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April 15, 2006

"And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you." Matthew 28:5-7
The following information is from The Pagan Origin Of Easter:
Paganism has infiltrated the contemporary "Christian" churches, and further study indicates that this paganism came in by way of the Roman Catholic System. The truth is that Easter has nothing whatsoever to do with the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We also know that Easter can be as much as three weeks away from the Passover, because the pagan holiday is always set as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Some have wondered why the word "Easter" is in the the King James Bible. It is because Acts, chapter 12, tells us that it was the evil King Herod, who was planning to celebrate Easter, and not the Christians. The true Passover and pagan Easter sometimes coincide, but in some years, they are a great distance apart. So much more could be said, and we have much more information for you, if you are a seeker of the truth. We know that the Bible tells us in John 4:24, "God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The truth is that the forty days of Lent, eggs, rabbits,hot cross buns and the Easter ham have everything to do with the ancient pagan religion of Mystery Babylon.These are all antichrist activities! Satan is a master deceiver, and has filled the lives of well-meaning, professing Christians with idolatry. These things bring the wrath of God upon children of disobedience, who try to make pagan customs of Baal worship Christian.

Another source: Easter - The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop

Blogger Timothy said...

May the peace of the risen Christ be with you...

Sister Cathy, while your intentionsand love are clearly for the best interests of God's Church, I feel you have been deceived and are being used to spread dissention versus unity among God's children.

Hislop's theory of the origins of Easter have ben thoroughly discredited. Mostly due to the fact that the word "easter" is found only within the Anglo-Saxon peoples. The origin of the word is still unknown and is more likely to refer to 'eastern' as it might to 'Ishtar'. The remainder of the world's languages refers to the religious observance of the Resurrection as "passover".

As to the date, the date was set at the Council of Nicea to ensure that the feast day fell on a Sunday, to promote unity within the Church, and to distinguish Christianity from Judaism. Its based on a lunar calendar because the Jewish calendar used by Christ and the apostles was lunar.

As to Acts 12:4:
"And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people."

The verse uses the word 'Easter' because someone's Latin was so poor they didn't know to translate the word 'pascha' as 'passover.' Instead they used the language of the common people (Anglo-Saxon/English) and used 'Easter'.

Compare the Latin Vulgate:

"Act 12:4 quem cum adprehendisset misit in carcerem tradens quattuor quaternionibus militum custodire eum volens post pascha producere eum populo"

While I agree with you regarding eating ham (Christ and the apostles likely never ate ham even once in their lives. We had lamb.), I disagree regarding Lent which is scripturaly based.

I too consider eggs and rabbits more secular; however, the Spring custom of eggs was observed by Jews and Romans and likely entered the Christian Church as an inherited Jewish custom.

I don't know enough about hot cross buns to neither condemn nor defend them. Thus, I would fall back on the scripture, "All good things come from God."

Kalo Pascha...

4/16/06, 11:42 AM
Blogger Cathy said...

Timothy, you think I am deceived but I think you may be, so let's pray that God's Truth be revealed to us both!

For me, there are simply too many red flags that hinder me from celebrating Easter as a born-again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The author of the above article, David J. Meyer, was born into a satanic family and himself was a psychic astrologer before putting his trust in the Lord Jesus Christ (read his story here: http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org/docs/aboutdjm.html. He has first hand experience about all this - check out his website.

4/16/06, 3:59 PM
Anonymous Dorothea said...

Hey cool, Cathy, we don`t celebrate Easter for several years now, because we don`t want to celebrate the goddess "Eostera", all this stuff (eggs and Rabbits and so on) has nothing to do with jesus or his ressurection. For over 300 years the Christians did celebrate Passah, but not Easter. easter was brought in by the Catholic church to make it easier for heathen to become Christians, they could still celebrate their feasts, but it was now interpreted unto jesus.
But what could be also interresting for you: It`s completely the same with Christmas! All the stuff that is done at Christmas (the eating, the tree with lights on it, the presents...) is originally another feast, a pagan gods birthday was celebrated that way and then for the same reasons as named above, the Catholic church made this feast a "christian" one and said, Ok, now it`s the celebration of Jesus birth (who for sure was NOT born in December!). Well, let me know, what you think about THIS ;-)
Lot`s of love from us all!!

4/16/06, 4:50 PM
Blogger Cathy said...

Thanks, Dorothea, for the good words!

And yes, I know it is the same with Christmas (Christ+mass). It's hard to not celebrate something that everyone in your family does, but it is more important to obey the Lord rather than please people.

This morning, I read several chapters in Daniel and I was very encouraged by how God blessed him because he put His trust in the Lord and did not obey the king.

Please give my greetings to your family and my all my wonderful Berlin friends in Deutschland!

4/16/06, 6:14 PM

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Inktober 2017

If you haven’t heard of Inktober, it’s a yearly challenge project to create an ink drawing for every day in October. I decided to give it a go this year, inspired by Lucy Bellwood’s 100 Demon Dialogues project. I liked the idea of using the structure and limits to improve my drawing skills, and added the additional challenge of foregoing pencil sketches and drawing without any guides. I cut up the papers and added the frames and captions in advance, then carried a small bag with the supplies around with me and tried to draw every day. For all but the cupcakes picture I used photographic references, mostly from‘s wonderful library.

The experience was pretty great. I enjoyed the discipline, the steadily growing accumulation of completed drawings, and how much I feel my skills improved from first to last. In fact, I enjoyed having a ‘daily’ project so much I started another one promptly in November! For now, here’s a collection of snaps of my Inktober 2017.

Rope wedding ring

A white gold wedding ring, sculpted in the likeness of a stout and steadfast mooring rope. The client is one of my favourite people to work with, and I was beyond delighted to see that she also wore one of my dragons on her special day.

With her generous permission I’m able to make sterling silver versions of this ring available in my Etsy shop, and other sizes and styles are available.

Buy on Etsy

Biggles the Destroyer

Portrait of a noble and distinguished pupper: Biggles the Destroyer. This photograph was an absolute delight to work from.
India ink with a dip-pen over a pencil sketch on bristol board, then coloured using Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolours, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Nikki’s Dragon

A lovely commission, to create a medallion-style pendant for a dragon lover.

Cast from a wax sculpture made using my new Wolf wax carving tools. It was an absolute delight to have 18 diverse and well-made tools on hand for whatever type of cut or scrape I needed. I’m looking forward to many more sculptures using them.

The final dragon is a little hefty at around 16g of sterling silver, even with the smooth, hollowed underside. Available from my Etsy Shop.

I will also be making bronze versions – let me know via etsy or the contact form if you’d like to be notified when they’re available.

Leather pincushion and sheath

Experiments with wet-moulding leather, using pricking irons and stitching with proper waxed cord.

I’ve been using a jury-rigged back-of-the-hand pincushion for many years, and finally decided to make a proper one. The dome is wet-moulded – stretched over a thermoplastic form and stapled down to a piece of scrap wood. Once it was completely dry I was surprised by how strong then resulting dome was. The punched holes are backed with a piece of linen, and the dome is stuffed with synthetic stuffing fluff. Using pricking irons to make the holes made life a lot easier than last time I did any leatherwork, and doing proper saddle-stitching with waxed cord was also a revelation.

I was concerned that it would be annoying to find the holes when replacing a pin, but I haven’t had any trouble, and the pincushion is very comfortable and convenient to use.

The second piece here is a sheath for the knife I made at a Green Wood Guild workshop, which includes a wooden liner tray to stop the blade cutting straight through the sheath. Cling film to prevent rusting from the wet leather and a LOT of clamps made the exercise pretty straightforward.

