Ted, Ted, Ted

This is a picture of me drawn by Seneca, who is in third grade. I really don’t look this good in real life.

I don’t think Laura reads this site, so maybe she won’t notice that I’m putting up a link to her work. She has been contributing heavily to fangathering.com and fanfiction.net in the last few weeks. She has written someone resembling herself into one story (no hints, you find it), and also tried some interesting mash-ups between work by Fowl author Eoin Colfer and work by some other writers, including some guy named Shakespeare. I especially enjoy the way her command of the language advances week over week, sometimes day over day. Armed with only a few basics, like “show don’t tell,” which I laid on her in a particularly pedantic mood one evening, she has done some remarkable stuff. I think the weakest point is that her excitement with plot can lead her to rush to publish before a story is fully baked, and the reader ends up having to mentally fill in transitions and details that the real Eoin Colfer, who probably works at a more leisurely pace, might have provided. Time and practice, of course. She has built some strong fundamental skills and I can’t wait to see where she takes this.

Lilly has been participating in a heart health program at her school. She went from two consecutive jumps to 50 at a time in about a week. She’s also been skating, with and without a hockey stick, and has a fine-looking swing with a bat. She spends more time than ever on her living-room trapeze, and she does an hour and half of gymnastics on Saturdays. Somehow she finds the energy to stay up until 10 whenever she can get away with it.

It’s rare to see a story about Venezuela in the U.S. press that does more than summarize the chatter at the last upper-middle-class cocktail party the correspondent was invited to. Hard to get good help these days, what with the housemaids getting so uppity, that kind of thing. On a few widely-spaced occasions, however, the preoccupations of the high of brow overlap with something that actually matters to people. This surprisingly warm L.A. Times story is an example of what can happen then.