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The Golden Age (a poem)

“She’s got a rule. She never dates her friends.”
“I know,” he said. “I really hate that rule….”

She keeps it, though, and she is all alone.
Alone at home, at work when it gets bad.
There’s trouble in the air, has been for years,
Then something breaks one quiet afternoon
At a presidential speech.
A kid is killed, and soon it’s on the news
And riots follow, cities start to burn.
There’s soldiers in the streets, and all too soon
There’s bombs.
And she is all alone.

She goes back to a place she once called home,
To friends who all among them made her world
And quietly they watch this world burn down.
All huddled up, squeezed tight on that sad couch
In his tiny apartment, second floor,
And wonder what the future holds in store.

For days it’s dazed and frightened disbelief.
At night their only light is CNN.
Then Dave hears that his boss has got a plan
The governor needs him to craft a speech
A bold address to set the city right
And bring back hope and reason, end the fight.
They go — these four, these friends, these college buds.
They’re kids, but they’ve been called to save the world
And only one has doubts — in that, she’s all alone.

More bombs in store, more death than they could guess
But through it all, he holds them to the course.
He’s brave for her — he saves the day for her —
But in the end they all are heroes true.
Here in the quiet Heartland, they wake up.
They face a dragon, slay a villain dark,
And live storybook lives in too-real life.

But then it’s done. It’s done, and they’re all safe,
But her mother back home is so afraid.
Her dad is, too, and asks her to come back.
To leave her friends, and come back to her home.
And hero though he is, her friend, she’s got a rule.
So she goes home, to grander stories yet….

And she is all alone.

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Journal Entry: October 30, 2009

I’m not going to pretend any of you are surprised at the lack of updates. I’m also not going to pretend there will be any rectification of that issue in the next thirty-one days. NaNoWriMo is here, and it gets my words. What I have to spare will end up in emails and FaceBook Discussion Board posts encouraging my other writers to stick with it.

That’s what I’ve been busy with in the recent bloggish doldrums. Two years ago when I decided to bully Dad and Heather into writing their books, I put together a prewriting curriculum for them, and I’ve used some of those exercises with a couple other people since, but I never really nailed them down.

I’ve spent much of the last two weeks getting them sorted out, cleaned up, and properly annotated (the exercises are now two-parters: lessons on topics in story design, paired with specific assignments).

I also went through all the exercises and did them for my own NaNoWriMo project, to set a good example, but I ended up having to switch projects right in the middle of all that, so it was a real mess. As of yesterday I’m all done, though, and ready to get to work.

Of course, I’ve been playing a lot of WoW, and we’ve had several opportunities to get a whole group together, whether it was D– and me and the brothers-in-law, or Mom and Dad and a nephew, we’ve had a lot of fun.

The kids are doing well, and T– (as always) is a phenomenal wife and mother. It’s amazing how much she gets accomplished, on so little sleep….

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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The OC (Week 9)

This post is part of an ongoing series.

Life is Funny
I started class today with story time. See, one of my students mentioned a couple weeks ago that he didn’t need to do the Employment Packet assignments because he already had a job. The Employment Packet assignments require them to research job openings, and develop a resume (and practice their business letter writing skills a couple more times). While I’m at it I’m teaching them some advanced styling techniques in Word, but that’s just an added bonus.

Anyway, today I started out by asking how many of them already had professional-level jobs or internships, and nearly all the hands went up. I wasn’t surprised by that — I’ve been getting information about their career status from them since the first assignment. Next I asked them how many really believed that would be the last job they ever needed, and only three or four left their hands up.

And, y’know, I’ve read their company profiles, and it’s quite possible. Still, I said, life is funny.

See, when I took that class in my senior year, I had no idea I would be a technical writer. In fact, just a few weeks before I was a technical writer I had no idea I would be a technical writer. I’d spent college killing time in the emptiest of the computer labs as a lab technician, and then supplementing my income by playing Asheron’s Call.

I told them that story, which was fun. I told them how I’d played AC and harvested singularity keys and sold them on eBay. Then, one day, Toby said he could probably write a program to handle that process for me, and we made the Damion bot. By the time it was done, I spent a few months making a couple hundred bucks a week off that.

Then I graduated, and a couple hundred bucks a week wasn’t going to cut it, so I had to get a real job. I got lucky there, because our department chair put me in touch with Mark Lee at Lowrance, who was looking for a new technical writer. He needed a resume, though.

