So, the first week has come and gone.  I admit to falling in increasing love with my little toy.  After several nights of reading my required bedtime-story on it, I branched off into newspaper articles and tried out the spiffy magazine subscription option.  I have uploaded several of my own documents to read.  I went shopping at the Amazon store directly from the Kindle and found it surprisingly easy to buy stuff although the UI needs some work.

The best thing so far is the screen.  The text is truly beautiful and very easy on the eye.  After months of reading mostly on a standard laptop monitor, I found that reading on the Kindle was stunningly easier and my reading was much faster.  Hubby was quick to point out that the Kindle does not have the many distractions that my laptop does.  That is definitely a point, but then he picked it up and read through the newspaper.  Before I wrestled it back out of his grabby hands, he was lamenting that the ink-technology wasn’t available in full size screens and was making plans to try to tweak his fonts and contrast so that his monitor settings are more like the Kindle.  Score 1.

I am also enjoying the content.  The magazine and newspaper subscriptions offer trial periods and the newspaper navigation is well done – at least on the newspaper I’m trying out.  One of the magazines I have downloaded is not so easy to navigate and I suspect that the Kindle is dependent upon the publishers to provide the nav.  UI may be hit or miss.

Another nice discovery was that the Amazon Daily newsletter offers free downloads and 99cent deals.  With room for 1000 books, I’m finding it easy to take advantage and try out the offers.  The sample chapters from new books are fun too.

So far I’m finding that I drag my Kindle along everywhere.  A new purse was required and happily acquired.  I find all my paper books that have been stacked in piles around my room looking at me with expressions of disappointment.  They will be ignored for a while while the shiny new toy gobbles my reading attention.

After four days of constantly refreshing the USPS package tracking site, my freshly minted Kindle2 arrived with a very unceremonious plop in the mailbox up the street.  Didn’t they know they were supposed to ring the doorbell?!!!  My husband had been ringing the bell all day just to watch me race to the door and then laugh at me.

So, the first 24hrs were mostly spent pining over the fact that I’ve got a crazy weekend with company in town and a writing project in the cliffhanger stage.  I did manage to open the box and plug it in right away.  My very first e-book that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for days, just waiting for my kindle to wake up, popped into the menu on my screen and I happily re-read the first chapter of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.  A dubious honor, but an honor none-the-less that I’m sure John Scalzi will quite appreciate. ahem.  He’ll appreciate the royalty check at the least.

First impressions:  the e-ink thing is crazy.  I’m a gadget user, but don’t care much about how things are built or programmed, so I wasn’t expecting such a different screen.  Once I was convinced that the flash between pages was perfectly normal, I found myself quite able to ignore it completely.  The text is crazy good, with a very soothing eye.  Take this though, as from someone who reads too much on very old computer monitors.  I used the kindle for bedtime reading and found it very relaxing to look at, even in cozy lighting.

The other aspect I have played with a lot over the course of the day has been the document transfers.  Part of my interest was the ability to put my own documents on the kindle and I have uploaded several to my @free.kindle.com address.  The conversions were very quick, the link to the document download was in my mailbox in about five minutes.  My Word story documents tend to get sloppy as they are often hybrid monsters of formatting from google docs, two computers, different venues, and whatever caffine I was on the day I created them.  So I realized after the first couple, that some formatting would be required to get them to look like “stories” on the Kindle screen.  Find/Replace magic has taken care of most of those issues, in my particular cases.  Transferring to the kindle through the USB cable was very easy.

I have lots to explore, and lots to learn, so that is probably enough for now.  I have only been frustrated by a couple of things that I am willing to write off as learning curve.  So far, I’m quite pleased.

The ONLY truly truly frustrating issue has nothing to do with the Kindle itself.  As a tool designed to facilitate reading, I just really with I HAD SOME MORE DAMN TIME TO READ!  Send me a beach and a babysitter and Kindle, I’m all yours.

You absolutely HAVE to go to the grocery store TODAY or the children will start gnawing on the furniture but then there’s no room in the refridgerator when you’re putting the groceries away?

In 1997 I had the pleasure of meeting Alan Rea at a film scoring seminar at UCLA Long Beach.  At the end of the month long session, Alan and his duet partner commissioned a work for piano, four hands (which means both players are using the same instrument and I have to make sure I’m not writing their fingers on top of each other).  

For the Turn of Another Century was the happy result.  That experience taught me many things, not the least of which is that a professional manner, even in casual company, will be rewarded by respect and work!

