Trainsformers

This is so wrong, and yet so very right. I don't dare show it to my kids, though - there's a fair chance that they would force me to keep playing it for years to come...

More Walls, More Shining

There's another little chunk of chapter one ("Vital Revocation") up at The Shining Walls. As usual, I'd appreciate it if you could point out any errors in spelling, grammar, or attention span (missing words, etc.) in the piece. It will get a proper run of proofreading later on, but every little bit helps.

Making Bargains With Children

So, we're potty training Secondborn. (He's three.) This is not what you'd call a high stress endeavor; it's more sort of laying groundwork for a serious attempt later. If he gets it now, great; if it turns out that he's just not ready yet, that's fine too.

But part of the process we're using is that we're offering a reward for each successful Poop On The Potty. And by "reward" I mean "toy". This has met with limited success, and therefore limited toys. (If we get to the point where he can manage his business reliably, we'll move on to stage two: earning a point for each day he doesn't poop in his pull-ups.)

So it's going reasonably well, as far as Seconborn is concerned. However, Secondborn is not the only child in our house, and he's not the only one with opinions on this plan.

Specifically, the plan has led to Firstborn complaining that he wasn't getting anywhere near the same opportunity to earn new toys. I explained that he had gone through the same process back when he was about Secondborn's age, and thereby earned his fair share of toys. To my great surprise, Firstborn was not entirely mollified by this knowledge.

So I have offered him a deal. In first grade, in his current school, Firstborn gets a weekly homework pack. It comes in on Monday, and it's due on Friday. Some of the work - spelling words, timed readings - needs to be repeated nightly. However, there are always three one-shot assignments as well. Generally we spread them out, so each night we do the nightly work and one of the one-shots, leaving Thursday night with only the nightly stuff.

If that last paragraph was absolutely indecipherable, I apologize.

Anyway, some homework gets done every night; the rest of it has to be done by the time it goes back Friday morning. The deal I've offered Firstborn is that he can earn himself a new Skylander if he gets all the "any time during the week" assignments done today. If it works - if he manages it - then all we'll have to deal with for the rest of the week is the spelling words and the timed readings.

Ideally, of course, this will serve as a lesson in the benefits of getting unpleasant chores out of the way as quickly as possible. More likely, it will serve as a lesson in Getting Toys From One's Parents. But hey, it's worth a try, right? And either way, it'll make the rest of the week a little easier...

Filler: VNV Nation

Filling in for my lack of sleep written content with some music from VNV Nation:

Darkangel:

Writer Blocked

I'd like to introduce a new term. It's similar to Writer's Block, but it's external - not internal. I'm calling it Writer Blocked. And it's basically a name for that peculiar phenomenon where, every single time you start to make progress on any sort of writing project, the Universe conspires to throw every obstacle it can find into your path.

You want some examples? Okay, as long as I'm ranting anyway:

• Random phone calls...
• Neighborhood kids knocking on the door...
• Your own children, being clingy and demanding because they're sick...
• Your children, refusing to go sleep and give you that precious half an hour of quiet time before you collapse yourself, because they're not sick...
• Getting sick yourself... (Every single time I get into a project. I swear. Every. Single. Time.)
• Your spouse describing her day, because you've just sat down at your computer and opened a word processor, and so are clearly available to talk...
• Cats meowing for food...
• Cats meowing for water...
• Cats meowing for incomprehensible reasons of their own...
• Children getting back out of bed because they don't want to go to sleep by themselves...
• Friends and family calling you up for technical support...
• Friends and family calling you up to ask about upcoming plans...
• School book fairs, or PTA Meetings, or just good old-fashioned homework that somehow hasn't gotten done yet...
• The sudden and inconvenient realization that if you don't stop and run some laundry, you won't have any socks to wear to work in the morning...
• Or any pants...
• The discovery that you're too tired to focus on the screen, let alone compose text...
• Massive, evening-and-weekend-consuming projects at work...

...And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, some of this is unavoidable. And some of it could be resolved by that classic bit of advice for writers who are - as I currently am - frustrated by their lack of writing time and/or writing progress: "You have to make writing a priority." I mean yes, technically, I could do that - if I wanted to be the sort of asshole who blows off their kids and leaves their spouse doing all the work because they're busy with their own projects.

And, yes, a lot of this will ease up or blow over - we're about three weeks out from the Big Event that marks the end of our busy season at work, and we're nearing the end of my wife's teaching semester, and the boys will eventually be less sick (though that doesn't always give me any more writing time), and at some point I hope to stop being sick myself.

Even so, there really does seem to be some particularly evil corollary of Murphy's Law when it comes to writing projects...

Wisdom from my six-year-old...

Me: "Work hard and be good. Do what your teacher tells you."

Firstborn: "Who wouldn't do what the boss says?" {Thinks.} "Maybe if it was a good henchman and an evil boss." {Thinks some more.} "A good henchman and an evil boss would be a nasty combination."

Real Work Conversations: In Hell

My boss: (picking up the phone) "Dante's Seventh Level."

Me: "The icy center."

Boss: "Just sec." (To me) "What was that? I heard 'icy' something."

Me: "Icy center. That's what you get when you get to the seventh level. It's the icy center."

Boss: "I thought it was a gooey center."

Me: "That's a Tootsie-Pop."