stressed, you have my congratulations! LOL. Maybe I’m more sensitive to it than others, but if I’m in a room of happy people, I feel happy. If I’m in a room full of sad people, yup, I’m sad too. Even if it has nothing to do with me! I’ve noticed this over many years and at times it’s very
pronounced. Last night was one of those times.

I felt drained even though I had been well reseted and eager to see what this event was all about before it started. There were so many distressed people in the audience. So much emotion. By the time it was over, I had a splitting headache. I went home and collapsed – way before my usual bed time – and slept for about 12 hours. Not normal for me at all.

But this morning (it’s noon here now, of course, because I slept way late), I feel much better. Energized and raring to go. It’s the freakiest thing!

So anyway – if you believe in this sort of thing, and if you ever have the chance, I highly recommend going to see John Edward in person. He’s amazing. And even though I wasn’t one of the “lucky” ones who got a reading, I understand why after seeing the tragedy in that room. The people who needed it, got the readings. The rest of us were blessed to
observe and learn from the experience.