Building Castles on the Beach

As I've said, I go back to school on August 1st. That's pretty early. At least it's not July, though, like it was the year before last. I'm not talking about year-round schools or anything.  Our district has decided that an extra week or two of instruction at the beginning of the year can only mean better scores when the state tests come around in March. Why don't  we   start school in June for maximum exposure and have our break in April and May? Or just test students in May to determine improvement over a complete year? You got me. Luckily, that isn't my point today. Instead, I simply ask w here does the summer go? I start off with such lofty goals. I want to fix things that drip. Weed the lawn. Patch holes in the walls. Even dust the ceiling fans. No, I don't WANT to. These are just things I CAN do (with the possible exception of the plumbing), and I feel like I SHOULD.  So I set myself up for failure, knowing good and well it's going to ta...

Every summer the LDS church sends their young women, ages 12-18, to a week-long summer camp. It's there they learn the ways of The Force, as well as the best fixins for Dutch oven cooking. Actually, I know about as much about what goes on at Girls' Camp as I do about what goes on at Boy Scout Camp, which most Mormon teenage boys attend every year, but which I never did, despite being a Mormon teenage boy. I was busy playing soccer or something. This started long before Title IX, by the way. In fact, 2012 is the 100th anniversary of Young Women Camp . In your face, 2014  Division I women's lacrosse at the University of Colorado. Where were you in 1914? Anyway, today my wife and my twelve-year-old daughter  drove   a car full of teenage girls  to their camp site near Cripple Creek, Colorado, tucked away back there on the sunset side of Pike's Peak. T hat leaves me alone with the boy for the rest of the week. The following is the account of how our first day as c...

I don't have much to say about shootings at the Century 16 theater .  You can follow the news yourself. I've had   9News  on all day. For me,  it's too shocking and horrific. I don't feel especially eloquent right now. Still, I thought I'd let everyone know that my family and I are safe. And especially to those reading this who I don't know personally, you might know I'm from Aurora, Colorado. It says so right over there to the right. But Aurora is a big place, east of Denver proper, spreading out into the plains of Colorado. We're urban and suburban, even rural. So the chances of a tragedy of this magnitude happening in Aurora and still hitting close to home are pretty low. The apartment where the shooter lived is only a mile from my house. Right now the police still haven't entered the place. It's booby-trapped. Authorities have evacuated a  radius of a  couple of blocks. That doesn't reach my place, but it's literally close to...

It's time once again to get meta. Much like Chandler Bing's reasons for spending Thanksgiving in a box, my discussion today will be threefold. A kind of long bit of nonsense follows. But when has that ever stopped you? Point One : Following First of all, last week my little blog gained it's one-hundredth follower. It's been a long time coming, really, but still I rejoice. Now, if one-tenth of those people actually read my writing, I could die contented. So, congratulations to Heather M. Gardner from The Waiting is the Hardest Part . She wins nothing, but continuing to read this blog will enhance her knowledge, health, and appreciation of good music. In a way, then, she wins everything. Point Two : Blog Awards A couple-few weeks ago I was kindly awarded a blog award for nothing less than being a recently new follower of  Miss Farawayeyes at the   Far Away Series  blog. I've been dubbed versatile before. I'm not sure if it's due to my ability to do dis...

Detritus is an interesting word. First, I just found out that it's spelled "detritus" with a second T, not "detrius" without a second T. And second, some people claim to pronounce it with a long "e" as in "dee" and a long "i" as in "try." Others leave the vowels short and even leave out the second T in the pronunciation. Plus, it seems to be mostly used in biology or medical jargon, as in "the detritus of the dead bird in the garden is fertilizing the plants." And because I'm a nerd, I looked it up some more and found out Detritus is also a video game much like Asteroids, a troll in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and some kind of electro-aggro-industrial band. Now you know. But for my purposes here, I'm referring to the physical debris that erodes away from our lives consistently, all day long. More specifically, the crumbs  of food  and bits of trash that end up on the floor of my house is ...

(Apparently my wife has a lot on her mind lately. This is the second guest post from her in less than a month. I'm happy to let her speak her mind here, of course, but you all should let her know in the comments if you'd follow her sage wisdom to a blog of her own.) It's about rebirth and second chances, right? I got my Master’s Degree from the University of Phoenix. To those of you out of touch with the world of for-profit academia, the University of Phoenix is not located in Phoenix. Or more precisely, it’s not only located in Phoenix. They have “branches” all over the place. (At this point they’re more ubiquitous than Starbucks.) But I digress. I freely confess that I enrolled in the University of Phoenix for the meanest of reasons. First, they didn’t require that I pass any annoying graduate entrance exams, obtain letters of recommendation, or write an essay extolling the virtues of their program and my fitness for it. Second, I was aware that they would make...

My summer's more than half over (back to school August 1), and I've only read three books. That's a little sad, except that one of them is nearly 1000 pages and I read it pretty much exclusively because it was way overdue at the library. JOHN GREEN First, I read the John Green book, An Abundance of Katherines . John Green writes stories about real teenagers with real problems, not problems like which griffin or manticore or schweinhund they might fall in love with. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but John Green is the perfect example of why my own YA book Trendy Poseurs Go Home  would  actually   sell. I like John Green. I kind of wish I were John Green. Where's the manual  for becoming John Green? He should write one. I'd follow it. HARUKI MURAKAMI That 1000 page book I read is  1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. He's an amazing writer from Japan who writes in the magical realism tradition that Gabriel Garcia Marquez kind of made up by himself. (Li...

Too much information.  I'm aware that this is nothing new, but it's still a major problem. Eighteen months ago I started actively pursuing publication of my YA novel Trendy Poseurs Go Home , building an online platform, and sifting through the glut of information about how to get it done. And I have yet to figure out how to get published. Where's the manual? I mean, if you want to be a doctor, there's a procedure, right? Get good grades, get into med school, pass your courses, and you're a doctor. My brother-in-law is trying to become a police officer, and he's going step by step through the process the police department sets up: tests, interviews, background checks, more tests, more interviews. In order to become a teacher, I had to get a degree, take courses in education, follow the application procedures for each school district. The procedures are different for every district, of course, but at least they have procedures. I know these analogies are...