What was I going to put on my resume? I had the writing degree, but all my writing samples were poetry and chapters from a dragon-rider novel. I put down the lab tech job, and my only other work experience before that was as an assistant at a private elementary school. I probably included that. I didn’t list “Professional video game player” as an occupation, but I’m sure I put video games under interests….

Then I went for the interview, and Mark listed all those things. Eyebrows raised in a question, “Says here you’re interested in…video games?” And I nodded, feeling stupid, and he said, “Y’know, the problem with posting a technical writing job opening is that you get all these applicants who know how to write, but don’t know anything about operating the devices. You sound like the kind of guy who could play with the gadgets we make, figure them out, and then explain them in a manual. That’s exactly what we need.”

Life is funny.

A little while later, Toby applied for a job there, too, and it happened to come just as our company was adding a new product to our development — turn-by-turn GPS devices. In Toby’s interview, he told them the story of designing the software that guided my character through dungeons to gather singularity keys for me while I slept, and that pretty much got him the job. Half a year later, he was in charge of developing the turn-by-turn software.

Life is funny.

Auto-generated Text
That whole bit was more mentoring than Tech Writing teaching, but it made a great introduction to my class lecture, which was on auto-generated text in Microsoft Word. I told them that when I got to Lowrance, Mark was still building Tables of Contents for the manuals by hand. It was dozens of hours of work tacked on to the end of every single project, and it was a huge source of errors (because it’s so easy to leave in a mistake and never notice).

That same spirit of poking around and figuring stuff out that Mark had thought would serve me well with the product documentation came into play with our documentation process, too. I got irritated trying to correct a broken ToC one time, and decided to see what sort of tools existed.

Turns out, Word has a pretty impressive ToC generator built right in. The trick is that you’ve got to use consistent, well-designed heading styles. That’s some of the “advanced styling techniques” I talked about earlier. I’ve spent the last month telling them how to develop these styles, and requiring them to use section headings in all of their homework assignments just to get them ready for this.

All of those assignments have been accompanied with tutorials I developed — six, so far — and each of those tutorials has been structured using a single set of custom styles (chapter heading, section heading, paragraph heading, body text, bullets, block quote, image, and caption). By now the students know well enough how I made those styles that they were able to grasp the significance of each of them.

So I pulled up all six of their tutorials on the overhead, and copied and pasted them together into one big long document, the chapter heading style automatically separating the different tutorials into chapters. I had to make a couple little adjustments (give the heading styles appropriate Outline levels, and make a clone of the chapter heading for the ToC title), and I explained what I was doing as I did it, but about ten minutes into the presentation I was able to scroll to the top of the document, choose Insert | Quick Parts | Field | TOC, and hit OK.

A fully formatted, populated, beautiful Table of Contents appeared on the page. Someone in the back said, “That’s awesome!” Somebody else said, “You cheated!”

Exactly the response I was looking for.

I showed them some more stuff along the same lines. We added automatic chapter numbers, and figure numbering in the captions, and then we built a Table of Illustrations to go with the ToC. We fixed the page numbering so the front matter had little roman numerals and the first page of chapter 1 was labeled 1 (instead of 5).

Then we went to the header and put in a field that shows the chapter title on the top of every page (so if you’re in the middle of chapter 4, you know it’s chapter 4). All of that took about forty minutes. Maybe a little less, and when we were done we had turned a handful of documents into a real book.

It was easy…but only because we’d done our work beforehand. Everything I did relied on the consistent use of well-designed styles. Because all of my chapters used Tutorial Chapter style, and every single section heading was Tutorial Section, and every caption was Tutorial Caption, I was able to do these things. That was really the main point of my lesson for the day. I don’t expect any of them to be able to build a ToC or add a StyleRef field to a document on command. I do expect them to be able to build a document that could support those, though. And if they ever have to work with one that does, I expect them to be able to recognize what’s going on, and use the built-in styles appropriately.

It was a pretty straightforward lecture day, divided evenly between story time and presentation, and when I got to the end of the presentation I let them go. I’d thought about having them build an Index as their in-class activity, but I’m pretty sure that would have taken hours. I filled fifty minutes as it was, and the lingerers and hangers-on kept me in the classroom, talking, until well past 2:15.

More next week.

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The OC (Week 8)

This post is part of an ongoing series.