Pirate Portrait – Emma and Ben

A really fun (if slightly infuriating) commission – to create an artwork featuring two wonderfully deranged pirates in full (and I mean full) costume. Seriously, I think they’ve got at least two guns and three blades each, not to mention all the straps, strings, parrots, hats, buttons, compasses, buckles and so on… Based on a photograph and taking style hints from a Deadpool poster, this is made with india ink and watercolours on bristol board. Also there’s a hint of metallic sparkle where appropriate.

Film Challenge – Lead Time

Another short film created under ludicrous conditions by the Tortoisebutler crew. This time I contributed props (including the robot’s bite-down charging plug) and the heads up display that shows us the world from our diminutive robot’s point of view.

The biggest part of the build, though, was the creation of the beast itself: to transform our fantastically physical actor Jinny into a threatening, alien creature that would spring from the darkness and attack our hapless protagonist.

“Let’s do a simple film challenge this year” they said, “Let’s make something simple, light on the FX”… so we wrote a script with a monster. Oh, and we needed to build it in a few hours, using only what we’d brought with us.

Magda’s fantastic body (and head!) stocking gave us a perfect starting point for the transformation, dehumanising Jinny and forming n overlay to attach things to our poor actor.

Given the pale colour of the body stocking, we sketched a sinewy, insectile, carapaced creature that would almost glow in the dark. It needed to be a clear threat, so we armed it with six scything claws, a weird pointy mandible, and spines on head, elbows, and anywhere else that felt like a good idea.

Most of this was accomplished with thermoplastic pierced through the bodystocking or attached to it with double-sided sticky tape. Thermoplastic is my go-to material for creating structural elements on the fly. With some hot water it’s sculptable, it’s springy enough to be safe and tough enough to stand up to rough treatment.

Once our beast was assembled it looked a bit blank, without much secondary movement for our super slo-mo camera. Materials Magda came up trumps again though, with some fantastic long-haired fabric I’ve not seen the like of before. Hooking it through the stocking around the spines gave us a really disturbing ‘hairy insect’ effect and great flowing motion.

The finishing touch was to mix fistfuls of black and red acrylic paints with hair gel, and plaster the hair up into a stiff mane. Strategically applied paint dirtied up our monster even more, and encrusted the claws with ‘gore’ from the struggles of past victims. The pale theme made it stand out starkly, especially when light glowed through the thermoplastic weapons.

Jinny endured so much being our human mannequin in a freezing hall, but I love the hideous and unusual monstrosity we created.

Magda shared a couple of awesome picture sets from the filming here and here, and you can read another crew member’s blog post here.

Photo Credit – TortoiseButler

Rusty skull and bee

An impromptu photoshoot to show some rust treatment experiments with an iron-and-resin version of my mask sculpture, complete with an unexpected model.

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Artificial Sports Pitch

artificial-sports-pitchArtificial Sports Pitch
We raised £250k in 2010  from the Walker Trust,  the Football Foundation and Shropshire Council) and built a half-size 3rd generation artificial surface which is fenced and floodlit. The local leisure centre manage the bookings for us (see below)

Teme Leisure manage the SpArC Leisure Centre in Bishop’s Castle

artificial-sports-pitch-bishops-castleFacilities include:

  • 20m Swimming Pool
  • 20 Station Fitness Suite with Air Conditioning
  • 3 Badminton Court Sports Hall
  • 2 Glass Back Squash Courts
  • Sauna & Sunbed
  • Fully Equipped Studio Theatre
  • Vending Area
  • Art Gallery
  • Floodlit Artificial Pitches


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November 28, 2016
Glatfelter Air Improvements Subject of Ohio EPA Meeting
Ohio EPA will hold a public meeting to discuss a draft air permit-to-install modification for P.H. Glatfelter Company – Chillicothe. The company is located at 232 E. 8th St. The hearing will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016, in the OU-Chillicothe auditorium, 101 University Drive, Chillicothe.

November 22, 2016
Ohio EPA Proposing Removal of Low RVP Fuel Requirements in the Cincinnati and Dayton Areas
Ohio EPA will hold a public hearing to take comments on its request to U.S. EPA to remove Ohio’s low Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) fuel requirements in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas.

November 10, 2016
Ohio EPA Holds Public Hearing to Discuss Avon Lake Power Plant
Ohio EPA is accepting public comments on a draft air pollution control permit-to-install for the Avon Lake Power Plant. The modified draft permit that requires an update to allow the facility to meet U.S. EPA’s more stringent emissions requirements for the 1-hour sulfur dioxide (SO2) standard, set by U.S. EPA in 2010.

November 10, 2016
Ohio EPA Requests Public Input on Volkswagen Settlement
Ohio EPA is asking the public to weigh-in on a plan that will use Ohio’s portion of the Volkswagen consent decree/settlement to offset the effects of diesel emissions. The state’s share of the settlement dollars is anticipated to be $71.4 million over 10 years, and will be directed toward grants and other efforts that can produce the greatest air quality benefits such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) emission reductions, reduced public exposure to the pollutants in diesel exhaust and the promotion of clean vehicle technologies.

November 4, 2016
Ohio EPA Proposes 2017 Water Pollution Control Loan Fund Program Management Plan
Ohio EPA will hold a meeting on Nov. 21, 2016, to discuss the Agency’s draft 2017 Program Management Plan for the Water Pollution Control Loan Fund (WPCLF). The fund provides financial and technical assistance to improve the quality of Ohio's rivers, streams, lakes and other water bodies.

November 3, 2016
Cleveland Economic Development Receives Covenant Not to Sue Under Ohio EPA’s Voluntary Action Program
The Cleveland Department of Economic Development has received a covenant not to sue under Ohio EPA’s Voluntary Action Program (VAP) after investigating and remediating a property on Crescent Avenue in Cleveland.

November 1, 2016
Ohio EPA Issues Air Permit for Bio-Energy Project at Brown County Landfill
Ohio EPA has issued an air permit-to-install to Bio-Energy (Ohio) to build a landfill gas power station at the Rumpke Brown County Landfill located at 9427 Byers Road, Georgetown.

November 1, 2016
Hamilton County to Improve Wastewater Treatment; Receiving Financing from Ohio EPA
Hamilton County is using a low-interest loan from Ohio EPA to make improvements at the Muddy Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant that will, in turn, help improve the water quality in Muddy Creek.


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BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Object knowledge in infancy: current controversies and approaches

    Mareschal, Denis (2000) Object knowledge in infancy: current controversies and approaches. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (11), pp. 408-416. ISSN 1364-6613.

    Full text not available from this repository.

    Studies relying on looking-time measures have found evidence of a far more precocious understanding of hidden objects than Piaget originally described. However, there is now a heated controversy surrounding the results from looking-time studies – do they constitute any evidence of a conceptual or explicit understanding of objects? Moreover, even within the looking-time paradigm, young infants show rapid changes in their understanding of what constitutes a legitimate occlusion event, and in their ability to use feature information to individuate or keep track of the number of hidden objects. The picture that emerges from these studies is that young infants have a limited and sometimes fragmented understanding of hidden objects. We suggest that computational modelling could help provide a coherent account of the emergence of object-directed behaviours in infancy, although the fit between current models and existing data remains poor.

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Schools and Departments > School of Science > Psychological Sciences
    Research Centre: Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD)
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 01 Aug 2017 14:54
    Last Modified: 01 Aug 2017 14:54

    Activity Overview

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Gray and Feldman – a Client Success Story

When you have had the pleasure of working with a client for 17 +/- years, you tend to get to know one another. And so it has been with the folks at Gray and Feldman (GFR).

We’ve helped them transition their website ( through a few iterations over those years, most recently revamping the entire site to emphasize the visitor experience while making the site mobile friendly (responsive). Great improvements….but something was still not working.

