by Charlene Teglia | May 25, 2010 | Uncategorized
In the follow-up to the TED talk linked below, Sir Ken Robinson calls for an education revolution that’s personalized for individual strengths. And his most recent book addresses the issue of finding your natural talents and passion. It’s a trend! Turns out that the same things adults need to deal with today’s challenges are the tools we need to give our kids to deal with tomorrow’s.
All of which makes me feel better about the time I’m spending digging in dirt because I have a passion for gardening and for eating fresh produce. Unfortunately, deer share that passion so today I’m reapplying the
Liquid Fence to discourage them.
What are you interested in? What are you good at? Have you done anything with it lately?
by Charlene Teglia | May 22, 2010 | Uncategorized
I’ve mentioned before that the situation in publishing is also the same in other industries, including education. Nobody knows what the future holds. Nobody knows what the picture will look like in 5 years, let alone 20 years. Here’s a great TED talk that’s well worth 20 minutes of your time on how we can
prepare people for the future we can’t define.
The important part is that experts can’t define it. Which means their guesses are just guesses, and your guess is just as valid. Maybe more so, for you. No expert can tell you if you should make this or that move for career longevity or security, but your gut can guide you very effectively. What do you most want to do from the list of available choices?
You might as well trust your gut because nobody has perfected the art of telling the future. The old Microsoft slogan, “Where do you want to go today?” is a good one to adopt. And there’s a lot less risk of being wrong when all the experts probably are, too.
by Charlene Teglia | May 20, 2010 | Uncategorized
Garden planting is underway, and I found myself doing the mental hamster wheel after the day’s work was done. Did I water in the starters well enough? Did I space properly? Am I going to have to move the cantaloupe after all, because it will get too hot where it is?
The last time I planted out a garden, I pretty much did it with wild abandon. I planted pumpkins and zucchini too close together and they cross-bred, producing long orange squash and round green zuke-ish pumpkins. I called them pumkini and zumpkins and didn’t try to eat or make jack-o-lanterns of the results. The results were unexpected but not catastrophic. And all the cats in the neighborhood ate the catnip to the ground and birds got all the strawberries and the tomatoes got out of control. I was okay with all of that. I didn’t take it too seriously. It was just a garden and there was always next year to do things differently.
Then came small children and special needs and life became very different. Everything became really damn serious and had to be done right the first time Or Else, and there was no time or energy for a veggie garden, although I did plant flowers which pretty much just needed to be stuck in the ground.
This is the first real garden after kids, and it’s kind of amazing to me how that serious attitude has filtered into everything and changed my perspective. I very carefully planned the lay-out so that no squash variety would unwittingly crossbreed with another. I measured the space between the blueberry bushes and
I hauled a wheelbarrow load of pine needles to mulch around them. There are stakes running up and down the rows with string marking them for straight planting, and much thought went into how to lay out soaker hoses between rows for easy and efficient watering.
Part of the seriousness is because this garden is intended to be food-producing. In our efforts to live a more sustainable life and to be healthier, it makes sense to grow our own produce. But I had to remind myself this morning, as I fought the urge to run out at dawn and measure my spacing in case I’d miscalculated and left some things too crowded, that it’s not life or death. It’s a garden, and there’s always next year. Some of the varieties I’m experimenting with will do well and others won’t and it’s all a learning experience that I can build on next year.
This is true for books, too. Books suffer from overplanning and constant digging up and transplanting scenes and paragraphs lest the initial placement turn out to be wrong. Books are organic and they grow as part of the process. Things change. Unexpected cross-pollinations happen and while the results might be surprising, they aren’t the end of the world. Different than expected doesn’t mean bad or wrong.
When you are dealing with things that have a life of their own, whether a book or a child or a garden, taking it too seriously and trying to impose too much control is a “serious” problem that can be solved by just lightening up a little. Books get done and do well or do not and writers go on to write new ones. Kids manage to survive their parenting and go on to have their own kids who they hopefully don’t stand over with a yardstick to see if they’re measuring up. Gardens grow and there will be weeds and pests and birds to contend with and possibly potato blight but in the end, there will still be harvest season and covering it over with mulch and winter and spring where it all starts up again.
It’s all the miracle of life, which is much too short and amazing to waste running on mental hamster wheels, second-guessing every damn thing.
by Charlene Teglia | May 19, 2010 | Uncategorized
1. Via Facebook, I was pointed to this free pattern for making a microwavable buckwheat pillow. This is exactly what I need for our cold-sensitive cat, so I’m making it in a cat-sized rectangle. I’ll probably substitute catnip for the lavender and make it out of the same soft fabric that makes the Snuggie his blankie of choice.
2. Barbara Sher’s popular book Wishcraft is free to read online. Read and (re)discover what you want.
3. Online
thesaurus and
dictionaries help you find the right word.
4. Keep kids busy over the summer building their reading skills at Starfall.
5. Plan and design your virtual garden before you start digging in real dirt. (Requires Shockwave plugin)
by Charlene Teglia | May 18, 2010 | Uncategorized
There’s a lot of change and unrest in publishing. Kind of like the rest of the world. Try to point to an industry that isn’t experiencing this. But publishing is being impacted by various forces that include new technologies, changing buying habits, rising costs of doing business. The changes are eliminating bad practices and inefficient businesses because they simply can’t survive in the current environment. When things are easier, you can get away with more. The harder it gets, the less this is true. This isn’t necessarily bad. Weeding out bad practices is good in the long run.
The changes create new opportunities. Some markets are shrinking but new ones have come up that show a lot of promise. Stories aren’t going out of style. Writing and publishing isn’t going to cease to exist, but when you see how content can be manipulated on a touch-screen like the iPad, you see that how people experience content is changing in a big way. And so are the delivery systems. Publishing is a delivery system for content that writers produce, but what that means in ten years may look very different from how it looks today.
I don’t believe for a minute that printed books are going away. Not any time soon, at least. The people who are declaring NY dead are premature at best. And the people who think publishers don’t add real value are probably in for some surprises, too. This doesn’t mean that an enterprising author can’t learn needed skills to design and format their work, and you don’t get to be pro level without learning to self-edit. (Which doesn’t mean editors don’t add value; but it’s also true that not all editors are equal and failure to provide real value happens in all positions.)
But while I don’t think printed books are going away, you can’t ignore the fact that it’s now possible to walk up to a book vending machine and order a title that’s printed while you wait. Content delivery change.
What does all this mean for writers? Well, probably publishers are going to try to take as many rights as they can get for as long as they can get them to exploit these new options. It means that reversion of rights becomes very tricky when a book is ‘in print’ if you can buy it through Google Books or an Espresso Book Machine, but having rights tied up may not be to an author’s advantage when where the sales happen and where the revenue is is subject to change and the author can’t move a title from a position of trickling sales to where the sales are surging.
I think publishers and authors alike will have to be light on our feet, able to change direction, innovate, adapt. We’ll all have to add real value, because nothing else will survive. What it means to be an author or publisher is changing. Being small may be more advantageous than being big; a large company has so much entrenched in old business models that change is difficult and slow. None of this is any different than it was five years ago when I had my first book out in stores, but the economic pressures have become significant and the new technologies have gained ground during that time.
I think if publishers and authors see each other as valued partners in changing times, the results will be very different than if we see each other as enemies. We’re all still in the same business; content delivery. We just have to adjust our thinking about what that means and partner with people who share our vision.
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