Tonight in Vancouver.

[From a press release]

What: The Joy of Words, An Evening of Readings and Music with Award-Winning Canadian Author Joy Kogawa
When: Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Time: 7:30 to 9:00 pm
Where: Christ Church Cathedral, 690 Burrard Street, Vancouver
Price: Admission by donation

Kogawa will read from her first novel, Obasan, recently re-released as a Penguin Classic. Along with Joy, special celebrity guests, including well-loved actors Joy Coghill, Doris Chilcott, and Bill Dow, along with CBC Radio One host Sheryl McKay and other special guests, will read favourite selections from BC prose and poetry. Japanese Canadian actors Minami Hara, Hiro Kanagawa and Maiko Yamamoto will read from the libretto for Naomi’s Road, the opera based on Joy Kogawa’s children’s novel. Jazz gospel singer Leore Cashe will also perform.

The event is a fundraiser to save Kogawa’s childhood home. The owner of the property has given TLC and the Save Kogawa House committee only until April 30 to fundraise the $700,000 needed to purchase the house. So far, more than $220,500 has been raised from 384 donors around the world.

TLC wants to save the house as a cultural landmark for all Canadians. Once protected, the house will be a used as a writing retreat, enabling new writers to create works focusing on human rights issues. It will also be open for public and school tours to educate people about the Japanese Canadian experience during World War II. For more information visit www.conservancy.bc.ca

I was in San Diego last week and toured the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier.

San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum website

The USS Midway was in service for 47 years. It was commissioned in 1945 and served as a flagship in Desert Storm in 1991. Apparently no other carrier has served as long.

Initially I was skeptical. I didn’t really want to tour an aircraft carrier, but then I listened to a radio documentary in Tod Maffin’s workshop. The documentary was “Somewhere in the Arabian Sea” from This American Life. You can listen to it online by searching the site for “arabian”. The documentary is about life aboard the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. The bombing missions and military aspect of aircraft carriers are still not interesting to me, but the people who live onboard are. And, the stats are certainly interesting.

There’s 2,000 feet of anchor chain aboard the USS Midway.
Each chain link weighs 130 pounds.
Anchors weigh 20 tons each.
The Midway is 1,001 feet long: 3+ football fields
The flight deck is 4.02 acres.
The catapult power is 0 to 170 mph in 3 seconds or less.

(An aircraft carrier does not have the space that an airport does, i.e., no runway. In order to get the planes airborn they are launched or catapulted into the air–0 to 170 mph in 3 seconds.)

The landing area within arresting wires is equal to the size of a tennis court.

(This means the planes must land within an area the size of a tennis court. They also must hook one of three cables or arresting wires. The cables stretch up to 273 feet. The plane must stop by then otherwise it crashes. One vet I talked to, Bob, said that stress tests have shown landing on an aircraft carrier at night is more stressful than surprise attack. Bob had 1243 launches. He said you want to have equal number of landings. He did.)

The flight deck is 50 feet off the water.
The aircraft carrier draws a 35-foot draft under water.
4,300 crew worked to support 200 aviators: approx. 750 men/women in engineering; 225 cooks.

I toured the hangar deck with the berthing spaces, where they slept, and then went up the Island, which is like the air traffic control tower. I missed the second deck with the mess, food galley, sick bay and post office. According to someone who did visit that area, it is impressive.

10 tons of food per day
13,500 meals a day
10,500 cups of coffee at a time
4,500 pounds of beef per meal when served
3,000 pounds of potatoes per day
1,000 loaves of bread a day
650 pies when served

The aircraft carrier weighs 70,000 tons. I wonder if that is before or after a meal. Regardless, it was all rather interesting.

Here’s my round-up of publishing tidbits:

SFU’s Master of Publishing program has launched the new version of Thinkubator. The site is aimed at those in publishing and newbies. I’ve never been a dedicated reader, nevertheless, I did read an interesting post on web fonts. Some web 2.0 developers have found a way to dynamically render any font for the web.

Bruce Walsh, formerly of M&S, has joined Atwood’s Unotchit team as vice-president of marketing. Bruce is a very clever guy and I’m glad that he’s still in some aspect part of the publishing world. Bruce got me hooked on the M&S 100 Readers Club, which I truly hope continues despite his departure from M&S.

And, if I wasn’t hanging out in San Diego, I’d show you the totally awesome bookplate that my internet buddy Patricia of BookLust has sent me. It is most beautiful. I adore her cartoons.

This might be treading into “sandwich blog” territory, you know, the type of blog that posts the minutia of someone’s day. I ate this, I went there, I did that … but I need to have a little sandwich moment.

Yesterday I went for lunch. I walked to a little restaurant nearby. It was awesome. Awesome because the food was good and I was actually away from my desk. I spend more time at my desk than I do sleeping at night. I know this is wrong. My sore back and bottom tell me it is wrong. Yet I toil away.

Luckily, care of Lue, I have discovered a nutritional plan to suit my daily grind.

Quote: As a Desk Potato, you have specialized nutritional requirements. Although modern wisdom is that variety is the key to good nutrition, the Desk Potato prefers the traditional method of categorizing foods into Food Groups, and recommending that you maintain a pseudo-random distribution of samples from each of the major groups.

The Desk Potato Food Guide goes on to discuss the essential food groups of caffeine, take-out, empty calories, gummys and chocolate.

