About Art: My four year old loves to dance. It's just a natural thing in her. Ever since she gained any coordination at all, she's had to move if there was any music on. One of my fondest memories is her as a little bald-headed toddler, lying on the couch. We thought she was asleep, but when she heard some music from a TV commercial, she had to raise her barely-conscious arm and bounce it with the music.

She's learned a little more about dance since then. She'll do her version of ballet when she hears classical music. She'll rock out, even play air guitar when she hears rock. Tap to tap. You get the idea.

I'm not saying she's a child prodigy or anything. She's not particularly graceful and I'm not all that sure about her sense of rhythm.

But man, does that girl ever love to dance.

There's an honesty in her dancing, where you can tell she's doing what she feels with the music. No matter how it might look to anybody else, to her it feels right, and it shows.

So tonight, I was watching her dance to some music on a National Geographic for Kids video they'd picked out from the library. Some animal or other was cavorting to the music on screen, but Miriam wasn't watching so much as she was listening, so she could dance.

And I got to thinking. About the things that draw us to art in the first place. About that raw love we have for the art form, for the way performing or creating that piece of art makes us feel. The way it is for my four year old, just to move her body the way the music tells her to. The way it seems to be for my three year old and drawing--even though the shapes are barely starting to become recognizable, she loves making them. The way it was for me, as a kid, making up stories.

And that got me thinking about the transition. The one that comes as we begin to go from yeomen in our art to journeymen. We start learning the techniques of the craft, the way everyone else does it. The things people have decided work and don't work. What was raw and free form is given a structure, an organization.

In some ways, that can expand our abilities. We discover things we didn't previously know about. Our means of expression expands.

But in some other ways, we begin to feel boxed in. All that organization and structure begins to put limits and boundaries on what had previously felt to us to be limitless.

Even the language of our art begins to put boundaries on us. I realized this when I learned another language. In Portuguese, there's a really terrific word--jeito. Now if you plug that into Babelfish, it will tell you that word means "Skill." That almost makes me laugh. The word jeito is actually a terrific concept. When you talk about a person's jeito, you're talking about their aura, their comportment, their methods of doing things, the whole way they present themselves, their charisma. But it's more than that--it's almost the whole way a person interacts with the world. When you say you're going to get something to change, you say you're going to give it some jeito.

Now Portuguese speakers are probably going to post here to say my definition here is inaccurate or incomplete. They're right. Again, the whole concept doesn't really exist in English. For us, it's complicated to explain. For them, it's one word. It's jeito.

It's the same way as we start building the vocabulary of our art form. Suddenly you're not just flinging out your arms because it felt right, but you're getting a name for that, and a way to fling them that's the right way, and reproving click-clicks of the tongue from the teacher if it's not.

Like I said, there's value in learning what you can about the art. A musician can never dream of making the beautiful music their heart yearns to create without being willing to slog through repetitious scales that familiarize their fingers with the instrument. A dancer, through repetition and training will enable their bodies to do exhilarating things the casual dancer only dreams of.

The trick, the hardest part of it, is maintaining that love of the art, maintaining that spontaneity and creativity that drove you into the art, even while you're having to spend all that time focusing on the nuts and bolts of it, seeing the rough stitching on the underside rather than the lovely presentation up top.

That's the part where a lot of people get lost as they work to become artists. All of that analysis, criticism, study--it's like taking your favorite dog and dissecting him on the kitchen table. All of that doesn't really reveal all that much more about true "dogginess." And it certainly doesn't explain the magic of the bond the person has with their companion. If anything, it strips a little of that magic away. It denigrates it. It says, look--this is all there is! Just flesh and bone and puppy parts. What were you getting so worked up about?

So that's the key. I don't know the language for dance or music or painting, but for writing, it means absorbing and mastering the principles of plot and character and hooks and twists and viewpoint and pacing and beats and still being able to generate that little squeal of a thrill from feeling that a story or a scene or even just a sentence feels right.

Like a basketball player who's done drills and learned plays and knows techniques and form, but in the heat of the moment all of that gets pushed to the back of his mind as he gets by on that same instinct that got him by on the asphalt courts at his junior high.

