Because I am hard at work on this LAST LECTURE (all cheerleading is welcome), I have to share a video worth a lot of belly laughing.

My husband has been saying since the first trailer came out that the wolves looked like Snufalufagus.  Damn that just doesn’t get old.  :wipes tears of laughter away:

As I have mentioned here before, I’m deep in the midst of prepping a Theories of Personality course for next semester.  I’ve been breaking my neck to get all the lectures written and the powerpoints mad, and I’ll continue to bust my butt in order to get the syllabus, quizzes, tests, etc. finished before January 6th, which is when class actually starts.  Why am I doing this?  Well, because when I first started teaching for this university, I was hired in October and my paperwork sat around on some lazy person’s desk in HR such that I did not get access to the system in which I was building my course until 2 days before the university closed for Christmas.  Meaning I had an entire semester’s course to write in 2 weeks.  I pulled it off, but it sucked.  I spent my entire Christmas break at my office at work.  I’m trying to avoid that this time.  In a perfect world, I’ll have everything written, recorded, and uploaded prior to the start of the semester, so that all I have to do is GRADE and answer questions.  This is how I work multiple jobs without going stark, raving mad.  Online courses, while a massive PITA to create and set up, are relatively self maintaining afterward.

I set myself the unconventional NaNo goal of finishing these lectures and the novella.  I’ve been a rock star on the lecture side of things.  I officially have one lecture + one remaining slide to write.  I’ll probably wind up expanding a few of the lectures a little, but the worst of it is almost done and we’re not at the end of Week 3 yet.  I’ve officially written 12 lectures in the last 5 weeks.  My brain is somewhere around the consistency of the porridge I like to eat for a winter breakfast.  Consequently the novella has…well, sat.

I needed to rewrite a few scenes from the beginining, which I did.  I have come right up to the middle of the story and my get up and go done got up and went.  I blame it on being firmly sucked into teacher realm.  There’s not much overlap between the two and I’m afraid I’m not very good at moving between worlds.  I’ve done a few character sketches, made lots of random notes, but I haven’t done any new scene work in about two weeks.  Seriously, this kind of stuff is the anti-fiction for me.  I haven’t been in the mood to write much at all.

So…I’m just going to let things sit another week or so, just wind up the lectures.  I decided it was best because what little I HAVE written hasn’t been productive or useful.  So I’ll knock out the mandatory stuff I’ve gotta get done.  After that I hope my brain will realign to the fiction polarity and start actually working again.  I’m waiting for any of my projects to sit up and speak to me again.

Wish me luck today!  I’d love to celebrate finishing the lectures with something tonight.

I absolutely LOVE this time of year when the annual results for the Darwin Awards come out.  Here are this year’s winner and honorable mentions:
1. When his 38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Provo, Utah would-be robber Jason Ellison did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.
And now, the honorable mentions:

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.

3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped… Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies.. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

5.. A teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

6. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money, is a crime committed?]

7. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly.. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.

8. As a female shopper exited a South Carolina convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”

9.. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti , Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast. The man, frustrated, walked away. [*A 5-STAR STUPIDITY AWARD WINNER]

10. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on an Atlanta street, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had.

I’ve been on a YA kick lately, having knocked out Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver and Simon Holt’s  The Devouring in the last week.  I’ve been listening to Alyson Noel’s Evermore on audiobook over the weekend, and it really brought home to me something that bugs me about some YA.

Of course it seems that the majority of popular YA these days is in first person.  It is supposed to give us an up close and personal view of the hero or heroine’s head, deepen our experience of the story.  But something I’ve noticed in a lot of the YA I’ve read (though not Shiver or The Devouring)–and I include the Twilight books in this category–is that a lot of them take that first person point of view and turn it into a story where the hero/ine is sitting there telling us the story.  The whole story.  In a tell the story rather than show it kind of way.  This is not a good thing.

It particularly heavily highlights the incredible self-involvement that a lot of teen hero/ines display in their stories.  And yeah, maybe that’s fairly true to life, but good fiction is not ENTIRELY always accurate.  Because, damn, that kind of accuracy makes me really dislike the hero/ines for being whiny, angsty, wishy-washy, and boring.  Possibly this is because I’m not a teenager and wasn’t a particularly typical teen when I was that age.  But still.  I think it takes a talented writer to write teens, or any characters really, in first person and still SHOW the story rather than tell it.

Many, many writers begin with first person when they start writing.  Not all, certainly, but a significant portion.  They often think it’s easier.  I know I did.  I switched sometime in high school to third person and I haven’t shifted back.  Part of this is because I’m far more comfortable in third person.  I prefer hitting multiple points of view in my stories, so it’s the natural choice.  The other reason is that I honestly think that writing in first person–doing it WELL so that you DON’T fall into the tell rather than show trap–is far more challenging.  It’s why I’m waiting to start my culinary paranormal series.  That story is absolutely best in first person, and it’ll be seriously pushing my boundaries as a writer.

