All the wild frenzy of the U.S. presidential election comes down to today. I’ve been bloggingabout it almostnon-stoplately, but today it’s time to shut up and go vote. And then spend the rest of the day in a state of unnerved distraction, trying not to reload your favorite news site every 10 minutes (oh wait, is that just me?).
So today I’m launching an election distraction: The Stephanies is now available. You can go buy the print version, the digital version or the “color-your-own” version where you (or your kid) can be the illustrator.
The Story The Stephanies is a short, goofy little story about two girls who are both named Stephanie. Sharing a name causes all kinds of problems and the two girls continually square off:
“My name is Stephanie!”
“No, my name is Stephanie!”
“Grr…” both girls grumbled.
It’s great fun. If you’re into children’s books, think more Robert Munsch than Margaret Wise Brown. This is the book my 6-year-old daughter and I wrote together and then published through a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Good Cause
Proceeds from the original Kickstarter campaign went to Lexi’s college fund, but for the month of November we’re going to share. Half the profits from The Stephanies will go to First Book, an organization that gives kids in need access to books.
Thanks & Please Review
I’d be remiss if I didn’t send out a big thank you to everyone who backed our Kickstarter campaign and made this project possible. Thank you!
I hope you’ll check out the book, give it a review on Amazon and tell your friends. Thanks!
The usual story we hear about Ethiopia is one steeped in poverty and despair. We hear stories of famine and political unrest. That’s the common narrative. It’s unfortunate because stories are powerful. But it’s not the whole story.
There are also Ethiopians doing amazing things. Not just marathon runners, but business leaders, doctors, activists, writers, musicians and more. Flowers of Today, Seeds of Tomorrow is a coffee table book to tell those stories. They’re currently doing a Kickstarter project to fund publishing the book. It’s about 85 percent written, and you can see some of the incredible stories and layouts on the Kickstarter page.
This is an opportunity to reframe the story of Ethiopia.
Doing Good in Ethiopia
I don’t want to contribute to the narrative of despair. I’m wary of providing the kind of international aid that’s merely drops of water on a wildfire. While famine, poverty and despair need to be stopped, I want to address those issues in ways that offer hope and empowerment, not empty charity.
Just last week we celebrated a new well in Ethiopia. I love that the local people in Segalu built their own wall around that well to protect it and are raising their own money to support and maintain that well. I hope this is a project that empowers them, freeing up their time and energy to pursue more productive efforts.
Likewise, I think Flowers of Today, Seeds of Tomorrow is a book that can empower a people. It reframes their story and shifts the focus from nostalgia for the past or despair for the failures of today to a hope in the promise of tomorrow. These are stories of Ethiopian heroes who have overcome that past to find success today.
We need those stories. We need those heroes.
Bring It Home
Four years ago today my son Milo was born in Ethiopia. I wouldn’t see his picture for six weeks and I wouldn’t hold him in my arms for five months. He no longer lives in Ethiopia, but it will always be a part of him, a part of me. These are his stories, and as you can imagine, I have a vested interested in seeing stories of hope and not despair.
Ethiopians, like all of us, are not bound by poverty and famine. They are not limited to political unrest. They have heroes and champions. It’s time for a book that tells those stories. I know my family needs one in our library.
Consider backing this Kickstarter campaign and helping this project come to life. I know it’s a lot of money, but the $50 reward gets you a hardcover version of the book and they’ll donate two softcover Amharic versions to libraries in Ethiopia through Ethiopia Reads. That’s a great way to share these stories with your family and with the people of Ethiopia.
I just finished reading The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves by M.T. Anderson. If the length of the title is any indication as to the length of the prose, be warned. At 550+ pages of 18th century writing by a classically trained slave, this book is a chore to read. It doesn’t help that very little happens. Which is all too bad. It’s a fascinating story of an escaped slave joining up with the British to become part of the Royal Ethiopian Regiment to fight the revolting Colonials.
