First off, as Odyssey approaches, I’ll probably be posting a bit less frequently, and definitely a bit shorter. I don’t think I’ll be able to kick the blogging addiction cold turkey though!
And a really cool note for today; Lani and Alastair played a voice-mail from me on this week’s Storywonk Sunday! You can download the MP3 off the Storywonk site or from iTunes, (yeah, it’s a nice long episode this week,) and they introduce me around the 9:20 mark of “StoryWonk Sunday 48: Someone is Wrong on the Internet” 😀 They even have some awfully nice things to say about li’l ol’ me.
So, I was listening to the Storywonk Sunday podcast this morning, and Lani and Alastair opened the show by talking about something that they’d been impressed by in their latest “The Amazing Race” marathon. I’ve found what looks like a pretty good YouTube of what they were talking about: Skip ahead to around 6:40 for the good stuff:
So, we have some crazy reality show challenge where each team has to nominate one player to knock over a suit of armor with watermelons and a giant slingshot catapult. Claire was picked as the catapulter, (because she was good with horses and they thought the knights on horseback were part of the challenge, not just stage dressing,) and Brook throws herself into the role of the cheerleader. Claire’s apparently having a bit of a hard time both pulling the watermelon back far enough to launch it far enough to reach the armor, and aiming it straight…
Then something goes terribly wrong with one shot, the sling swings around to rebound one melon right back into Claire’s face, hard enough to explode it into lots of pieces.
The big thing that hits me, after watching the video for myself, was the tack that Brook took afterward. She wasn’t callous; I could tell that she cares for her friend and teammate a lot, she’s really grateful that Claire wasn’t seriously hurt and sympathetic about the pain and shock she’s going through right afterward.
But she doesn’t let up, she urges and coaxes Claire to dive right back into the race as soon as she can, because other teams have started to pass them. If Claire just lay down and wallowed in what had happened to her, their team would have been the first to get eliminated, and Claire would have regretted that. Instead, she grumbles a little, but she goes back to the catapult, nails that suit of armor on the second try, and they rush off to the checkpoint rankings or whatever, Claire yelling “I can’t feel my face!” And they make it in fourth place for that episode.
Of course, in real reality, most of us have the option to wallow for a little longer, but the idea of not letting opportunities pass us by is a good thing to keep in mind I think. I had some kind of metaphorical fruit hit me in the face yesterday, when I didn’t pass my G road test on the first try. But I’ve already booked my second test appointment, and once I can feel my face again, I’m going to go over the test paper and figure out what I have to practice over the next few weeks.
We all get hit by some kind of fruit in our lives.
It should surprise none of my faithful friends and followers here that I’m a huge fan of the Storywonk podcasts with Lani Diane Rich and Alastair Stephens. A little while back I submitted a question on the Storywonk.com forums, and this week Lani and Alastair really got on a roll!
It’s a great episode, including the jokes about how nice Canadians are, and shoutouts to myself and to Elizabeth Twist, who I mentioned when introducing the questions. (I’m not sure if Lani and Alastair know that we’re both Canadian or if that was just a random coincidence.) There’s three listener questions and a follow-up ramble about reader expectations in the episode, and I’m the second, so  the stuff about my question is mostly in the middle-ish of the MP3 file. They go to town explaining the differences between problem and conflict that were confusing me, (and the trouble with the capital T Trouble,) and share some interesting thoughts about Man versus Himself contrasted against Man versus Nature, both of which might be applied to The Time Bubble Blues.
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The Kelworth Files 