The Anxiety Persists
So, I’ve been through this often enough now that I can make a pretty good analysis of the situation. Early on it seemed like my pre-class anxiety was getting less and less as it moved from a weeklong problem to one that only took up a couple hours.

With only really one exception, though, I’ve realized that the total severity of the anxiety remains constant, regardless of the duration. That is to say, as my downtime has decreased, it has gotten worse and worse. I spent two hours before class today confident that I was about to die.

Then one o’clock rolled around, I cut off their chatter with a relatively quiet, “Okay,” and I felt fine. Really every week since the first has gone like that. I don’t have any trouble talking to them anymore, it’s just waiting for class to start that gets to me.

National Novel Writing Month
Of course you knew I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to promote NaNoWriMo while teaching a writing class, but I refrained from offering extra credit. Enough of my students have expressed an interest in writing novels, though, that I felt pretty confident making the plug. I started the class out with that, and mentioned that it had “about as much to do with Tech Writing as that conversation about DeBord’s grading practices.”

Still, I recommended it and wrote the URL on the marker board. Incidentally, that’s the first time I’ve used the marker board.

Information
From there I went to the lecture, and my big point for the day was that Tech Writing is about more than just writing down information. Information is more available than ever, but most people have trouble using information. The role of the Tech Writer is to convert existing information into a usable form — and often to convert the same information into multiple forms.

On that last point, I titled the lecture “Repurposing Documentation,” and I described my work environment to them, where every little change to the system requires us to document the status quo, the proposed change, and the predicted effect of the change according to a very specific standard. Well, no, seven very specific (and very different) standards. An Engineering Study requires all of that information in five to ten pages, whereas a Safety Risk Management memo requires it in one short paragraph.

And, I pointed out, until they hired me five years ago, it was the engineers and programmers on my team who were writing those seven different documents for every single project. That point probably hit home. My major focus for the last several assignments has been on finding best practices to minimize the effort of properly formatting documents, which really comes in helpful when trying to repurpose information from one project to the next.

Doing It with Style
I followed that up with a brief demonstration. I pulled up my tutorial for Thursday (“How to Write a Resume”) with no real formatting to it. Everything was reduced to Word’s Normal style. I asked them to identify it, and they said, “It’s instructions on how to write a resume.” I waited for a more specific answer, and someone said, “It’s poorly-formatted instructions on how to write a resume.” I didn’t really get a better answer than that.

So after a moment I said, “This is actually your tutorial for Thursday–” and I got a wave of surprised realization from them. That…wasn’t really how I expected that to go. I use exactly the same wording in the introductory paragraph of every tutorial, so even without the formatting it should have been pretty clear. I guess it made the point better that way (how much of an impact formatting has), but it wasn’t what I expected.

I went ahead, though, and asked them to help me format it. They’ve seen five tutorials now, all with consistent styling, so they were able to tell me where I needed to add spaces between paragraphs, where I needed to bold or change font sizes or change font styles…and after a little while I revealed to them that the document already had custom styles in it, so I could show how easy it was to go through the document and apply those styles.

Then, in the end, I brought up the original, unformatted document and showed it side-by-side with the one we’d just styled for comparison. It was a pretty stark difference, and that worked well.

The whole demonstration didn’t, though. I’m not sure if I failed to set it up properly, or if I misjudged how familiar they would be with my tutorials, or what. I didn’t feel like they engaged with it, though. Something to remember for next time, if there’s a next time.

Playing Games
It didn’t take terribly long, though, which was entirely my intention. As I was pointing out the differences between the two documents, I mentioned that once I had the custom styles designed and once I knew my basic template, it became just as easy to make the good tutorial as it would have been to make a crappy, unstyled one — and look how much better the results were!

And they all agreed. So I looked around the room, and said, “Hey, remember back in week two when you guys made tutorials?” Immediately I got good-natured groans.

That was the time I divided them kindergarten-style into three groups, so today I made them return to those groups. Then I showed them where to find my Tutorial template (with embedded styles), and where to find their week two tutorials on the class’s BlackBoard page. Just as they were about to get started, though, I said, “Now, before we start, we’re going to make a little change. This [pointing to group two] is now group one. That’s two, and that’s three.” Essentially, each table got assigned the document produced by the next table to the right.

Someone said, humorously pathetic, “I don’t like this game!” They did a fantastic job, though. It’s remarkable how much different their tutorials look now, after just a few weeks of training.