This performance was recorded in 2003 by UMKC doctoral candidates Vincent van Gelder and Inara Zandmane.  I hope you’ll enjoy listening!   

turn-of-the-century

Here are the program notes from that 2003 recital/concert:

For the Turn of Another Century was commissioned by Alan Rea and Sylvia Park O’Neill in 1997. It is a series of reflections on a very simple 2 measure “lick” that separates and introduces each new section and contains the thematic material for the whole work. This idea, taken from a jazz ensemble performance at KU, adds to the fun and whimsical nature of the music. The influences of Debussy and Scott Joplin in the harmonic language of the piece determined the title, and were enthusiastically received by the commissioning duo who are regular openers at the annual West Coast Ragtime Festival. This work has been performed several times in the San Francisco bay area.

Copies of the score are available upon request.

I want a Kindle.

The interesting thing about this device goes far beyond the fancy screen and electronic books.  What caught my eye a year ago was the whispernet instant access to the library and the availability of newspapers, magazines and blogs.  Not to mention the ability to put my own documents and stories on it.  With the backing of powerhouse Amazon.com behind it, the experiment has a chance to ride out the early adopter cycle and push boundaries of publication and media.

I can see young authors self-publishing to the kindle and finding an audience in better analogy to indie film and music than the current vanity press system offers (which tends to exploit rather than encourage).  I can see blogs and litererary writing merging.  I can see my nightstand with a few less stacks of dead trees threatening to topple my waterglass onto  my clock radio in the middle of the night and shorting it out.

Right now, the price is a hefty barrier for going mainstream.  And while I see the broader idea taking off, it may or may not be the Kindle that ends up the physical device of choice.  But, like the advice to wait a year before getting a tatto,  I’ve waited my year in considering the Kindle, and I want to do it.  I would have bought one before Christmas, but they’ve been sold out for months.  Today’s gizmodo scoop predicts an announcement for the launch of the Kindle 2 on Feb 9.  I don’t know whether that means they’ll go on sale that day, but I hope so.

Because if it doesn’t come out soon, I may have to get a tattoo instead.

As I’ve been tinkering with my blog the past weeks, I’ve wondered what kind of blog I’m actually writing.  As with the visual theme, I spent some time analyzing other blogs – of writers, entertainers and other venues.  There seem to be many styles to choose from.  Here are some of my personal names for them:

A diary blog is the most personal.  Posts are usually nothing more than a rant of the day from the very specific worldview of the author.  Mood, daily activities, and even slights or arguments are recorded, often in excruciating detail.  I generally dislike this style because it is hard to subject myself to the problems and emotions of someone I don’t know without good reason, however entertainingly they might tell them.

A topical blog is at the opposite extreme.  Posts are composed (meaning deliberate), well-crafted, and focused on a specific area of expertise that the author is knowledgeable in.  Often, very little about the personal life of the author is known at all.  Sometimes the area of expertise is somewhat personal, but the delivery will then be fairly dispationate.  I read several of these, and applaud the authors for providing true value to the greater community.

A personal PR blog is somewhere in the middle.  I read several author blogs that not only effectively communicate with a fan audience, but provide a venue for marketing and audience building.  They are often very personal in the sense that everything from what the author ate that day to what bookstore they are signing books at are painstakingly cataloged.  They are also often very ‘professional’ in how they communicate their image to the blog audience.  And when a new book comes out, or a new job is announced, their loyal blog fans are the first to know.

Other:  Other styles range from massively professional, print-quality publications like Gizmodo (that hardly seem to fit inside that tiny word ‘blog’), to painfully unprofessional merchant sites peddling their latest homemade wordpress themes.

So what is Tepring.com?

To further complicate matters, I thought back to the origin of the word ‘blog’, a contraction of the phrase Web Log.  Dictionary.com defines the word ‘log’ as: any of various records, made in rough or finished form, concerning a trip made by a ship or aircraft and dealing with particulars of navigation, weather, engine performance, discipline, and other pertinent details.

In its truest form, a Web Log is a record of an online trip.  A journey, if you will, of exploration into uncharted electronic waters.  THIS definition finally offered me some direction.

Tepring.com is a journey of one who is exploring a new venue for writing.  There will be days where it might look like a diary.  Others where the easy-to-use posting tools will offer an opportunity for the most vain of vanity publishing.  Still other times, when I hope to be able to offer something of value on a topic on which I have some expertise.  Many writers say that keeping a journal of interesting observations or thinking-while-driving revelations is a useful and necessary tool for the writing process.  Tepring.com, in part, will be my venue for that end.

I expect I’ll be travelling alone.  But drop me a note if you happen to tag along for the ride once and a while!

I was watching my daughter prepare a gourmet restaurant meal for me the other day at her play kitchen.  After asking me if I wanted marshmallows in my hot tea, she busily measured out a cup of water, poured it into the sauce pan, and then turned on the burner.  What fascinated me was not the way she creatively put chopped vegetables into the pan along with my tea (what a timesaver!) but the detail with which she went about her imaginary cooking.