Chocolate is described as the “cross-over food between the sugars and the caffeines, yet soooo much more!” And I’ve also just learned that “gummy technology is a highly evolved food form, replacing the older, ‘sugar’ group.” How can you not love the gummy? “The gummy group includes not just Gummy Bears, but also such varieties as gummy colas, sour keys, sour peaches, floral gums, wine gums.” I enjoy the blue whale, the Swedish berry, orange sections, strawberries and licorice: black nibs and red twizzlers.

Are you a desk potato? Take the test. It’s a little outdated but swap Netscape for Firefox and you’ll do just fine.

I’m removing the index.php from my site and although I’ve followed the directions, I don’t truly believe everything won’t explore. This is a test. Not to panic.

On a side note, I was discussing computer crashes with a colleague and we were laughing about the fact that people expect computers to act goofy. To do things that we don’t understand. Anyone who has called support or an IT person has internalized the following, “have you tried shutting off and restarting the computer.”

This magical act of shutting down works in most cases. At minimum, it eleviates the desire to throw the computer from a second-storey window, and while you’re calming down, something magical is happening in computerland to make everything dippity-do again. I work on a Mac so when the smiley face guy re-appears, my smiley face appears.

Now we were laughing because this restart-behaviour is par for the course with a desktop computer, but what about other big computers? If something goes wrong with our car, we don’t pull over, shut it off, hop out, lock it up, wait a few seconds then start it up again. That would be ridiculous.

Ah, but with the small Mac mini that controls my life … I wait by its side, cooing softly to it, and building a small catapult. I’m led to believe that it is a memory problem, as in not enough, that is causing my angst. I’ll add some decorative features to the catapult while I wait for that theory to be proven or rebuked.

Now let’s see if that index.php thing is still around. I hope not because I can no longer see the hidden .htaccess file on my desktop.

I was one of 20 lucky contestants awarded the chance to hang out with Tod Maffin all day Saturday at the CBC. Tod was volunteering his time as part of a fundraising effort for Multiple Sclerosis. He was offering us a full-day workshop “From Idea to Air: Making Radio and Selling it to CBC”. In exchange we were making a donation, or not, to the MS Society.

The workshop was fantastic. It was very practical, and surprisingly the pitch steps are quite similar to the submission stage for manuscripts in a publishing house. Tod is a fantastic speaker and if you’re interested in radio documentaries or producing podcasts, you should definitely attend one of his workshops: www.todmaffin.com/speaking

The ebook for the workshop is also available for purchase from Tod’s site. It is packed with amazing notes: www.todmaffin.com/ideatoair/.

As I mentioned, Tod was donating his time as a fundraising effort for his wife Kim, who has MS. It was a surprise to hear Tod say that MS is a young woman’s disease and that Canada has one of the highest incidences of MS in the world–this has something to do with vitamin D deficiencies, although I may not have understood that correctly. According to the MS pamphlet MS is the most common neurological condition affecting young adults in Canada. Age of onset is between 15 and 40 years, and affects twice as many women as men.

If you’d like to know more about Multiple Sclerosis, check out Kim’s MS blog, it’s www.restperiod.com. She also does a podcast about multiple sclerosis at www.mspodcast.org.

Now because Tod makes his living giving workshops, I’m not going to post my notes, but I did have some interesting thoughts during this adventure in the bowels of the CBC. The first was that the pitch stage is very similar to the submission stage in book publishing.

In radio:
– Listen to the program you want to pitch your idea to, listen to it more than once.
– Find out who the senior producer is, or at least someone with “producer” in their job title
– When you pitch that person, it is a 2-3 paragraph pitch, which includes what I call the hook–the one sentence description–and then a summary of what the documentary is about, who it’s aimed at and what’s it’s going to say.

There are more specifics in Tod’s ebook, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here. The basic point is do your research. The second point is be brief, be brilliant, be gone. Don’t send a full script, don’t send a resume and long list of credentials. You’re gauging interest. If the producer is interested, then you can present the longer version. The challenge is that no producer has the time to read through hundreds of pitches in a week and do their job. You have to hook them. The only way that will happen is if it is relevant to their program–you’ve done your research–and they get it right away–in 2-3 paragraphs you’ve conveyed the idea.

This is true for submitting a manuscript.

In book publishing:
– Look at the publisher’s website, look at their catalogue. Read some of the titles that they give a full page to in their catalogue or prominent positioning on their website. In particular, make sure you’re looking at a publisher’s originated list, not the titles that they distribute or that come from their multi-national divisions. Really do your homework.
– Find out who to send the manuscript to. Don’t assume that the editor listed in an outdated book on the writers market is still at the organization.
– When you send your query letter, this is your pitch. You need the one sentence hook and the 2-3 paragraph description of what the book is about, who it’s aimed at and what it’s going to say.

There are of course more specifics in the plethora of books on query letters. The basic point, like with radio documentaries, is do your research. The second point is be brief, be brilliant, be gone. If the publisher’s guidelines say don’t send a full manuscript, don’t. The query letter is about gauging interest. If the publisher or editor is interested, then you can present the longer version. The challenge is that publishers receive hundreds of query letters and submissions a month. You have to hook them. The only way that will happen is if it is relevant to their publishing program–you’ve done your research–and they get it right away–in 2-3 paragraphs you’ve conveyed the idea.

Following these basic steps will put you into the top 10%. They seem simple, but they are the basic steps that most people don’t follow.

From idea to air — from idea to book.