The difference is, now his instincts have the benefit of all that training and study and practice to rely on. Because he managed to maintain his love of the game through it all, he's now able to be paid to do it. Others want to crowd arenas to watch him do it.

I think that makes the difference in taking him from journeyman to master.

So I know that my daughter is eventually going to have to make a choice. It's the same one I have to make in my writing. The same one you've got to make in whatever you do. Do you love it enough to lay it out, dissect it, and understand it? Can you endure all of that enough that it can bring you back to where you started, that place of innocent creation, only this time, armed with the tools to create what you only barely sensed was possible in your first fledgling attempts?

I sincerely hope the answer is yes. For me at least.

My daughter's still got time to decide.

For Pete's Sake: Will everybody stop talking about this letter as if it's news? Seriously, no one, not Lewis, not Lewis's Mom, not the president of Lewis's fan club would have thought The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe would have made a good live-action movie. He basically said, live action effects don't do these kinds of films justice, and he was right.

But that was nearly thirty years ago. That was the year Ben-Hur won the special effects Oscar. Peter Jackson wasn't even born for two more years.

This letter was pulled out of some vault somewhere by some PR guy to get a little more buzz going for the movie. It's anything but news.

On Kids: I was going to post this in my friend's blog's comments, in response to this post, but when it go long, I decided to share with everybody.

I have girls.

And there's only one way to stop having situations like this.

And that's to not be afraid to have situations like this. In fact, you have to be willing to have situations twenty times worse than this.

But it does not go down the way it did for the Mom in the store. You don't melt into a pool of jello.

You leave. Right there. Leave the grocery cart in the middle of the store, and you leave. No train ride, yes, but that's just the start. No cocoa puffs, no pop tarts, no whatever the thing is that gets the kid's mojo going. No groceries.

The store, and shopping, and even food are stuff for kids who know how to behave themselves in public, and they are most assuredly not that, and they are not going to continue to embarrass Mommy.

Now, this probably would not have helped this woman. These are the kinds of lessons that have to be taught before Thanksgiving shopping trips and deadlines and whatever else this woman probably has on her plate.

They definitely need to be taught before four. Even the three year old should have them well in hand--if it was autism, though, that could have either helped or hurt him, depending.

The point I'm trying to make is, in order to win fights like this--every time--you can't make it a fight. Ever. Because if you make it a fight, there's a chance the kid could win. So if it's any kind of struggle--a battle of wills, a battle of bribery, any type of battle--the kid knows he's got you. The mere fact you've given him that much means he's got leverage.

And he knows it.

So you don't yell. You don't fight. You don't raise your voice. You take both kids out of the cart, put them in an empty one, and you cart them back out to the car. You put them in their car seats.

"Grandma's going to be disappointed," you tell them, "when there's no turkey. And no olives. But If all we have with us is kids who act like babies, we can't go to the store like the big kids."

And you have to mean it. You have to honest-to-goodness be willing to leave the groceries at the store and find some other time to go shop.

Yeah, I know you don't want to do it when your mother-in-law's coming and you don't want to have to explain why you can't control your kids.

But two things.

First, if your mother-in-law is worth earning of the respect of, she'll respect you for trying to raise civilized human beings in this world of children who are spoiled by parents' feelings of guilt and inadequacy over failing to raise their children as civilized human beings.

And second, if you had bothered to give this a shot before your kid's fifth Thanksgiving on this planet, Thanksgiving V would have gone fine.

I'm sorry if I don't sound sympathetic.

But when I sit in church on Sundays while five and six year old kids run up and down the aisles, while parents just smile and shrug and say, "I just can't control them!" I'm reminded of the Sundays I spent with both my daughters before they were two training them on how to behave for one hour of church.

Not by giving them toys to quiet them down--lest they feel they've been rewarded for being bad. Not by taking them out to the lobby--lest they see being bad as a way to "escape" from the meeting. And not by spanking them or otherwise doing something that will lead to further tears and lead to me having to hug them to calm them down--another indirect reward.

Instead, I would take them out of the meeting and hold them. Not hug them--it's not a reward--but hold them, so they can't play. If they're crying or fussing, I would sing to them softly or otherwise let them know that I wasn't angry or mad or mean. Once they calmed down, I would talk with them about why they needed to be quiet in the meeting, until they'd agree they could do it.