GFR is a traditional and mature law firm in many ways. The principals are experienced, knowledgeable and established professionals in the Rochester legal arena. Like many law firms, the yellow pages were the staple of their marketing activities – and one of their largest line item expenses! Yet, calls were dwindling and fewer new clients were coming through the door.

Frustrated, they began asking the common question ‘why isn’t our website working for us?” The frank answer was they were not continuing to invest in their website. It was sitting there ready to gain attention but there wasn’t anything being done to get any attention. That’s when, at our encouragement, they began to explore what digital marketing might do for them. You might imagine that they did need some convincing that this digital marketing ‘thing’ was worthy of their attention – it was that ‘traditional’ concept we had to overcome to convince them this was a good thing!

It turns out that George (attorney George Gray) likes to write and Roberta (attorney Roberta Feldman) likes to make presentations. They made structuring a plan so easy! All we had to do was set the direction and let them do what they already like doing!

Today, George writes and publishes his blog articles on their website whenever it’s convenient for him or when a hot topic needs to be written about. Roberta is comfortable in front of a camera so using a SmartPhone to create good quality videos is easy and cost effective. Since embarking on this journey, they have seen a significant increase in online inquiries that have resulted in new clients and an increase in revenues. Hum, that’s an ROI that anybody can deal with!


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Master of Science in
Human Security & Resilience

Human security and resilience are interdisciplinary approaches to understanding global affairs. These concepts focus on the security of populations (human security) and their ability to withstand and recover from a wide array of internal and external shocks (resilience), ranging from extreme weather to terrorism and armed conflict.

The concept of human security was first defined by the United Nations Development Programme in 1994. Graduates of the Master of Science in Human Security & Resilience are often the type of people who care about the good of humanity and seek solutions to not only ensure safety after a catastrophe, but to help identify and prevent future incidences.

Embry-Riddle’s M.S. in Human Security and Resilience is an online program designed for working professionals who want to transition into a career or a new role within the field.

Students benefit from being part of a cutting-edge program whose curriculum is designed to align with current events and security practice, policy, law, and solutions.


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Tuesday, February 5, 2013

My take on school leadership... Building Principal's perspective

This is a part of a 3 post collaborative effort between Russ (teacher), myself (building principal), and Matt (central office admin) (And yes, Matt's my brother and Russ is my brother (in-law ... though he's a brother!))

We're planning to lead a session at EdCamp Eastern Iowa on February 16th. Being that we serve in different roles within a school, we would like to have a discussion on what school leadership looks like and what it could/should (in our opinions) look like. Being that I'm a building principal, I want to do a little pre-planning and sharing about my thoughts on school leadership.

In my last post, I wrote about being a collaborative leader as Principal.  I wrote that and submitted it to a educational magazine, was kindly rejected, so I posted it on my blog!

Anyway... I feel there needs to be a leadership structure in schools. One of my most important jobs is to be an umbrella for teachers. I want my teachers to be able to focus on what they are good at and paid to do... teach students, facilitate learning, and inspire our youth to pursue their dreams! I should be the one worrying about the budget, dealing with students who are too disruptive for class, and making sure the custodians clean the bathrooms and vacuum the floors. To me, this is a vital role of the Building Principal, these managerial tasks.

Managing the building is just one of the many hats the Building Principal is wearing in our current system. They are also to be the Instructional Leader. I know when I walk down this road, many teacher leaders and instructional coaches will fight for a say... but, in certain schools, especially smaller school districts, resources can't be used on instructional coaches. The role of leading professional development falls upon the building principal.

I do believe that my role as building principal is to be a lead learner. This can be leading professional development, or being an active participant in learning when a not leading PD. I've heard many teachers about their principals say, they haven't taught for 15 years, how can they tell me how to teach. I feel it is my job to stay in the know about teaching. I try to sub for teachers sometimes as well as volunteer to teach a lesson every once in a while. While I don't get to do this as much as I like, it sends a message to my staff that I'm willing and able!

Well, just a start of my thoughts on leadership... more of a validation of what I do, but I believe my role within my school is vital to it's function.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Some reflections on shared leadership

An article I wrote and submitted to an educational magazine. It wasn't chosen to publish, so I will "publish" it here!

When a building administrator leaves, a grieving process begins for some staff and a sigh of relief resounds for others. A new principal must try to bridge the work of the previous principal and put their own stamp on the future. There are many concerns which come to mind: handling staff and student discipline, communicating with parents and community, teacher evaluations, and the list could go on and on. One of the key items that is many times missed by new principals is identifying teacher leaders.

Identifying Leadership

Identifying teacher leaders is a difficult task. Those teachers who visit your office early and say they are willing to help may not be the best leaders for the building. Some teacher leaders may have been very connected to the previous administrator, are still grieving, and do not want to reach out to you. You must take the time to get to know the staff and build their trust. Visiting with staff members individually and in small groups gives you time and the means to build a working relationship with your staff. This takes time, but is time well spent.

One task the principal may want to complete is to ask other teachers who the leaders are. This can be during individual or small-group meetings or with a survey tool. It may be surprising what is revealed. Those vocal people who present themselves as leaders may not actually be valued as leaders by their peers.

There may be teachers who are identified as leaders, but do not see themselves as leaders. There may also be leaders who do not want to serve in leadership positions or on a committee due to various circumstances. These could include negative experiences in previous leadership roles or bad relationships with other staff members. This in itself can provide many roadblocks. It may take time to build a relationship with the staff member and show them the value they bring to the leadership team.

Just within the last couple of months, one of my teacher leaders was not able to attend a district level meeting. I asked another a teacher, fairly new to the district, to step in and represent our building. She was very nervous about this task. We sat down and briefed about what the meeting would entail and what her role would be. She did an outstanding job and represented our building very well. The signs of leadership that I had noticed through conversations and glimpses of staff interactions have blossomed. My job as Principal is now to nurture and build her leadership skills, which includes membership of our School Improvement Team. This team is the my coalition that guides our professional learning.

Building the Leadership Team and Building Leadership Skills

"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results." --Andrew Carnegie

Once you have identified your leaders, building the team becomes the task. Getting the leaders into the room is just the beginning. There are 4 key needs the team should fulfill before the true meaningful work can begin.

1. Establish norms or expectations for the team. These should include meeting times (both starting and ending), expectations for attendance, procedures for disagreements, and methods for solving conflict.

2. Establish roles. These can include timekeeper, scribe, encourager, and any other roles you see fit.

3. Establish a goal. Many teams use the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely ) goal plan or the five Ws and an H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How)

4. Understand the purpose of the team. This can be to make decisions, provide the principal with a sounding board, distribute information back to the other staff members, or a combination of these. Prior to building the team, the principal needs to have a firm understanding of the purpose of the team.

One component of the principal’s duties with the team should be to help build the leadership capacity of the members. This can occur through many forms of Professional Development. There are some great books which can be used as a book study, video series that can be purchased, or other means. Some recommended examples: Reframing Teacher Leadership to Improve Your School by Douglas Reeves, Leaders of Learning by Richard DuFour and Robert J Marzano. and Teacher Leadership that Strengthens Professional Practice by Charlotte Danielson. As an educational leader, a principal needs to build teacher leadership and continue to support teacher leaders with time, resources, leadership opportunities, and support.

Valuing the Team’s Time

One of the most important jobs of the principal is to ensure that teachers have the time and resources to provide the best learning possible for the students. Just the same, the teachers’ time is very valuable. There are norms which Leadership Teams should have in order to ensure teachers’ time is valued and honored.

1. A start and end time should be set. If a meeting is supposed to end at 4pm, the team should do whatever is possible to keep that norm or expectation.

2. All meetings should have an agenda which includes meaningful work necessitating the teachers’ time and energy.

3. Detailed notes should be kept for those who could not attend or for reference at a later date.

If teachers’ time is valued and honored, the culture of the building will improve.

