The First Five Pages: Focus

The Oprah Machine

From Publishers Lunch February 29^th, 2008:

“Following Oprah’s enthusiastic endorsement Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH has added another 3.45 million copies in print, “the record for the most copies ever shipped by Penguin Group USA in a four-week period.” That’s on top of an initial shipment of 776,000 copies in advance of the Oprah announcement. BN buyer Jules Herbert says “for the first four weeks on sale [it] is our bestselling Oprah’s Book Club title.” The publisher says over 500,000 people have registered for the 10-week webinar that begins next Monday night.”

The Oprah machine never ceases to amaze me. She says something is great and all these people blindly follow her. She would make a great cult leader. Or maybe she already is. After all, she is charismatic, has people giving her money (Angel Network), taking her word as truth and more. Lately, I haven’t been able to watch her show because she has these amazing people on and then cuts them off and talks over them and puts words in their mouths or interrupts to talk about herself and her experiences when she initiated the subject—or a related one—which was supposed to be about her guest and what they do. Why does she even bother to have guests on her show? She could just ask herself questions. Plus the vast amounts of product placement and commercials and self promotion turns me off. There is no longer any content outside of Oprah and her products.

While I commend Oprah for encouraging North America to become more literate and is helping authors out by placing her little book club sticker on their books and instantly launching books onto bestseller lists, I also feel uncomfortable. Mostly because she has this great pulling power. Her current pick is about changing your life and leading with purpose, which is good. Many people are searching for purpose—myself included—yet there is something about this that doesn’t quite jive. Maybe it is her commercialism. Maybe it is the fact that she is a celebrity who can no longer bear the thought of sharing a bar of soap with another person. In other words, who is she to tell us how to live? She thinks we should all be spanx wearing, purposeful life driven consumers. If we are busy trying to emulate her and be all purposeful and enlightened yet trying to buy, buy, buy, what is going to happen? I think we are going to actually push ourselves further away from who we are truly supposed to be.

At the end of the Oprah day, we are going to be less the vision that she is trying to lure us towards, because in the end, Oprah just wants us to consume what she’s peddling.

Who Put the Extra Day in February?

Today, this moment, in a nutshell: 

• Didn’t win anything more than ‘please pay again’ with roll up the rim. I want to win the freaking car, already! Or the money. Or the GPS. Or a donut.
• Made media player glitch out.
• Rolled my change.
• Discovered that the ashtray in my car is exceedingly large and was harbouring a zillion coins. Yes! Let’s order pizza!
• Finally got my hands on the BBC version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Let’s see if it lives up to the super-high expectations that have been gradually created over the years. (Not likely.)
• Have one and a half days to find a baby shower gift as the one I bought a few months ago has likely been already outgrown by baby of honour.
• I don’t want to cook. I vacuumed today. Isn’t that enough domesticity?
• I now have to track down a car alternator.
• I have three parts to return.
• I have to go to circuit training alone tomorrow.
• I am unmotivated.
• My daughter doesn’t want to go anywhere this week. She didn’t even want to go to the park. There really must be something wrong with her.
• My hubby bought three boxes of cookies a few days ago and I don’t know where they went. I mean, I know. But we are all in denial. Denial, I say. Denial.
• The blogs that usually make me laugh are all about the boring business.
• Somebody put an extra day in February this year. Now whose idea was THAT? Don’t they realise that February is a short month for a very good reason—that being that February SUCKS.

• My daughter still only weighs 35lbs. I just want her in a car booster seat and I swear it doesn’t matter how much cream I give her, she only seems to feel heavier but won’t actually get heavier. It defies the laws of gravity and weight.

• My daughter has only one volume for singing and it is earsplittingly loud.

• I discovered that this software thinks it is March 1st. It isn’t. It is Feb 29th. And it is only 5pm. I wonder what timezone this thing is in and if I can change it–or if I even care…

 Later note: ordered pizza and had friends over, making it an all round wonderful day! 

Car is Fixed

Yay!

The car is fixed again. I rode my bike around with the little kid trailer today. All is good. If you need proof, I can show you the trail of mud on my backside and up the back of my coat. Anyway, car is good again and driving very nicely. Found out what the growling noise is. It is a bearing in the alternator. (I do know how to fix that.) So, another thing to add to the list. That windshield just keeps on being shuffled to the bottom of the list, does it not?

Somehow, I have turned the funny foreign accents back on my keyboard again. Anybody know how to turn them off? The help section does not cover it, unfortunately. But watch this:

ÉÈÀÇ éèàç

That is good fun. Annoying, but fun. I would like my apostrophe back though.

Plotster-Pantster Combo

I’ve picked up an idea I’ve had kicking around in my documents folder for a few months and looked it over. I like the premise and I have a loose idea of what this book is going to be. Yet, this one is different from the other four manuscripts I’ve banged out on thee ol’ computer.

And it isn’t the plot that is different or the genre, it is me. This time, I am putting more thought into what I want each scene to accomplish and where I want the story to go, what I want the characters to do or say.

In other words, less pantster (writing and planning and plotting by the seat of my pants) and more plotster (planning out it).