And then the reward was that they got to go to the meeting and draw or do whatever we did for quiet play. They came to feel that the meeting was the good place to be--not the lobby--and they'd work to be there.

Now that they're a little older, I just use time-outs in empty classrooms. I don't have to do it often, but they know I'm willing to do it, and that's why a raised finger or a knowing smile usually quiets them down now. They just smile back as if it say, yeah, dad, you got me, and they settle down.

So what I'm saying is, it wasn't easy. I know I'm not giving this lady an easy solution.

But I'm saying in the long run, it's easier if you do it early, earlier than most parents are even willing to admit their kids are able to respond to them, than if you wait around until your kids have figured out where your buttons are or how to wrap you around their finger or otherwise learned how to get their way every time.

And, also in this woman's defense, it's easier if Dad's around and doing his job. I don't know how the church thing would work if Mom wasn't around to sit with the kid's who's being good while I'm out missing the whole meeting so I can sing "In The Leafy Treetops" to a crying two-year-old. In this case, I got no idea what continent this guy's husband's on, let alone what town.

But--as harsh as this probably sounds--that's why she's got to get this going now.

Maybe do a couple practice trips with the kids on days where she's got the time for it. Make definite plans for how to react the next time it happens.

Because it's just going to continue. And that five year old who won't mind when you tell her to leave her brother alone really is going to morph into a teenager who won't be able to make sensible decisions when Mommy's not standing right beside her holding her hand.

So there really does have to--have to--come a moment where you stop merely trying to get through each day and you assess where you truly are and what you have to do about it. If you don't know, get help. It's one of the biggest idiocies of our society that we think that just because the kid came from us that we should somehow know everything about how to handle them. I have infinite more respect for parents who admit to feeling overwhelmed--the ones who probably feel the least competent--than the ones who just shrug and say, "I just can't get them to do anything. The former are at least acknowledging the enormity of the task. The latter are basically saying that if there's anything about it they don't know, it isn't worth knowing.

And I fear the life of a child in the hands of someone who puts that little value by doing it right.

Incidentally, to my friend who made the initial blog post--the mere fact that you recognized you were seeing, the empathy you felt for the woman's situation, the mere fact that I know you're tough enough to stand up to complete strangers when the need arises, and you're certainly not the type who's going to allow your toddlers to go careening of course while you stand by wringing your hands and wondering what to do, and the fact that I know you've go the brains and the courage to learn any new concepts you feel responsible for knowing--all of these would make you a great mother.

Even to girls.

Watched Pots: I think a lot of us, when we decided we wanted to be writers, thought of it those terms--we wanted to be writers. We never really stopped to consider what we would spend most of our time actually being, which is people who were struggling to become writers. Which basically consists of typing for a living.

No, that's not true. It basically consists of typing in the hopes of one day having a living, while in the meantime you spend all your real creativity and energy doing something else for a living.

So that's the first reason more people aren't real writers. Because the writing part, no matter how much you love it, is hard.

But then there's the other part. Like writing, some people are better at this part than others. But it's just as vital.

And that's the part where you send the stories out to editors and cross your fingers.

I'm lousy at this part. Absolutely terrible.

I know there are writers out there who can send their stories out and forget about them. They can keep cranking out the fiction day after day while the dozens of stories they've already written float around the markets. The ones that sell, great, and the ones that don't--well, they just pop them in another envelope and try out the next-best-paying-market.

Not me. When I tuck one of my babies in an envelope and send them off, it's like I've got a kid on trial for murder. I can't sleep until I know his fate.

It's not healthy. You have to forget about the stories. It's hard to decide to have more kids if you're still not sure if you screwed up the last bunch.

But I know I'm not alone in this. Otherwise there wouldn't be as many "Response Time Trackers" as there are.

What? Never heard of a response time tracker?

Well, those of us who want to obsess over our submitted stories have found a way to use the internet to pool our resources. See, my own submissions are basically a two-day process. One day I send it, one day I get the response. There's not much tangible there to fret over.

