Ask me about ...

[resonant]

I went to a conference this fall where instead of saying, "Hello, my name is ..." the name tags said, "Ask me about ..."

I loved that. It was a sustainability conference and that narrowed the options a bit, but there was still a surprising variety. "Ask me about organic eggs." "Ask me about green alleys." "Ask me about saving electricity."

We have a huge range of knowledge and talent here. We pretty much know who can draw and write and pod and vid, but if some of you are experts on octopus intelligence or making eclairs or the works of Jane Austen, I would never know it. I wish we had those name tags here.

As for me, you can ask me about:

How to make a sentence flow better. I'll do public rewrites, even.

How to improve a sex scene. Hell, I'll do public rewrites of a few of those, too.

Some tips on job-hunting, though I haven't actually gotten a job yet, so you'd have to take it on faith that they were worth anything.

Cooking and meal-planning.

Organizing.

Parenting, birth to early teens, with the caveat that the great kid lottery issued us an easy one.

Dozens of things that are not recommended when moving out of the house you've lived in for twenty years.

Comments

[via_ostiense]

I'm interested in the things not to do when moving. What do you suggest? (Or not suggest)

[resonant]

Well, first of all, if there's any emotion involved in the move (if anyone who lives in the space will be homesick for it afterwards, if the move is part of a stressful life change, etc.), do not do it in pieces. Do everything you can to move all your stuff at once and be done with it. It would be a whole lot of inconvenience packed into a short time, but better than having to reopen all those emotions every time you go back for another carload.

(And on a practical basis it's a real pain to have months on end when whatever you reach for turns out to be in another area code.)

I started getting rid of stuff a year in advance, but I wish I had started even earlier, and been much more ruthless. Like -- I wish, actually, that about a year before the move I had taken every single thing out of the kitchen, and then brought things back in as I used them. Then at moving time I would have known which of my possessions had sat untouched for an entire year, and I would have just gotten rid of them all.

I also wish I'd socked away several thousand dollars to pay for big things like truck rental and little things like packing tape, so I wouldn't have had a big credit card bill to pay off after I left my job.

If I could go even further back in time, I wouldn't buy anything that I couldn't lift by myself!

And finally: if your new space needs shelves installed or anything like that, do it before you move all your stuff in! (That seems obvious -- but we didn't, and now I can't install pantry shelves without getting a metric ton of food out of the way.)

What can I ask you about?

[mific]

OMG, ORGANIZING, please! And this should definitely be a meme!

[resonant]

It totally should! I'll come to your journal and ask you about things, if you want.

OK. Organizing. Whether you're talking about stuff or time, in my opinion the two keys are:

Try to minimize thinking. Don't use your brain for storage and retrieval; that's what lists, auto-reminders, and timers are for. And train your hands to put your keys on a certain hook the moment you come in the house.

Try to minimize, full stop. The absolute best organizing tool is the word 'No.'

I can give more detailed suggestions if you have something specific you're dealing with.

[mossybomb]

How to make a sentence flow better.

Oh yes please! I would give my third arm to figure out how you don't overload with exposition and make your prose so streamlined (in Sherlock, in particular).

(Idk if we're meant to reciprocate with my name tag, but you can ask me about most forms of cooking, professional or domestic)

[resonant]

Journalism school, baby. I've spent so many hours rewriting sentences that I can't even begin to count. How about you give me a sample sentence and I'll take it apart and show you what I'm doing with it?

Ooh, seriously, professional cooking? I'm an enthusiastic home cook, but I'd never dare to take on anything bigger than a church supper. What are the biggest differences?

-- and, hey, would you want to recommend some soup recipes?

If you want to treat this like a meme, I'll come ask these questions on your journal instead.

[whetherwoman.livejournal.com]

Long time lurker, hi, trying not to be creepy but I am very interested in parenting advice. :) I love your kid stories so I figure one way or another you've probably done things right. The big thing on my mind right now is screen time. Maybe especially related to wanting to raise a fannish kid? On the one hand all the research that Screen Time Is Bad, on the other hand I love screen time and hope my kid does too. What do/did you do?

[resonant]

Can't really take credit for the kidlet -- she's her own fabulous self just the way she came into the world -- but we did give a lot of thought to screen time.

I'll tell you how it worked for us, but first I want to say that we're really just not TV lovers; kid or no kid, the TV wouldn't be on very much in our house. So the way things worked for us would be a big sacrifice for people who really enjoyed TV, and I think they would probably want to use different techniques that didn't cut into their enjoyment so much.