The job of Principal is a daunting task. To make the job easier and to make our schools a greater place for our students building and fostering teacher leadership is essential. Developing a leadership team that has a specific goal or purpose will provide a principal with a coalition of support.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Ego vs. Task.... That is the Question!

Our district has two days of Professional Learning this week prior to students coming back on Monday. We chose to bring a lot of our learning from over the last year or so together by looking at a unit plan, aligning our essential learnings (we call them Learning Targets), planning Formative Assessments based upon the Learning Targets, then planning activities based upon the results of the Formative Assessments.

I felt it went great! However, the purpose of my blogging today isn't to celebrate a great day of learning with our staff, but rather ask for some help on a question/discussion we had today. We watched this video (LINK) The purpose of the video was to talk about planning for the types of feedback to give students from the Formative Assessments.

In the video, Dylan Wiliam talks about Ego involving vs Task involving. This was concerning to our staff. They understand that "Good Job" or a star or check mark is not good feedback. However, the question came up... "If a student got it right, how do you tell them that?" Does, "Good start, but how could you expand your thoughts on (item XYZ)" constitute Task involving or Ego involving feedback? So I ask, what do you think?


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Oh, 2017. You were a year.

I’m not even sure where 2017 went. It seems like it was just snowing and now it’s snowing again. Perpetual winter though I’m pretty sure there was a summer in between.

The still-new house is more house-like, more us and more lived in. There are still places missing furniture and oh so many cardboard boxes in the basement with the mice but it is cozy and currently there is a fire burning in the fireplace and cocktails on the coffee table and snow outside and stars and it is a wonderful, wonder-filled place to be.

It was a mostly-at-home year but also this year I floated in a perfect sunset-lit pool in Florida and stood in complete cave darkness in Virginia and went on a very cold perfect date night in Toronto.

I got a haunted pencil.

I watched an eclipse and made friends with a butterfly and finally bought a bottle of Yellow Chartreuse.

I finished yet another draft (two, actually) of this thing that will someday be a book. Someday.

It’s getting there. I think. I hope. I sort of know. Insert metaphor about baking or sailing dark seas or something else here. It has been a forward motion year even though I spent most of it standing still, staring at computer screens and trying to make the words work. January will be a locked away in that world month and then I’ll see what happens on the other side.

2018 should be interesting.

Annual review of media things, 2017 edition

This was a writing year more than a reading year but I did manage an eclectic list of favorites:

Blood, Sweat & Pixels – Jason Schreier

Modern Tarot – Michelle Tea

The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson

Her Body and Other PartiesCarmen Maria Machado

Sourdough – Robin Sloan

The Child Finder – Rene Denfeld

The Night Ocean – Paul La Farge

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Vol. I – Emil Ferris

Horizon: Zero Dawn

I love this game with a love that is pure & true and knows no bounds. (Adam gave me a Funko Aloy for Yule which is my first & only Funko.) Still haven’t played the Frozen Wilds DLC, saving it for a snow day treat but I’m sure we’ll be in for a lot of snow days in the coming months.

What Remains of Edith Finch

I still think about moments in this relatively short game months after we played through it. It’s full of brilliant gaming moments and brilliant storytelling moments and I’m waiting to revisit and replay it.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Only about halfway through this one but loving it so far.  I’m not usually an Assassin’s Creed person but I’ve had a thing for ancient Egypt ever since I was little (thank you, The Egypt Game) so even just running around this gorgeous game is a delight plus it has everything I love about an open world and I get to shoot hippos.

Also when had a terrible cold I played Cat Quest on my iPad and it made me feel better.

We still don’t have proper cable or internet so this category is light as usual. Favorite movies I saw this year were Wonder Woman, The Last Jedi & Get Out.

I’m still anxiously awaiting a chance to see The Shape of Water. Hopefully soon.

The only TV I’ve been watching is The Great British Bake Off, over and over and over again. That probably says something about my 2017 mental state. It’s soothing and full of things I can’t eat and I love it.

This year I listened to Vaults and Arcade Fire and ODESZA and the Baby Driver soundtrack and the new Taylor Swift but with Look What You Made Me Do edited out. I’ve also kept the Skyrim Atmospheres track from the Skyrim soundtrack on repeat as background in my office a lot lately.

This is the other song I had on repeat this year. Not sure why, it just sounded right.

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Today I am 39. My grandmother used to say she was 39, every year, and when I was young and my dad turned 40 I was very confused as to how he could be older than his mother. Math is hard. Age is just a number.

I believe this means the website/blog is 9 years old. I should bake it a cake next year when it reaches a decade.

Rainy birthday. For a moment it there was hail but now the sun is trying to peek out again.

Hopefully going to have a very interesting year ahead of me.

There is a signed 1st edition US hardcover of The Night Circus in this auction to benefit Planned Parenthood organized by the wonderful Kelly Braffet & Owen King. It is also–because it is the 101st year of operation of Planned Parenthood–annotated on page 101 with circusy footnotes & nonsense, so it is utterly unique. The high bidder gets to find out where, precisely, my glittery red pen ran out of ink. Bidding is open through July 15th.

We are getting used to house things. We had a frozen pipe in the winter and bats in the walls and it seems like a crash course in home ownership but we also have hummingbirds and sunsets and a brief June burst of peonies.

There are several still unpacked cardboard boxes, mostly in the basement. We finally have chairs for the library. My office is still a work in progress but it’s getting there.

We are cooking a lot. We got a grill. Our dish of the summer so far is this Ina Garten quinoa tabbouleh but I replace the tomatoes with diced strawberries dressed in balsamic vinegar. It’s better that way. Sorry, Ina.

I don’t have proper internet right now. I am typing this while running a wireless hotspot off my phone. Supposedly there are plans to get this area of wilderness wired properly in the foreseeable future but for now I am mostly only able to do internet things on my phone or my iPad and I am a terrible touchscreen typist so I have been and will continue to be fairly scarce around the internet in general. It’s hard to keep up with things when everything takes ages to load if it even loads at all. Twitter hiatus continues.

We don’t have cable, either, so no new tv for me. I have been catching up on Adventure Time and binge-watching British Baking when I have tv time.

Favorite things I’ve read so far this year (and I’ve barely been reading) are book one of My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz & The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld which is out in September.

I have been listening to ODESZA and Oh Wonder and Halsey.

Game-wise I am a little bit obsessed with Horizon: Zero Dawn. Not quite finished with it yet, and I keep randomly stopping because the light or the environment is just so pretty. It does so many things I like in a game and does them really well and thoughtfully and with a strong story line. Super excited that they already announced DLC & I hope they franchise the heck out of it, I would play sequels upon sequels in this world.

Favorite game I’ve played and finished is What Remains of Edith Finch. In certain ways its the best game I’ve read/story I’ve played. It has distinct mini story-sections that are all inventively different and there’s a moment in one of them that when I realized what it was doing with the controls I was probably the most giddily delighted I have ever been when playing a game.

And of course, mostly I have been writing.

I am very close to a new draft. I am not quite where I wanted to be by birthday-time but not too far off, either. It is book-shaped again but the end is missing and there are a couple of holes in the middle.

It is a different book-creature than it was at the beginning of the year. It is stretching its wings and finding its feet and only occasionally hissing at me. Not quite tame but it doesn’t really want to be, not entirely. It’s also very proud of me for not using a cake analogy to describe its current state.

Going to spend the rest of my summer mostly in my head. I don’t get sunburned there and there’s less hail.

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springtime & snow

It is officially spring and we are still buried in snow. Confused little flowers are trying to bud in the yard and the sun feels spring-like sometimes, coercing things to melt. Slowly.

