writing « Christa Allan

July 12, 2010

A few totally random Monday musings

Filed under: Random Rumblings, Writing and Wreading — Tags: Bay Books, drinking, New Orleans, Ray Nagin, spies, writing — Christa Allan @ 1:27 am

1. So, while I and many of my writer friends are brooding, writing, angsting, plotting, marketing, writing…here’s a new book I discovered yesterday: MILK EGGS VODKA Grocery Lists Lost and Found. And here’s a blurb: HOW Books introduces “Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found,” a new book by über-collector Bill Keaggy. “Milk Eggs Vodka” features 300 real grocery lists recovered from shopping carts and parking lots across America and other corners of the globe. Keaggy dissects each list with his acerbic wit and offers intriguing insights about what we eat and why.

I spotted the book yesterday before my writing workshop and booksigning at Bay Books in Bay St. Louis, MS. Delightful group of writers and artists at the workshop, and I loved just hanging out, cruising the shelves and talking to Kay Gough.

Obviously, I’m missing a wealth of opportunities for books as further evidenced by: Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items From Around the World.

I actually think these books are brilliant social commentaries, and I find them fascinating. If nothing else, I think I’ll buy them because somewhere in there is a book waiting to happen.

2. As if we need more proof that getting drunk is the epitome of stupidity (love the sound of that…): A 47-year-old (as in the name of everything holy, how many brain cells have you already murdered) man lost a bet with his drinking buddies. So…what’s a guy going to do? Well, when you only drink six, and they’ve had more, you let them set your prosthetic leg on fire.

What’s truly fortunate and amazing is that they did manage to distinguish the prosthetic leg from the real one. The flames, however, did not. They spread to his butt and back.

And his drinking buddies helped, right? Sure they did. As reported by the Las Cruses Sun-News, “The sheriff’s office said the man took his clothes off because of the pain and his friends decided to take him to the hospital. But they got nervous and instead dropped him off on the side of the highway.”

3. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said that the ten Russian spies “posed a potential threat to the United States” by explaining (justifying?) the recent trade.

Okay. Then why did it take TEN YEARS of watching them to determine that?

4. Ray Nagin is no longer mayor of New Orleans (can I hear an “AMEN!”), but his arrogant carelessness lives on. The city had $72 million in its “rainy day fund” in 2007. From 2007-2009, it must have stormed to the tune of $65,000 a day because the fund today is zero.

Over $3 million was spent on Armstrong Park, which he touted as his legacy. I suppose therein lies the irony; the park is trashed because the contractors he hired were inept. And the ten foot statue of Louis Armstrong was not only cracked, here’s the rest of the report from Times-Picayune’s Jarvis DeBerry:

“Not only did the company demonstrate an inability to install sidewalks; not only did the company damage the statue of this city’s most influential musician and cultural ambassador; but A.M.E. Disaster Recovery also damaged curbing, knocked a light pole into the lagoon, broke manholes and sprinkler pipes and cut power and phone lines.”

Perhaps he was the spy left behind…

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March 8, 2010

Sewing my life together

Filed under: Moments of Grace — Tags: writing — Christa Allan @ 2:54 am

Sometimes it seems like the creatures in my head are unraveling stories, like Penelope who stitched by day and unwove by night to ward off obnoxious suitors anxious for Odysseus’ treasures–both in his bank and in his bed.

But the threads fray when I’m frantic to shove them all through the eye of the needle of sanity. I want to make order out of chaos, but the memories and the pictures and the stories waiting to be told are like bolts of lightning–powerful, visible, yet impossible to clutch.

I think this happens most when I’m creatively procrastinating embarking on what will be an emotional archeological dig. The feelings are buried alive, and I’ve been content to ignore them. Hoping, dreaming, praying that logic will suffocate them. But, no. They demand to be noticed. And while I create chaos, thinking I will somehow murder them with inattention, they wait patiently.

And what do I fear? Having to bear the weigh of regret, pain, loss? Even too much sunshine burns and blinds.

