Furlough Called Off, Due to Congressional, Um, Can-Kicking

With Congress kicking that budgetary can down the road for another two months, we’re back to work as normal on Monday.

Listening to folks at work today, though, was kind of comical. There’s a streak of disappointment going through the plant that the furlough didn’t go through. I think a lot of people, despite the moaning, were looking forward to some unexpected time off work.

The announcement from work is thus:

As you may have heard, Congress passed legislation last night to fund the government through a temporary Continuing Resolution (CR) through January 15, 2014.  While it will take a few days for the Department of Energy to process its funding distributions, CWI has existing carry over funding to sustain operations until receipt of the funding allotment next week. 

As such, DOE-ID has authorized CWI to resume work, thereby averting the planned furlough.  Accordingly, all employees are directed to report to work on their normal schedule on Monday October 21, 2013.  We will provide additional information as necessary if there are any new developments.

I appreciate your support during these times of uncertainty and I’m excited to keep everyone working!  We will conduct a safety stand-up meeting Monday morning  to ensure we are fully focused  after experiencing the distractions of the past couple weeks.  Please coordinate closely with your managers and supervisors to confirm you have clear guidance as you move forward with all CWI activities, maintaining our stellar record of safety and performance. 

Again, a big ‘THANK YOU’ you for your patience, understanding, and caring!  This workforce is the best!  Keep your eye on the ball – see you next week!

There's A Peck Here, and He's Got Marketing Experience Pointed Right At Me!

Thinking about ebook marketing, because I hope to have an ebook to publish within the next six months. And I’m listening to Clay Shirky speak at a LinkedIn symposium in which he’s talking about how social media is bringing an end to the traditional business thoughts of what constitutes “the audience.”

Learning some fascinating stuff.

Here’s the germ of his talk: Businesses need to figure out how to make their audience more than just potential transactions.

Here’s further eludication:

Amazon says if we give them a place to tell one another how much they love this book, it won’t be good for business in any kind of direct transactional sense this person has already bought the book and no one is going to buy the book based on the 6,021^st recommendation. What is happening here is that there’s a platform for human engagement which allows Amazon to have an audience that’s just more than an aggregate of potential transactions.

Robert Newton Peck hits upon this idea in his book on writing, “Secrets of Successful Fiction.”

He did it all physically, speaking wherever anyone invited him, taking whatever compensation was offered. He knew he wasn’t going to make a lot of money on these trips. But he knew that trip by trip he’d be able to sell books. Here’s what he said back in 1980, well before the opularity of the Internet, and long before social networking made this kind of thing a bit simpler to accomplish:

Knowing that I am far from ever being the most gifted novelist at Doubleday, Knopf, and Little, Brown, I decided to be their best salesman.

All over the country trots Peck, speaking at schools, libraries, colleges, and in many a damp church basement. I keynote almost every month at state conferences of librarians, teachers, and reading specialists.

I talk to groups of men, women, and children.

Do you know when the best time is to sell a book? I do. It’s right after you speak.

So wherever you go, take tons of books with you. I have twenty-five books out and they are all in print? Why? Because I huckster them with shameless abandon.

There you stand, in front of a hundred eager listeners, who want not just one of your books, but one of your autographed books. Sign a lot of books and you’ll sign a lot of checks. Writing is not an art: It’s a business. It’s what you do for a living.

Soooo, what are hucksters of ebooks to do?

Might be as simple as bringing a laptop, ensuring your location has a wi-fi connection, and directing folks to Amazon.com or your own book selling site. Or engaging in some kind of nifty ebook signing technomancy, like this.

Here’s how an Autography eBook “signing” will work: a reader poses with the author for a photograph, which can be taken with an iPad camera or an external camera. The image immediately appears on the author’s iPad (if it’s shot with an external camera, it’s sent to the iPad via Bluetooth). Then the author uses a stylus to scrawl a digital message below the photo. When finished, the author taps a button on the iPad that sends the fan an e-mail with a link to the image, which can then be downloaded into the eBook.

Now that is nifty.

Conversely, authors can be active on the social web. That’s certainly my intention. If I’m ever popular enough to attract even a small audience. Small or not, I’ll be there chatting with them, because who knows – that might sell a few more books.

Is that contrary to what Shirky says? Possibly. But if readers see value in the social web interactions and some of them see that as the end, not the means, then I’m fine with that. Others may notice their activity and come aboard, buy a book or two, and enjoy the conviviality as well.

