I visited Salem Middle School in Apex, North Carolina, last week, and in addition to talking to all the students about Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten, I got to spend time with the Salem Middle guys read group. I did a podcast interview with them, which they've posted on their blog. Check it out - they asked great questions!
So we started work with our new toy - the scissor lift. There are a LOT of warnings and alarming graphics plastered all over this thing. Here are just a few - really - there are a LOT more.
And here I am, working at the full extension of the lift. It has a sickening tendency to sway back and forth, especially when it's fully extended.
Most of the time it was Alan and I together up there, which was a little scary. Actually a lot scary. It was like being in a very tippy boat with another person - both of us overcompensating for every move.
One of the hardest things we did was cover the overhanging eaves. At the full extension of the lift I could just reach the underside of the eaves - if I stood on my tiptoes.
So here's how we put these up. . .
I'm not normally a big bug spray user. I found a can under the sink so I must have used it at some point, but usually I'm more of a live and let live kind of person. But not when stinging things are dive-bombing us. I get that they were protecting their nests, but they were building their nests in OUR nest.
Here's where we stand so far - halfway done with the work we have to do this week. Those last few panels in the top corner are actually up now, but it was pitch dark when I finished the painting, so no pictures until tomorrow. And now it's supposed to rain every day for the rest of the week. Lovely.
So most of the time she collected ladybugs.
This is actually not all we've gotten done so far this week, but I'll save some pictures for tomorrow. . .
Read more...
Meet our new scissor lift! Well, it's ours until next Friday. This little guy is going to help us finish the exterior siding AND get a head start on the insulation that goes in the tall, two-story walls and two-story tall ceiling on the first floor. Once Wendi and Jo get back from school, that is. Today is one of our parent-helper days at Spruce Pine Montessori, so of course we have to wait . . .
More pics of scissor-lifting to come!
Last Friday while we were in Lexington for the Bluegrass Book Festival we got out to see Speed Racer, the movie. I absolutely loved it. Visually, it's a treat. The characters and cars leap out of their anime show into live action with all the vibrant color of a cartoon, and the pacing is, for the most part, pretty crazy fast. Also, there are ninjas.
I realize in writing this that I am being totally fanboy here, and that this movie will not appeal to everyone. Jo (age 5) and I (age 5 mentally) loved it. Wendi, not so much. She'll be the first to agree though that the movie is gorgeous to look at--we spent half the movie whispering and pointing at hypercool costumes, the jaw-dropping, glee-inspiring architecture, and the art-deco wallpapers we would SO buy right now for the new house.
But the plot was, surprisingly, more complicated than it should have been, the driving sequences were often so fast and chaotic they were hard to follow, and while I personally loved the literal translation of the anime characters, that direct interpretation worked against them as well. The movie was very cartoony, which rubs some people the wrong way. (See Dick Tracy and Sin City.)
The Speed Racer movie was weirdly nostalgic for me. I was never a die hard fan of Speed Racer, mostly because I rarely caught it on television. One of my earliest memories, however, is of being in a camper--did my grandparents on my Dad's side own a camper in a trailer park when I was little?--and trying to tune their little black and white television to something--anything--to relieve the boredom of sitting around in a camper.
I found Speed Racer. I remember only bits and pieces: The car, the little kid with the monkey, Trixie in her helicopter. Speed Racer was the first experience I and most other American kids had with anime. We didn't even know what anime was. But whatever this was, it was something different than the cartoons we could see on Saturday mornings. It was drawn differently. The characters acted differently. Sometimes they would jump around and wave their arms like they were hopped up on sodas, then go back to being normal just as quickly. They talked fast, ssomehow managing to squeeze five minutes of dialogue into the space of thirty seconds. And what the heck was up with that monkey?
Fast forward three decades, and I'm sitting in a movie theater as an adult and recognizing, from somewhere way back in the dark recesses of my earliest memories, the theme song. I find I can even sing part of it. A grin crosses my face when I see Speed and Racer X--I know who he really is!--and Spritle and that dang monkey, and Trixie . . . and by the time we see the Mach 5 impossibly spinning and jumping and bouncing around a racetrack in brazen defiance of the laws of physics, I'm smiling ear to ear.
So add Speed Racer to my list of unabashed guilty-pleasure films, right up there with Tron and Charlie's Angels.
Oh, and for a fascinating look at what the Speed Racer cartoon was like in Japan in the 1960s before it got edited and translated for American audiences, check out the Wikipedia entry for the Speed Racer anime. It was wild to find out the show's inspiration was a mash-up of two very different 1960s pop-icons: Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas, and James Bond in Goldfinger!