But I know I must continue to stitch the stories together, to resist the untangling of the threads, and to listen to the whisper in my soul.

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January 7, 2010

Are you a creature too?

Filed under: Writing and Wreading — Tags: writing — Christa Allan @ 2:11 am

Today is day four of the new school semester. Because of the scheduling, a process we refer to “fruit basket turnover,” the students don’t always stay in the same class hour.

So, after eighteen weeks of togetherness, we’re all thrown into a different orbit. It’s unsettling for some of them. I don’t assign seats in my classroom; it’s easier for me not to mess with a seating chart. Plus that notion of seated by alpha is totally skewed when the new kid arrives, as they inevitably do. The students are the ones who actually make their own seating chart. They sit in the same desk everyday. In fact, minor verbal skirmishes have taken place over, “S/He’s sitting in my desk.”

And when I gently remind the person that there are no assigned desks, the response is, “But I sit here all the time.”

Tonight, scrolling through my usual news blogs, bloggy blogs, Twitters and Facebooks, I looked up from my wing-backed chair next to the pie table stacked with books that belonged to my mother on which sits the lamp my husband almost brained the decorator with after she handed him the invoice, and thought, “I sit here all the time.”

Maybe to stir my writer brain I need to move my writer butt to, if not another part of the house or out of the house, at least a different chair.

What habits might you be a creature of?

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September 17, 2009

I’m guest blogging about not getting egg on your face

Filed under: Writing and Wreading — Tags: writing — Christa Allan @ 2:07 am

Visit me at ROMANCE WRITERS ON THE JOURNEY where I’m guest posting on Keli Gwyn’s blog about cleaning up your manuscript before submission.

You could win a copy of Grammar Girl’s new book or one by Anne Lamott.

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August 23, 2009

Is it too late to teach math?

Filed under: ej-oo-key-shuhn — Tags: writing — Christa Allan @ 11:46 pm

Monday will begin week three of the new school year, at my new high school, where I’m teaching two new Digital English classes…along with two 9th grade honors classes and two 9th grade regular classes.

I wish we could bring back the “red bird” and the “blue bird” designations because I’m not fond of this “regular/honors/gifted” label. Perhaps the day after I officially retire, I’ll share my searingly honest viewpoint about those labels. I have too few years remaining to risk teaching in a broom closet, being tarred and feathered, and/or generating a flurry of voodoo dolls that too closely resemble me.

Since it’s almost midnight, and I have to roll out of bed in almost five hours, I’m going to give the microwave version of the past two weeks:

1. I’m simultaneously amused and enraged by the insolent arrogance of some freshmen who inform me that reading and “writting” will “defiantly” not be important in their future.

2. I have a student who buys books from “barns and nobles.”

3. Another student said that he “learned last year how to profread better.”

4. The favorite book of another is Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Zeus.

5. As for receiving feedback on writing, this student shared: “A teacher who doesn’t writhe on my paper doesn’t care much about what I write.”

6. How did this student learn to write? “Teachers taught me letters of the alphabet which obliviously helped.”

7. Another student is “writing an autobiography of his life.”

8. Writing issues noted in papers submitted to date:

no use of apostrophes when writing contractions, so I find myself “decoding” the following: dont, cant, arent, isnt, wont, theyre, Ill

less than 10% of my students use cursive; I don’t mind that they print…what I mind is that they print IN ALL CAPS or in all lower case. If the periods ending their sentences aren’t the size of green peas, I don’t know where one sentence ends and another begins

use of “i” for personal pronoun “I” is gaining popularity

so far, not one student is using hearts or asterisks to dot the letters “i,j”

usage errors are multiplying faster than clunker cars: your/you’re, their/there/they’re, its/it’s, then/than are the major problems

we’re chanting ” a lot is two words”

paragraphing is apparently becoming obsolete

And, in closing, I’m reminded by one student that “going to collage is important because he wants to become a veet.”

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