But if all of us send in those two dates, now we've got something we can follow in real time. We can track exactly where each story market is in its reading process. We can get average times for each market, so we know about how long we're going to be waiting. And of course, we can read far more into it than we probably should if we see people getting rejects back who submitted to a market after we did.

My own daily "Doom Loop" through response time trackers includes the one at Speculations, Andrew Burt's much-loved Submitting to the Black Hole, and sff.net (If you've got a favorite I missed, feel free to leave it in the comments).

I'm hoping that once I break out of the semi-pro market and make my first solid pro sale that I'll give up this obsession. That at that point, whatever crazy validation I'm pining for will have come to pass and that I can just settle in and write, confident that regardless of what response I get to each story, my status as a pro writer is secure.

And maybe a leopard won't need it's spots any more once somebody says, "Hey! Look! A leopard!"

Crit Up: Just a heads up that my short story, "Moonshine" is up for critique this week over at Critters if you're a member and were looking for which one to read.

Obscure Movie Review Of The Day: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

First off, if you're a fan of the book, it's worth it to rent this movie just for the "Really, Really Deleted Scene." It features Arthur, Ford, and Zaphod bursting through a door like something out of an Ah-nuld film, and Arthur shouting, "The name's Dent! Arthur Dent! DO panic!" before firing off a few rounds.

What about everybody else in the world? Is this one for the fans, or will everybody love this one?

Well, I'm sorry to say, you'll probably find it a mixed bag. I definitely think you'll enjoy it, but if you're not a fan of the book you're not going to understand what the big deal was.

I think the movie's biggest weakness is how busy it constantly is. There's always something happening on the screen, and if there's not something funny happening, there are usually seven or eight things happening all at once to try to distract you from the fact that there's really nothing happening.

Part of the charm of the book was how understated everything was. In the book and radio play, the babel fish is a rather clever idea cleverly presented. Here, it's turned into an action scene--and I'm not talking about the Rube Golberg-esque action of the babel fish scene in the computer game. Arthur and Ford literally wrestle around for a while as Ford tries to get the fish into Arthur's ear.

Yeah, that's what I always loved about the Guide books. The wrestling.

Some of the new stuff absolutely works. I loved the Vogon home planet, Ford's nervous feeling that he ought to hug Arthur whenever he thinks Arthur's upset was terrific, and Trillian was absolutely delightful.

But Sam Rockwell played Zaphod so obnoxious that it almost made the movie obnoxious, and Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast was forever ruined way back when I first heard rumors that John Cleese was being considered for that role, so any performance would pale in comparison to the one I shall forever imagine could have been done by Cleese.

But all the best bits are there and a few good new ones. I can comfortably say that I still don't think the definitive H2G2 movie has been made, though, so there's a chance we still have that to look forward to someday in the future.

Oh, and my daughters enjoyed it.

At least, they keep asking to see the singing dolphins.

How Do You Do That?: Whether you're interested in magic or not, I strongly recommend Mallusionist as a source for magical secrets.

I recommend the stage magic section for the biggest secrets, but if you want a trick you can do for your friends, check out the principle of Magician's Choice or Memorizing a Shuffled Deck.

Saturday Story: I have another story. It's not the one I've been working on. The one I've been working on I'm really excited about, and everyone should come back next week and ask me for it, because I want lots and lots of feedback on it so I can turn it into my first pro sale.

In the meantime, I have this overwhelming wish sometimes to hold a book in my hands that has something by me in it. Whenever this happens, I try to write something to fit an anthology. I then go to Ralan and pull up the anthology list and try to find a print anthology that appeals to me.

This happened to me again tonight.

I decided to write a story specifically for Carnifax Press's upcoming Clash Of Steel Book Three: Demon. The guidelines are here. The story, which is much shorter than my usual stuff to fit their guidelines, is available for critiquing and commenting and helping if you email me.

It's hot off my fingertips, all written by me this very night. Which means it probably needs a lot of help.

Just drop me a line . . .

Fate Smiles On The Doc: Well, it just happened that I went to post a long, drawn-out and probably overly mean post about something, somewhere, and then vanished it myself on accident before I could post it.