Adam took some photos of me mid-blizzard last week. We got two feet of snow. Most of it is still here. There are paw prints near the trees that might mean our fox is visiting again.

snow day march

There is an interview with me up on Haute Macabre today. I have not been doing interviews of any sort as a general rule but I made a single exception for Jess because I’ve followed her work at bloodmilk for years. I adore & collect her jewelry, I’m wearing her naja owl talon crescent moon in the photo above. It was a pleasure to be interviewed by her, even though I’m a bit out of practice with the whole interview thing.

(It’s always strange to re-read interviews awhile after I gave them. The more recent reading list includes The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel & The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill.)

We spent the weekend running around caves and caverns with our dear friend Kim Liggett. It was like being underwater, so many beautiful deep dark things. One of them turned the lights off so we could not-see how darkest dark cave dark is. (It’s really dark.)

Home again and snow again and back to revising again. Getting through the deep dark unseeable parts. Finding my way toward the end.

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last day of 2016

This was a year.

Good things first: I have a house. More than just a house I have a space that is mine and a place that is ours and I am such an introvert homebody Cancerian moon child that this brings me a good deal of joy.

Also within that house I am currently sitting in my new office which was supposed to be finished in October and it was not. It’s still not, but it’s finished enough for me to start moving my boxes and my books and my statues of bunnies into.

I finished a draft of the new book. I think I’m going to change the vast majority of it, but hey, it’s a draft. It still counts.

I drank a lot of sparkling wine with several truly lovely people and I turned 38 years old and celebrated my 2nd wedding anniversary and I ran around in the snow in my own yard in October when we got the first of what appears to be quite a lot of snow.

There were some good things.

And there were a lot of other things.

I feel like I don’t have words for things a lot of the time which makes me feel like a failure as a writer but I just don’t. The words aren’t there, not for blogs or tweets, not the right ones to capture the gamut of emotions from disappointment to anger to sadness to fear that seem to be on constant rotation this year in no particular order.

That’s not the way my brain works. I can’t say how I’m feeling or react to the world in the moment because combinations of 26 letters never sound right the first time, in the sharpness of the here and now. I’m a rewriter more than I’m a writer. I have to keep trying until I get it right. So my words for this emotional storm cloud of a year are going to slowly find their ways into fiction instead.

The world feels different now, or maybe it’s that the world is not yet the place I had wanted to believe it already was. I feel different now and so the book needs to be different, too.  Maybe that’s why I’ve been having so much trouble with it, because it is and always was a book that was somewhere in the future and things are different now and it had to wait for me to catch up to it.

Maybe I’m at the place in space and time this story needs me to be in, finally.

I don’t know yet. I’m still figuring it out.

I do know it is a winter book, though, so it helps to be covered in snow.

And I do have a lot of snow.

Two end of 2016 thoughts that probably would have been tweets if I were on Twitter more:

  • I am not moving to Canada even though I actually have the ability to, I am staying right here.
  • I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.

A request of sorts:

I turned off my website email because I can’t keep up. I know there are technically other ways on the internet to attempt to reach me but I can’t keep up with Tumblr/Instagram/etc messages either. Especially when they’re often flooded with people asking google-able questions about The Night Circus that seem to be part of homework assignments? Google is your friend. I would like to be friendly, too, but I only have so much time and even less energy.

Please be patient with me. The last few years have been really, really hard. Not just this one. Trying to write a book in the middle of all of it has been hard. I am doing better than I was while also realizing I had not been doing nearly as well as I had thought I was before. I am trying to be patient with myself, too.

I have to get where I’m going one step at a time and I have no idea how many steps there are.

That was a metaphor about how I can’t tell you when this book is going to be out because I don’t know when it’s going to be finished, and trust me, you won’t want to read it until it’s finished. It wouldn’t have an ending for one thing, and there would be pages missing in the middle and then the bees might get out and oh, now I’ve said too much.

Annual review of media things, 2016 version

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

I had somehow managed to never read this until now and I regret it immensely. Easily a new very favorite. Such pitch-perfect voice and tone and everything. I recently picked up the new Shirley Jackson biography by Ruth Franklin & I’m looking forward to that, too.

milk and honey – Rupi Kaur

I’ve been trying to read more poetry lately and this volume is brimming with tiny, truth-stuffed gems. (Though I admit my favorite part of this particular edition is the forward that begins with “i don’t feel like the girl who wrote milk and honey anymore” because oh, I feel that feeling.)

The Secret Place – Tana French

I adore Tana French and when I saw she had a new book out this year (The Trespasser) I realized I was behind so I read The Secret Place to catch up. It might very well be my favorite of the bunch so far. The structure is brilliant and it nails a particular teenage girl-ness that I haven’t seen done so well before. Any Tana French is my go-to detective/crime recommendation lately.

Death by Video Game – Simon Parkin

This is an excellent book about games & gaming that is not quite as dire as the title might suggest. I read bits of it aloud to Adam in the car this summer while we were waiting for our movie to start at the drive-in theatre, an environment that sharpened the observation that video games are still such a comparatively young art form. (I read several different books on gaming/game history this year and this was my favorite.)

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places – Colin Dickey

I’m not even finished with this one yet but it has to go on the bests list. It’s what you might expect from the title and more: a thoughtful look at the stories behind the ghosts and the times/places that created them. I have a thing for haunted spaces and I’m learning things that I didn’t know about places that I’d already been aware of and finding out about new ones. (Also I used to live within walking distance of the Haunted Place in Chapter 1.)

Atlas Obscura – Joshua Foer, Ella Morton, Dylan Thuras

I have loved Atlas Obscura via the internet for ages and now I get to have them on my coffee table and it is delicious. Perfect book for opening to a random page and learning something nifty. Here, I’ll find a random one for you, and I really did just flip the book open to see what came up, bibliomancy style: Page 333. Cincinnati’s Lost Subway. Apparently there is an never completed subway system beneath Cincinnati. (Aside to the bibliomancy gods: I see what you did there.)

Preface because I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this before: we currently have something like five different game systems in our house but the PS4 is the go-to. It is my favorite, to the point where the dulcet tones of the home screen might very well be my Proust questionnaire answer for “What sound or noise do you love?” (but in a three-way tie with the crackling sound of a spoon breaking into a crème brûlée and also Nick Offerman’s giggle).

If you are not a game person but you are a book person or a story person please give Firewatch a try. It is beautiful and thoughtful and funny and touching and I still think about it months and months after first playing it. It’s not challenging and it’s not very long and it feels like a playable story. I might replay it next year. I never did find that turtle.

We haven’t finished Rise of the Tomb Raider yet but I love it, especially the way it does this turn-a-corner-and-see-something-amazing thing with the environments. I’m a sucker for a good exploration game and I like puzzles and while I liked the previous Tomb Raider a lot so far this one is balancing its different elements a little better. Looking forward to playing more of it.

I have been escaping into remastered Skyrim since November. I played the original back when it came out and the remaster is gorgeous. It has been kind of meditative, taking long meandering walks from Solitude to Riften and throwing fireballs at the occasional mudcrab. Meditative and therapeutic. And it allows me to say things aloud like “Why do these vampires have so many cabbages?”

Arrival was probably my favorite thing I saw in the theatre this year and I was delighted to find the Ted Chiang short story it was based on in Adam’s extensive SFF collection when we got home.

I will not admit how many times I have watched Zootopia already but I will probably watch it more and then again and possibly one more time after that and I will probably watch Moana just as much when I can.

I don’t have cable or internet right now so I don’t really get to watch TV.  Sometimes I’m sad about it. Mostly I’m not.

(I did enjoy Stranger Things even though I had some issues with it. Dustin is my favorite because of course he is.)

(Every year I do this it becomes more and more obvious that I am a books/games/music person more than I am a movies/tv person.)