Jo and I got MarioKart for the Wii over the weekend, and we've had a blast steering away from the couch. So far Jo is much better at running into walls than she is finishing races, but she'll get there--and if the other video games we've played together are any indication, she'll get there very quickly. In the meantime, I can still enjoy beating the pants off her.
So today, on a whim, I logged on to the free MarioKart online player connection board, and was quickly transported to a game with 12 other players from around the world, including one player from Japan! It's pretty cool--before the race begins, it highlights the general location of all the players on a globe and shows you their Mii icons. It was awesome playing against live players from around the world.
Until they beat the pants off me. I think I need more solo practice.
In the meantime, if anyone out there has MarioKart Wii and wants to play, drop me an e-mail and we'll set up an online game together! Only I'm always Luigi . . .
I'm going to be teaching at two regional workshops coming up soon. The first is a workshop I'm teaching on my own on May 31st on writing for middle graders and young adults, sponsored by the Knoxville Writers' Guild. Today is the registration deadline for this event! The second is a workshop where I'm one of three instructors focusing on the nuts and bolts of building novels for young readers. (See ad above.) Here are the details on each:
Writing Novels for Children and Young Adults
Instructor: Alan Gratz
Saturday, May 31 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
in Lenoir City (just outside Knoxville)
Sponsored by the Knoxville Writers' Guild
Fee: $115 (including catered lunch); $135 for non-members
Join us for a one-day, nuts-and-bolts workshop on how to write novels for middle grade readers (ages 8-12) and young adults (ages 12 and up). Through a series of mini-lessons, writing exercises, and facilitated group critiques, you'll learn how to write stories that entertain the "young" half of young adults while still respecting the "adult" side of the equation. We'll talk about the unique challenges of MG and YA pacing, voice, perspective, plotting, audience, and more. Bring a work-in-progress to workshop, or come with an empty notebook and a burning desire to begin writing for kids--all levels are welcome.
Sponsored by the Knoxville Writers' Guild, this workshop will meet from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 31, at a scenic rural farmhouse near Lenoir City. Cost (which includes a catered lunch) is $115 for Guild members and $135 for nonmembers. Registration is limited to 12. The deadline for registering is May 15, but the workshop may fill earlier. Please register promptly to assure getting a seat. Guild membership is $25 and for students, just $10. For more information, visit: http://www.knoxvillewritersguild.org/alangratz.htm
To register or for more information, contact Art Grand, agrand@grandcreative.comRead more...
I hope you can join me!
I was driving in to Spruce Pine, North Carolina the other day, and happened to notice the license plate of the car on the road in front of me. Not one I see on the road very often, so I made sure to snap a pic of it after they'd parked downtown . . .
Congratulations to Gratz Industries Employee of the Month for May 2008--Wendi Gratz! She gets a brand new serger for her workshop, and a specially designated parking space in the driveway.
I've been rereading The Maltese Falcon lately, with an eye toward using it as inspiration on the next Horatio Wilkes mystery, which is currently in production here at Gratz Industries. The Maltese Falcon is by Dashiell Hammett, not, like my previous inspirations, by Raymond Chandler, but I think I can be forgiven the transgression, as even Chandler considered Falcon to be high art. Reading it for perhaps the third time, I'm blown away all over again.
The prose is sparse and electric, and Sam Spade is an enigmatic and enthralling protagonist--a man who won't rest until the murder of his partner Miles Archer is solved and avenged, but who perhaps never really liked his partner, and had no problem having an affair with Archer's wife when his partner was alive. The action is fantastic too. The Maltese Falcon kind of magically falls into Spade's hands about 3/4 of the way through the book, but otherwise the plotting is tight and realistic, and somebody's always drawing a gun or getting beat up or ransacking an apartment.
But one of the most intriguing things I ran into again was what has come to be known as "The Flitcraft Parable." Sam Spade is a man of few extra words--he says what he needs to when he needs to, and he doesn't go in much for stories or poetic thoughts (unlike Philip Marlowe)--but he does take the time about sixty pages into the story to sit down and tell Brigid O'Shaughnessy the story of Charles Flitcraft.
I won't quote the whole thing here--it's about 1200 words--but you can read the entirety of it online here. In short, the story Spade tells is about a successful, well-adjusted family man from Tacoma named Flitcraft who is walking along one day when a heavy steel beam from a construction site hits the concrete just a foot or so from his face. Flitcraft is so rattled by his near-death experience that he never comes home from lunch that day. He leaves his wife, his two boys, his successful real estate practice, his four o'clock tee time, and just disappears.
"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand."
