Speed Reader Epiphany

It’s not my fault! I learned to read and write at a very young age. So by the time we reached poetry in school, my only goal was to parse the darned verses and get on with the good stuff, (Agatha Christie, Nancy Drew, Piers Anthony, etc). Once I hit upper elementary, I learned to speed read. Strip mining the key information from our assignments, answering the questions as quickly as possible, was my goal to return reading what I really wanted (anything but our class work). All through undergraduate and graduate school my reading style served me in relatively good stead. There were some glitches, a missed negative word here, confusion over syntax there, but over all I succeeded. An earned doctorate in Religious Studies from a Jesuit University isn’t to be sneezed at, unless you have a horrible cold but that’s why they put the degrees in these snazzy faux leather covers. I bet you thought they were for looks, nope, sneeze guards. I know, I have allergies.

My reading style crippled me. I don’t listen to lyrics of songs, far preferring classical, celtic folk (I don’t know enough Scots Gaelic to understand the lyrics), and movie soundtracks. I’m missing out on so much. When a friend posts lyrics to a favourite song, I don’t recognize it when every one else does. Opera is a closed, locked tight, and completely ignored book to me. I turn green with envy when my writing friends at Sleuths’ Ink share their poetry. It was only when I started on my journey of fiction writing did I realize how crippled I was. I don’t hear the music of words. I don’t appreciate sentences for their rhythm, style, or sound. I’m like a dog who has only learned one trick and can’t see anything else. Content and use for my academic writing was my one trick, my one goal. What a tragedy. I’m like a tone deaf person learning the piano; I can pound out the tune but have no true understanding of what lies beneath.

There is a cure. I can learn to hear the music. Appreciation, if not understanding, can be taught. I’ll never be a great poet nor a great lyrical writer. But I can spot my deficiencies and mitigate against them. That is why I love my chosen hobby/profession. The craft of writing, like beading, can always be improved. For a former academic – this is music to my ears!

Keep on writing and learning. I’d love to hear how your reading style helps or hinders you.

Stephanie Jarkins

tweet me: skjarkins

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 Confessions of a reforming perfectionist

Black, white; all, nothing; elation, depression; 100%, 0% – that is me when I’m not doing what I need to do to stay sane.

Throughout my life I was digital – 1 or 0, on or off, no analog dial of the grey gradual or via media. High or low, no middle. Perish the average.

If I couldn’t master something I’d quit it, claiming boredom or irrelevance. Really I was scared out of my shoes to work. In school I didn’t have to work until my doctoral course work. Didn’t fail a test until my German language proficiency exam – I still loathe German with a passion. (My father’s fault for correcting me as a child in German – that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).

What really brought my insane digital thinking to the forefront was my housework. If the house didn’t sparkle; it stank. Excuses made, piles buried in back closets, feet stuck to the kitchen floor. Or everything gone and if it wasn’t nailed down it was dusted, washed and scrubbed until it glowed. Then a friend suggested, very nicely I thought, that I check out Flylady www.flylady.net. There I learned how to break chores down. Change my attitude. Do house work for me to smile not to impress or please anyone else. Do I always do the Flylady emails? No. But is my house a sty? Never. Does I hug me when I come home? Usually. I found grey in my life – who knew? It’s a dust rag!

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 “LEST WE FORGET”

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Written by: Major John McCrae May 3, 1915

The poppy’s significance to Remembrance Day is a result of Canadian military physician John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields. The poppy emblem was chosen because of the poppies that bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I, their red colour an appropriate symbol for the bloodshed of trench warfare.

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 Mom’s Night Out

Sorry men, this is a sexist piece. Please read another blog post whilst the women continue reading, if you so desire.