New-to-me artists I discovered this year and love to little bits: Oh Wonder, Kaleo, Perfume, Aurora.

New albums by artists I already loved: Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool & Birdy’s Beautiful Lies.

I always pick a song of the year and I had too many to choose from this year, too many tracks on repeat (Bon Iver’s “33 ‘GOD’” & Sia’s “Alive” & Kaleo’s “Way Down We Go”) and then I thought about how I always post a video to go with my now traditional New Year’s Eve blog and this came to mind and is another one of those songs I listened to over and over again and the first time I saw this video for it I couldn’t stop smiling.

I think that’s probably a good thing to say goodbye to this year with.

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lovely, dark and deep

autumnalI took this photo in my yard.

I have a yard now.

Possibly obvious, but I no longer live in Manhattan.

I left the city in a blur of cardboard boxes and craziness and I owe a great number of people goodbye cocktails that never happened and probably even more people a “by the way I’m moving” update. My apologies. Time, as it does, got away from me, and here I am deep in autumn and leaves out in the woodsy mountains and now I have to make my own cocktails mostly but I am very much okay with that.

We lived in Manhattan for almost four years. I am going to miss parts of it dearly and other parts not at all. I already miss the ability to have sushi brought to my door, drinking sparkling rosé and eating pommes frites at Lafayette. Probably most of the things I will miss are food-based.

(Though as if I needed a sign from the universe that it was time to go, my favorite restaurant closed.)

I will miss Bryant Park and the High Line and the lobby of the Ace Hotel. The Met and the Morgan Library. I will miss walking up Park Avenue very late at night in the winter and buying used hardcover books at the Strand and Shakespeare in the Park but these are all things I can do again, that I may do even more now that Manhattan is for visiting.

So I have a house now, with stairs and rooms and trees outside and mice inside (teeny adorable mice it is difficult to be too terribly annoyed at even when they get into the Hallowe’en candy). I have never had a space of my own that did not come along with a diminishing number of months for occupying it, a space that can be painted and personalized and stayed in and lived in and it is nice but strange and I am still getting used to it.

I am organizing books on shelves. My new office is not office-shaped yet. Many things are still lost in cardboard boxes, waiting to be found again and put in new places.

Also I am quite literally in the woods. My internet is currently questionable at best though supposedly that might change in the future. I will try to keep up with things as well as I can. I am remaining on Twitter hiatus for now but I might drop in now & again more often than I have been.

I am still writing. New book is book-shaped but is not the right book-shape yet, which is a fussy confusing stage that there is probably a cake analogy for but I’m not sure what it would be. I write things wrong before I get them right, apparently it’s just a thing I do.

I am tearing things out and rewriting and replacing other things and trying to figure out which parts are book and what parts are not book and how to put them all back together properly and in what order. If this were indeed a cake analogy it would involve a very messy kitchen and there would probably be gluten-free flour in my hair. Sometimes in this non-existent analogy kitchen I sit on the floor and cry amongst broken eggs and ruined cake layers and sometimes the mice come out and whisper baking tips and advice to me before running off with more chocolate.

So, yes, still writing.

Every time I crawl out of the writing cave to peek at the internet someone somewhere is asking when my next book will be out. Here is your answer: I don’t know. If I knew I would tell you. I’m busy trying to get it right and make it good and find the proper way to tell this particular story, which feels more important than doing it quickly.

(I don’t have circus movie news either. No one tells me anything. It is, apparently, how such things go.)

A few new circusy things:

easton-press-editionThis very fancy, very limited, very pricey but very beautiful leather-bound, signed & gilded edition of The Night Circus is currently available from Easton Press. (They also have a very shiny edition of Ready Player One.)

vintage-childrens-classics-night-circusVintage UK has a Children’s Classics line that includes books for older readers and they’ve just added this new edition of The Night Circus. (It is in good company, including The Handmaid’s Tale. They have such great covers.)

I shall try to update the blog more often in the future. This year has been a blur of writing and moving. Whenever I find the time to stop and say something here I’m often at a loss for words.

To those about to NaNoWriMo, I wish you many words and endless inspiration and unexpected surprises. Last year’s post with lots of NaNo-related links including pep talks is here.

Merry NaNoWriMo Eve, Happiest of Hallowe’ens and Blessed Samhain.

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happy bookaversary

The Night Circus was first published five years ago today.

It’s been a wonderful, strange, emotional roller coaster since then and I am still so very grateful to everyone who embraced and supported the book and visited the circus.

Thank you.

I have been a bad blogger this year. I have been very deep in the writing cave and I really did have a blog post half-drafted that was a summertime check-in of sorts around my birthday but now it is September and beyond the point of summertime check-ins.

This is not a proper check-in. This is just a quick September bookaversary internet hello before I crawl back in my cave. I might grab a pumpkin to autumn-up the cave decor while I’m here.

I am fairly certain there will be news of varying sorts to post here in the foreseeable future. I might even be allowed back on Twitter sometime soonish. Lots of things are afoot and busy and buzzing like bees.

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goodbye, 2015

Here we are at the end of the year again. I have had my least productive blogging year possibly ever. I am sorry, blog. I think this post will knock the last 2014 post off the front page, so that’s something. I have spent a lot of 2015 not on the internet, which has been good for me. I’ll be spending parts of 2016 offline as well, beginning with a very hermity writing January.

I started this year hibernating. I am ending it at home in New York, just back from a surprise trip to Hogwarts, about to hibernate again. In between I went to South Bend for circus shenanigans and Toronto again after too long away. I turned 37. We celebrated the first of hopefully many, many wedding anniversaries. I had a lot of cocktails with new friends and old friends. I learned how to make a proper carbonara. I added many, many bottles to my BPAL collection. I was a crossword puzzle clue.

I wrote a lot. I am well out of word soup phase and probably somewhere nearing the word cake phase, though not quite fully baked yet and there will be layers to carve and frost and a great many fussy bits to come. It’s almost a book. It’s thinking about it, really hard.

It was a more eventful year than it looks like through the lens of the internet. Much of what is going on in Erinland is still hidden behind curtains, waiting. Preparing. On one hand I feel badly about not being able to share and on the other I am trying to savor the quiet times because I know they are temporary. I am still trying to learn to balance living in my head which I need to do to write and living in the actual world with people and social media. The easiest way for me to manage is in extremes, and now is a mostly in my head time. Sooner or later the contents of my head will be properly captured in words and then put on paper so they can spill out into other people’s heads, which is magical but intimidating when it’s just me, just my head and just my thoughts, trying to keep them clear and finding the best ways to translate the spaces and people in my head into words. It’s difficult and then it’s easy and then it’s difficult again, like the optical illusions that shift depending on how you focus, though the image always stays the same.

In 2015 for the first time in a long time I started to feel like I’m getting to where I’m supposed to be. That there’s some forward momentum.

No stars in my hair this year. This year there are bees. It is time for new things. Time for changes.

new year's bees

No proper list of favorites this year, either. My favorite book I read out of an embarrassingly short list was Speak by Louisa Hall. I spent most of my non-writing story consuming time this year playing video games, mostly Dragon Age, mostly out of order (Inquisition, then Origins, then II, then the epilogue of Inquisition which made me cry and then laugh through my tears and I cannot even begin to explain how much I love that game). I liked a lot of tv, consumed mostly on Netflix: Black Mirror & Broadchurch & Sense 8 & competitive British baking. I really liked the BBC adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I didn’t go to many movies but I did just see the new Star Wars and really liked it, and I am not really a Star Wars person.

I’m going to try to read more in 2016.

Lots of good music this year, which made it difficult to choose a song of the year. If I wanted to be really honest my most-played track is the main theme from Dragon Age: Inquisition but since that’s not precisely a song I decided to be a bit more traditional. This artist & this album were very much exactly the right music at exactly the right time.