I suppose all the things I’ve learned and picked up in the past few months is all jiving for space in my mind as I set out the backbone of the story. Theoretically, my story should need less editing and rearranging in the end and should flow with more purpose and direction this time. So far, I haven’t beaten out all the desire to write this story. I mean, I haven’t done any plotting or character motivation sort of exercises or really anything yet and I am already 12,000 words in. (Yikes, how did I get that many so quickly!)

I am hopeful for this one. I know I can make this one really good with several plot lines running through it. The only problem is that there is an awful lot to think about, plus whenever I type ‘say’ or ‘says’ I cringe due to the discussion line over in the ‘On Writing’ section on AgentQuery. Sometimes you just have to say it! 

So here’s to the plotster-pantster combo!

Fool Me

Ha! Foiled!

He thinks he can fool me….

Okay, so it has taken me a few months to figure out how to shuffle a bunch of albums in the music player because there wasn’t a button in the drop down menu and you can’t hit ‘shift’ and click to select a couple. My hubby said he wouldn’t tell me when I asked him how. He said somewhat mysteriously that he wouldn’t reveal all his secrets. But I knew it could be done.

Well, ha!

I figured it out. I hit ‘control’ and click! Now I can shuffle Nora, Paolo, Johnny and The Presidents!

Ha!

Now if only I could turn off those pesky foreign accents.

Getting Things Fixed

It’s a grey day here today. And not just because the steering rack needs to be replaced on the Dodge. That’s expensive. So, I did our taxes. I even filed them. Soon we will have our return and I can fix everything. Party time. Seriously, there are other things I would rather do with that return. We tend to be very responsible with our returns. For instance we used it as a down payment on our first house one year. But, there will be room for some fun. For example, I’m sure we’ll also use it to pay for our upcoming trip over the mountains to beautiful Victoria.

Speaking of fixing things, my laptop decided it didn’t want to play nice. It was working for a few days, so I lugged it all the way downtown yesterday. See, without a car, it meant walking my daughter in a stroller the 12 blocks to playschool, dropping her off and hanging at the library for 2 hours before returning to get her. So, after lugging the 8 pound laptop a total of 32 blocks, all I have is a broken blister on my heel. Because of course, my laptop would not work for me.

But I had a back up plan. I brought my library card (the nice librarian gave me a new one) so I could sign out tons of fun stuff in case my laptop acted up. I had even tracked down the BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice” which is supposed to be great. (I’ve been hearing about it for years. Evidently the scene where Colin Firth takes off his shirt actually sent women to emergency with heart palpitations when it was first aired on TV (who knew they had TV in the 1800s–ha, ha). Isn’t that totally crazy?) Anyway, I had all this great stuff to sign out and then I couldn’t find my library card. Groan. I had put it down somewhere at home and therefore I was a good 16 blocks from home and without my library card.

So now to just get the shingles replaced–again–on our roof, grow some new skin on my heel and a few other little tasks and my life should be back on track. Maybe…

Spelling and Identity

How do you feel about language?

How do you feel about spelling?

How do you feel about identity? Yours as an individual? Yours as a citizen?

I rarely think about language. And I use it every single day. I speak it. I write it. I listen to it. But I rarely sit down and think about it.

Now spelling. I do think about spelling. Not when I talk or listen, but when I write. I think about it a lot. And not just whether I have spelled something correctly. Although I sometimes think about that quite a lot. For example, if you look at a basic word like ‘the’ for long enough, it starts to look pretty darn strange.

When I most often think about spelling is when I write on international sites like this and even when I write on my own site. I prefer Canadian spelling as it is what I grew up using and I live in Canada. Yet on a site like this, you don’t want to come across as someone who cannot spell. Therefore, the tendency is swing over to American usage.

In Canada, I would argue that American spelling is slowly becoming the new norm. The majority just don’t care. For instance, Canadian books that are being marketed outside the country, you see American spelling, not Canadian. In classrooms you see teachers beginning to spell words like ‘honour’ without the ‘u’. They are teaching the next generation to spell the American way. In a way, that is one small loss of our heritage and our ties to our British roots as a country.

I suppose us Canadians could blame Microsoft Word as the default language for spell check is American. And yes, it is possible to change the language over to Canadian although many people do not know how to change it, plus it never seems to remember that you were serious about Canadian spelling being the new default.

So how about identity? It is said that language is tied to culture and culture to identity. So, am I losing part of my identity? It feels like it. To me, having our own quirks of the language gives me pride. It is a way to distinguish myself from the pack.

I think a great number of Canadians do not care that there is Canadian spelling and do not realize that we are losing it. So what if we stop using all those pesky ‘u’s? What difference will it make?

When I worked as a librarian, I brought in the “Atlas of Disappearing Languages” for the social studies teachers teaching globalization. I’ve been thinking about that book lately. With the globalization of the written word, could Canadian spelling/language now be considered to be disappearing? It sure feels like it.

As for identity, what is the impact of losing our spelling? Will it affect our culture? It’s one of the small things that separates us from American culture.

Will North America become one big box store? Or are we already there?