I gave about two seconds of thought to writing my YA trilogy in first person, doing a sort of chapter by chapter POV switch as was done in Shiver.  But it’s just not me.  And I don’t think I can tell the story the way it needs to be told in first person.  I find myself far too bogged down in all the “I”s and “me”s.  And so, too, do a lot of authors (YA and adult).  And then there are those that do it SO WELL you feel like the characters are your best friend.  Everybody has their strength.

What do you think?  Do you think first or third is harder?

I spent my weekend in south Mississippi at Desoto State Park at an Adventure Riders motorcycle rally.  That’s me on the yellow bike.  See how tiny I am compared to our friend Michael?

We very nearly didn’t go.  Hubby called Thursday afternoon saying we weren’t, that the fix for his rear brakes was going to take more time than we had.  I pouted enough that he relented to try to fix it on Friday and maybe we could go late.  He gets the rear hub torn apart, turns out that the seal that his dad thought he had to fix it was the wrong size and the parts store closes at noon on Friday (it was already 1).  So then we weren’t going again.  Then Dad remembers there’s a spare rear hub in the parts barn, so hubby digs that out and replaces it, refills necessary fluids, test drives it and whee!  It works better than the old one.  We’re going!  Then he makes one more test run up the road and promptly snaps his front brake cable.  I should mention that he rides a 1971 BMW R75/5 that’s older than he is.  It requires a lot of TLC.  So then we weren’t going again.  Then he goes BACK down to the parts barn and finds an ancient and kinda sketchy brake cable that he lubes and loosens and says he’ll try.  Meanwhile, I run into town to the courthouse to properly tag and title MY bike (which looks awesome with its new yellow paint job).  Get back and he’s finishing up, things are working.  We’re going again!  It’s after 4 by this time.  I should mention that Desoto is about 4 hours away.  So we race home, pack as fast as we can (which takes an hour since we HADN’T prepped stuff the night before because we thought we weren’t going), then come back out to his parents’ to pick up his bike.  Of course it takes another hour there because we had to fix a short and adjust some stuff.  We finally got off about 7:30.  Naturally he about froze his butt off on the 4 our ride down (with me watching like a hawk as I follow in the truck because I’m starting to wonder if all the stuff going wrong was a sign or something) and we finally rolled into camp at 11:30 to the cheers of the riders still up.  By the time we finished visiting, setting up camp, and fell onto our air mattress, it was after 1.  We damn near froze to death because we brought the summer weight sleeping bags by accident.

Saturday we went on the big ride–6 hours of roads and trails with a break for a truly superb catfish lunch somewhere around Lucedale (I think)–2 up on hubby’s bike.  In the morning we had a little spill (only going about 5 mph as he’d managed to lose a fair amount of speed before we went over).  Hubby it the ground, I hit hubby, and the bike pinned us both.  He had a bit of a Superman moment, managing to lift his bike off me, from the ground, with one hand.  If I hadn’t been so freaked out, it would have been really sexy.  But anyway, all was well, just some bruising and no damage to bones or bike.  When we got back in the afternoon, we decided to go into Wiggins to pick up a new sleeping bag so as not to freeze that night too.  It was my first official ride that wasn’t on my in-laws’ road, with real traffic, real highways and everything.   It was really nervewracking, but when I made it to Walmart (15 miles later) without incident or injury, I relaxed a little.  On the drive back it was getting dark (I should note, I do NOT like riding in the dark), and we passed this field covered in mist with this gorgeous hot pink, dark purple sunset behind the trees.  GORGEOUS.  One of those shots that would look totally photoshopped.   Naturally, we didn’t have a camera.

At the big cookout dinner that night, all the guys (there were about 40 of us in all) were pointing out me and my bike to their wives (who mostly just showed up for the dinner) and saying “Don’t you want to do that?”  Evidently I am an oddity.  I’m the ONLY wife who rides and has her own bike, and apparently this makes me the coolest wife.  Hubby says the guys are really jealous as their wives won’t come out to play.  The whole thing cracks me up.

We took another short ride Sunday morning to enjoy the last of the gorgeous weather, then came on home.

Let me tell you I am GLAD that I got to sleep in my own bed last night!  Of course the next several days will be the graduated doing of laundry and household chores that were neglected while we were out of town.  Which was a lot since we left in quite a hurry on Friday night.  But it was a GREAT weekend.  I had a blast, the weather was beautiful, and I got out of town for a much needed, totally unplugged weekend.

Now it’s back to the grindstone and so far Monday has been one of Those Mondays with one thing after another going wrong.  But it will be okay.  Things will steady out, I will catch up, and I will get back into the swing of things.  The semester is winding down for class, so I’m trying to do a big final push to tie up loose ends with current classes and finish the last 3 lectures for Theories of Personality.  I would REALLY like to have them all written by Thanksgiving.  Which would leave me with December to record them and get all the quizzes, discussion board questions, and tests written.  Oh, and somewhere in there, I’d like to get back to my novella.  But in the meantime, I have to finish parsing out some missing data for the Evil Day Job.