Happy New Year.

I have a feeling 2016 is going to be an adventure.

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post-nanowrimo time again

I keep forgetting it is December, probably because I finished my NaNoWriMo-ness early this year.

I do hope all of you who NaNo-ed enjoyed yourselves, regardless of how many words you wrote, and I hope you’re proud of yourselves because you should be.

All I really wanted to do myself was add 50k to this draft during November and I managed it in 21 days which was excellent timing because my last week of November was very busy. Look, word count graph!

nano 2015 graph

I do so love a word count graph. I should probably just make my own little motivational graphs to use all the time but I don’t think it’d be the same. Maybe I’ll just stick gold stars on things.

So the good news is that this draft is much longer than it was, the not so good is that it is still quite a ways from finding its end. It wants to be long. I am going to try to talk it into being perhaps just a little bit shorter once I find the end of it. It keeps looking at me and pouting and going “but I’m epic!” and then we have debates over the difference between epics and fairy tales and myths and regular old novels. It is consenting to becoming book-shaped, though. It is much more book-esque than it was even before November, and it is very much a winter creature so I have a feeling I will be sledding towards the end of this draft over the next few months and thus things will likely be quite quiet around here though I will do some annual end of the year posts.

I wish I could say more about the not-quite-book but at this point I can’t, really. This point is still alchemy and ingredients and I’m not quite certain how the finished product will turn out, exactly, not enough to describe it properly.

But here, have two sensory hints about it, early winter holiday presents:

Right now the new book smells like snow and beeswax candles and leather and honey.

And it sounds like this, a peek at the beginning of the ever-changing playlist:

playlist sneak peek

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nanowrimo time again

nanowrimo2015-design by eric nyffeler

I have realized it’s been quite some time since I wrote a proper National Novel Writing Month post. I pseudo-participated the last 2 years and might do the same this year just because I’m trying to finish a draft and I do so love a wordcount graph, but this post is mostly a refresher about NaNo and me and my opinionated opinions.

First, info & links:

Some refresher points regarding The Night Circus that usually need to be cleared up around this time of year:

  • The Night Circus did indeed begin as a NaNoWriMo project.
  • To be specific: The Night Circus began as an unplanned tangent in the middle of a different NaNo project. I got bored & sent my characters to a circus. The circus was much more interesting than anything else that was happening.
  • I then spent an additional two Novembers worth of NaNo time on what eventually turned into 100k+ of long, sprawling, very rough first draft.
  • When I say rough I mean rough. I mean those rocks you use to scrub the dead skin off of your feet rough. I mean it had no plot and Celia wasn’t in it.
  • That NaNoWriMo version of The Night Circus bears little resemblance to the finished book. It was heavily revised and rewritten both before and after it was sold.

My NaNoWriMo profile informs me that I’ve been a member for more than 12 years which is making me feel both nauseated and old. I skipped a few years and I can’t tell you which ones because the site doesn’t believe in keeping my entire history anymore, but of those 12 Novembers I’ve probably participated during more of them than not.

I didn’t really write much before NaNoWriMo. I thought about writing, which is different than actually writing. (This is one of the great lessons of writing: you have to get the words out of your head and onto paper or screen.) I would write a page and hate it and stop, which is not a good way to get better at anything. I’d write little scraps of things and bury them under self-doubt and insecurity.

NaNoWriMo helped me get better. It took awhile, my first several NaNovembers worth of writing are terrible things that will never see the light of day but the later ones have some good bits here and there that could potentially be excavated. You learn a lot writing page after page after page and not having the time to go back and worry over how awful that one particular page was because there are so many more to write. It’s also probably one of the reasons I’m a binge writer and not a write-every-day writer, but that works for me.

NaNoWriMo is not for everyone. That’s okay. I still maintain that the word “draft” should be involved somewhere. It can be a very helpful first step but there are plenty of other steps. That “the world needs your novel” on the top of the official site that I’m pretty sure wasn’t always there raises my skeptical eyebrow. I’m not sure the world needs your novel but I think maybe you need to write it, if you want to. When I started NaNo-ing back in the dark ages it seemed (to me) much more of a personal challenge and not a means to a publishing-based end. Really I think it’s a writing tool. A crazy, autumnal whirlwind of a writing tool that you can use however works best for your own writing or not use at all. There is no one way to write, after all.

To those about to NaNo, I salute you. I wish you electrifying ideas and caffeinated beverages and I hope you discover things before November 30th that you didn’t expect to find on November 1st.

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perfect pumpkin

We went apple picking on Friday and did not intend to look for pumpkins but then there was the Most Perfect Pumpkin and it had to come home with us. Not even going to carve it, it is too perfect in its perfect pumpkinyness.

I am so glad it is finally fall. September was a lying month filled with 90-degree days but October seems to have its act together. I have socks on. This is better.

(The most properly autumnal thing I got up to in September was running around in corn in the dark for the lovely Kim Liggett‘s Blood & Salt launch, which was moonlit and magical and possibly evil.)

I keep forgetting to blog because I’m writing and when I’m not writing more typing seems like silliness when I should be resting my fingers, or doing little finger exercises. I’ve been knitting, trying to finish the scarf I started in July (um… July 2014, that is), and I suppose knitting is finger exercise.

I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and loved it. I like books on creativity and this one is a fairly quick read but packed with very big ideas. It feels like it took up more space in my brain than it did on the page which is a neat trick.

(My brain sometimes feels like it is too big, with too many things and too many people and too much imaginary architecture in it. Can you get agoraphobic in your own brain? I’m going to close this parenthetical before I think about that too hard.)

Adam took some lovely photos of me during Friday’s apple picking perfect pumpkin excursion. I do not know what’s going on with my hair.

oct 2015 portrait

Okay, I do know what’s going on with my hair: I cut it wrong last time I did it (I always cut my own hair) so I’ve been putting it up in shame ponytails when there is not quite enough of it to pony.

I am trying to think of what’s new or what’s news and there is no news and not much is new besides pumpkins and pounds upon pounds of apples (I am going to bake an apple crisp of some sort this week). Still writing. Still throwing things out and rewriting. Still trying to figure out where this book is going though it is finally consenting to being almost book-shaped. Almost.

But it is a winter book, so it is sorting itself out more now that there is a chill in the air, pulling up a blanket and sitting next to me on the couch and hopefully once I ply it with enough warm beverages it will tell me the rest of its secrets.

(It told me one big secret yesterday and I said “Really? I’m not sure I can write that.” And it said “Well you’d better, lady, that’s how it goes.” Sigh. Wish me luck.)

Still on Twitter hiatus, likely for at least the rest of the year. Still not doing any public appearances until this draft is done. Still obsessed with Dragon Age, still trying to figure everything out, still over-using the word still.

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text:
MEPs cancel Turkey trip as relations sour

Turkish officials refuse to meet two senior MEPs, as diplomatic relations continue to deteriorate over Ankara’s post-coup crackdown.

Top EU lawmakers yesterday (16 November) cancelled a visit to Turkey after Ankara refused to see one of the MEPs because of her criticism of Ankara’s massive crackdown following July’s failed coup, a parliament source said.

EFD Rights Watch:

Trustees have been appointed to Mardin, Van and Siirt Municipalities. The total number of trustees appointed to DBP municipalities has become 33 with these appointments.
Turkish judicial authorities arrested the CEO of daily Cumhuriyet on Nov. 12, a day after he was detained as he arrived at Istanbul Atatürk Airport following a trip to Germany.
French news organizations have urged Turkish authorities to release a French reporter detained on Nov. 11 in the southeastern province of Gaziantep.