Until the kidlet was in preschool, we just didn't turn the TV on. Like, at all. (I think the spouse used to watch the State of the Union Address, but that was about it.) This was kind of similar to our approach to shopping; I think that until she was about five she thought the mall was some kind of museum where you could buy a gumball on the way out.

Once she was old enough to understand TV and ask for it, we gave her 30 minutes of screen time a day, with the option of doing chores to earn more. Usually what would happen was that she would sort of bank all her screen time on weekdays and then use it to watch videos on the weekends. (We never had cable, so non-video programming didn't appeal to her much, and I was glad because that way I didn't have to deal with commercials.)

Two additional rules were: homework first, and everything gets turned off 30 minutes before bedtime.

When she got old enough to get on the computer (early grade school, mostly playing games on Webkinz), she started using all her screen time for that, and boy, during the Webkinz years, we got a lot of chores out of her!

By middle school, we stopped keeping track of her time. She mostly didn't seem to care about watching TV; we only had one computer (mine), and sharing it put a natural limit on her time; and increasingly what she wanted to use it for was to open up a word-processing program and write, which wasn't something we wanted to put too many limits on!

This year, I'm having the vague feeling that things need to be readjusted; she has her own computer plus a smartphone, and it seems like she's glued to a screen every time I see her. On the other hand, she's got straight As and many school activities, so maybe it isn't that long in actual minutes; probably we just need to establish a period of no-screen family togetherness and leave it at that. At any rate, at this age when I see a problem I usually say, "Hey, I see this problem -- can you come up with a couple of possible solutions?" and usually she has better ideas than I ever could.

Boy, that was longwinded! And it probably didn't address the needs of families that like TV, rather than being all grumbly like me when someone forces them to watch a video.

I don't think screen time is bad. I think ads are bad, especially for young kids (and especially for girls, because the patriarchy wants to be in your house with you), and I do think it's good for kids to be bored sometimes and have to figure out ways to entertain themselves.

And I have a vague and ill-formed suspicion of a television that's on all the time providing a continuous flow of stuff that you're neither completely engrossed in nor completely able to ignore. One of the things that parents need to teach their kids is how to direct their attention. Which means that watching "Lilo and Stitch" together is really no different from reading "The Hobbit" together, but those are both very different from trying to go about your life while intermittently tuning into hour after hour of America's Best Teen Moms Dance On Sunset Brought To You By Jenny Craig.

[muccamukk]

If a sentence isn't flowing right, what are your top three ways to rework it?

[resonant]

Ooh, nice one!

Actually once I started trying to answer this, I found it very difficult. I've been doing this for so long that it's like driving; my hands do a lot of it without any input from my conscious mind.

But here's how I would start.

1. Ask it whether it wants to be two sentences instead. I have a bad habit of trying to cram way too much into a single sentence, and I am far too fond of semicolons and parentheses, but if you put too many things into a sentence, it will burst.

2. Look for opportunities for parallelism. (an example, from the exchange above: that you're neither completely engrossed in nor completely able to ignore.) In a short sentence, it's just pretty; in a longer sentence, it's an organizing tool. (See what I did there?)

3. Pull all the parentheticals out of it. (It's me, so there will be too many of them.) Then either turn the sentence inside-out, with the stuff that was in the parenthetical part moved to the beginning or the end, or break it into two sentences, or reluctantly delete the parenthetical material and move on.

For example, I could decide that this sentence from one of my earlier responses wasn't working:

if there's any emotion involved in the move (if anyone who lives in the space will be homesick for it afterwards, if the move is part of a stressful life change, etc.), do not do it in pieces.

Here the parenthetical statement is actually in parentheses; other times it might be contained between two commas or two dashes. But I could pop it out:

If there's any emotion involved in the move, do not do it in pieces.

and then experiment with different ways to put it back:

If there's any homesickness, stress, or other negative emotion bound up in the move ...

Do not do the move in pieces if there's any emotion involved in it -- if anyone who lives in the space will be homesick for it ... etc.

[monanotlisa]

HOW DO I IMPROVE MY SEX SCENES?

I tend to be reasonably okay with a lot of my slash (Fringe, SGA).

But my het or femslash scenes, despite me craving it more, perhaps, don't flow as well (Fringe, and oh, hell, I don't even have any explicit f/f or het SGA…

I realize there are complex reasons for this, mostly for me and my therapist (and fucking society!) to discuss, but if this is this something you too have noticed -- any input?

[elizabeth_rice]

Hope it's okay if I jump in for a moment. A writer should be able to get into the mindset of any character and write from that character's POV. So if you're having problems that means that you're over-thinking or over-analysing things and trying to control the creative process. Let it go. Seriously.