Laud to girls’ night out. What would I do without my girl friends? Be far bitchier to my family, that’s a given. Societies in which the women are permitted to gather together regularly have it right. Birthing, child rearing, harvesting, deaths and everything in between, go far better when many women of different ages gather together. I have been blessed to have some amazing women in my life. We don’t get to see each other as often as we would like but when we do it is like I’ve been holding my breath for all that time. Exhale. Relax. Breathe. Laugh.

My Goth posse is comprised of four other amazing women. They are wonderful mothers, wives, and all very much themselves. We are not clones of each other nor do we want to be. We are strong personalities but we complement each other. When trauma hits we drop everything to help. When life becomes unbearable we are willing to talk at any hour for as long as needed until things feel a little brighter. Do we have miscommunication issues? Sometimes. But a forgiving and open heart cures all ills.

All to soon our lives will get even busier and we won’t be able to see each other as much. That’s why I send my thanks out to Amy, DeAnna, Nikki, and Kellie. Thanks for always being there for me no matter what. You ladies are truly the best.

If you have a crew of close girlfriends and haven’t seen them for a while – fix it. You’ll be glad you did.

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 Twitter 101 – Part C (Last one – I promise)

What does RT, MT, via, #whatever mean? As with any new enterprise there is jargon.

RT = Retweet. This is used when someone has written a tweet that you consider is great and want to share it with your followers. This is the basic premise of Twitter. The RT is a direct quotation. Some folks don’t like it when one messes with it to make it stay under 140 characters. If you do have to edit – use VIA then @ and the person’s twitter name. Edit at will, but do keep the same intent, that’s only fair.

MT = for some means mention, for others it means other stuff. I haven’t found a good shortform for it. There is a lot of confusion between text speak and twitter speak. So I write it out and just thank fewer people each time.

Via = see above under RT

Now for the great and powerful #. You luddites out there thought it meant pound, or number. Oh…how nineteenth century of you. It is the great and wonderful hashtag. This is the means by which folks can do quick searches that pull all the tweets on that topic. You need to use the # on your blogs too for searches. You can go on hashtags.org they tell you what many of them mean. I don’t suggest creating your own until you’ve been tweeting for a while.

Some of the hashtags I use and follow are: #amwriting, #ambeading, #tweetlikeapro, #whyIwrite, #justread, #follow.

When thanking someone for following, mentioning or RT I use #TY and #shoutout.

There are also special things for different days of the week. The three I use the most are #mentionmonday where I highlight special folks, #writerwednesday or #WW where I thank and say to #follow great authors, and #followfriday. For this I use www.followfriday.com to click on names and have tweets sent out with #follownow or whatever hashtag I want and highlight the folks I’ve tweeted with the most.

This is why watching what is happening on Twitter is so key. Look up the terms you don’t understand. Take your time to be polite and follow the etiquette. It is a great interaction chance. I’ve found some wonderful folks. Come on in. It is a time suck, but usually a polite one.

If you want more etiquette etc information check this blog out. It’s great.

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 Twitter 101 – Part B

In the Twitter Universe, there are “broadcasters” and “companions” the terms are mine.

Team followback are part of the companions, you follow them, they follow you. Some others are in between, (that’s me) I don’t automatically follow folks back. If their bio doesn’t reflect something I’m interested in, or their last three tweets are full of curse words or sales then I don’t follow. Then there are the rock stars of twitter – the broadcasters. They follow a miniscule number of folks and have followers in the hundreds of thousands. I first thought that my goal was to be one of the rock stars. Now I’m not so sure. There are so many wonderful things said by everyone, I’d hate to miss out. But I’ll wait to decide on that after I’m on the NY Times Best Seller list.

After not to long, I started to “unfollow” folks. That has been a more challenging proposition. There are websites out there who help with that (for a fee). So instead of paying someone else (I’m still cheap), I did a spreadsheet comparison. I’m sure my computer whiz husband could set up an equation for me to do it automatically, but instead I’m reading through the spreadsheets and seeing who is following me and who I am following.