Microsoft Word 2007 for Mac OS X
Most of the time they were working on their activity, I was working one-on-one with one of my English majors who has been having a lot of trouble with the tutorials. Turns out (and I learned this about a week ago, when I got a frantic email from another student) Word 2007 on Windows doesn’t really look anything like Word 2007 on Mac.

That’s a problem I should have foreseen, but absolutely didn’t. In the last couple weeks, their tutorials have gotten increasingly involved in the nuts-and-bolts of how to make Word apply specific style formatting, and a lot of my advice was worthless to the Mac users.

Now, their laptops can all dual boot to either OS X or Windows Vista, and the girl who initially emailed me just ended up switching to Windows to do the assignments (which, she said, ended up making the projects a lot easier, so it was worth it). Still, that’s something I’m going to have to keep in mind in future tutorials, and try to find some good solution for.

We started on time, and though I released them on time, I had students in the classroom for another fifteen minutes afterward — most of them trying to finish their activity. I probably could have cut the on-screen demonstration entirely, and they would have had more time for rewriting and formatting. I’m not sure how well that would have flowed, though.

More next week.

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Journal Entry: October 20, 2009

Yesterday I made a To Do list, but I didn’t actually do anything.

I got home from work to find AB napping and XP about to, so I was all too happy to watch them while T– ran to the store.

She brought home pizza for dinner. While I played WoW, we watched some Psych and some Law and Order. And I gave AB a bath before bedtime. It was a pretty quiet night, but I was glad to have them home.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Journal Entry: October 19, 2009

Last Saturday was the big Charboneau family birthdays party for everyone with a birthday in October, and T– felt the itch to be a part of that, so she ended up packing up the kids Friday morning and heading to Wichita. That left me with a weekend of bachelor freedom. I mostly spent it practicing poor sleeping and eating habits.

I did get my lesson plan for next week done on Friday, and yesterday I took care of some stuff around the house, but apart from that it was movies, football, and lots of WoW. Amazingly relaxing, but before it was over I was really missing my family.

Friday night I was home alone, Saturday I went over to K– and N–‘s for lunch and the OU/Texas game. Lunch was some incredible cheeseburgers K– grilled. Then while I was there K– offered to help me track down an electrical problem I’d been having with my car, but that sort of tracked itself down as soon as I popped the hood and we saw the mountain of corrosion sitting on my battery’s positive terminal. So we cleaned that off, and I haven’t had any problems since.

I got home from Edmond in time for D– to pick me up for dinner at Belle Isle, then we went back to the house and played WoW until 3:30. We also watched a bunch of unwholesome movies, which was pretty fun.

Sunday D– and I went to lunch with my sister’s family up in Edmond, then came back to the house for more WoW (although, as I said, I also got some stuff accomplished). I had to call it a night a little bit earlier, so as to make it in to work this morning, but it was still a pretty similar night to the one before.

And now my family’s home safe, and I’m looking forward to seeing them tonight.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Journal Entry: October 16, 2009

Well, after all my angst yesterday over the NaNoWriMo prewriting stuff, I loaded up the rough draft of my novel-writing how-to, and discovered that it was already reformatted to work on two weeks of prep time (instead of the month I thought I’d used), and that all of the assignments were written out, and all but one of the lessons that go with them.

So, it turns out, I’ve got about one hour’s worth of work to do over the next two weeks, to take care of all that stuff I was woeing over yesterday. That doesn’t count my own prewriting, of course, but I can find time for that. It was the technical writing I was worried about. Turns out, that’s done.

So I spent about an hour (off an on) on Facebook yesterday posting that material and chatting with my writing group, and there’s some real excitement to get started. I can’t wait.

In the evening we had the last of our monthly summer picnics for Britton Road. T– was really looking forward to it (as she always does), and with them going out of town it seemed like a really good idea to go along and spend the evening with my family, away from my computer. Of course it didn’t hurt that T– was bringing two gallons of my chili recipe to compete in the chili cookoff, so I knew I’d get a great dinner out of it.

Turned out, I didn’t do so well. Before I’d finished the short walk to bring the crockpot from our car to the picnic tables, I found myself struggling to breathe. I thought, “I’m not that out of shape” before I realized what it really was. Too many people. I ended up spending an hour and a half huddled over my little bowl of chili, trying not make eye contact with anyone but K– or N–, and mostly just focusing on my breathing. It was a real waste of what could have been a fun evening.