Furlough Forward

By all indications, I’ll be furloughed next week.

That could last a week, or longer, depending on how long the ongoing derpfest in DC continues. If the news today is any harbinger of the future, a week may be too little time.

Ours is a dual-income family, because in addition to my full-time job, I also teach part-time. Having that money coming in is a blessing, though it’s not near enough to cover the bills if this turns into a long-term arrangement. We do have savings we can dip into – a rainy day fund that should last us about three months if we’re careful.

We are luckier than most. We do have a house payment, but it’s less than many of the nearby apartments rent for. We have no car payments, very little credit card debt and only month-to-month bills to fret about. We should be fine for three months or so, hoping, of course, that the furlough doesn’t last out the month of October.

But we’re torn.

Part of me thinks I should spend the time next week hanging drywall in the basement to finally cover up the new furnace ducts (thank heaven we paid for that work in cash). Part of us also think we should take the family to Disneyland, just to show Congress that life goes on. That makes me a little nervous, not knowing of course how long the furlough may last and how long we’ll have to stretch our reserves. No matter what happens, I still plan on standing in front of Rep. Mike Simpson’s shuttered Idaho Falls office waving a “CONGRESS FARTED” sign.

Most interesting to see is all the bright, shiny news about a Senate deal in the works to end the shutdown. What nobody seems to want to emphasize is that both the House and the Senate have to pass anything before it comes into effect, and the White House still isn’t talking to the House much at all these days. So pardon me if I’m pessimistic. I’m a believer in Reagan’s words, but not necessarily for the reasons he said them. All parties involved say they’re here to help, but you’ll note none of them agree on exactly where that elusive “here” might be.

Three Cluttered Pigs

I’m going to reveal a little secret about the “Three Little Pigs” assignment:

I hate it.

Why do I hate it?

Because of the subjective nature of the English language.

What is cluttered writing? And, when you get to the bottom of it, is cluttered writing all that bad?

Consider this little bit of writing:

It was much more important to him to get a clear understanding of his position, but he could not think clearly while these people were here, the second policeman's belly - and they could only be policemen - looked friendly enough, sticking out towards him, but when K. looked up and saw his dry, boney face it did not seem to fit with the body. His strong nose twisted to one side as if ignoring K. and sharing an understanding with the other policeman. What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home? He was always inclined to take life as lightly as he could, to cross bridges when he came to them, pay no heed for the future, even when everything seemed under threat. But here that did not seem the right thing to do. He could have taken it all as a joke, a big joke set up by his colleagues at the bank for some unknown reason, or also perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday, it was all possible of course, maybe all he had to do was laugh in the policemen's face in some way and they would laugh with him, maybe they were tradesmen from the corner of the street, they looked like they might be - but he was nonetheless determined, ever since he first caught sight of the one called Franz, not to lose any slight advantage he might have had over these people.

Is it easy to read? No. And consider that any one of us could look at this piece of writing and edit it savagely, cutting it down to this:

He couldn’t think clearly with all these people here. One policemen, with the fat belly, looked friendly enough. But when K. looked at his boney face with the twisted nose, he felt it didn’t match the body. He looked suspicious. Who are these people? What were they talking about? Who do they belong to? He lived in a free country, where the laws were upheld. Who would dare accost him in his own home? He didn’t take life too seriously, didn’t worry about the future, even when things looked gloomy. But that didn’t feel right now. Maybe this was a joke, set up by his friends at the bank? Because it was his thirtieth birthday, after all. Maybe all he had to do was laugh and point out the joke, and the policemen would laugh with him and turn out to be shopkeepers from up the street, put up to the joke. But he was determined not to lose any advantage over these people. He did not laugh.

And even my version could be pared down.

But here’s the trick: The passage we just edited is from an English Hungarian author Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Kafka is considered a literary genius. To edit his prose – to cut out the confused syntax, one thought running into the other from the mind of a man arrested in his bed one fine morning for no reason neither he nor the arresting officers can fathom, robs the passage of its mystery and its impact.

Yes, we should speak in clear language. But what is clear and what is valuable is subjective, person to person.

So here’s what I hope you get out of our exercise:

Avoid the passive voice.

Some of this may sound familiar from your high school English courses: Sentences have subjects, verbs, and direct objects (the target of the action), as in this following sentence:

Snow White ate the poisoned apple.

Snow White, the subject, does something – eats – to the direct objet/target, the poisoned apple.