Here's the thing about me: I'm not short winded. I tend to try to draw as crystal clear message as I can. I tend to be long because I want to be understood. I don't just want to be so clear as to be understandable--I want to be so clear I cannot possibly be misunderstood.

Granted, I generally fail miserably at this, but that just makes me inclined to go on even more the next time.

This means that I usually keep two windows open in any BB thread I'm going to post in. One for the window I'm replying in, and one for the thread. That way I can refresh the thread and see if anyone posts anything while I'm posting. I'm sure others do this too.

The problem comes when you hit "refresh" on the wrong window. After you've typed a lot.

It was probably for the best. I should probably get some kind of default timer put on my computer that makes me verify, after a monitor verifies my blood pressure and pulse rate are back to normal, that I still want to post something.

Or better yet, I should get a program that refuses to let me post (or blog!) anywhere until I finish that week's story.

I promise there will be a story Saturday.

What Order?: It's a problem that people have faced for years. What order do I read these books in? What order do I watch these movies in?

CS Lewis said, the minute he wrote it, that he thought people should read The Magician's Nephew first. It took place first chronologically, so that made sense, right?

Only people rejected that. Since they'd read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe first, they thought the only way to give people the full impact of their own experience was to have others read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe first, too. So strong is the thought of that as the first book that Disney is filming it first, even though they're clearly looking to turn this into a Lord Of The Rings-esque series of blockbuster movies based on a beloved book series.

So now, there's two questions, posed by Becky. The first is, can you read "Mazer in Prison," the short story in the Enderverse from OSC's new magazine, without having read the last couple of Shadow Series books? And the second is, can you watch Serenity without having watched all of Firefly?

The first question is easy--I'd argue that you can read "Mazer in Prison" before you've read Ender's Game. There is nothing in the story that would even spoil that book, let alone any of the books in the Shadow Series. Some people might argue that you want to read Ender's Game first, because that's where they first met Mazer and some of the other people in the story, but I don't think knowing who a character is is so much a spoiler as some might.

So what about Serenity? I'll tell you, there's a part of me that wants to tell everyone to see this movie right now, because it's doing bad at the box office and it's the kind of movie I want to make, so I'd like to see it doing better. So I'll warn you up front that my first response is to say, "Go! Now! Take twenty friends and see it!"

And I would not be at all wrong in this. You can absolutely enjoy every minute of Serenity even if you never saw a minute of the TV show. The writer and director of this is used to writing for episodic television, so he knows how to hook people in while catching them up.

But I've got to be honest--there are some moments in this movie that absolutely will not have the same effect if you haven't seen the series. If you don't know who these people are, if you haven't got to know them through the series, then some things in the movie won't be nearly as important to you as they could be.

In other words, if you go watch the movie without having seen the show, you'll have a great experience. If you go watch the movie having seen the show, you'll have an incredible experience.

I will say I don't think you have to watch the whole series. In fact, I know some people who only watched the pilot--they were even a little put off by the pilot, which is why they never finished the series--who went to the movie, "got" everything, and loved the film enormously. "Browncoats" will probably want my head for saying this, but if you're on disk 3 or 4, for heaven's sake go out and see this movie while it's still in theatres!

If you've heard some bonehead say you have to watch the series first and you have no intention of giving that many hours of your life to a $50 set of some cancelled TV show, ignore them and go see it. You'll dig it.

And for those of you who have heard the title--Serenity--and thought it sounded like a chick flick with Emma Thompson in it, go here at watch some trailers and video clips. It should ease your mind.

I guess what I'm saying is, prepare yourself to the degree you're interested in preparing yourself and then see the movie. But above all, most important, no matter what, do see this movie.

Editor's Note: I realize that I'm making a terrible mistake here. I'm hyping the movie so much that it may end up being a let down for some people who see it. They're going to go in thinking, "Erik said this would be the best experience I had in the theatre this year," and then end up disappointed when it's still only a movie. I use such adamant language not to get you overly hyped, but to overcome what seems to be some level of resistance to seeing a movie that has no known stars in it and a chick-flick title. So I'm not going to tell you it will be your new favorite movie. I will make this promise though: You will like the characters even though you don't know the actors who play them. You will like the story, even though the title puts you off. And you will definitely be glad you went.