Thursday, February 20, 2003
rate your date
Bob Thursday, February 20, 2003
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Dear Ms. Lo,
Thank you for your kind rejection letter.
You are in an interesting place in the history of this text. You are the only person to read it who is neither a very old family friend, nor one who sleeps beside me in the night. (You will be happy to know that my wife read the letter and immediately agreed with it. You must be right.) So, even though it was a rejection, it was a thoughtful rejection and it sent me back to Paul.
Right now, unfortunately, I am firmly caught in the nets of a school year. Grading, planning, laying out a webpage, and the real world of school politics occupying most of my scheming and dreaming world. It is hard to go back to Pidge and Paul with any sort of clarity or purpose since I don?t know how much time I can devote to them. This fall, while I was on leave, I could give them six hours and 4000 words a day. Now, I am lucky if I can do a journal entry.
Like a good cheesecake, ?Keeper? keeps coming out of cold storage for a little while, giving up a taste, and then slipping back in. As a result, there are parts of the story that I have rewritten and polished a dozen or so times, and there are parts that are almost first draft. They came out, dropped onto the keyboard and made it into the text. After I sent my copies out, I thought about little over-written paragraphs that just needed to get flushed and evicted from the text, but lived on. I keep a notebook for further changes to it, so maybe I will get around to finally sending some little bits of precious prose down the drain.
Your letter gave me a lot to think about. I had to decide whether the novel was perfect as it was, or needed so many structural changes that it should be scrapped or if it could be tweaked in another draft. My wife assured me that the novel was not perfect, so I couldn?t honestly pretend that. On the other hand, your comments weren?t all that horrible, so maybe there is life in the old dog yet. So, I am setting myself up for another draft and another attempt to understand Mr. Brody.
Paul is a stranger to me. He kept changing throughout the various drafts and then, just as I had him nailed down, Pidge came in and practically took over the story. When I first came up with the ideas for Keeper, Paul was a much nicer guy. He had morals and his own little code of beliefs. He was much more of an odd, eccentric little duck who was trying to make things better for his students. He kept trying to help out and getting stepped on. His final scene had Pidge abandoning him for his roommate, who was much more athletic and fun.
I had spent most of my adolescence and young adulthood reading Travis McGee, Spenser and Lew Archer stories, so I had that tarnished moral knight image in my head and I wanted to try that out. But, I didn?t like the fit so much because those authors always found themselves in some sort of moral quandary near the end of the story that required luck or the timely intervention of fire ants to solve the problem. Suddenly, Spenser was no murderer and everything fit into a neat gin and tonic story.
Paul kept seeing good moral things in the story and whispering ?Fuck this? to me in my ear, and finally I listened to him. So he got darker and more like Flashman and Lucas Davenport and less like prissy old Spenser. The current Paul is almost a sociopath. He messes people up because he senses a threat to his independence. He turns on Shaw purely because Shaw wants to investigate his past. Shaw wants to intimidate him a little and Paul, instead of walking away, blows him up.
Now, as I now know Paul, I see him conflicted between his better angels who want him to walk away from fights and his darker angels who want him to bring a gun. And he likes the darker angels so much. To shift metaphors, he?s addicted to it. Even when it threatens much of what he holds dear, his instinct is still to go evil.
He?s aware of this, of course, and it makes him hesitate with Pidge. He doesn?t know what to do with her love at all. He is so afraid of himself and of her. He is afraid of what his darker angels will do to her and what she will do to them. Will he have to give up his fix in order to keep her? Will he manipulate her into some nasty compromise? Why does she want to be with him anyway? What does she want? Up until the day I wrote the last chapter, I had no idea what would happen. My outline has her walking out on him, but I just couldn?t do it.
The Paul I know is motivated primarily by loneliness. On one hand, he hates it and its accompanying silences. Early in the novel, he races back to town in order to be with friends and to avoid the silence of his house. His passionate attack on Pidge at the Eliot hotel comes after a week of being alone. On the other hand, he prizes his control and his independence. Sitting on the back porch in the middle of the night is his spot where he can nudge the constellations back into their positions. I left a throwaway scene in the novel, about two kids lost in a Range Rover to underscore this loneliness. They at least have each other. Paul doesn?t even let them drive over his lawn.
So, now I will go back and reacquaint myself with Paul a little bit. He is still an intimate stranger. I tossed out some scenes from the early going that highlighted his loneliness and I killed a lot of his backstory because I hated the exposition at the opening. I like the idea of leaving Paul as a bit of a cipher. He is a character who requires a bit of work out of the reader, perhaps too much.
Once again, thanks for reading the story and for your kind letter.