When you're writing a character who is the same gender as yourself, don't compare yourself with her. But it's not enough to just think about her, you should think like her. At this point, I'd recommend that you take advice from actors because they know how to be the character and that's actually the best exercise for any writer. All actors recommend learning the physical stuff first -- the way the character walks or stands or sits or maybe a habit they have. Some actors recommend wearing the kind of shoes the character would be wearing and the rest of it flows from that. I've done some of these exercises and they really work.

Once you're the character, the rest flows easily -- how she thinks, moves, what she would do in any situation, how she feels about love and sex. How she feels about the people in her life.

All that remains after that -- that's technical skills. I'm still learning this. But I have a rec for this too: Creative Writing by Neil Nixon. He's a creative writing teacher and fiction author. It's a very tiny book just full of writing exercises that you need to practice regularly. I'm not so good with the regular part. *blush*

Seriously, there are no complex reasons for being unable to write a story. I have written complete stories that involve my triggers. I sobbed throughout the writing process, I'd curl up into a ball in my bed. But I wrote them, completed them even. But they're depressing and don't always have a happy ending so I haven't posted any of them because I prefer to make people laugh. I prefer to post humourous stories. I prefer to be a comedian.

[resonant]

Oh, lord, there's so much patriarchal baggage that you're dealing with any time you write a sex scene with a female body in it! I so sympathize. What little female-related sex I've written has tended to be much less explicit than my male/male for just that reason.

I wonder if, as a mental exercise, it would help to write the first draft of the scene with the female character(s) gender-swapped? Like block out the scene with John and an always-male Teyla, and then switch her back into a female body in the second draft? I may try that myself; it won't help with the fact that nearly all the specific language we have for female body parts is contaminated with patriarchy, and of course it would have to be adapted for the fact that a woman's sexual response arc is different from a man's, but I think it might help with the "romance novels have led me to believe that women in sex scenes act like this" problem.

(Though on the other hand I am always craving stories that really revel in that different sexual response arc -- slow build, multiple orgasms -- in the same way that slashers revel in things like the unhideable erection and the too-fast orgasm of the male body. I'd love to read a story in which a woman said, "I want another one," and then said, "I want another one," and then ... )

A lot of this is going to be rooted in the particular characters -- in how they feel about their bodies, about femaleness, about sex and the OKness of having sexual desires, in how much they even know about what turns them on and what makes them come. Which could be fun, or hot, to explore.

[marina]

Oh man, this is such a cool idea!

Give me your top 3 ways to improve a sex scene. As in, not the thoughts that go into writing one, but the thoughts that go into editing one once you have a rough draft (if you do rough drafts!)

You can ask me about - growing up trilingual to monolingual parents, intelligence gathering/global espionage, soldering/the military, non-US movie industries, marketing.

[resonant]

Nice question! Faced with a sex scene that wasn't working as written, my approach would be:

1. Think about the emotional specifics. What's the characters' emotional situation before they have sex? How should it be different afterwards?

My first-draft sex scenes tend to fail either by being too long and full of extraneous, button-by-button detail or by being too generic and not character-specific enough, and this is a fix for both of those problems.

(I throw away a lot of sex scenes and start over.)

2. Make sure I'm tight, tight, tight, tight, tight in character POV. I don't want to see anything he can't see, feel anything he can't feel, know anything he can't know; all that has to come out. But if his position is likely to make his neck hurt or leave a button pressing uncomfortably into his flesh, if the wall is cold or the car is cramped, if he has an unanswered anxiety that breaks his concentration, all that needs to go in.

3. Because I'm me: make the sentences shorter and less parenthetical.

[resonant]

And wow, what a selection! I'd like to know some things about the military that civilians always make wrong assumptions about.

[travels_in_time]

This is an awesome post! \o/ Could you tell me about meal-planning?

[resonant]

I made a meal-planning post!

[shayheyred]

Having re-read my Yuletide fic and finding the sex scene I wrote cringe-worthy, look forward to my pleas for help in the near future!

[resonant]

Ha! It would take a bold person to let a draft be dissected in public, but email me any time!

[riverlight]

Oh, what a fun post!

I'd love to hear about meal-planning, actually. One of the things I've long been in awe of my parents for is the way for so many years of my childhood they cooked us three meals a day, every day—we lived in the countryside, without restaurants or take-out, so if you wanted food, you cooked it. Now that I'm an adult, I have a hard time with it: cooking so much is just exhausting! How do you do it? Any advice?

Also, you can ask me about: oh, choral music, I suppose, or opera, or feminist theology, or language learning, or how to get through divorce (from the perspective of a kid, not a spouse!)

