It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day! A Pirate Goes to School

Posted on by johnpbaur
at Harris
Ol’ Chumbucket with students at T.H. Harris Middle School. Note the logo on their shirts – look like anyone you know?

Well THAT was fun!

First, a happy International Talk Like a Pirate to ye!!! “That time in September when sea dogs remember that grownups still know how to play!”

You’ve got the buckles! It’s time to swash ’em!

This morning I got up earlier than usual, put on me pirate garb, and headed out with Tori (who was also in full pirate) to her school, T.H. Harris Middle School. I don’t know who this Harris fella was, but the school mascot and logo is a pirate. I was there to greet some rather surprised kids getting off buses. They were still fairly groggy and not happy about being awake. I’m not sure whether, from their point of view, having a pirate bellowing at them as the stumbled into school was a good thing or a bad. Pirates are not quiet. (“We go to eleven,” as Cap’n Slappy says) so we got their day started off with a bang!

As we greeted kids coming off the bus, the school’s uniformed police officer came by, curious. I assured him, “No pirates here. Just a couple of ethically challenged merchant seamen.” I think we fooled him.

Then the bell rang and they all headed to class. I headed to the office, where a couple of girls were starting the morning announcements. I let them do the pledge of allegiance, then I took over!

The first announcement was for anyone who wanted to sign up for the football team. They were to see Coach something or other in room 201, and pick up an insurance form. I added that if they wanted to sign up for pillaging on the Spanish Main, they could see me after school down at the docks. No insurance form needed.

The next announcement was a reminder that it was T.H. Harris night at Canes (a local purveyor of fried chicken strips.) A fundraiser for the school.

“Aye! We”ll gather at Canes and scuttle ’em, taking the booty to … wait … What? Really? They’re tellin’ me we’re just gonna go there and buy chicken and some of the proceeds will go to the school. Well, that’s good too.”

Couple more announcements, then I explained Talk Like a Pirate Day and gave them the Five As, so they’d know what was going on during the day.

And then it was time to head home, leavin’ the rapscallions, scallawags and nippers to the tender mercies of their teachers. But the day had been a little different, a little surreal for them, and that’s always good.

Oh, I should mention that I wasn’t wearing me cutlasses this morning. I felt almost naked! But the school has a very strict “no weapons” policy. Now, a pirate’s not afraid of anything! We’ll stare down storms at sea, revel in the shot and shell of battle, hurl ourselves over the side to board a Spanish galleon.

But even pirates don’t want to get detention!

(Thanks to Tori Baur (Mad Sally,) Principal Hubbard, and the faculty, staff and students of T.H. Harris.)

First Draft of WIP Is Done

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reading to Tori's class 04252019Finished reading the work in progress to Tori’s class today (spring break got in the way) and it was great. The ending is really good, cliffhangers and payoffs and heroic sacrifices and laughs and everything. All in three chapters, a space of a few thousand words.

I had their attention, and I kept it.

End of next week I embark on the rewrites. Maybe a lot. But I don’t think it’ll be too bad. The ending is really good. The beginning is good, needs a few tweaks, not much more than that. The middle is perhaps the most problematic, I’ve got to come up with a few more “events,” close calls and peril and a bit more humor. Nothing in the middle is “bad,” there just needs to be a bit more going on, and it has to drive harder towards the conclusion.

I know this because I have the kids’ reactions (and sometimes lack of reactions) to tell me so. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I don’t see how anyone can write a book for middle school aged kids without having a classroom full of them to bounce the story off of. The kids in Tori’s classes were, as always, invaluable.

I am not starting the second draft until May 1, because I’m in the middle of a project that is a real change of pace for me, and a lot of fun. But that draft is almost finished and then it’s back to the novel. I think I can have something to show agents by summer – when everything in the publishing industry sort of goes on hiatus. Oh well, it is what it is. I warned the kids that it could be a year or more before I know if there’s any hope of the book getting published by a traditional house.

It was funny, I talked a little about the whole publishing process and the kids were aghast. Why would anyone intentionally go into a business as dicey as that, where everything takes so long and your fate is in the hands of other people?

As I told them, sometimes you just can’t help it. You write, because writing is what you do. You’re a writer.

Back to Class

Posted on by johnpbaur

Great day Thursday. Tori asked me to come in and talk to her her sixth grade English classes about writing, which she wants them to concentrate on this semester. She wants me to come in each Thursday and talk about how I write and read them my latest chapters. Thursday was the first time.

I’d done this before, back on St. Croix. I’d come in every Thursday afternoon with the new chapters and read to them. It let them follow the process of writing a novel and let me gauge their reactions to what eventually would become “Chrissie Warren: Pirate Hunter.” It was invaluable. I don’t know how anyone can write a story for middle schoolers without having real kids to bounce it off. I assume they got something from it as well.

So I was looking forward to to it, although not without trepidation. The kids on St. Croix were fifth graders, these were sixth graders, and there’s a world of difference between the two. And unlike on St. Croix, where Tori taught one class of 13 motivated kids, she has two classes of about 30 kids each, ranging from bright, polite kids to kids who are, shall we say, less motivated and more difficult. And she doesn’t have the luxury of deciding the day’s schedule, when she’ll teach a subject and for how long, she’s got a firm schedule ruled by bells. I couldn’t just show up in the afternoon. I have to be there to get the last half hour of her second period class, then stay for the first half hour of her third period group.