That’s the active voice – the subject doing the action. It’s clear what’s going on.

Enter the passive voice, in which the target of the action is promoted to doing the action, even though the target isn’t doing anything.

Here’s what the passive voice looks like:

The poisoned apple was eaten by Snow White.

Who is doing the action? It’s still Snow White. The apple is just being eaten, it’s not doing anything. Not even screaming.

Why is this bad?

You can sort out the object and target in the passive voice example I provided. But what about this one:

Mistakes were made. (Credit to Grammar Girl for this wonderful example)

 

Who made the mistakes? We don’t really know, do we? Here, the passive voice is used for humorous effect – the little one-eared rabbit would not rather fess up to having made the mistakes himself, so to the leering figure, he merely says “Mistakes were made.” It’s a weasely way to deflect responsibility. We hear politicians talk like this all the time. If you learn to recognize the passive voice, you can learn when people speaking to you might not want to reveal all the information they have at their disposal.

It’s easy to slip into the passive voice. The active voice reveals, the passive voice conceals. Sometimes.

So using active voice versus passive voice is an exercise in being clear. If, for example, I said “The assignments were graded,” I could mean I graded the assignments, or that my wife did, or that I let my nine-year-old read them and assign grades based on how he was feeling at the moment. If, however, I say “I graded the assignments,” it’s clear who did the action.

Avoid clutter. Unless you clutter for effect.

Consider this headline:

“Kitten taken from Boise shelter by teens has been returned.”

This is in the past tense, but it’s not in the passive voice.

There’s still something missing, though.

What could you imply by reading the headline?

When I read it, I thought, “Oh, the miscreant teens who took the kitten from the shelter returned it.” That’s reasonable, right?

Not really. Because when you read the article, you see the parents of the teens who took the kitten returned it.

The headline is unclear on that point. Because it's cluttered.

So what to do?

Eliminate clutter, and eliminate confusion.

What’s important here? That the kitten was returned, or that the kitten taken by teens was returned?

We could write “Kitten taken from Boise shelter is returned.” And then let the first sentence of the article fill in the detail: “A group of teenagers stole a kitten from the Idaho Humane Society Saturday, but parents made sure the animal was returned Monday morning.”

Cutting clutter from the headline made it less likely that the reader would imply incorrect information from what was written.

Hate it When This Happens . . .

Winter Camping

I see a lot of this in my future . . .

Civil Disobedience

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849.

We can either accept the government that we have or take steps to change that government into what we want.

But that’s harder than it looks. Or sounds. Or best testing indicates.

Casey Neistat did a little bit of what I mean, in making this video showing why at times it’s impossible or hazardous to stay in New York City’s bike lanes. He got a $50 ticket for wandering out of the lane. But was safer doing so.

So what can we do, with a government that closes the open-air monuments on the Mall in Washington to tourists, but allows pro-immigration protesters access to that same Mall during the same week?

We do what would-be visitors to the World War II memorial on the Mall did: We cross the barricades. We demonstrate, as does Mr. Neistat, the danger of being too literal in obeying a law when there are others around who do not.

There are folks jumping the fences and barricades at national parks. Some, I’m sure, for the thrill of it. And some, of course, out of desire to be civilly disobedient. Utah’s San Juan County, for one, is rumbling about taking on duties of letting people use the national parks in its borders, as a demonstration of a local government being civilly disobedient.

I, for one, think that’s a fantastic idea.

What am I doing?

Nothing.

And that’s sad. Because those who do nothing have the government they deserve.

Oh, I’ve got plans. If I get furloughed on Monday, my plan is to hang out at Rep. Mike Simpson’s shuttered office in Idaho Falls until somebody notices.

“I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward,” says Henry David Thoreau in Civil Disobedience. “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

He goes on:

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

The remedy right now is worse than the evil. Yes, evil is in the eye of the beholder, but Thoreau points to anticipating and providing for reform as more desirable than scoring political points and remaining inflexible.

A good compromise shows, they say, when both parties go away from the agreement disappointed in what they did not get but glad for what they got. Compromise shouldn’t come in name-calling, weak-ass analogies (President Obama, this is not leadership, it’s schoolyard name-calling), locking US citizens and foreign nationals in a hotel to prevent them from “recreating” at Yellowstone National Park, and other excuses for not doing anything because to give in to the other side would be perceived as weakness.