Bob Barsanti
Who is the picture of the day? Come to Class
Bob Wednesday, February 19, 2003
I don?t have a lot of time right now to respond to this thread, but I must say that this is one of the most interesting threads out of this group.
I am actively wrestling with this question. How much time is reasonable to devote to the students?
I am in my sixteenth year of teaching out here on Nantucket Island. For most of my time out here, I taught five forty-five minute classes in a seven block day, along with a duty. In addition to that, I had the usual meetings, clubs, and coaching that would lead up to four or five in the afternoon. I refined my teaching technique in a world where you woke up early too finish grading, taught school, stayed after for help and bureaucratic busywork, then took the grading home in the darkness. All of the other, good, English teachers did this.
In addition, because we have high turnover or faculty and lousy administration over the years, we had no fixed curriculum, at the high school. We had no store of old handouts and exams, nor even a list of required books. I got a key to the book closet and a kick in the knickers.
Ten years later, we moved to the 4x4 semester model. Suddenly, school got a lot more bearable. 90 minute prep periods make a lot of things doable in school, as does 50 total students at a time. My classroom got manageable, as did my grading and my prep. I was only bringing home an hour or two of work a night. (I know all of the counter arguments. They have validity, too)
Then I got married.
Then I had a son.
Then I had another son.
In short, even with the better schedule (for me), school became this huge time eating monster again. I leave for school at 7:15 and return at 4:00 with at least an hour?s worth of work. Then, it?s parenting time until the kids go to sleep and couple time until the wife goes to sleep, when it becomes school time again. No workouts, no hobbies, no Quake Deathmatch or Grand Theft Auto III.
I don?t think my teaching life is all that unusual.
I am a project oriented, guide on the side.
I don?t waste a lot of time at the coffee machine.
I use rubrics to speed up the grading, as well as peer editing.
I fight less politically.
I gave up department head.
In short, I am fighting hard to make school workable for me. I am trying to teach the students to do (not ?to know? or ?to cover?) as best I can, while at the same time leaving weekends and evenings for the family and sleep. It is an ugly fight that leaves little time for on-line musing.
However, I do think that modern American society, as shone in TV shows, movies, graduate schools, Town meetings, list-servs and whatever, wants teachers to be more like Monks and Nuns. Think about all of the religious references that get laid on our profession. Martyrs, sacrifice, calling, and the like. We all need to think about our profession (as doctors need to think about theirs) and how we can practice it without tonsures, vows, and habits.
P.S. Think about all of the young teachers you have seen burn out of the job in two years or the great influx of professionals switching careers to also burn out of the job.
Yours In Christ
Bob Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Peace Rally
Bob Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Monday, February 17, 2003
Why Nerds are Unpopular Very high marks for this.
Bob Monday, February 17, 2003
gambling
Bob Monday, February 17, 2003
Sunday, February 16, 2003
So, the agent who sniffed at the Manuscript bounced it back to me. While I don?t have her comments right here in front of me, Paul didn?t connect with her. He needs more faults and more depth. My first instinct is to agree with her. I think that Paul starts off on a distant look and he does need some reason to start messing around with people?s heads. The scene at the liquor store and an early classroom scene with Karyn doesn?t really explain it. So, I can see the comment.
At the same time I think that she may have missed two things,. First, this is a mystery novel.
Spenser, Travis McGee, and Lucas Davenport don?t really give you a lot of internal faults and motivation. On the other hand, much of my style is to underwrite the story. I think she may have expected more transparency. Keeper of the Constellations is not a particularly easy book. I think she missed something.
So, the truth is in the middle. Her rejection had elastics attached. I am sure that if I were to rewrite, I could bring it back in. Unfortunately, that requires time. I don?t have time.
Great storm coming. Looking forward to it.
Bob Sunday, February 16, 2003
So this has been a slow week. Not really.
I have been in the classroom for almost every waking hour this week. I don?t think I remembered how much time I spent teaching this fall. Really, I spend almost every waking hour either reading, grading, teaching or organizing myself for school. All of the kid stuff or the writing stuff or even the ?bop around the island taking pictures with sleeping boys? stuff gets stuffed into the never-never bag. I liked that stuff.
Now, this is the week when reality set in on the school front. The day to day drudgery is going onward and all of the excitement of the fall has worn off. This week help parent?s night, professional development and other drudgeries that keep me in the building until 4:00. On top of that, we had no Leith.
No Leith means that the bride gets to be on full-time Mommy patrol, with all its blessings and its curses. Lots of clean?up in aisle 9.
And no writing.
