Watermelon Determination

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.

Staking a claim on my literary name

Well, I mentioned yesterday that I have a brand-new twitter handle, and that’s just a part of what I’ve been doing to finally ‘stake my claim’ to the name Chris Kelworth around the internet. Generally, I’ve been following the checklist laid down by Lani and Alastair on the rather staticky podcast episode Storywonk Sunday: Cuddling Afterwards. In addition to the twitter username change to @ChrisKelworth, I have:

• Registered chriskelworth.com and set it to forward to the kelworthfiles.wordpress.com address for the time being.
• Signed up to gmail as chriskelworth@gmail.com
• Opened up a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/chris.kelworth

The idea is to establish yourself in all these places where potential readers might be looking for you, before somebody else comes along and takes the same names – or if you find that one of them is already taken, you want to find that out as soon as possible so that you can make alternate plans – whether that’s changing your pen name or signing up with a variant and beginning to promote that address.

If you’re an author or a writer, have you done any of these things to claim your name? Tell me all about it in the comments.