"Rats!" & Hooray, I'm For the Other Team!"

If you are familiar with Schoolhouse Rock from the 1970's, these phrases will sound familiar. Interjections!  Show excitement! Or emotion!

I grew up with Schoolhouse Rock and now my 3-yr-old daughter loves to watch them on DVD.  If you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, well, Google it.  Basically, they were a series of wonderful songs about numbers, grammar, and other stuff, that were developed for TV as PSAs, I think.  I"m not Googling it.  I was there!  Anyway, dducational songs that were really catchy and had wonderful images to go along with them.  So.  My subject line is two examples from the song about Interjections, one of my favorites.  I could sing it for you,  but no, let's not do that...  what was my point?  Oh, all this to make my life seem more fun and exciting!

To file under "Rats!": my comm ed zine class got cancelled because no one signed up.  Bummer.  I'm going to look into teaching it in Minneapolis Comm Ed in the Fall, or maybe someplace like MCBA or the Loft.  I know it will be a great class, I just have to figure out how to find my audience.

Under "Hooray, I'm for the other team!" (this example in the Schl. Rock song was taking place during a football game, and when the away team scored, the home team fan said "Rats!"and the away team fan said "Hooray! I'm for the other team!"  Ok, I know, I'm being kind of mental, but I have a migraine and I'm on painkillers and I'm trying to feel productive): I get to teach a workshop at the Chicago Zine Fest!

My workshop will be on rewriting and things like how to focus your ideas into a zine, or into a whole.  I think my big idea is how to make sure you're getting across what you want to, how to connect back to that fire inside you felt that got you to sit down and try to do a zine in the first place.  I know sometimes ideas can get lost once you start writing, for a number of reasons.  You might have an inner editor that gets in your way and makes you correct your sentence structure and spelling before you are even done getting your ideas down.  Or maybe you went off on a tangent and forgot what you were really going for.  I'll talk about clustering, from the book Writing the Natural Way.  And I'll talk about writing specific instead of generalizing, that people like to hear about personal experience, not just opinion.  And stuff like that.  I still have a month to develop it. And it's only a 45 minute workshop, which I think will probably go really fast.  I'm thinking I'll do a handout, too.