Ted, Ted, Ted

Usually when I see a site I like I subscribe to its RSS feed and it shows up in the left column here, but this site out of Kerala, India has no feed, so I’m putting it here to remind me to go back and read it sometime.

Here is a small sample of the reams of material Laura has been supplying to the Artemis Fowl fan community. And here’s another.

She has been putting in a lot of time at this the last couple of months, and it shows. Her dialogue gets better every time I look at it. She has as good an ear for speech as for melody, maybe better. She seems pretty excited about going to writer’s camp for three weeks this summer. My only worry is that she might come out of it a threat to my job. Losing work to India is the least of my concerns. Running into better writers: that’s a real problem.

I guess the biggest difference between Laura’s literary activity and mine at that age is the instant feedback she gets from the Web. The sites she frequents are all about reviews and rankings and there’s a constant flow of chatter among the writers. When I was learning to write, it seemed like a more solitary pursuit. It took a long time to get better. With the commentary Laura gets — sometimes in pretty sharp terms — she knows exactly what to fix right away, and she does.

Hied me to the ancestral homeland for a week to attend a professional conference and see friends and family. My first day here I got to see my mom (right) and my sister Jo (left) perform with a flute choir called Flute Cocktail, accompanied by my brother Nathaniel on the Andean quena and related tubular things. The next day my brother threw a fairly raucous brunch, partly in my honor. I also got a tour of my brother-in-law Luther’s dauntingly large collection of solar cooking equipment, all of it fully functional — I witnessed him making a batch of darn good custard pudding with the parabolic reflector stove. Later on my dad showed off his most recent model railroading achievements.

Lilly’s classmate Xavier was talking about shooting off toy rockets with his dad, and Lilly decided she wanted to do that too. So last week we ordered a kit from Hobbylinc.com and put it together, and today we went out with Xavier, Dan (his dad) and his big sister Guadalupe to a softball field in the neighborhood to try it out. It was beautiful out but a little windy, so Houston, we had some problems, but everything was recovered and we came home with a new hobby.

This is, by the way, the luckiest picture I have ever shot. I was fiddling with the camera when I heard Xavier starting his countdown from five, and I turned toward his voice and shot at whatever. You have no idea, unless you’ve seen it, how fast these things take off. I could have spent years trying to squeeze the button at the exact millisecond, but this one just came out.