It has recently come to my attention that some people still visit this site, which means it looks like I have not posted since May. Ha! :)
I posted notifications of my move everywhere but here apparently.
Go to my new blog at:
http://chadthomasjohnston.com
Enjoy! :)
Monday, November 1, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Book Happenings
It has been awhile since I have written about my book, and it is certainly not because I have not been thinking about and/or working on my book. Writing has indeed been sparse, as time has been in short supply as of recent. In the past month and a half we visited Wisconsin twice in support of Becki's Dad, who underwent emergency heart surgery, and we visited my sister and brother-in-law in Arizona on vacation. We have also worked on our house quite a bit and generally ushered chaos into the world as much as possible. But all is well. I keep pushing the date around, but I really do hope to be done with this round of edits in the next few months. I have loved writing this beast of a book, and there are a few associated happenings going on with it:
1) Danny J. Gibson is 80% done with the book art, and a preview of his creations can be found at:
I gave Danny a collection of Art Cues to prompt him, and he ran with them. In fact, he has apparently created something for each of the 100-150 cues I gave him. I will be submitting art samples with the pitch package I send potential agents.
2) Becki's twin Katie Damon of Ruby Lane Photography is coming down from Milwaukee town this weekend to take author photos, also for my promotional pitch to potential agents. We are going to have a good time setting up visuals. I want us to come up with some truly busy looking photos that are jam-packed with visual information, highly detailed, and a little weird. There will be lots of props and staging and cats.
3) I am submitting two short-form essays from the book (Purple Horseshoes and Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider) to Writer's Digest's 79th Annual Writing Competition (http://writersdigest.com/annual). The grand prize is three grand, and the winning author gets to meet with a group of agents and publishers. Might as well shoot for the moon, right? Even if you miss the moon, you might accidentally hit Mars, after all.
4) Oh yeah. I plan to finish writing the book. :) And then on to book two, which I came up with in the middle of the night one Friday night. I jumped out of bed at 2:00 a.m., ran downstairs and hammered out three pages of details/sketches in an hour and went back to sleep. It will be a radical departure from The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope. Be afraid. I want to knock it out in a matter of months. It promises to be a much easier endeavor than my current creative memoir, which is loaded from front to back with detail work.
Au revoir! :)
Monday, May 3, 2010
Swenson, Swanson, Samsonite
I am on my company's Relay for Life team, and last week I sent our Team Leader on a wild goose chase for an invisible goose. A nonexistent goose, even. Our team met up two weeks ago to discuss strategies for raising heaping mountains of money to benefit cancer research and, as our group sat around the table, each person signed a sign-up sheet. I have this horrible habit of writing not only my own name, but the name the person who is next to me, and with slight modifications. When I hand the sign-up sheet off to the person in question then, they are surprised to find they have a different surname than they did before.
My friend Hilary Edwards was in attendance at this meeting and I decided to sign her in as "Hilary Swenson." It just sounded so... right. However, instead of scratching through her newly invented last name she just assumed Hilary Swenson was someone else, a valid member of our Relay for Life team. She proceeded to sign her own name below that of our newest imaginary member, Hilary Swenson.
When our team leader Elizabeth Kanost was reviewing the sign-up sheet she came across Ms. Swenson's name and immediately drew a blank in her mind. She began to ask people in the office "Do you know Hilary Swenson? I can't figure out for the life of me who she is..." Forget about raising funds. She was on a mission to find this Hilary Swenson person. And so her mission continued. By the time she finally asked me, Hilary Swenson was practically a real person. Everyone in the office knew her name, at least. I would not have been surprised if HR had a file on her. "Well, she's signed up for the dental plan A, and she has been late to work 5 times in the past 6 months."
When Elizabeth finally asked me about Hilary Swenson I came clean. We did not, in fact, have a new team member who was adept at hiding under desks, behind doors, in tiny office cabinets. She just plain did not exist, and that was the harsh truth of it. Elizabeth did not stab me or kick me in the face. She just said, "I figured as much," or something along those lines.
I am the human monkeywrench.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
No Tears to Cry Over "Tears" Candy
I have long loved sour candy. It is probably made of chemicals that will create kidney stones and cause me great pain. But what a delicious road to pain! In 1997 I discovered Cry Baby Tears candy, and after seeing it in stores for about a year or so, it disappeared. It was my favorite of all the sour candies, and I have searched for it online every year ever since. It is available in bulk, but if I order it I will eat it, and I do not need 15 lbs. of Cry Baby Tears.
Tonight Paul, Alyssa, Becki, and I were visiting the Fresh and Ready Grocery store here in Phoenix when, upon looking down, I noticed Cry Baby Tears on the ground near the store. Just scattered pieces of candy laying on the ground like shattered joy.
Once inside the store I began scavenging the joint for this long lost, much loved candy. Paul, Alyssa, and Becki could not understand the depths of this love, but they humored me as I searched. I came up empty-handed until... on the way out the door, I looked to the left and saw a cluster of candy machines, one of which featured my beloved candy. My wife handed me 25 cents, and I got my fix.
It was a moment of bliss, pure and simple. Better than hitting my head on a mountain.
