Patrick

Apprenticeship Reading

Posted on by Patrick

Since Jan­u­ary, I’ve been men­tor­ing two six­teen-year-old appren­tices, Becky & Tan­ner, in cre­ative writ­ing under a pro­gram by ACI. It’s been a great time, and we’ve cov­ered a lot of ground: char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, world-build­ing, plot out­lin­ing, essay writ­ing, the whole copy­right / licens­ing / Cre­ative Com­mons imbroglio, edit­ing, tax­es and what you can legit­i­mate­ly claim, infi­nite libraries, and a pile of oth­er topics.

Today, we held a small friends-and-fam­i­ly read­ing. I read my short sto­ry Exit Inter­view, Becky read a 2nd-per­son short sto­ry (“The Great Ant Race”) and a snip­pet from her nov­el-in-progress The Cigám Tri­ad, and Tan­ner gave a pre­sen­ta­tion titled “Why the Edu­ca­tion Sys­tem Sucks”, which was about the dif­fer­ence between inter­est and pas­sion, and how the edu­ca­tion sys­tem needs a rev­o­lu­tion to nur­ture the latter.

It was a great end to a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence. I intend to stay in touch with my appren­tices, and I look for­ward to read­ing and hear­ing more of their work.

Thanks, ACI, for this oppor­tu­ni­ty. And thanks, Becky and Tan­ner, for being great appren­tices, or men­tal­ists, or man­a­tees, or what­ev­er the right word is.

To Do list

Posted on by Patrick

Things I should do in the next while:

  • Make a list
  • Laun­dry
  • Install some project man­age­ment soft­ware and start using it for per­son­al projects
  • Go through the cards I got on my busy week­end and con­nect up
  • New theme for my site
  • Write, write, write
  • Prep for my readings

Addendum

  • Run some numbers

WordCamp Winnipeg

Posted on by Patrick

One great Word­Camp, indeed.

I learned about Ian Stew­art’s jour­ney from utter Word­Press “noob” to mem­ber (lead?) of the Automat­tic Theme Team.

I learned that there are still sev­en or eight things I don’t know about Word­Press, cour­tesy of Sheri Bigelow.

I learned from tri.be’s Peter Chester how to fix Word­Press when it’s slow (Find the slow­est thing; fix it; rinse and repeat).

I taught an intim­i­dat­ing­ly full room of peo­ple that Word­Press Mul­ti­site isn’t real­ly all that scary.

I learned from Reid Peifer about how you should man­age a dis­trib­uted team (final rule: GIVE A CRAP).

And I learned from Dave Pen­sato that while Word­Press is awe­some, it could prob­a­bly be more awe­some still. (Blinky FTW.)

Then I had some snacks and went to vis­it my fam­i­ly. A good day all around.

Sassy’s

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When I saw they were tear­ing Sassy’s down, my first thought was Oh, no.

day 314_sassy demolition

…I have a scene set in there in my novel-in-progress.

(It’s one of the places where the under­ground dwellers can come up above ground.)

Sassy’s, for the unini­ti­at­ed, is was a down­town-Bran­don dive bar.  For a long time it was a strip club, and by all accounts not a classy one. It’s the only place I’ve ever actu­al­ly gone to see the strippers—during my low-key bach­e­lor par­ty, when we set the drink spe­cial at a piz­za joint, then drank mul­ti­coloured drinks at the bowl­ing alley—but that’s a sto­ry for anoth­er day.

Sassy’s also played host to the local instance of the smalls’ “Good­bye For­ev­er” tour, to which I scored free tick­ets by putting up posters around the uni­ver­si­ty. The strip­per pole was gone, but the ceil­ing mir­rors had­n’t been torn down.  The smalls played on a stage that I pre­sume had been thor­ough­ly cleaned.