I was curious about this Royal Ethiopian Regiment, though it probably had few if any actual Ethiopians in it. While the story is fiction, it’s based on fact. Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that any slaves escaped from rebels would be granted freedom for serving in the British Army. Some 800 were organized into the Royal Ethiopian Regiment, though they were never given much of a chance to fight. They were led into a trap at the Battle of Great Bridge and were later decimated by smallpox. Only 300 of the original 800 survived the eventual retreat to New York.
The story of black Loyalists in the American Revolution is interesting. The title of the book paints Octavian as a traitor, but what choice did he have? Traitor, slave, dead. Black Colonials had no hope of freedom, while the British often offered freedom as a way to encourage recruits and disrupt the colonists. Those promises were eventually honored and some of these black Loyalists were moved to Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone.
There’s an interesting author’s note at the end of The Kingdom on the Waves that reads in part:
In the course of my research for this book, I have come to believe that the American Republic would not have survived its early years—would not have made it through the War of 1812—if it had not been fueled and funded by two profound acts of ethnic violence: the establishment of slavery and the annexation of Native American lands, both of which practices played a major part in the inception and conduct of the Revolution. The freedom—economic, social and intellectual—enjoyed by the vocal and literate elite of the early Republic would have been impossible if it had not been for the enslavement, displacement and destruction of others.
With so much whitewashed talk of our founding fathers, that’s perhaps a more realistic look. But they’re not alone in their guilt:
But it is easy to condemn the dead for their mistakes. Hindsight is cheap, and the dead can’t argue. It is harder to examine our own actions and to ask what abuses we commit, what conspicuous cruelties we allow to afford our luxuries, which of our deeds will be condemned by our children’s children when they look back upon us. We, too, are making decisions. We, too, have our hypocrisies, our systems of shame.
Last month I launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish the book Lexi and I wrote this summer called The Stephanies. In less than three days the project was fully funded.
Awesome.
Over the last month the campaign has hummed along, raising more than double the original goal. That’s pretty cool, especially since extra cash goes toward Lexi’s college fund.
But the Kickstarter campaign comes to an end tonight at 9 p.m. Central. Today is your last chance to join our Kickstarter campaign and support The Stephanies.
But wait, if the campaign is already fully funded, why should I join?
Great question. At this point the goal is met and the project is going forward with or without you. We’re at a fun stage in the life of a Kickstarter campaign where there’s no more hoping and dreaming. The project is a reality and joining up now doesn’t carry any risk that the project might fail.
But two reasons why you might still want to join the campaign:
1) Get the Book Cheap
The Kickstarter campaign will be the cheapest way to get a copy of the book. You can get the digital version for just a buck and the print version for $15 (shipping included, plus a personal thank you from Lexi and me). If you want a copy, now’s the best time to get it. The Stephanies will be on Amazon later, but you won’t be able to get it for as cheap.
2) Cool Rewards
We also have some cool rewards available now. Along with the book, you can also get some cookies, Lexi artwork, join Lexi’s book of the month club or some other fun extras. My personal favorite is the book of the month club. It’s a little pricey at $250, but considering that you get a book shipped to you every month for a year, it’s a pretty great. Today’s your last chance for any of these goodies.
Last week I finished the book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Chris McDougall. It’s easily in the top five best books I’ve read this year. And that’s not just because I’ve been doing more running this year than any other year. It’s an incredibly interesting book that makes the most mundane things completely fascinating.
The writer starts off the book with a running injury and wants to know how he can run without getting hurt. His doctors tell him to stop running. It launches into an exploration of running shoes, which didn’t come into use until the late 1960s. The author ends up pursuing a lost tribe in Mexico called the Tarahumara who easily run up to a hundred miles a day in ridiculous canyons with little more than sandals for shoes.