Face it, Feds, you all look bad already. Congress has an approval rating of 5 percent, without anyone giving a cuss for what party those Congressmen belong to.

So here’s to seeing what Thursday brings.

Becoming A Visual Storyteller

NOTE: A little something I'm trying out for my writing students. It's not quite ready yet. Suggestions?

Writers want readers to keep reading.

Writers do that best by telling stories.

The best stories connect to the reader personally by offering them detail – or withholding it – in ways that compels them to continue.

Do these clips show or tell? Do they do both? What do they show? What do they tell? What do they withhold? Explain your answer.

Wall-E

Charlie Chaplin

Peter Sellers

Steve Martin

I’ll take the last one as an example.

This clip tells us little. We don’t know who the man, the woman, or the child are. We don’t know if they have a relationship. We don’t know where they are, or what circumstances have brought them together. We know it’s winter.

This clip shows us a lot, or at least lets us assume a lot. (As writers, we can let our readers assume, because our readers are smart. But if we want them to assume, we have to show them the right kinds of clues so they assume at least some of what we’re going to tell them.)

We can assume the man is used to living alone; an unexpected noise, not of an animal or of the environment – but of a human being – startles him. We can assume the woman and child have a relationship. We can assume their presence in this environment is accidental or at least poorly planned– neither woman nor child are adequately prepared, clothing-wise, least of all the woman. We can assume it’s cold, because even with a blanket and wearing a jacket and sleeping near the fire, the man has to stoke the fire to get additional heat.

We can assume the man’s house is not their intended destination – if it is, why wait outside in the cold?

We can assume the woman is troubled. Her appearance is haggard. She is unkempt. She either left home without a coat, or has no coat to wear. And while her child has a coat, it is unzipped and she has no shoes on; only the feet in her pajamas protect her. No mother in full control of herself would allow her child outside in such circumstances, or allow her to wander off in such an environment.

And we, as readers/viewers, are begging for more. We want to know who these people are, and what brought them together. Most certainly, we want to know what happens to them.

This is excellent writing.

Do I expect this kind of writing from you?

No.

Not yet. Because I’m still struggling with doing this kind of thing myself.

But I do want you to think about details. I want you to think about what you should show, and what you should tell. We can do this with any kind of writing. I’ll show you. Here’s my “This I Believe” essay.

I sat in the back of Mrs. Barrett’s third grade classroom, next to the bookshelf.

When I got my school work done – and sometimes even before it was finished – I’d pull a book off the shelf to read. There I found the magical worlds of Robert C. O’Brien, Beverly Cleary, Alexander Key, and so many others.

I wondered at a new world alongside Jon O’Connor after he fell through that forgotten door from his planet into the wilds of the Carolinas, befriended by the Bean family, hunted by the greedy Gilby Pitts. I tagged along in the background as Henry Huggins romped with Ribsy, that ragged, sharp-eyebrowed dog beneath the bold serif font declaring his name on the cover of the book. I sat beside Mrs. Frisby in the rats’ library, rapt at the story of the how the rats of NIMH gained their intelligence and how they hoped to use it to stop stealing from man, and later soared with her on the back of Jeremy the crow in the film inspired by the book.

Then I promptly did nothing about it.

Oh, I did little things. A poem here, a short story there. But through several fits and starts, I never did what I set out to do, there in the back corner of Mrs. Barrett’s classroom at Lincoln Elementary.

Until 2010.

By then, my wife and I had a third-grader of our own, plus two other children. I was working as a writer – but as a technical writer at a Department of Energy laboratory, after ten years as a journalist. It paid the bills, but hardly satisfied the soul.

During a lunch break in late January that year, however, I sat at my computer mulling the madelines of memory. I pecked out a few hundred words, centered on two boys, bored at living in their primitive village, longing instead to climb the cliffs that ringed them in and climb toward the stars, then over and out the green pass that led to the world beyond.

Maybe, I thought, I have something.

So the next day, at lunch, I wrote some more.

Each day, it became an obsession. Write a few more hundred words about these curious boys, now departed from the only home they’ve known into a mysterious school training them to become –I didn’t know. I kept writing, on the bus rides home, late into the night on weekends. And at lunch. Many lunches. I posted snippets of this growing story on my blog. If anyone ever read them, I didn’t know it. I knew a third-grader who was reading them. And he kept insisting, staring at those words in the ethers, that the story continue.

It did.

By January 2011, those first few hundred words turned into 114,000 words.

I’d written a novel.