Me vs. the Mountain: Sir Edmund Hillary I Am Not
On Friday, my wife and I climbed Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona with my brother-in-law Paul. En route to the top Paul remarked to me, "If your Mom tried to climb this mountain, she would get distracted, turn around to talk to someone, and hit her head on an overhanging rock." Apparently I inherited more than my Mom's brown eyes and gregarious nature. At that very moment I felt a sharp pain in my skull, as if someone had fired and landed a cannonball on my cranium. At first I could not figure out what had happened. It did not take me long, however, to realize that I had hit my head on an overhanging rock.
I had been so concerned about finding secure footing that, in trudging along, I had largely been looking downward. It did not help matters that I was wearing a hat and sunglasses, restricting my view even further. I looked up and saw the outcropping rock that had headbutted me. It was utterly unrepentant, jutting out without a care in the world. "What'choo gonna' do about?" It seemed to say, taunting me. I always hated it in school when bullies unleashed lines like that. They never really expected answers to questions like this, and neither did the mountain.
Of course, Paul saw all of this happen. In fact, he remembers hearing the sound of my skull making contact with the mountain. He heard nothing like the music that accompanied "making contact" in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There was only the dull thud of my head hitting the mountain and probably, somewhere deep within the belly of the mountain, a chuckling sound.
Although there was a small gash on my scalp, my wife the Physician Assistant evaluated my condition and said it was only a flesh wound. We pressed onward and upward, and the mountain proved to be absolutely brutal all the way. The official web site for Camelback says it is not for beginning hikers. Apparently Paul never saw this web site, or at least did not heed its warning. "Yes, Chad and Becki," he seemed to say, "climbing Mt. Everest will be fun and easy. Just bring some trail mix and a scarf. No biggie." (I should give Paul some credit, however. Before leaving the house, he filled two sport-bottles with water and contemplated filling up a third, an empty mouthwash bottle that would probably leave any ice water tasting minty fresh, so at least we were hydrated.) Paul had apparently never read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which is essentially a story of death by mountain. At 2,706 feet, it was hardly Everest, but to my inexperienced frame it might as well have been.
Surprisingly, we made it to the top without any further injuries. We could see the entire city from the summit. It was exhilarating until I remembered we had to climb back down. Some portions of the climb had required us to use handrails for support because the terrain was so steep. These handrails bissected the areas of the trails they spanned, allowing hikers to safely ascend or descend on either side of the rails. On the way back down, it was these handrails and not the mountain itself that were gunning for me.
We had climbed halfway down the mountain when we came upon these handrails and, thinking I could safely lean back on one of them, I did exactly that. Nevermind the fact that Becki and I had been awake since 3:45 a.m. so we could fly to Phoenix with our standby passes. Nevermind the fact that the effects of sleep deprivation are known to mirror those of alcohol intoxication. I leaned back on the rail and found myself flipping headfirst over the rail, my hands gripping it all the while. In a split second I found myself upside-down on the rail. It all happened so fast, and I remember thinking in slow motion "I should probably hang onto this rail or something" as it did. I remember yelling "P-a-a-a-u-l!" He remembers turning around and seeing his brother-in-law hanging upside-down, his legs draped over the rail, his hands gripping it with white knuckles. I suspect he remembers me looking something like a deranged lemur.
It was a moment of terror. In Kevin MacDonald's mountain-climbing reenactment documentary Touching the Void, one of the men interviewed in the film describes how he thought if a person fell while climbing the mountain, he would tumble all the way down to the bottom. For a moment I suspected I might somersault head over heels over thousands of rocks, all the way down to the bottom, rolling past the other tourists like a basketball, a living cautionary tale.
For Becki all of this was a source of laughter. On our trip to Arizona we met several of my sister's co-workers, and Becki proceeded to tell all of them about my mountain-climbing mishaps. It was a matter of payback, I suppose. I always tell stories about Becki and her Wisconsin accent. For example, when I first met her she pronounced the word "bag" the way most people pronounce the word "bagel" (BAY-gull). "Put it in a BAYG," she said at restaurants when she needed a doggie-bag. In her world, knights slew "DRAY-guns," and early American settlers traversed the continent in covered "WAY-guns." (Paradoxically, President Ronald RAY-gun was, in her estimate "Ronald RAGGIN.'") Now she is in the habit of correcting herself in order to keep people from noticing her Northern accent. Sometimes she corrects words that do not need correcting. "BAY-gull" becomes "BAG-ull," for instance. In Sunday School, she referred not to the 10 "PLAY-gues" of Exodus, but the 10 "plags," pronounced like "flags." It is impossible not to tease her about such things. I suppose then, it is equally impossible for her not to tease me about running headfirst into a mountain and treating a mountainside handrail like an Olympic athlete might treat the parallel bars.
From here on out I plan to stick to the hills of Lawrence, which are all the mountains I need. I cannot emphasize enough how grateful I am to live in a flat state where I am not likely to hurt myself simply by going outside. Despite all of my mishaps, I made it over Camelback's hump with only a few lumps on my head and a deeper sense of humility, and I suppose I am better off for it. As far as mountains are concerned, I am now officially a pacifist. I will never climb into the ring with a mountain again. I might climb one again someday, but I will refrain from violence. I will also refrain from mountainside spontaneous gymnastics. That is, unless the mountain has other plans for me. Sir Edmund Hillary I am not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