Five years later, someone matching Flitcraft's description is seen in Spokane, and Spade, who was then working for a Seattle detective agency, is sent to investigate. It's the same man all right. He's living under a new last name, but, oddly, his life is very similar to the one he left behind. He's married, has a baby boy, and makes a good living as an auto dealer. Spade has no instructions, so he meets the man and tells him plainly why he's come. Over lunch, Flitcraft explains--for the first time ever--why he left. The day the beam fell, he was scared, of course, but not so much frightened as shocked. "He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works," Spade tells Brigid.
Rather than be upset at the injustice of a cruel and indifferent world, "what disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not in step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life." The realization was profound: "Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away."
After wandering around for a few years though, Flitcraft fell into the same routines and patterns of his previous life--perhaps without even realizing it. "That's the part of it I always liked," Spade tells Brigid. "He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."
The placement of this mysterious "parable" in the otherwise rapid-fire, no-nonsense patter of The Maltese Falcon is noticeably out of place--and for that reason you won't see it in the exceptional movie adaptation. Even Brigid O'Shaughnessy is caught off guard by the story and by Spade's sudden openness. It's so different from everything else, it practically screams, "this is the theme of the story!" Which begs the question: just what does the story mean?
Some people read it as Spade telling Brigid that no matter what crazy things people may do in the moment, they will always, eventually revert to form. Sam tells this story to Brigid specifically, and though Brigid is pretending to be innocent, Spade knows she is an inveterate liar. Is he just telling her, in a veiled way, that he knows she's a liar and that eventually she will betray him?
Others have read a more existential theme to this parable. Says one professor, "The Flitcraft parable might best be thought of as Spade's understanding of the existential universe--a world without rules. Flitcraft had fashioned his life by a set of societal expectations, and the 'beams
falling' temporarily convinced him that he'd been walking blindfolded all his life, not realizing the random nature of chance. He thinks, by leaving his wife, home, and career behind that he's behaving in a hard-boiled way, which he is until his nature channels him back into the same life he'd always lived. He 'got used to them not falling,' as Spade says."
That's a bit heady for me. I like the former interpretation--that like Columbo, Spade sees human life as a collection of routines. But where Columbo is always looking for the things criminals do outside of their routine that trip them up, Spade seems to be focused on people's "foolish consistencies" as evidence of who they really are.
The real trick of it is, Sam Spade never explains what the parable means, so if this is a theme of The Maltese Falcon it's difficult to understand what that theme is supposed to be. He tells us what part he likes, so we can look for meaning there, but ultimately, like a Rorschach test, perhaps the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. Do you disapprove of the man for abandoning his first family the way he did, or like Sam do you understand him completely? Is it a story telling us to break the rules, or does it argue we can never escape them? Does the world not care one way or the other? Or is it telling us in far more words what Buckaroo Bonzai said so much more succinctly: "Wherever you go, there you are."
Give the "Flitcraft Parable" (or better yet, the whole book!) a read and let me know what you think.
Jo says, "Happy Mother's Day, moms!"
Why does this picture remind me of Isaac from The Love Boat?
Sarah Mlynowski, E. Lockhart, and Lauren Myracle sign How To Be Bad.
Let's do lunch.
Shannon Hale, Lisa Klein, and Wendy Staub sign at the Bloomsbury booth.
"Veni. Vidi. Vendi." -- I came. I saw. I snacked?
I know low voltage is certainly the way I preferred to take all my exams.
The view from the greenspace in front of the World Congress Center. 
Finally I was off to my own event, where I signed copies of Samurai Shortstop, Something Rotten, and advance reader copies of Something Wicked, which comes out this October. The Penguin booth was hopping every time I came by:
And did I remember to get someone to take a picture of me while I was signing? Of course not. That would require a brain. I was a little off my game anyhow, as by this point the near-yelling conversations I had the night before at the author reception and a lingering cold combined to rob me of my voice. I was able to croak well enough to chat with people as they came up to see me, but by the end of the hour my throat was pretty much gone.
My editor Liz Waniewski and me, back at the Love Boat bar. Outta sight!
New Note! In 2011 I'll be launching the Shiny Happy Sewing School - offering weekly video tutorials for beginning sewists of all ages. Sign up for my newsletter or "like" Shiny Happy World on Facebook now so you don't miss a single thing! And if you know someone who wants to make "Learn to sew" one of their New Year's resolutions - please forward them the link. Thanks! And happy sewing!
Now back to the original post. . .
I've been making lots of aprons lately and I finally got the patterns listed. If you want to make your own, you can find my patterns here.