I got through it, though, and when we got home there was a whole Thursday night’s worth of comedy to watch, and we watched it all (quite in spite of the late hour). That was fun.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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Journal Entry: October 15, 2009

Yesterday I got started on NaNoWriMo. Specifically, I sent out an email to everyone I know who’s going to be participating with some prewriting instructions to help get them started thinking toward the writing that’s going to be going on.

That’s something I started doing two years ago, when I got Dad and Heather to do NaNoWriMo with me, and they were both deeply grateful for the October assignments sometime around the end of the first week of November. I put a lot of thought into crafting a curriculum to ease them into story creation, but build enough of a foundation to make the writing of a novel possible. It worked — first time either of them had tried to write a novel, and they both finished NaNoWriMo in style.

Unfortunately, that sort of success creates pressure to follow it up, and now I’m part of a 17-person writer’s group, and directly accountable to nine of them, and I somehow let myself wait until October was half done before I sent out my first email. So that’s frustrating.

Anyway, I sent out my first email yesterday, and I have high hopes to get the rest of the curriculum put together into a fancy format before tomorrow, so I can send an overview along with the follow-up assignment.

Yesterday also found us at Mama Roja again (following an unforgivably long absence). D– joined us for an early-ish dinner, but T– had been wanting to go ever since last weekend, and it turns out she’s going to be out of town this weekend, so it was last night or next week. We opted for last night and next week. So there you go.

Anyway, delicious as always. Afterward she took the kids to church, and D– gave me a ride home, and then I spent the rest of the evening watching Christmas Vacation and playing WoW.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.

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The OC (Week 7)

This post is part of an ongoing series.

After spending six hours or so on class prep Monday, I ended up canceling class yesterday with the following BlackBoard announcement:

Your professor has granted himself an excused absence for sickness today.

Thursday is Fall Break, so Week 7 will go down in the annals of history as one of the three least interesting weeks in this sixteen-week semester. Or maybe one of the five, depending how well the students do on their presentations….

More next week.

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Journal Entry: October 14, 2009

No, there is too much. Let me sum up….

It’s terribly frustrating to me that, as times get more and more interesting, I write less and less about it on my blog. That’s been true of every NaNoWriMo I’ve been through (and how many birthday parties and Thanksgivings have been lost because of it?), and it’s been true of both of my babies.

Admittedly, XP isn’t doing anything terribly newsworthy. He’s adorable, but that doesn’t make for great plain-text updates. It’s a shame, though, that when I look back at now three years from now, I won’t have a very detailed record of the semester I decided to work full time and teach a college course while participating in two different writer’s groups, having a new baby, and maintaining a 30-hour-per-week WoW habit. Oh, and writing. A little bit.

It’s not going to get any better, either, because in the midst of all that, a NaNoWriMo is looming. All I’ll have to look back on are these occasional complaints, and a word count ticker. I guess that’s something….

Anyway, I’ve spent the last two weeks with “blog journal” as the longstanding not-marked-out item on my rolling Post-It Note To Do list, and I decided to shed the guilt and stress of that unwritten post getting longer and longer, and just write a quick post about yesterday.

I made that decision three days ago. And here we are.

There’s been lots worth mentioning in the recent past, but the most exciting among them is probably B–‘s new job and the party that went with it. That’s more than a week ago, though, so it’s lost to history. Last Friday night AB spent the evening with Diana, so T– and I could have a date night. We went to Texas Roadhouse and then watched some TV. It was awesome.

On Saturday D– and I went over to B– and E–‘s, because he had missed the previous weekend’s party with some vile disease. Conversation and martinis, and about seven minutes of The Empire Strikes Back with RiffTrax.

Sunday the Cowboys barely beat the miserable Chiefs, and that gave us our first winning weekend of the season — or at least the first one where I got to watch both games. It was exhilarating.

Monday was Columbus Day, which is actually a holiday for people like me, so I went to the Science Museum with T– and the kids, then spent the afternoon preparing materials for my class.

Yesterday I woke up sick, but I went to work anyway. I did end up canceling my class, though, which gives the students a full week off because Thursday is Fall Break. Wasn’t the flu, though — I was better by bedtime. And today I’m back at work.

Other than that, it’s just things and stuff.