My Auspicious Career as an Author

I got an email this afternoon informing me that a piece I wrote, Shush will be run on the Drabblecast later this week.

My first published story. All 100 words of it. No money (Even at the "good" rate of $0.03 per word, that's... $3), but still, I'm happy about it. One story submitted, one story accepted; that's a pretty good ratio.

They also asked for a bio. Something to read on the show to introduce the author.

A bio? About me? Golly. How do I sum up all the stuff I do, and still come out brief, interesting, and maybe even humble? (I have a lot to be humble about. Take that as you will.) All I knew was that I didn't want to end it, as so many authors do, by telling people that they live in "X" town with a wife and three cats. Clichés aside, I'd need two more cats.

Here's what I came up with:

By day, Andy pushes pixels and corrals commas as a graphic artist and webmaster for Eisenbrauns, an academic publisher specializing in the ancient Near East. Drabblecast listeners may remember Andy and/or Eisenbrauns from Drabblecast #109, with the Babylon Battle of the Bands Bbardle. Or... you might not—go give it a listen. It's a great story, and an awesome song.

By night, Andy is a husband and father, with three children under the age of seven, and says that treehouses are worth every penny and drop of sweat you put into them.

Andy's other published works include You Know You're an MK When..., a book he co-wrote and published with his then-girlfriend (now wife) about the idiosyncracies of life as the children of missionaries. Between the two of them, they've lived in five different countries, but call Winona Lake, Indiana, "home" ...for now.

Did I succeed? Dunno. You tell me.

How to speak Andalú

Part of the joy/trials/tribulations of moving to Spain was having to learn Spanish all over again. I'd spoken it well when I was a kid in Costa Rica, but we left for southern California when I was seven or so, and that was the end of that. (Supposedly, one needs to be exposed to a language up until age ten to remember it.) Now, I still had the canto, the the song, so to speak, of the language, and I remembered some vocabulary, but I knew absolutely nothing of grammar other than what sounded right.

In many respects, this is one of the few times where I honestly say, "Thank God for television." The news, especially. Here were people who were trained to speak clearly using good grammar and pronunciation. Be that as it may, what I understood on TV, and what I understood on the street were two different matters entirely. Andaluz, the... accent? dialect? ...that they speak in Andalucía, where I was, is a lesson in great economy. I can't tell you how many times I've heard kids contract "Mamá" into "¡Maáa!" as they were yelling up to the second floor for someone to let them in. If written Hebrew gets rid of the vowels, spoken Andaluz gets rid of the consonants. I remember, very early on, one of the guys in the church youth group trying to teach me how to speak "Andalu" ("Instead of 'voy a la casa de Paco' say, "vocapáo'") ...I just stared in amazement.

So it was with a great deal of laughter that I watched this video, "Curso Dandalú." Yes, normally you'd say, "Curso de Andaluz," but we're going for authenticity...

Note: The video may not make much sense unless you speak Spanish.

Note: Even if you do, it may not make sense anyway.

Three conversations

Deborah and the kids were getting ready to go to Science Central this morning, while I was getting ready to head off for work. (Which is grossly unfair. I want to go to Science Central...) While I was pulling on my socks, Aiden came and found me.

Aiden: Daddy, daddy, daddy, are you going to work?
Me: Yes.
Aiden: OK, just make sure you come home.
Me: OK, Aiden.

It was the sort of thing where you laugh for five seconds, and think for two hours.

* * *

As I was shaking out a bag this morning, something wet and black slipped out, streaked my leg, and made several blots and a lump on the floor.

"Ack! What in the world was that?"

Fiona hurried over and looked at it in fascination.

"It's a splatterpillar!"

I still don't know what it was — or used to be — but Fiona's neologism was certainly apt.

* * *

Aiden: Daddy, daddy, daddy*, would you get me the golf ball from the Everything Room?
Me: What's it doing in there?
Aiden: Sitting still?

---

Notes
* Daddy, daddy, daddy: When Deborah reads books, she's largely lost to the world. After some research, we figured out that you have to call her at least three times to actually get her attention. Fiona gets around this by combining a greeting with a flying leap, but Aiden and I resort to the triple hail. Aiden, however, has gotten the idea that this is what you need to do to get anyone's attention, not just Deborah's while she's reading. The fact that he also tends to stutter a bit, and restart his sentences often, makes for some rather recursive conversations.

Foot in Mouth Disease

My co-worker still isn't talking to me, the one that designed the catalog cover. I'm not sure how he found my post. I'm not certain I wrote it well. I meant to talk more about how what we know gets in the way of communicating. I think I ended up making fun of the cover, instead.

