Amy’s Thoughts

Who knew that iPods were for more than music???  Well, apparently a lot of people knew, but none of them ever told me, at least not until this past September.  The thing is, I’ve never much been into music.  I mean, I love listening to my niece, AJ, and my nephew, CS, play the cello and I love listening to my nieces and nephew singing, but really, other than that, music is a non-entity in my life.  If music is playing in the background, I find it distracting.  I just can’t think with the music going, and as a writer, I’m always thinking, plotting, creating scenes and scenarios in my head, so music is like my kryptonite.

Anyway, I entered a new classroom this year and found waiting for me, forty iPod Touches.  “iPods,” I thought.  “What on earth am I going to do with these?  How am I going to use music to teach my students English?  Well, actually, I do use music in the classroom to teach both English and skill concepts, but still.  Forty iPods???  How often does my district think that I use music??”

As it turns out, there are these nifty little things called apps that you can download to your iPod and those apps teach all kinds of amazing things!  WHO KNEW????  Well, like I said, apparently an awful lot of people, but not me!

In any case, I’ve been using the iPods for PWIMs.  That’s teacher-speak for Picture Word Inductive Model.  In other words, I upload photos of vocabulary we’re focused on in the classroom, children pull up the photo in Comic Touch and label the photos with target vocabulary words.  From there, we write paragraphs describing our work.  It’s really amazing, the work the kids have created.  I have some amazingly talented artists in my classroom as well.  In lieu of using the photos I provide, many students draw their own pictures in Doodle Buddy, then import those pictures into Comic Touch and label them.

Two other apps my students love are Stack the States and Stack the Countries.  I don’t know why, but as a country, we don’t seem to put much emphasis on geography anymore — how many people in this country really know where Djibouti or Myanmar can be found?  My students are no exception — they really struggle with geography.  Many of them don’t even understand that Kansas is a state and the United States is a country.  They have no idea where Mexico is in relation to Kansas or where in the world Australia can be found.  These two apps have

helped them to really develop their understanding of the world and our place within it.

In the end, I’m simply amazed.  iPods are so much more than just carriers of music.  They have become purveyors of knowledge and tools for teaching.  WHO KNEW??

Well, I have advanced a bit further in the ABNA.  At this point, the anxiety has reached epic levels.  Each cut I make, while wonderful in and of itself, ultimately seems to cause an increase in extreme neurotic behavior.

Since discovering that I am now one of two hundred and fifty, I have been obsessively re-reading the manuscript, frantically checking createspace and amazon to see if any new reviews have been posted, and generally making myself insane.  Ultimately, while I am thrilled to have made it this far, I am terrified the next cut will leave me crying into my bowl of cheerios, woefully bereft of breakthrough worthiness.

Is it April 27th yet?

Well, I am now one in a crowd of a thousand who made it to the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.  Actually, technically, I’m one of two thousand — there’s me and 999 other hopefuls in the Young Adult section and then another thousand in General Fiction.  This first round was based on nothing more than a 300-word pitch of our novel, so it’s great news in the sense that I now feel like I have a functional query letter (which has been absolutely the hardest thing to write, harder even than the 67,000 word novel!)   But now the hard stuff begins — they actually start to read our novels!  The next round is based on the first 5,000 words of the novel, and the pool of a thousand gets narrowed to 250.  And so the waiting begins… March 23rd can’t come soon enough!

Over the past several weeks, I have been involved in a rather absurd email debate with some woman who lives her life in the darkened dungeons of credit card customer service hell.  I was quite annoyed to discover about a month ago that my 5% interest rate had unexpectedly been hiked to 12%.  No prior warning, no explanation given, and absolutely NO cause (other than of course, the changing industry laws that were intended to protect the consumer but that appear to have inspired interest hikes for them instead).

In any case, in our email debates, I have repeated several times that I was NOT notified of an interest rate change, to which she has consistently (and quite stubbornly) replied that her records indicate one was mailed.  WELL THEN.  I’m sorry, I must have accidentally shredded this very important piece of paper that told me you were going to more than DOUBLE my interest rates and that I had 30 days to protest said changes before they went into effect.  RIGHT.  (In case any credit card representatives from this unnamed company are reading… this was EXTREME sarcasm, not to be read as any form of agreement that said paper was EVER in my hands!)

Of course, as I was writing my latest argument with this woman, it occurred to me that really, I was engaging in a battle I could not possibly win because I was shouting in the wind at an entire system that was corrupt.  I found the woman’s arguments to be absurd.  When I stated that I never received the notice, she countered that it was mailed.  When I stated that the hike was unreasonable in any case, she said the company had the right to do anything they wanted, so long as they notified me in writing.  When I reiterated that I received nothing in writing, she again stated it was mailed, starting the ridiculous cycle all over again.  When I questioned the intelligence of anyone believing that I would be okay with a 7% interest hike, and brought into question the ethics of presuming my agreement based solely upon my LACK of a response, rather than, say, receiving a signed agreement from me, she claimed that her company’s “business practices are continuously reviewed to ensure we provide valued services and remain competitive in our business”.   Umm… anyone else notice a distinct lack of response to the question of their ethics?  Instead of insisting this company adheres to ethical business practices, she instead insists they are … competitive?  Oh, and that they provide valuable services?  You bet they do.  To those who are desperate, and to people like me, who are weak.

Am I the only one who is sick and tired of the business practices of corporate America?  I think in the end, I am mostly annoyed at myself, though.  After all, I hate credit card companies and everything they stand for, and yet… here I am, sitting on my new bedroom furniture bought with a Nebraska Furniture Mart credit card, typing on a laptop purchased with a Dell credit card, snug in my grumpy sweatshirt paid for by Chase VISA.

Yep.  There is absolutely no denying that I am most definitely part of the problem.

You know, I truly thought that entering the Amazon contest would mark the end of my obsession, at least for a while.  I’ve been in edit mode for entirely too many months, and it’s frankly time to be done with this novel and to move on to its sequel.  Unfortunately, I didn’t read the fine print closely enough.

I want to know who thought it would be a good idea to make the submission window for the contest last TWO WEEKS and then allow those who have already MADE their submissions to edit, change, and otherwise revise/perfect those same submissions right up until the moment the submission period is closed.  Don’t they understand that this means I get to obsess over EVERY SINGLE WORD of my submission for a full TWO WEEKS?  Just accept my submission and be done with it!  Don’t put me through this crazed insanity of “maybe I should have said this instead” or “maybe I should re-read the entire 218 page novel again, just to make sure there aren’t any typos or glitches or obvious flaws in the plot” or even better “maybe I should re-write the first 70 pages of the novel because it’s just not as exciting as the last 150… after all, who cares about character development?”

ARGH!  I truly believe this contest was designed to send hopeful would-be authors into early retirement.  It’s clearly a ploy to weed out the crazies who would otherwise be bombarding overworked literary agents with the “greatest thing they ever wrote”.   Now these agents have a few months of freedom while the crazies bombard the contest instead.  Of course, even better for the agents is when the process of submit, obsess, edit, obsess, edit, obsess, wait, obsess, wait, wait, wait, obsess, wait, obsess, obsess, obsess, wait … drives those same hopeful crazies into a downward spiral of drunken foolishness, and their literary (pseudo-) genius is lost forever.  One less query letter to read, one less manuscript to file in the recycling bin.

Save me from my (blue arrow like) swirling thoughts of craziness!