“Finn’s Island” by Finn
This is a creative piece Finn wrote for a school assignment. I asked his permission to publish it here. I was in the third grade, just a year or two younger than he, when I first took an interest in writing. All spelling and punctuation is just as he wrote it.
Finn’s Island
by Finnegan (age 9)
Once upon a time, I was on a deserted island. I was worried by sharks and rubies. My mom is not a building type of person. She can cook while I try to build a hut. We saw lots of animals on this island and people. There was a cook, cowboy, Indian, and a rich family. “I want to go tot he wierd island,” my mom says.”Let’s go to the capital of Hawii, no mom. The girl that can’t be quiet says she wants to go to Alaska. No!
We went to a mysteryes Island. I was scared. Oh I was scared of sharks. I saw People on the island. They built a hut for us so we would not have to sleep in thier hut. I wanted to go home, but we had some gas. We would be stuck, so we didn’t go. We have yarn and knitting needles to knit a blanket that says s.o.s. Ok then, we will get back to the place we came from which is Alabama. We took a radio to the shore, so we can get to our boat with the radio. This way we can get better signal. We went to bed in our hut.
It’s morning at Finn’s Island (That’s what we named it for now.) Our boat was gone. We were scared by sharks, rubies and other stuff that might kill us. It was rubies burning our boat. They tied us up on a stick. It was scary. We got saved by the Indian/cowboy. The rescue people did save us. That is how we got to go back home to Alabama!
Books on the Brain
The second draft of the shuttle book is back with the publisher — now 20% lighter!
I had an awesome meeting with a local author recently (more on that in the future).
I’ve read more books this year than any other year of my life — 24!
Today kicks off NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — which I’m not participating in (writing novels ain’t my thing), but lots of people are.
Needless to say, I’ve got books on the brain.
I’ve even taken to listening to books on CD in my car.
So, given the opportunity to host a carnival for the Rocket City Bloggers, the topic I chose was books — anything about books! Book reviews, paper books vs. e-book, crafts from books, writing books, library books, cookbooks … books, books books.
So here goes:
Mrs. Dragon rediscovers her love of her reading and commits to read more — 87 books and going strong!
Bo Williams’ reviews the dystopian fiction novel This Perfect Day and interjects a little timely political commentary as well.
Carol reviews the Nook Glowlight and compares it to other e-readers she has used.
Life coach Linda DeLuca offers interesting thoughts (I loved her posts!) on how reading books can help you get a better job – according to Linda, employers rank reading and writing as top deficiencies in new hires — and how not to read, which may sometimes mean not finishing a book that isn’t doing it for you. I SO struggle with this.
Finally, this is not a post from anyone in the local blogger group, it’s from Country Living, and it’s a how-to for making a purse out of an old hardback book. No blog carnival is complete without some sort of “how to” article. (I just made that up; plenty of blog carnivals have no “how-to’s.” I just wanted to share it because I think the hardback book purse is cool. Personally, though, I’d need a wider volume to hold all the stuff in my purse.)
One more thing: a favorite recent find for more cool things about books, is Book Riot. Check it out. I especially love their book fetish posts which are usually book-themed items like, in the Nov. 1, 2012, Book Fetish post, for example, is a book case that doubles as a coffin and a book-page patterned skirt.
Thanks, bloggers, for your sharing your links! Happy reading!
Relevance & Proximity
“Do not judge your relevance to this fight by your proximity to the battlefield.”
On my second day at my new job, the above quote was on the wall of the Army facility I was touring.
The comment was made in 2005 by Gen. Dick Cody, Army Vice Chief of Staff, to a crowd of contractor and industry personnel who support the Army by developing and improving new technology (story here). I imagine it’s on the wall to encourage workers who may feel like they are working on some small or remote part that what they do is important to the big picture.
Well, my job is too and I was thankful for this reminder. My job? My job is to write about the success stories of the contract to which I’m assigned. I am to write about successful tests, advances in technology and the people behind the projects. These stories are important for boosting the morale of the workers and for making sure the public and our government officials are aware of the kind of work we do.
As a writer, I’m even more removed from “the fight” than those working in that facility. But I still have relevance, and I take this responsibility seriously.
I was first made aware of this at NASA, although I think I’ve had some sense of the relevance and influence of writers at each of my writing positions. At NASA, we often wrote to “inspire the next generation of explorers.” We weren’t the scientists or astronauts, but we filled a unique role in furthering the cause of space exploration: the role of educating the public and students about what their space agency was doing and hopefully inspiring them to get involved.
The same is true wherever you are. Everyone plays a role. We must all do our part.
It’s a Carnival!
I am part of a blogging consortium called Rocket City Bloggers, even if I’ve yet to make a meeting.
Rocket City Bloggers is a group of Huntsville, Alabama, bloggers who meet once a month to talk about bloggy things and who have so far hosted two blog carnivals. For the carnivals, each blogger writes a post around a theme, and then one blogger “hosts” the carnival by posting links to all the other posts. Then all the bloggers post on their own blogs about the carnival. It’s a way of driving traffic to each others blogs but also (and more importantly, to me) a way of sharing with each others’ readers more cool blogs out there that they may like.
Blog communities are tied by a variety of different bonds, most often content. The Rocket City Bloggers community is tied together by geography.
This month’s carnival theme was the Best of Huntsville. I blogged Home Sweet Home, about my heritage as a native. That turned out to be a quite an interesting approach because so many in the group wrote about what it’s like to be Huntsville transplant. While I was not the lone native in the group, I was the only one who wrote about it from that perspective.
Check out all the posts in the carnival here.