I love the three I designed for the pattern, but I decided to make a girl-sized one to match the apron I made for Kit. I wanted to design something a little simpler than the Madeline apron - something that would be easier to make. It's so easy that it's the perfect beginner's project - here's how. . .
Start out by cutting out all the pieces. Cut one rectangle 22" wide by 12" high. That's the skirt part of the apron. For the pockets, cut two 5" x 5" squares. For the waistband cut enough pieces to make a strip 3" wide and 66" long. I'll show you how to join the strips together later.
First we'll start with prepping the pockets. Turn in the sides and press them down. It doesn't really matter what your seam allowance is - just do whatever feels easy for you. My eyeball seams always seem to measure 3/8". It should look like this.
Now turn the bottom edge up the same way and press. It should look like this.
You'll want a more clean edge for the top, so turn that top edge in and press, then turn it in again and press. It should look like this.
Stitch down the top edge pretty close to the folded edge.
Repeat for the second pocket. Now you need to hem the sides and bottom of the apron. Use the same method that you used on the top of the pocket, turn the hem under, press, turn it under again and press again. Stitch down both sides, and then repeat the turning, pressing and stitching for the bottom hem. I didn't take pictures of this part, but it's pretty straightforward.
Now you're going to place the pockets on the skirt of the apron. Line things up so that the top right corner of the finished pocket is 5" down from the top edge of the skirt, and 2 1/2" in from the right edge of the skirt. See the picture below - the gridlines on the cutting mat and the ruler are all 1 inch.
Pin the pocket in place and repeat for the other side. Stitch each pocket down one side, across the bottom, and up the other side of the pocket.
Now it's time to gather the top of the apron. In my pattern I show how to gather using basting stitches, but I recently acquired a gathering foot and it has changed my life. Seriously. This thing cost about $20 and I can't believe how long I've been sewing without one. You snap the foot on, adjust the stitch length and the tension, and run the fabric through. It comes out all gathered and nice - and in no time flat. This foot should come standard with every machine. I can't believe I made this without one. Look how pretty!
Gather the top of the skirt until it's about 12" across. That's an approximation - this isn't rocket science so don't go ripping out stitches (or your hair) if you end up an inch shorter or longer.
Now you need to make the waistband. I like to use a double-fold waistband - it has a little extra body without having to add interfacing or anything like that. First you need to join your strips together into one long strip. Do this on the diagonal so that you don't get annoying lumps where all your seam allowances pile up. Lay out two strips so that they make a corner. Stitch across on the diagonal.
Cut away the extra fabric.
And press the seam allowance open.
Repeat, joining as many pieces as you need to get a strip roughly 66" long. Again - close to 66" is good. Now fold the strip in half the long way, right sides out, and press.
Open it back up and fold one side in to the crease in the middle. Press.
Now fold the other side in to the crease in the middle and press.
Now attach the waistband to the apron by folding the two sides around the top (gathered) part of the skirt. It's easiest if you fold the waistband in half to mark the center, line that center mark up with the center of the apron and then work your way out from the middle.
Pin the waistband strip in place.
You're almost done. Time to stitch the waistband on. To get a nice clean finish on the end of the tie, open it back up and fold in a bit at the top.
Refold the strip along the crease and stitch it down. Sew down the short end first.
When you get to the corner - stop, turn your needle down so it's in the fabric, raise the presser foot and turn the fabric 1/4 turn so that you can sew down the long way. Don't forget to lower the presser foot before you start sewing again or you'll get a nasty mess of thread under your project.
Keep sewing down the whole length of the waistband. Don't sew too close to the edge - if you do that you may not catch the folded edge on the back side. I like to sew about 1/8" from the folded edge - that's the point on my presser foot where it goes from clear to metal so it's a good, easy mark to follow.
Pivot again at the end of the waistband and sew up the last short edge. Don't forget to fold down the short edge like you did at the start of the waistband.
You could stop at this point and you'd have a finished apron, but I like to add an extra feature when I make aprons for children. I know mine's not the only kid out there who likes to do things herself. Even after they learn how to tie a bow things that tie in the back can be really frustrating - so I add a bit of velcro at one hip. Nifty! Here's how. First you have to cut your new, nicely finished waistband. Make the cut about 1/2" from the edge of the apron.
Cut a piece of velcro about 1 1/2" long. Fold that little 1/2" tab you left to the FRONT of the apron.
Lay the soft side of the velcro right over the tab (it will cover the raw edge) and stitch it down all the way around the edges.
Fold back a little bit on the cut end of the waistband and stitch the prickly side of the velcro over that.
Put them back together and NOW you have a finished apron. Tie it on to fit and after that your girl can put it on and take it off all by herself.
Perfect for keeping little friends close by.
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