But it went great. The kids were more curious than anything, but they listened and for the most part they stayed focused. I talked about writing, and the fact that I had been earning a living at it for more than 40 years. I tried to tie my own experience and ideas about writing into things that I knew they’d talked about on other subjects, why writing is important, how shared stories tell us who we are as a society, what we think is important.

And I talked about the magic of writing. It’s not an original ides with me, it may even be a cliche, but books are made of trees that are cut down and pulped then have ink smeared on them and are glued together. And when you look at those ink smears, the voice of the writer is in your head. It could be my voice, if you’re looking at “Chrissie Warren: Pirate Hunter.” Or the voice of someone who has been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years: Shakespeare, Homer. And that’s sort of magic, isn’t it?

Then I read them the first two chapters of my WIP, a sixth grade story about two friends who always get in trouble but are the world’s only hope in the circumstances of the story. The kids laughed when I hoped they would, seemed interested, and got a big laugh where I hadn’t really expected one. I took note and will be revisiting that issue repeatedly.

Afterwards I asked for feedback and ideas, and many of them had thoughts about what should happen next. (They were wrong, but I wasn’t going to tell them that.) I also talked about how you want to start a story as close to the action as possible, but you also have to set things up – the characters, the kind of world they live in, the circumstances of the story. Plus there are things I’m planting in the first three chapters that will pay off at the end, that will enable our heroes to figure out how to save the day. I told them the ancient Greeks (who they’re learning about in social studies) invented drama as we know it, and sometimes in their plays the situation was doomed, only to be saved at the last minute by an intervention from the gods.

“The Greeks called it deus ex machina, the machine of the gods,” I said. “Today we call it cheating. You’ve got to set up the story so that the solution is always there, but the reader doesn’t necessarily see it until you spring the payoff. Then they go, ‘Aahhhh! Of course!'”

In all, I was pleased. And Tori was even more pleased. And I’m looking forward to next Thursday morning. And working hard so that I’ve got fresh chapters for them.

Note: I haven’t written in a while, obviously. No excuses, but I’m back at it. The more I write, the more I write and that’s a good thing.

Big News and Lots of Work

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Bunch of things in the last two weeks – Here’s the best.

jack-and-caseyMy eldest son, Jack, sent me two photos on New Year’s Eve. One was of him and his girlfriend, Casey, a picture we’d requested a little while earlier. When decorating for the holidays we’d noticed that our family photos were getting a little dated – we like the older photos, but we didn’t have anything current.

The other was this. Somewhere in that gray blur is my first grandchild. Yeah, sometime in August I’m going to become a grandfather. Yippee!

I have never pujack-and-casey-21shed my kids to procreate. I’m not against the idea of grandchildren, far from it, I just want them to live their lives. But Tori has noticed for several years that I have been paying more attention to babies in the supermarket and elsewhere around town. Or on TV. It’s all she can do to keep me from playing with their toes. That ‘s not a good thing, touching some stranger’s baby, and I have refrained. Tori says I’ve lapsed into permanent “grandpa mode.”

What can I say, babies are cute. It seems like a pretty great way to start life.

I have friends my age who have been grandparents for 20 years or more. One who is a great grandparent. And that’s been fine for them. Like I said, I never was in a hurry for my kids to reproduce. I want them to get their lives in shape and on track, make sure they’re responsible for themselves before they become responsible for someone else.

Well, Jack is 37, a librarian in the Berkeley Public Library System in California. A respected professional and something of an authority on graphic novels and comics – he’s a regular panelist at San Diego Comicon. I think he’s good to go.

Tori and I have joked that whichever of our kids became parents first, that’s where we’d move. Well, cost of living in the Bay Area is crazy high, so that’ll take some planning (and perhaps winning the lottery. Or at least selling some movie rights.) But for the short term, it sure changes our travel plans for the year. We’ll definitely be heading to the West Coast in late summer or early fall to meet the little sprat. Can’t wait.

In the meantime, I’m working on my new project and I like it a lot. You always do at this stage. It’s when you get about halfway to two-thirds in that things start getting hard. But this is a story with a lot of potential and I’m very excited about it.

Tori is arranging a time after school when I can read chapters to a group of students, whose feedback will help shape the story. That’s the same way it worked for “Chrissie Warren: Pirate Hunter” and it was very helpful.

I can’t even write the title here yet, because it pretty much gives the whole story. It’s not a pirate story. It’s something different. I want it to be equal parts funny and exciting. It’s a stretch for me, and that’s a good thing. What do you learn if you keep doing the same thing over and over?

Sadly, I didn’t get much work done on it that last two weeks. I just finished a 12-day stint of work for my day-job, which is a misnomer since most of it is done at night. Working desk shifts for the Source until 1 or 2 in the morning, then getting up at 6 to get Tori and Max off to school. By the time they’re out the door I’ve been kind of brain dead, so not much writing has been going on.

But my colleague is back and I’m on the job again. Looking forward to getting back to the adventure of Connor and Ronnie and their struggle to save their town from an unspeakable horror.