The Incredible, Edible Letter G: Three Thoughts on Learning to Read

While we were on the way home from our small group last night, several people started singing the alphabet song. They did so in various keys, rhythms, and meters, and largely without regard for harmony or unison with anyone else. So it took a few minutes to catch on to what they were singing:

a, b, c, d, e, f, EGG!, h, i, j, k, elemeno, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z!

Eggs appeared consistently after F, but in subsequent performances, squares, houses, and big rigs started appearing throughout the alphabet. By the time we got home, the alphabet was so surreal that the kids could barely sing it for laughing.

***

I was making my lunch this morning, and discussing the magnetic letters on the fridge with Fiona. She was sounding out the letters, and then, with this bright look of amazement, put all the sounds together, and said, "Andy? It says Andy???" I wasn't the one who had put it there, but I was still pleased that my own name was the first thing she had read. (At least as far as I know. Deborah may know differently!) That shining look of wonder just made my day.

***

Fiona keeps asking me to read my cuneiform mug whenever I use it, but I'm afraid I'm not much help... that dawn of comprehension hasn't come over me yet. I should at least memorize the pronunciation of the Akkadian text, even if I never learn to read it properly.

New Emoticons

Most of us here are familiar with "emoticons" — sideways smiles and winks we add to our posts and emails to help convey certain sentiments. Only using the standard keyboard characters available to you is quite limiting, though, and I figured I could do better. Just adding the International Phonetic Alphabet to the standard set of emoticons opens up all kinds of new possibilities:

That was tasty, but I'll probably regret it later.

colon, hyphen, Unicode ʠ (Latin small letter q with hook — voiceless uvular implosive)

My lips are sealed, but you can't stop me from smirking.

colon, hyphen, Unicode ɟ (Latin small letter dotless j with bar — voiced palatal stop)

I am screaming so loudly that you can see my uvula quite plainly

colon, hyphen, Unicode ʚ (Latin small letter closed epsilon — lower-mid front rounded vowel)

I'm keeping an eye on you, buddy.

Unicode ʘ (Latin letter bilabial click), hyphen, close parenthesis

I'll create more in the days to come. In the meantime... ʘ-)

Editing and Ice Cream

Many years ago, I participated in an editing contest at work. (For those who don't know, I work at a publishing company.) The prize was a Subway gift certificate, and the goal of the contest was to see who could best edit a single sentence and correctly identify all the errors therein. To my surprise, I won. (This probably has something to do with the fact that all the professional editors were barred from the contest.) Aside from pinning down most of the grammatical errors, I was the only participant that actually did any fact-checking — turns out that a major premise presented in the material was false, and my entry was praised above all others for catching that.

Returning to the present day, as I've been working with Deborah to go over the text of YKYAMKW for the next printing, one item caught my eye:

271. You get excited about ice cream, but think that Baskin Robbins might be a legal firm, Häagen Dazs a European conductor, and TCBY a mission organization (Taking Christ’s Blessing to Youth).

Now, aside from some punctuation issues, it's always bothered me that I'd never even heard of TCBY as a missions organization. TCBY frozen yogurt, yes — I'd had it twice, back in California, with the LACC youth group — but missions, no. I always thought it was a weird name, anyway. So, after having this entry in the book for over ten years now, I decided to look it up.

Guess what?

It doesn't exist!

Or, maybe, it did, and it was so obscure that there's no mention of it anywhere on the web outside of YKYAMKW. Have you ever heard of it? Have I been duped for over a decade into thinking this was a real organization? I would dearly like to know.

In the meantime, I wonder what I should do... leave it as it is? Found a missions organization by that same name? Make up an alternate ending involving Ben and Jerry, those obnoxious twins from the other dorm? Go have some ice cream....? Hmm, I answered my own question...

May goes native on us

The four of us were sitting around the table last night, playing Barricada (an Ecuadorian board game) when May, annoyed by some cereal under her chair, said, "The kitchen needs vacuumed." We reacted instantly:

"Whoa, May!"
"May, wow, you Hoosier!"
"Two months and you're already talking like that!"

It's a bit of Indiana grammar that I've never gotten used to: the complete lack of helping verbs. It needs to be done. Or, perhaps, a nice gerund: It needs doing. But needs done still drives me up a wall every time I hear it. Apparently it affects Paul and Deborah the same way!

I will, of course, tease May mercilessly about this for a week.