If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve been on posting cartoons for my up-coming webinar through Writer’s Digest:
3 Secrets of the Greats: Structure Your Story for Ultimate Reader Addiction.
And now the Big Week has finally arrived.
Halleluah!
So I’ll tell you a little story about that. . .
ACT 1
Hook
I’m having a complicated week this week—but not as complicated as it could have been.
Backstory
You see, last fall I decided to scale back on blogging and editing and actually closed my editing business to new queries (unless someone has a story and passion for craft to which I simply cannot say no).
I wanted to spend more time with my teenage son, so I volunteered to work with our local high school radio station teaching the kids all aspects of writing: journalism, interviewing, debate, storytelling, comedy, all that good stuff.
Conflict #1
Then a couple of months ago, the teacher of the radio station asked me to come in during Alternative Education Week to help him shepherd a classroom of kids with little or no experience in storytelling through a week of filmmaking. I said, sure, I’d teach the kids how to tell a story in a short film. I don’t know beans about filming, but I can make sure that whatever they spend all week filming turns out to be entertaining in the end.
I’d have to be fingerprinted by the school district, but that’s okay because I’ve been fingerprinted for work with children a zillion times in my life. And if there’s one thing in this world I am completely absolutely 100% behind, it is protecting our kids from potential pedophiles.
Honestly, the only real difficulty I foresaw was the fact that the high school—for god only knows what reason—starts classes on Monday mornings at 8:00 am. I didn’t realize this beforehand because my son is homeschooled, so we get up whenever we darn well please around here.
It’s been an awful long time since I myself was forced to show my face at school at that ungodly hour.
I can’t tell you how I dreaded stumbling blurrily to my feet at 7:30 am in order to reach the high school by 8:00 and then try to appear even remotely intelligent in front of a bunch of teenagers who might possibly be looking to me to teach them something very important to their week.
But anyway, this filmmaking venture was set for this week:
April 8 — 12, Alternative Education Week
ACT 2
Conflict #2
Now, about two minutes after I agreed to this, I was contacted by Writer’s Digest asking if I’d be interested in teaching a webinar on craft for them. I said, sure, there’s lots of aspects of craft I can teach that I don’t see commonly taught out there in the online community.
We tossed around some ideas and came up with structure—specifically, secrets of structure that no one else is teaching.
That’s why they’re secrets.
Then we talked about timing, and I said, let’s do it in the spring because my summers are always heck of busy with family travel and stuff. We settled on this Thursday:
Thursday, April 11, 1:00 EDT (noon CDT, 11 MDT, 10 PDT)
You all should be hearing Beethoven’s Fifth right about now.
Because—that’s correct—I had completely forgotten which week I’d agreed to teach writing at our high school for Alternative Education Week.
Faux-Faux Resolution
The thing is that I have a really strange memory. I can remember word-for-word conversations that took place among people around me forty years ago, but I can’t remember for thirty seconds why I went upstairs or what I meant to do when I got there. And I’m even worse about this, now that I’m past half-a-century on this planet, than ever in my entire life.
Which is, frankly, saying something.
Conflict #3
Luckily, I sent the Writer’s Digest email to my husband, who immediately responded, “What about AE Week?”
Faceslap.
I immediately contacted Writer’s Digest, and we messed around with dates and ideas for a special one-time webinar a different day of the week.
But it really just turned out they couldn’t find me another spot until mid-summer. And I didn’t want to do it in mid-summer. My family tends to travel, and I always take a week off in July, and it always all just turns into scheduling spaghetti.
So I finally said, “No problem, don’t worry, I’ll do both things that week, I’m sure it will all work out just fine.”
I mean—what could wrong wrong, right?
Right?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Act 3
Faux Resolution
So you can imagine my reaction when I got a call last Monday morning from the teacher of the Alternative Education Week informing me that he’d just learned from the high school that I needed to be fingerprinted and it could take up to thirty days to process through the police department.
I don’t care how bad you are at math, there’s not one of you out there bad enough to condense thirty days down to seven.
I was off the hook!
I didn’t have to get up at 7:30 am this morning!
Instead, I put together a PowerPoint presentation on storytelling and gave it to the filmmaking teacher—I wrote down everything he’d have to say, and I used a bunch of cartoons that I drew. And he was very happy with that.
Which means I have all week now to be charging my batteries and giving a final finesse to my Writer’s Digest webinar for you people.
Which can only work out better for everyone involved!
Climax
But, yeah, I am going to drop in on the filmmaking class briefly this morning to see how things are going.
Like they could keep me away.
And I still get to go to the party on Friday and be one of the judges.
So in the meantime, this Thursday at 1:00 EDT:
3 Secrets of the Greats: Structure Your Story for Ultimate Reader Addiction
We’ll all be there.
We’ll be saving a spot for you!
UPDATE: Yeah—
“briefly this morning to see how things are going.” “What could go wrong, right? Right?”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
As it turned out, I dropped in just after lunch and learned that the filmmaking class had divided itself up into four teams making four films: three teams of three and one team (the entire gang from the alternative high school) of nine. Or ten. I lost count.
If any of you have—or have ever had—teens, you know the odds of nine of them cooperating without a leader on any massive project like, I don’t know, creating a film from scratch in one week with no previous experience.
So I was asked to go into the cage with the Big Team and help them put together their storyline.
Two hours later I staggered out with eyes like saucers and all my hair on end.
But we did get a three-act story plotted out in a series of scenes from Hook through Development to Climax with which they were all happy! So I went home and collapsed.
And now I have to take my son to the high school this afternoon, so I’ll “drop in briefly” again just to make sure they’re all still alive.
Pray for me.
UPDATE AGAIN: I didn’t see the kids yesterday, except as a sort of ectoplasmic event on the horizon wandering the high school campus, but I was told that they’d decided:
-
they don’t all nine need to be present in order to shoot every single scene
-
they’re getting by without a director because they couldn’t agree on who should give orders to the others
So I’ve changed my mind: you don’t need to pray for me.
Pray for them.
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