It’s unpublished. It’s unedited. It’s raw. But there, in that little folder on my desktop, in that binder at home, on the thumb drives were I’ve stored it, my first novel awaits the finishing touch that may someday lead it to sit on a bookshelf in the back corner of some dusty classroom where another kid will pull it off the shelf and fall into the world I created because that inner third-grader who still loves the rats of NIMH told me I had to do it.

I believe, with the proper tools and motivation, one person can indeed move a mountain. I’ve got other mountains to move yet, but at least I’ve finally written a story that’ll get me out of the foothills and back on that track I found in that desk next to the bookshelf in the back of Mrs. Barrett’s third-grade classroom.

What do I show?

I show where and in what environment I decided I wanted to become a writer.

What do I tell?

I tell I’m still working on it.

What do I leave out?

I leave out that I’ve written three other unpublished books since then, and that I’m still working on them until they’re good. I hope I left you wanting to know more, but not so much more that you’re mad I left too much out.

This is like “Angels on A Pin.” There is no one right way to write, no one right way to tell a story. There are infinite ways to do so, and it’s up to us to find out which ways we can work with.

Our Government, Playing "Wheel of Fish"

As silly as the government shutdown is, it’s not as silly as what led up to it:

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

True, the Republican Party seemed bent on shutting the government down over a showdown on Obamacare, but let’s consider the Democratic Prime Alternative:

Letting the Republican Party shut down the government over a showdown on Obamacare.

Yeah, that is their solution. Don’t fix things, just let the other party implode and reap the political rewards, scant as they may be in an institution that has an overall approval rating of 10 percent.  Way to be, Congress!

Which means – no surprise here – that both parties are imploding. One is tilting at windmills, while the other is less interested in action than letting the other party tilt at windmills for perceived political gain. Nothing that’s going to help the country. Nothing that’s going to solve any problems. Just stuff that’s going to score political points.

Armageddon, the Constitution hanging by a thread, the doom of the Republic, is not going to come from any certain bit of legislation, nor from one certain political party. It’s going to come when politics and score-keeping and political point-making is the end, not the sideline, to what Congress and the president do.

So, we’re there folks.

Congress (and I mean both political parties) and the president, metaphorically, have gone for what’s in the box.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Stupid! Stupid! You’re so stupid!

What the Best Science Shows

So. Still nervous about nuclear power, given the disaster that occurred at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in early 2011 when it was first damaged by an earthquake and then a tsunami?

You shouldn’t be.

Nor should you believe the majority of what’s been reported on the accident, its severity, and government “worst-case scenarios” that had 30 million people in metropolitan Tokyo evacuating due to an impending plume of radiation.

So says Paul Blustein and a bevy of nuclear experts he interviews at Slate.com, in an article that should be read by anyone in favor of nuclear energy and by those who oppose it. Especially those who fear nuclear energy but rail on those who fear climate change.

Here’s the deal, summed up: politics and misinterpretations by news agencies across the world made the disaster at Fukushima seem much more dangerous than it ever was.

Says Blustein:

[T]he public deserves to know what the best available science shows. Whatever conclusions people draw about the implications of the accident, the following should be borne in mind: The claim that an evacuation of Tokyo could have been necessary is based on flimsy, easily rebuttable evidence. Furthermore, the falsity of that claim is indicative of the distortions in much of the Fukushima news coverage. That coverage has given rise to baseless fears about Fukushima that have heavily influenced public opinion. It is time to dispel those fears.

Even more illuminating is what Gregory Jaczko, chariman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in the days after the disaster, per Blustein:

There’s what’s worst-case, and then there’s what’s possible. We should produce a worst case that’s actually possible. I mean, a worst case would be that you eject the core and somebody puts it in a bag and carries it across the ocean and pus that in  . . . California. So I think we should produce a source term that is truly what I would call a worst case but a possible scenario.

Politicians looked at some worst-case, but implausible, scenarios, spun up their own, and fed it to a media primed and ready to shout about the nuclear boogeyman. At the same time decrying those who do the same with climate change – ignoring the science, trumpeting exactly what the echo-chamber listeners want to hear.

We deal with worst-case scenarios where I work all the time. There was a time when an airplane crashing into one of our waste retrieval tents seemed implausible. Not now. We drill for that. We drill for fires and waste spills and earthquakes and other events – but all are possible. We don’t deal in the improbable. And neither should our trusted nuclear experts nor politicians nor the media.