Bob Sunday, February 16, 2003
Goodman:
Bob Sunday, February 16, 2003
Friday, February 14, 2003
Going Revsersible and waiting for a miracle
Bob Friday, February 14, 2003
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Ping Pong
Bob Thursday, February 13, 2003
Teach for America
Bob Thursday, February 13, 2003
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
loans
Bob Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Subs:
Bob Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Monday, February 10, 2003
Mike Jackson, Genius
Bob Monday, February 10, 2003
Sunday, February 09, 2003
Sick and wierd
Bob Sunday, February 09, 2003
Mickey's
Bob Sunday, February 09, 2003
Behold the juggler family
Bob Sunday, February 09, 2003
Saturday, February 08, 2003
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It?s cold, I am tired and there is another storm inbound.
I think that the thing with teaching isn?t the difficulty of the work, it?s the volume. I am being pecked to death by ducks. Do 451, layout the next two weeks, do the challenges, comment on Paul?s letter, poll the e-mail and keep going on the textbook. Oh, and keep the kids in line.
Quack, quack, quack.
I need some reading for challenges, toot sweet.
Today was a big sledding day for the doodle. He and Syd were off with the dead quakers sledding down the hills. Much fun. Quick bath. Asleep in five minutes. Beck has been a sleeping fool recently. Apparently there is a growth spurt going on.
Bob Saturday, February 08, 2003
It?s cold, I am tired and there is another storm inbound.
I think that the thing with teaching isn?t the difficulty of the work, it?s the volume. I am being pecked to death by ducks. Do 451, layout the next two weeks, do the challenges, comment on Paul?s letter, poll the e-mail and keep going on the textbook. Oh, and keep the kids in line.
Quack, quack, quack.
I need some reading for challenges, toot sweet.
Today was a big sledding day for the doodle. He and Syd were off with the dead quakers sledding down the hills. Much fun. Quick bath. Asleep in five minutes. Beck has been a sleeping fool recently. Apparently there is a growth spurt going on.
Bob Saturday, February 08, 2003
Friday, February 07, 2003
Snow is inbound. If I were in Wakefield or Middlebury, I would calmly say that we will have school. I don?t think so here. Looks like about a foot. Lots of good kid pictures will soon be happening.
A few notes. I just joined Audible.com. I should get the money back very quickly.
I wore the cowboy boots yesterday. Made my life a little more colorful.
My response to the superintendent is done. Hopefully, that should end the whole sordid saga. Ridiculous.
Currently he has his own problems.
A great little story has sprouted up. I maintain a website that holds all of my old handouts and sheets. I figure that whoever wants to download them is welcome to them and can use them in class. I do hope that they give me credit. On Tuesday, I got an e-mail from a girl looking for answers to the Portrait of the Artist sheets. I figured she was a teacher and bought time, since I don?t have answer keys. A day later, she writes back and fesses up that she is a student. Seems that her teacher has been busy plagiarizing me in class and she figured this would fix her boat. Since I was feeling vindictive and had some time, I explained all of my motivations and encouraged her to go to the principal on this. She has.
Interesting stuff. I am a heel for ratting my colleague out, but she could read the book.
Bob Friday, February 07, 2003
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
I slept like a log last night and didn?t do some of the work that I need to do?.the textbook and answering Alan?s notes. I need to set up a work time along with some family time. Right now it is school and famly and maybe some workout time.
We have had two night in a row where Beck woke up before Rourke. Great stuff. The best part is that he is rested and ready for the day. He doesn?t whine through his morning. I think the answer may be the magic nightlight.
Snow predicted for Thrusday night. Get ready for rain and wind.
The ice is now starting to break up in the lower harbor (although we are back below freezing) We can do some snow shots.
Bob Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
Google your life:
Bob Tuesday, February 04, 2003
Well, now I have missed many days. I need to be better about that. Perhaps this prep period will do it for me.
Nothing really new in the world, unfortunately.
Well, Columbia disintergrated.
In my small world of Nantucket, there is nothing new. After a period of horrible illness, the boys are back in shape. Beck has decidced that he needs to test everything. Rourke is working on the potty training thing. Not very hard. I pulled him off of his dresser the other day. He filled his underwear, pee?d on the top, opened the window and dropped his poop on the floor. Nice. Good for you.
The school budget had been bounced back from the Fincom to the Superintendent. Shame, really.
Continue to hear nothing from the agents. I consider the silence a good thing. Nerve-racking, but a good thing.
Bob Tuesday, February 04, 2003
Monday, February 03, 2003
Dave Eggers
Bob Monday, February 03, 2003
plagiarism exercise
Bob Monday, February 03, 2003
Sunday, February 02, 2003
5..4..3..2...1...Shuttle
Bob Sunday, February 02, 2003
shoebomber:
Bob Sunday, February 02, 2003
Saturday, February 01, 2003
Cool Green Hills of Earth
Bob Saturday, February 01, 2003
school silliness
Bob Saturday, February 01, 2003
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