[resonant]

I made a meal-planning post!

Ooh, ooh, feminist theology! Do you know much about how it's used in practice in actual religious communities? Or are you more comfortable talking about the theories?

[kinetikatrue]

...I'm not so sure I'm up for the public part (or whether it not being one of your fandoms matters), but, uh, I could really use some improving sex scene feedback, if you don't feel you've offered your limit, yet.

As for what *I* am knowledgeable about? Quakerism and boarding school are the two topics that tend to generate the most questions when they come up IRL, but I'm pretty much a generalist sponge when it comes to knowledge.

[resonant]

Whoa! OK, want to tell me five things about boarding school that would surprise most people? Either here or on your own journal.

I'm very willing to take a look at a sex scene -- actually I'll do a better job with it if I can see the whole story, or as much of it as is finished. You can email me at resonant8(at)sbcglobal(dot)net. If it's not my fandom, I'll probably miss a lot of undercurrents -- give me a note if you think of any background I ought to have, and also if you have specific concerns you'd like me to keep in mind.

[cinco]

I'd love to read your job-hunting tips, thanks! <3 This is a great idea for a meme.

[resonant]

OK. In no particular order:

- I got this from the Ask a Manager blog (which I really like): If you're planning to relocate, an out-of-town address is supposed to be a significant disadvantage, since it makes you look like more trouble than a local candidate. If you have a move definitely planned, she recommends putting a line under your address at the top of your resume and cover letter that says, "Moving to Newtown on March 1." She also says it's kosher to put a friend's local address on your resume.

I also really like the pre-interview prep guide that you can download from Ask a Manager, though I've only used it once.

- If you're changing careers, you need to address that in your cover letter -- even if you've put a lot of effort into rewriting your resume to highlight your transferrable skills, people aren't careful readers, and I think that at the weed-out phase, they look at your resume and go, "Why is a librarian applying for our delivery driver position?" (I haven't gotten a job yet, but since I started addressing this explicitly in my cover letter, I've at least gotten a phone interview for every position I applied for, whereas before I was just getting silence.) If you want to see a sample of the explain-my-career-change paragraph, let me know.

- Do the exercises in the back of What Color Is Your Parachute. I really recommend these, especially the one that has you write a bunch of little narratives abut projects you've enjoyed doing and been proud of, and then break them down to find the transferrable skills and preferences in them.

- Volunteer for organizations that you feel passionate about or doing tasks that you enjoy doing. That puts you in a place to meet people who share your passion or people who value the skills you most enjoy using.

- Start a lot sooner than you think you need to.

Then there's this multi-part process that might be subtitled Networking For Introverts.

- Preparatory step 1: Make a profile on LinkedIn and friend people that you have professional relationships with -- co-workers, ex-co-workers, people you know from clubs or religious organizations or the neighborhood or whatever.

- Preparatory step 2: Join a networking group that makes its membership directory available to members. If it has a LinkedIn group associated with it, join that group. Connect on LinkedIn with anybody in the group that you have a conversation with, sit at a table with, get a business card from, etc.

- Now. When you're applying for a job, check LinkedIn and your membership directory and see if you can find a first connection who works for the same company; send them an email and say, "I just applied for the job of Octopus Director in the Invertebrate Department, and I'm looking for someone who can answer a few questions about the workplace and the culture." This gets you a phone call that can often turn up useful information such as the name of the hiring manager (so you can google her and find out about her), the fact that you're probably not going to get the job because they just had a round of layoffs and all the laid-off people are applying for that job, the fact that they really value cooperation and friendliness or aggressiveness and competition or creative problem-solving or whatever.

(If you have no first-level connections, look for second-level connections -- I've been successful in emailing someone who was in a networking group with me and saying, "I see on LinkedIn that you've got several connections at Major Employer; do you think you could connect me to someone who could answer some questions about the culture?" I've gotten results from this even when I've never met my first connection -- when I say, "I haven't met you yet, but we're both members of the Big Fat Networking Group, and I'm looking for ...")

This doesn't work 100% of the time, obviously -- some people won't talk to you, some people will talk to you but only tell you obvious things ("They like people who are smart and hard-working"), some people will be discouraging and bring you down -- but sometimes the inside information is very helpful.

Another good resource on networking is Steve Dalton's book The Two-Hour Job Search, which has some very specific exercises on narrowing down employers and making contacts -- it's not the fix-all that the title might suggest, but it's a very good step-by-step networking guide for a person like me who says, "OK, I have all these connections ... now what?"