If folks aren’t following me, then I look and see who they are, what their bio says, what they tweet, and what their following is. If it is a famous author I love, then I keep following them. If it is someone who hasn’t bothered to follow me back, I unfollow them. The reason for doing this is to get my following/follower ratio closer to 1:1.

How do I interface with Twitter? Three different ways (there are more ways but three is my limit).

a) via email – I set up my preferences in Twitter to email me when someone follows me, direct messages, mentions, or retweets me. (This is very important so I can thank folks for doing all those things – gratitude and appreciation are key on twitter. One of the reasons I like it.)

b) via hootsuite – this was a suggestion that @stacyjuba put out in the twebinar #tweetlikeapro by MWRA. I used tweetdeck for a bit, but the interface didn’t work for me. There are other applications out there, look for what works for you. The advantage to hootsuite is that I can set up columns with my list of followers, key word searches (ie. #amwriting, #ambeading), mentions, messages, and main feed. This is the interface I use to thank folks with cute notes always including #TY or #shoutout so that if folks search on those then the tweets come up.

c) via twitter (directly) – this is the easiest way I’ve found to click on my follower list, see their bio blurb and decide whether to follow them back. I also use that interface to unfollow folks.

My cell phone is from another century, so I don’t use it. Nor do I have other means of dealing with twitter other than my laptop. Use what you can, experiment. The worst thing that happens is you’ve wasted an hour of your life on it.

My last Twitter 101 blog will be about the nuances of Twitter etiquette I’ve alluded to in these last two blogs. Find me at http://twitter.com/#!/skjarkins

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 Twitter 101 – Part A

Or how I went from 3 followers to over 800 in six weeks.

I signed up for twitter three years ago and let my account sit until I attended a conference this summer. At it I was told that editors and agents check social media platforms of authors. I’d heard that before but I finally listened it. I also finished the authorized biography of the Queen Mother. My Mom told me that the Queen Mum tweeted – not how you think. The English aristocracy wrote quick notes throughout the day to their friends, family and staff. If the Queen Mum could carve out time in her insanely busy schedule then I could.

So I put on my calendar specific times to go on twitter. I observed for almost a month figuring out the etiquette of the tweet world. I wrote my bio (very important) to highlight my professional aspirations and fun interests. This is my calling card on Twitter. Folks decide whether or not to follow me thanks to that small bio. So I put some thought and time into it. Then my profile picture, that was easy. My Goth Soccer Mom club logo that my designer set up for me. It is punchy, colourful and fun.

After all the preliminaries were in line, I dove in. A very helpful resource was the free twebinar #tweetlikeapro sponsored by MWRA Marketing for Romance Authors http://mfrw.blogspot.com/ featuring Keith Keller http://twitter.com/#!/KeithKeller. He suggested that one finds 100 people to follow everyday and one should tweet five times a day. I followed the first suggestion, not the second. I do tweet about three times a day during the week, and a few times over the weekend depending on my schedule.

I also found that to find 100 people to follow wasn’t too hard. I went to my favourite tweeters and looked at their following list. Then I followed the folks who had similar interests to mine. I didn’t buy my follower list, I’m too cheap to do that. But if you really want to do it – go for it. I want to have followers who have similar interests and aren’t just paid to follow my tweets.

Is Twitter worth my time? Qualified yes. I found wonderful information about writing blogs, beading ideas, and fun quotations. There is a lot of information on twitter and sorting the wheat from the chaff is challenging. Next Twitter blog will be about the nasty situation of “unfollowing” and interfacing with Twitter.

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 Publish or Perish

Anyone in academe quakes at the little phrase: “Publish or perish.” For many, this means toiling over abstruse ideas and flogging them to various presses in the vain hope of publication to tenure, the academic equivalent of the good life. As a recovering academic, this wee phrase holds a new intrigue. It encapsulates my raison d’etre.