Personally it’s engaging because I’m fighting the same battle. I’ve taken up running recently but I’m terrified I’m going to hurt myself. Something like one in three runners get injured every year. I was going to run a 5K this weekend, but I came back from a run on Thursday with my knees hurting. Pushing it didn’t seem wise. The idea of barefoot running that’s explored in Born to Run suddenly seems appealing.
The fact is that for all our fancy cushioned shoes, running injuries have only increased. Running shoes actually increase the power of your footfall, magnifying potential damage to your feet, ankles and knees. But people have run for millenia without such fancy shoes, so why not do it that way (or at least in minimal shoes—I’m too much of a wimp to go completely barefoot). This barefoot or minimalist trend has skyrocketed recently, to the point that Nike has released their own “barefoot” running shoe. Here’s a good summary from the author’s site.
I’m not sure where I’ll land. I know I need to ease into minimalist shoes if they’re going to work for me, and with my iffy knees right now I need to be especially careful. Exercise shouldn’t be this difficult.
And that’s the most compelling part of this book, that perhaps we’re doing something wrong. Virtually every disease that plagues Western nations can be blamed on poor diet and exercise. Many of our health problems could be solved if we simply went running. We need to re-learn how to run, both to get back into the practice but also to learn how to do it right so we can avoid the epidemic of running injuries.
Which brings me to what I thought was the most fascinating portion of the book. McDougall talked to some evolutionary biologists who theorize that the human body was made to run. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which holds that our design is for walking. But as they compared human and animal physiology, they found that we have more traits in common with runners than walkers. As they explored further they found that we’re especially designed to run—but not sprints like a jack rabbit or a cheetah, but long distances. More than any other animal, humans have a capacity to go fast over long distances.
At first this stumped the biologists. How could that be helpful? Long distance is no good if a tiger catches you in the first 10 seconds. Likewise dinner would manage to escape in the first 10 seconds as well.
Then they discovered an ancient art of hunting that involves literally running an animal to death. It’s very rare today with fenced in preserves and what not, but they managed to find a tribe in Africa that would hunt this way: Persistence hunting. They would run an animal down over 20 miles, tracking them, herding them to keep from losing the stragglers and eventually the animals would overheat and die. A deer might be able to outrun you, but if you keep after it, the deer has to slow down to rest and you don’t.
That’s incredible. I’m probably summarizing the story poorly, which is why you should go read the book, but that’s just fascinating. I’d like to see how it goes over with my hunting friends. What if instead of grabbing the rifle or bow, they headed out in shorts and a water bottle, ready to run that buck to death? Think you need a hunting license for that?
Here’s a good video that summarizes the book and includes persistence hunting:
Five years after the release of the final Harry Potter novel (has it been that long?!), J.K. Rowling is releasing her next book, The Casual Vacancy, today. It’s not a kid’s book, as every review seems to point out with quotes about balls and vaginas (gasp!).
The New Yorker has a lengthy piece about Rowling that’s part bio and part review. It’s fascinating, especially reading about her incredible rise from welfare-recipient to near-billionaire author (almost there: the piece says she’s worth $900 million).
Of course The Casual Vacancy will be a best seller (it’s already #1 on Amazon). But the real question is if it will be any good.
I kind of hope it’s horrible. There’s something encouraging about someone so successful sitting down to dream it all up again and failing miserably. I’m probably not the only one with a bad case of schadenfreude. Though for what it’s worth I’d love to see her come back from a failed comeback (!) with a real winner and put us all to shame.
Of course it’d be that much better if The Casual Vacancy was amazing. Dreaming it all up again worked wonders for U2, delivering us the masterpiece of Achtung Baby. I don’t have those kind of expectations though. I have a hard time imagining Rowling’s voice in anything but a magical children’s novel. But I’ve love to be proved wrong.
I just finished reading the sci-fi thriller Angels of Vengeance by John Birmingham, which is the conclusion of the Without Warning trilogy. The basic premise of the book is that an unexplainable phenomena, dubbed the “wave,” covers a huge swath of North America, instantly killing everyone inside.
