Time is a Plastic Camera (Or Maybe Not. But Plastic Cameras Are At Least a Good Compromise)

by Gigi

I used to love to go to the darkroom to print black and white photographs. In addition to getting some great prints, the time spent in the quiet darkness was relaxing.

But somewhere along the way, the tools of Photoshop and the quality of digital cameras caught up to the detail I could get from making my own prints. I could no longer justify the inefficient time spent in the darkroom. (At right: darkroom or digital?)

Giving it up had to be done. I was done with design school, I was working full time, and I had gotten serious about writing. Something had to give. (Unlike Martha, I need sleep.)

I got myself a digital SLR camera and some cool lenses, and thought I was good to go.

But something was missing.

Did I really want to see exactly what a photo would look like the second I took it? Where was the mystery and anticipation in that?

I couldn't go back to regular 35mm, so what could I do? Medium format 120. And not the fancy kind. The sloppy fun kind.

I now have two plastic cameras: A Holga that takes square photos and allows light to sneak in through its duck-taped sides and gives each photo its own unique look; and a 35mm Lomo Fisheye camera that captures skewed images I never would have imagined.

So although I won't make it into the darkroom any time soon (too many edits to make and stories to write!), I've got my plastic cameras to keep the mystery of photography alive.

Martha Bends The Laws of Space-Time

I decided to become a young adult writer on August 17th, 2008.

A friend of mine who works at Scholastic shipped me an ARC of Suzanne Collin's The Hunger Games. I read it in one sitting less than four hours long. It was like an injection of literary crack between my toes, straight into my veins, into my frickin' eyeballs. I couldn't think, sleep, dream anything but young adult novels from that point forward. Of course, my appetite had been whet several months before with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series but it was The Hunger Games that showed me YA is where it's at.

It has been one year and one month since that date.

One year and one month of:

- completing a manuscript
- signing with an agent
- going on editorial submission
- joining the Brain Trust critique group
- building a website and personal blog
- writing half of manuscript #2
- attending two national writing conferences
- meeting and joining with the Pens Fatales group blog
- forming/joining a YA That's Why critique group
- interning for a literary agent

All on top of daily life vagaries.

Lemme tell ya...I have days. Weeks.

Of ugh.
Of I'll never make it in this town!
Of I'm gonna be that person - who plugs away at an impossible dream until it is neither romantic nor inspirational but strangely pathetic because yes, that point happens - don't patronize me and don't regale me with stories of people who published after 50 years because I took statistics, dammit, and you can't fool me into thinking those data points count.

Maybe I will be that person. But that person is 49 years away, and I think if I could glimpse into the future by folding the fabric of space-time so that point 49 years in the future is bunched right up alongside now, I'd still see a happy me.

Lisa's Theorems of Time (as helped along by Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison)

by Lisa Hughey

I’m a bit of a geek. I like science. I like solid, physical evidence and proof that things exist. So when I started thinking about our topic, Time, I decided research was necessary. Turns out that time is a pretty complicated subject. Possibilities hover in the metaphysical realm as well as the physical.

Albert Einstein postulated that time is relative. It speeds up or slows down depending on how fast one thing is moving relative to something else. He also theorized that the closer we come to traveling at the speed of light, the more time would appear to slow down for us from the perspective of someone who, in relation to us, was not moving. He called the slowing of time due to motion, time dilation.

In the 1970's some scientists used atomic clocks to test Einstein’s theories. Two clocks. Both starting at exactly the same time. One clock set up on the ground. One clock flown around the world on a jet. When the jet landed back in the same place, it’s clock was behind the clock on the ground.

Einstein was right. Time had actually moved slower.

But I think the Einstein experiment missed an important fact. At the end of the experiment, both clocks ended up back on Earth in the exact same place. Proving Lisa’s first theorem of time: Even if the goal is to end up in the same place, everyone’s path (and the time to follow the path) is different.

Sophie (A Bad Day For Sorry) and Juliet (Secondhand Spirits) both have books out on the shelves right now. Their paths to publication were radically different. Not better or worse, just different. But they still ended up in the same place at the same time.

Lisa’s second theorem of time: Time is never wasted. The journey is as important as the destination because every experience we have leads us to where we are now.



Thomas Edison (to steal from National Treasure) tried and failed over a thousand times before inventing incandescent light. He has many things to say about failure but this one is most profound: "Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

It is never the time to give up.

You’ve probably guessed by now, I’m also a very big fan of the power of positive thinking and the importance of motivation. Einstein and Edison are both examples of people who tried and failed over and over but also succeeded over and over.

Which leads to Lisa’s third (and final) theorem of time: Time passes. Whether you put your effort toward your dreams or you just keep wondering and wishing you could... take a class in anthropology, learn to speak Farsi, travel to New York City, do a hundred pushups (http://www.hundredpushups.com/), color your hair purple, or...write a novel. You won’t know unless you try. And whether you’re moving or standing still, you’ve got time.

Lisa

ps. I didn’t realize I had theorems of time until I started working on this blog post which helped me to define in my own geeky way, the relativity of time.

pps. The info on Einstein comes from a PBS show, Nova. www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/hotsciencetwin/

It's Time To Talk About Autism

--Adrienne Miller

We are coming up on an anniversary in my family. I remember every detail of the day. How kind the psychologist was as we came into the little office. How much I just wanted her to get to the point when she presented my husband and I with our copy of the long report. And, even though I thought I had prepared for myself for what was coming, how much it hurt to hear for the first time that my son, Jack, has autism.