I am a self confessed writer. I want to share these stories my fevered and short-circuiting brain birthed. Without sharing, my stories seem like toddlers – cute but not mature. Publishing them allows the stories to proceed through the rites of passage where at the end of the tunnel they can stand on their own in the glorious world of the readers.

What happens when a book won’t be published? I answer with a loud “YET!” It means I must rework, edit, review, and labour to make my story walk through the tunnel. Sometimes the story must rest whilst I work on another. But they will be published – eventually.

Some days I feel as though I’ll die if these stories don’t see the light of day. But that fever gives me energy to keep writing, editing, networking, and learning so I won’t perish. At least not yet – I have a few more stories to tell.

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 Gateway Dying – The purple hair saga

Some of us use violet hair dye to shock our parents when we are teens. Others of us didn’t dare. Some of us keep with the amethyst locks through our twenties. Others just pine and pray for the right moment. Some of us have the purple fever in our thirties – flaunting our unnatural coloured coifs neither caring nor apologizing. Others decide to join in.

I’m a late purple hair club member. When my child was two, I celebrated a milestone birthday. I gained the gumption to do the purple. My hair dresser dutifully bleached, dyed, etc. I emerged with a glorious purple fade in the back and my purple blaze in the front. I loved it … except for turning my tub, pillowcase, fake pearl necklace, neck, fingers, everything – purple! Then to my horror, my hair faded to the dreaded anti colour – PINK!

What to do? Hie me back to my long suffering hair dresser. Different purple dye, longer processing time, different this, that, and the other. The purple deigned to remain with me longer. Then the evil pink reemerged like an unwanted ex-boyfriend. Always lurking in the shadows, never completely repelled. By then my hair felt traumatized by the bleachings.

At lunch some time later, I spy my answer. A lovely mother with black straight lustrous hair and a purple blaze to die for. I interrupt her conversation and asked “What dye did you use for your purple?”

She let me in on a little secret – extensions. Her’s looked natural – as natural as a fluorescent purple does – no blunt ends, similar length to her own hair, not too plastic looking.

No more bleaching for me. My hair thanked me. Now I can look like an anime character whenever the spirit moves me.

For me, purple works. But there is an electric blue I saw the other day. Hmmm, I wonder…

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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 My Sixth Grade Report Card

My father disinterred all my childhood papers. After twenty years, I’d given up all hope of seeing them again. Sure that they had been recycled as fire lighters (thank you, Douglas Adams) during my many moves across countries and various states. Wrong. My school photos (looking nothing like me, according to my husband) and all my special papers survived. The most valuable paper is my sixth grade report card.

To explain, I skipped grade five for reasons that are not important. I had something to prove in grade six. My indomitable balding red-headed British teacher, Mr. Burt, had his hands full. He was the only teacher who gave me two weeks detention to work on my handwriting. (It didn’t help). His comment on my report card was:

“Stephanie sometimes does a good impersonation of a cross between William Lyon MacKenzie and Ma Murray!”

This will mean little to my American friends but may mean a touch more to my Canadian compatriots.

To explain, William Lyon MacKenzie (not the Prime Minister) was a Scotsman born 1795 and died 1861. He was an insurgent, journalist, first mayor of Toronto, and leader of the 1837 rebellions. He was described as forthright and forceful. (Nevermind the armed rebellion part – so un-Canadian.)

Now to Ma Murray, it is she with whom I identify far more. She was a journalist and suffragette. A firey Kansan who moved up north with her sister and kept her shoot from the hip American attitude even in the most frigidly polite Canadian society. God bless her.

She who ended most of her editorials with “That’s fer damshur.” This from a woman writing in the early part of the twentieth century and on.

What does this mean? I likely won’t start a rebellion, thank goodness. Nor will I own a newspaper. However, it does mean that my sixth grade teacher had my number oh so long ago and the older I get the more I become like I was in the sixth grade.

And that’s fer damshur!

Stephanie Jarkins

www.gothmomz.com

twitter: skjarkins

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