How’s that for a premise? Everyone in the continental United States (except for a tiny triangle in Washington which includes Seattle) is instantly gone.
But Birmingham’s trilogy is not about this strange phenomena. In fact, he never explains how the wave came or why, at the end (uh, SPOILER ALERT) of the first book, it inexplicably disappears.
Instead Birmingham’s series is about what happens if you took away the entire population of the United States. Who would fill that vacuum?
It’s not a story about the event. It’s a story about what happens next.
And what happens next is a lot more interesting than whatever sci-fi hocus-pokus you can think up. That’s the lesson for interested writers. Thinking up some incredible event is not the trick. The trick is taking us on the roller-coaster that happens afterward.
I should have realized it, but the same thing happens in Birmingham’s other trilogy, The Axis of Time. An international military force is inexplicably transported to the middle of World War II and accidentally destroys the U.S. Navy (oops). In this case what happens is explained (experiment gone awry), but it doesn’t matter. The story is about what happens next. Not why it happened or how it happened. It’s what now?
That’s perhaps the single greatest question for a writer: What now?
This summer Lexi and I wrote a children’s book called The Stephanies. Lexi drew the pictures and we want to publish it. We need your help.
The Stephanies is a short, goofy little story about two girls who are both named Stephanie. Sharing a name causes all kinds of problems and the two girls continually square off:
What’s a Kickstarter?
Good question. Kickstarter is awesome. It’s a site that allows creators to go straight to their fans to raise support for their projects. Creators come up with a fundraising goal and a deadline. If they can raise the money before the deadline, people pay up and the project goes forward. If the goal isn’t met by the deadline, everybody keeps their money and the project doesn’t happen (You may remember that I tried a failed Kickstarter project back in 2010—we didn’t meet the goal, so all those great backers kept their money). Creators also come up with rewards to encourage people to support their project, like a copy of whatever is created, behind-the-scenes access, limited edition items and more.
It’s an exciting development for creators and fans alike. Last year Kickstarter brought one of my favorite bands, Five Iron Frenzy, back from the dead. It allowed indie artist Shaun Groves to fund a new record without a label. It enabled a sequel when a publisher balked. Just last week it funded the new Molly Danger comic book from Jamal Igle. And it’s two-thirds of the way toward funding a new book and album project for Justin McRoberts. And those are just a few of the projects I’ve supported. It’s for plenty of other awesome ideas as well, like smarter consumer electronics (they’ve already raised over half a million dollars!), an ad-free future for the comic Penny Arcade, and even a space elevator.
It’s great fun to become a patron of what you think is cool.
Back to The Stephanies
So yeah, we’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to get The Stephanies published. We’re trying to raise a modest $300 by Oct. 3 to help defray the time and effort of publishing the book. We’re going to do three versions—digital, “color your own,” and full-color paperback. Back the project at any amount and you get a copy of the book ($1 for digital, $10 for “color your own,” and $15 for paperback, shipping included). Pony up $25 and you get all three versions, plus Lexi will create some custom artwork for you. We’ve got some higher end rewards for the big spenders, including a cookie package, Lexi’s book of the month club and your very own custom book written by Lexi and I.
Lexi helped me every step of the way on this project, including coming up with the rewards. She didn’t think anyone would pay a lot of money for this project, so we tried to keep all the reward prices as low as possible. By backing the project you’re getting the family discount. This isn’t about making money, it’s about sharing our story.
The Stephanies has been a fun summer project for Lexi and I. We’d love to turn it into a real book and share it with the world. We hope you’ll help.
It’s only the second day of Lexi’s summer vacation and she already needs a project to keep her from being bored. OK, I need her to have a project to keep her from being bored.
A while back we wrote the outline of a book together. I asked Lexi who she wanted the characters to be, what she wanted to happen and kind of made up the rest. She drew one picture and it got filed away for another day.