Its not an uncommon scene, though I wish with all my heart that it was. The CDC says that 1 out of 150 children have autism. Which means that a whole lot of families have been through similar first years. And just as many are now starting this journey. 

It's almost been a year now and I think I'm ready to start talking about autism.

I remember the horrible tangle of emotions I felt in those first few weeks and months. Lots of anger and despair. And guilt. Don’t forget the guilt. Maybe I did something to cause this. I have no right to be this upset. Jack is healthy and some people aren’t so lucky as that, you know. 

But then I would see Jack and most times just being around him would snap me out of it. Cause he was going on with his life, not caring about the specifics of that report or where he fell on what chart. He went on being the sweet, funny guy he always was. The little boy who loves trains and books and Disneyland.

Jack went into early intervention program through our local school district, one that gave him 25 hours a week of ABA therapy. We were also lucky enough that our insurance covered speech therapy sessions at our highly esteemed local Children’s Hospital. 

He began making amazing progress. When Jack first started school he only had a vocabulary of about 40 words, now he talks in sentences. The same kid who couldn’t draw a straight line with a crayon can now write his own name. We have a gallery dedicated to his art work in the entryway to our house. He even plays with his younger brother. Not alongside him. With him.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still a long, long road of us. There’s a lot of skills Jack hasn’t mastered. Maybe he always will have those problems or maybe he won’t. I don’t know. No one does. 

But over this last year I’ve learned a lot about my son. He’s an amazing courageous boy who has handled everything that this tough year has thrown at him.  I can only imagine how difficult every day is for Jack-- every day that he has to struggle to communicate, every day that he is bombarded with too much sensory information, every day that he works so hard in school to learn what comes naturally to the rest of us.  And everyday I see him smile. 

And this is what I’ve really learned over the last year. This is why its time to talk about autism. Because Jack isn’t just a 1 in 150 statistic. He is brave and strong and downright amazing. All our kids are. And that is what the world needs to know about them.

Time...gee I wish I had some more

I believe in a theory of relativity.

For example, the way time expands and contracts, relative to what you're doing.

I don't just mean how, when one's book is due, say, in one week... that week seems like two days. Or how it also, simultaneously, drags on for a month, so that it's impossible to remember Life Before Manuscript Due .

How about when you take a trip to...anywhere, really... as long as it's someplace new. Time slows down. You return home three days later and folks hardly even noticed you were gone, but you may well have had a life-altering experience. At the same time, the time absolutely flew and you can't believe it's over.

Right now, though, all I can think about is the manuscript that was due two days ago (seems like an eternity)...my editor gave me a couple of extra days, which is great because I need the time, but not so great because I will take all the time I can get, which means the days will simultaneously stretch ahead of me and rush by, and I won't get to other stuff. Petty things like paying bills (those bill collectors apparently don't understand the whole "time is relative" thing) or fulfilling those obligations to friends and family and colleagues that have been piling up over the past few weeks.

Wish I could see the future, and see how it all turns out. But I guess I'll wait for time to unfold its mysteries, on its own schedule.

Nora Roberts Has More Free Time Than I Do

Recently, I saw Nora Roberts speak in a video chat. She's a wonderful speaker, engaging, charming, and witty. She seems to be a straight-shooter, and she tells it like it is. She gets a lot done because she works a lot; it's as simple as that. She works five to six days a week, six to eight hours a day.

I heard her say that, and I thought, huh. I can do that.

Hey, wait a minute. I do that.

This week, I'm working 60 hours at the 911 day job. Monday is an overtime shift, then I'll do Wednesday-Saturday, all 12 hour shifts, like normal, 6am to 6pm. I get up between 3:30am and 4am to write for about an hour, before I leave the house at 5am for my commute. I get around a thousand words done before work, unless I accidentally make the coffee too weak.

On my days off, I write for four to seven hours, depending on how the words are treating me, unless I'm editing under deadline, and then I can be at my desk for ten hours or more. As my last deadline approached, it wasn't uncommon for me to be at my desk for twelve hours on every day off. (For those doing the math, that's an 84 hour work week between both jobs.)



La Nora, whom I adore, is working her ass off, yes, but she's putting in a writing work week of between thirty to forty-eight hours.

I can DO that. Let me AT it! I feel like a leaping animal, wild to try. Let me get to the point where I can support myself by the writing, let me get to the point where the royalty statements allow me quit the day job. (A girl can dream, can't she?) Let me know what it feels like to be completely self-employed, and to feel (mostly) safe being so.

I'm passionate enough to do the work to make it happen. I'm putting in the time now, and I'll put it in then, too. But on the flip side, I'm savvy enough to know that putting in the time doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to make it. Nor does being talented. Nor, even, does being in the right place at the right time. There's no magic formula, except, perhaps, continuing to get up after you get knocked down, again, and again, and even that might not work.

But I'll keep writing. Keep putting in the time. Nora inspires me. "Discipline, guilt, and guilt." That's how I get to the page every day. Yep. I get that.