She held the cup under the faucet for exactly the amount of time it would take to fill it.  She tilted her head as she twisted the knob on the burner exactly like you would to check the temperature and make sure the burner had turned on.  She waited impatiently (complete with exaggerated sigh) for the water to heat and the tea to be ready.  There was a moment when I was looking at her faucet to make sure it hadn’t actually started spouting out real water!

It strikes me that this is very much what a writer must accomplish in a story.  Using tools at hand, a writer must imitate the motions and patterns and emotions of a character or setting so thoroughly that a reader will begin to forget that the faucet is imaginary and the tea invisible.  It wasn’t the end result of my daughter’s tea that convinced me of its authenticity, it was her attention to those minute, but important, details in the creation of it. (I sense theatre in her future…)

And who could have guessed that marshmallows were such a tasty topping on tea?

Since I worked up the courage to post my first post, I have been thinking more about the blog and what it should be, do, look like as I devote more attention to it in the months to come.  I have dabbled with wordpress.com on a group blog project, and was familiar enough with blog style and layout to have an inkling of what role a theme plays on a site.

So this is what I did.  First I asked a professional (aka web developer hubby who snapped up my domain on a lark and has been bugging me to blog ever since).  He tells his clients to look at competitors and come up with a list of sites that they like.  I did this by actually clicking through to the several blogs I read daily.  Then I started looking at free themes, one at a time.  I made a list of any that appealed to me for any reason, keeping in mind the other blogs .  After looking at dozens, I realized that my favorites had at least one of three consistent elements:  blue color palette, swirly graphics, and a two colum, right nav layout where the posts were distinct and prominent.

Once my preferences were more specific, I skimmed several more sites until I found this one.  It’s blue with pretty, swirly designs, and a clean layout for posts.

And MOST importantly?  Writing about picking themes pushes out the moment when I have to write about something actually interesting!

First day of the year, first blog post on my very own blog – named, quite logically, after me: Tepring.

What does one post in their very first post?  A profound missive?  An introduction?  A biography or resume?  All worthy ideas, surely, but I cannot help but wonder if it’s really worth the effort to expend a profound beginning on a blog with no audience.  Even if, say, in two years this blog has earned a prestigious number of visitors, would those future-loyal fans take the time to read back to the very beginning?

Since I’m feeling lazy and smitten by the vacation spirit, I’m going to gamble and say: no.

First post:  Ok, not so profound.  Unless I’m right.  And then it is.

Happy New Year!

tepring

(This is a copy of a post I wrote in 2007 on another blog. Transferred to tepring.com for reference!)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reflecting upon the realization that I’M A BIG FAT CHICKEN!

The epiphany occurred during our vacation last month in CO. A large group of people that we camp with planned an aggressive 18 mile hike earlier in the year and I wanted/want to do that hike. I even joined a couple of the training walks that happened through the spring, and did a lot of walking on my own time. Summer and kids, though, killed my walking routine and the short story ends with when the time came, during the week of our trip: I chickened out. I didn’t do the hike. I was even OK with the decision UNTIL: My husband joined the group and did the walk instead.

The second he announced he was hiking, (Mr. back trouble, foot trouble, not even sure if he’d make it around the block) I was pissed. At me. Myself. I. My husband’s only crime in the situation was that he was brave. He just decided to do it, and did it. I’m sure he thought I was mad at him for a couple of days, and I was, but only as the symbol of my own chicken-ness.

Once I got past blaming him for stealing my victory (which he didn’t, I’m just still feeling a bit vindictive, hee hee) I started to wonder when I got to be such a coward. When I think back to my High School days, I remember myself as a big dreamer and bold achiever. I signed up for and took college classes as a Sr., just for some pre-college experience. I left for college that was literally across the nation from home and never looked back. I grabbed responsibility like it was nothing, and earned more in the process.

But at some point, I’ve lost that daring, that go for it and see attitude. I’m too cautious, and afraid of rocking the boat. I got weary of fighting for the road less traveled, and habitually choose the smoother path.

In my case, I think that there are 100 little reasons (2 big *little* reasons, ages 7 & 3) and 100 little compromises rather than a single cowering event. The 18 mile hike that I’d talked about and even prepared for a year has served as a useful wake-up call, because, you see, I hadn’t even realized the pattern of choices I’ve been making. With fresher eyes, I’m seeing quite a bit about those patterns that bother me and I’m finding myself taking steps along a bumpier road. I think this is a good thing, because if I want to pursue new career options or dream big again, I need to find the part of me that will take risks again.

In short, I need to cook the chicken!