[lobelia321]

But didn't you just say you worked 8 hours a day...? So how could you not have a job?

I remember your 'how to write a sex scene' LJ posts. They reside on my hard drive. I love them! But I feel fairly good about my own sex scene writing so that's one department I don't need help in...! *g* (I'm in this slash thing for a reason...)

We moved 3 years ago and did lots of things wrong. *Now* you tell me that you could have advised...

:-)

[resonant]

I'll bet you could advise on moving now, too!

Here's my woeful work situation. We moved on August 3, and the spouse is in school, so I'm the only person in the family working. In September, I took a job through a temp service -- it's full-time work, but it pays very poorly and I don't get paid time off or health insurance. Also I hate the work itself.

Starting next week, I'll be doing a couple of 4-hour shifts each week as an on-call library assistant (still trying to make as close to 40 hours a week as I can at the temp job by coming in early and taking short lunches) -- I expect to find the work more interesting, and the pay's considerably better. I'm also doing some freelance writing, which pays very well if you look at it from an hourly point of view, but will only give me one story a month.

All this is unsustainable in the long run, but in the long run I'm devoutly hoping I can find one full-time job with benefits doing something I actually like doing.

[holli]

I am currently trying to write a story with the POV difficulty turned up to 11 (because the POV keeps changing depending on how brainwashed Bucky is at the time), and it is making the sex scenes... challenging.

Meanwhile, I am good at picking apart world-building, especially when it comes to material culture, and ESPECIALLY when it comes to clothes. If you are writing anything where clothes matter even a tiny bit, I can probably help.

[resonant]

Wow, that sounds like a big POV challenge. I can imagine that it would be almost like different sex scenes involved different characters.

That's a fantastic skill, material culture. We read A Christmas Carol every year, and every year I think, "I'll bet there's all sorts of characterization information embedded in these clothes, but we're not getting it because it was written so long ago." Georgette Heyer is more explicit about what her clothes mean because she's not writing about her contemporaries.

Since I'm not doing any world-building at the moment, want to talk about something in that area you see done wrong a lot that bugs you?

[jedusaur]

I could use some suggestions for activities to keep kids busy, any target age from 10 months to 7 years--especially ones that span a few years, for kids of different ages to do together. I babysit a lot, and sometimes I run out of ideas.

If you like, you can ask me about psychology/neuroscience, vegan cooking/baking/candymaking, puzzle construction, hockey, or juggling and related activities/cultures.

[resonant]

I can't believe how much I've forgotten about keeping a kid busy -- my problem now is that mine is too busy.

One of the best purchases I ever made was of a bunch of pieces of colorful flowy fabrics from the remnants table -- they were costumes and architecture and doll clothes and room decor and all kinds of creative things.

Big boxes are also great, but probably less practical for a person to carry to another person's house.

The kidlet used to really love playing hotel, for some reason -- we'd take turns pretending to be the innkeeper or pretending to be the customer. Over a number of games, she worked out the best hotel that a kid's imagination could come up with -- I remember arriving to check in and being asked whether I'd like a pet for my room, and then getting to choose the pet and its clothes and accessories. (If I asked for a ferret, I'd also get "ferret perfume," I guess because the smell was the reason I always gave for why she couldn't have a ferret of her own.)

I don't feel like I'm answering this very well. It's hard for me to remember how we used to spend our days. What we need is a preschool Montessori teacher to advise us.

Tell me some things about juggling culture that I probably don't know!

[indywind]

This is a brilliant idea. I'm loving everyone's asks and answers.

People can ask me about:
Western European historical trivia of daily life (i.e., not who ruled/died/warred when and where, but what did ordinary people do for work, fun, food, clothes, education, healthcare; what expectations did they tend to have about relationships, social roles, etc. --generalizations and spotty specifics available).
About horses, and to a lesser extent dogs and cats--their general physical and social-psychological processes, and odd specifics (horses can't vomit, a wagging dog or a purring cat is not necessarily happy, cats learn very well by observing other cats' behavior but are relatively insensible of training cues like gesture and gaze that work well with social-group animals like dogs and horses)
Gender theory and trans* stuff, personal experience
Hatha yoga in the modern Western world
neuroatypicality of the gifted/autistic-ish variety, personal experience (surprise! does not necessarily involve scorn for all other humans or inability to learn basic social rules as well as obscure facts!)

[resonant]

That's an interesting variety!

Do you know why dogs have the involuntary tail-wag/tail-tuck reaction? What's the benefit of having other creatures be able to tell whether you're happy or sad? Do other herd animals have anything like that? Is it related to humans blushing or crying, which I also find baffling?