Today was that day.
The Stephanies
We pulled out The Stephanies and started work on our book. I’m the writer and Lexi is the illustrator (apparently on Saturday we’re going to switch roles for her Star Wars book). I had to explain how illustrating works, how you have sketch things and draw them and redraw them and draw them again to get it just right. I explained how she had to practice drawing each Stephanie so they looked the same in each scene. I also explained how this wouldn’t be a quick project that we’d finish up today—it’d take a while. (All of which would probably make me a horrible art teacher)
So I spent the afternoon writing and Lexi spent the afternoon drawing. I have most of the story, though the ending needs some work and it needs lots of polishing (my last children’s book was Mike, The Cat, written when I was a child). Lexi has a lot of good drawings, though I think we need to pick some new colors or figure out what’s wrong with the scanner (the girls should be wearing dresses that are highlighter pink and yellow).
So that’s your preview of The Stephanies. It’s going to be awesome. I’m hoping we can release it later this summer, probably as an ebook and maybe as a full-color, printed book (I’ve been wanting to experiment with that for a while).
What About Milo?
And why isn’t Milo involved in this little project? Mainly because I insisted the kids clean their rooms on the first day of summer vacation and then keep them clean. Lexi finished after an hour or so on the first day. Milo kept procrastinating, not doing it and somehow completely avoiding it. For two days. He finally finished the half hour job tonight, so maybe I’ll have to find a role for him tomorrow.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading this year. Mostly I’ve been finding books at the library, but I also decided it might be time to actually read some of the books on my book shelves. We had a bit of a used book addiction when we were first married and amassed quite a library of books that we had no hope of ever getting around to reading. Though if my reading habits of this year keep pace for a while, I could get there.
The initial Coca-Cola business involved selling syrup to soda fountains that added the carbonated water and ultimately mixed the drink. The company was not interested in bottling Coke and selling it in bottles or cans at the grocery store, to the point that when enterprising and persistent bottlers came to Coke, the company practically gave away the bottling franchise in a perpetual contract that would cause them headaches for decades to come. As you can imagine, the bottling business soon surpassed soda fountains.
The familiar Coca-Cola bottle was developed and trademarked as a way to discourage imitators who kept trying to borrow everything distinctive about Coke–the red color, the diamond-shaped label, the scripted font and even the words “coca” and “cola”. While the company’s efforts to trademark each of these components met with some limited success, trademarking the bottle was a brilliant and effective move, cutting off the imitators.
During World War II, Coca-Cola was considered vital to the war effort as a morale booster to the troops. So much so that Coca-Cola men were given technical observer status and Coke and the Army partnered to build bottling plants behind the advancing Allied troops, all to keep the Coke flowing to the men in uniform.
While Coke adamantly refused to develop other drinks until the 1950s and 60s, Fanta was developed during World War II by the German branch of Coca-Cola that was nationalized by the Nazis. The drink was created to fill the gap left by sugar shortages and take advantage of what scarce resources were available, namely fruit.
Coca-Cola had at least three opportunities to outright buy Pepsi Cola and shut down their primary competitor (a tactic they employed on other occasions). They never did. While this seems like an enormous mistake, it’s likely some other competitor would have filled Pepsi’s shoes. Also, the rivalry with Pepsi is credited with spurring the company on to greater creative heights.
The New Coke debacle of the 1980s when the company dared to change the formula of America’s soft drink gets detailed treatment. While the new formula seemed like a sure success, beating both Pepsi and old Coke in blind taste tests, the company didn’t pay attention to its own research that said Coke drinkers hated change.
A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.
All the wild frenzy of the U.S. presidential election comes down to today. I’ve been blogging about it almost non-stop lately, but today it’s time to shut up and go vote. And then spend the rest of the day in a state of unnerved distraction, trying not to reload your favorite news site every 10 minutes (oh wait, is that just me?).