It is not for West to decide reintroduction of death penalty: President Erdoğan

Turkey will decide whether or not to reinstate the death penalty, not the West, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Nov. 12
Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu has criticized a group of foreign diplomats for attending a People’s Democratic Party (HDP) parliamentary group meeting on Nov. 8 after its two co-leaders and eight other deputies were arrested on terrorism charges
Aggravated life and from 6.5 to 17.5 years imprisonment have been demanded for Özgür Gündem’s nine writers and executives, four of whom arrested.
It has been alleged that intelligence engineer arrested as part of the FETÖ investigation has committed suicide in Kırıkkale Prison where he was held.
The Minister of Justice has announced that “36,000 people have been arrested as part of the FETÖ investigation and 3,456 judges and prosecutors suspended from duty”.
An indictment prepared by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has demanded aggravated life sentences for a total of nine suspects, including novelist Aslı Erdoğan and linguist Necmiye Alpay, on terror charges as part of an investigation into columnists and managers of closed daily Özgür Gündem.

Mavi Boncuk |

Anatolian Agency Publication | Coup Attempt in Turkey (PDF)

Cumhuriyet Newspaper Executive Board President Akın Atalay has been detained at Atatürk Airport where Atalay returned from abroad.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has criticized the outcry after the recent arrests of journalists and Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputies. “When my prison sentence was confirmed in 1999, I went to the Pınarhisar Prison quietly and served my sentence. I did not yell, have a fit, or stage a show,” he said.
The activities of a total of 370 associations in 39 provinces across Turkey have been terminated over their alleged links to terror organizations, the Interior Ministry announced on Nov. 11 – Taylan Bilgic – Nov 13, 1:00 PM

Don’t be put off by his conviction for inciting murder, Turkish bus baron Galip Ozturk says. That was just how the secret society that tried to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once punished people who refused to pay up. The 51-year-old

The president should retain links with his political party because an impartial head of state causes “weakness in legislative activities,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said, speaking after the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) delivered its draft for a new constitution to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has found Turkey guilty for violating the right to life in a notorious police operation at an Istanbul prison in 2000.

Beaten Son of HDP Deputy: They Beat Me Worse as They Knew I was Son of Hüda Kaya

Detained in the wake of the protest organized following arrest of HDP MPs and got his L4 bone in his spine broken by being pounded in custody, Cihad Ebrari, the son of HDP MP Hüda Kaya explained to bianet what happened.

Cumhuriyet’s homepage on November 7.

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Monday, May 11, 2015

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The World Heritage List includes more than 1000 properties (sites) forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value.

The World Heritage PSK Award (WHPA) is dedicated to the 10th Anniversary of the European PSK Club. It has been sponsored by Radioarena UK Ltd and devised by the European PSK Club on 1st May, 2016 for two-way PSK contacts with amateur radio stations working from various World Heritage Sites. Contacted expeditions (stations) don't need to be members of the European PSK Club. Contacts with a certain World Heritage Site are valid starting from the date of its designation as per the World Heritage List.

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AJMEC TUNISIA is an autonomous, non-gouvernmental youth organisation whose main aim is to open international exchange for young people, promote youth initiative in improving social work and facilitating the integration of young people into society especially those of rural areas by involving them in our work, and encouraging their creative spirit that helps increasing youth partecipation in both local community and society in general.
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Posts Tagged ‘Mike Ashley’

We worry about who is running our clubs when we should be worrying about how

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

It is hard to imagine a sight less dignified than the public hawking of Newcastle United by Mike Ashley as he tries to off load the Geordies attaching the sale rider that the club requires a bottomless pit of money.

Ashley contests that only wealth at the level Manchester clubs now enjoy will bring silverware and happiness to the supporters although the evidence of Spurs and neighbours Middlesbrough bringing back prizes suggests this to be a misjudgment on someone’s part. Unfortunately all football seems to buy into the idea that the richest wins all despite Chelsea’s two years of running up. It is more accurate to say that the biggest wins unless they mess it up and that biggest is at Old Trafford with Newcastle not that far behind.

Regardless the Magpies are shopped around with the idea being – and the worry that – they will be the latest club to fall into the hands of overseas investment.

Each time there is a purchase of a club by non-English investors alarm bells are sounded do the future of our game so much so one could be forgiven for thinking that we have a monopoly on good governance in football. With almost half England’s professional clubs having used bankruptcy protection in the fifteen years since the formation of the Premier League that supposition would seem to be far from the truth.

English ownership covers Risdale and Richmond just as much as it does any examples of the better run sides and the likes of Randy Learner and his slow, deliberate building of Aston Villa is as valid an argument as any for the idea that it is not who owns clubs that is problem so much as how they are owned.

Learner probably has the best manager in the business in Martin O’Neill – he got him in place before he arrived – and backs him up with sensible signings. James Milner, Gabriel Agbonlahor and Ashley Young probably take home the same combined as Robinho and unless the situation in England’s second City is out of focus the club is run within the remit of having huge out goings met by the huge income of a Premier League club. Morally one might question the size of the figures but from a business point of view there seems to be equity which one simply cannot say about Manchester City or Chelsea.

Distressingly one would thank that outside the realms of the mega-rich clubs at Eastlands and Stamford Bridge the thinking would veer more towards a model of attempting to balance the books or when attempting to advance the club investing soundly but the experiences of those down the leagues suggest that in most cases this is anything but. The well run teams are accused of a lack of ambition and those who overspend seem to do so in the assumption that when the chickens come home to roost they will be long gone. Any sympathy one could have for the likes of AFC Bournemouth or Luton Town is not shared by supporters who have seen their teams lose out on promotions and progressions in cups to a team bought on the hock.

The Football Association has recognised the need for control of finances starting running the Football Conference as a tight ship but the Football League struggles to do the same unwilling to douse the flames of passion that come to the game via investors in their local club but incapable of ensuring these new investors behave in a way that even guarantees a long term future.

The popular perception of football investment is that it is done in the transfer market and by paying higher wages and one would be niave to suggest that was not a factor in the improvement of clubs. Squads are important but so are supporters and the recruitment of the next generation of fans which is failing at lower levels with the jump between the child’s rate and that for teenagers being simply too steep. A wise investor looking at trying to create something other than a season or two on the field would do well to look at subsidising or creating a way that will build the fan base for a generation or more.

Likewise facilities are a way of ensuring revenue streams for clubs and it is telling that while Gillett Jnr and Hicks continue to fund Liverpool’s squad a section of support are bitterly opposed to them on the grounds that they are not building the new stadium putting the future success of the club at risk.

On the whole football chairmen fail to understand the best way to invest in clubs because they do not grasp genuine value in clubs. They look at playing squads and imagine how much a player could be sold for but more acute book keeping would render Robinho’s £120,000 a week as a liability from which the business suffered and his resale value as windfall payment rather than a reason to value the club more highly.

The real assets of football clubs are position in the league set up and the sponsorship and television deals that bring, good will – in the support and in the brand – and facilities. The league position is temporary but the contracts it bring in are easily read, the facilities can be assessed with some ease but that middle element – good will – is harder to put a value on.

However Mike Ashley values Newcastle United as twice what he paid for them because he understands that what Freddy Shepherd sold him at the value of a mid-range debt ridden Premiership club is actually one of the league’s strongest with a permanent tradition of support and a strong brand. His hawking of the club around is undignified for sure but having bought the club on the cheap he is not so much trying to get rid of it quick as realising the value of his investment. Shepherd’s last cock up at Newcastle was to not understand the value of what he had.

Too many chairmen are the same. They have a thing of value but have no idea how to augment that value and end up spending the club’s resources on things of no value – players – and not the assets they have got – good will.

We worry so much about who owns football clubs and where those investors come from yet we do not worry at all about how those clubs are run or even if the people who own them even know what they have bought and how much it is worth.


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