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 It’s a little outdated but swap Netscape for Firefox and you’ll do just fine.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.

Van “The Man” Porter is selling an instructional video of the Orange-Coloured Sky routine. I have a copy in my possession and love it. It’s only $40 CDN for you dance fans out there, and you can buy it from www.vantheman.ca.

For non-tap dancers, there is also a cool clip of Van dancing with a jazz band at the Vancouver Tap Dance Festival.

Here’s the link:
http://www.vantheman.ca/html/clips.htm

When I was younger I used to watch Janet Jackson videos and imitate the dance moves. I wasn’t the only dancer to do that. My entire jazz class one year knew so many of the steps that we created an entire rip off of Miss Janet.

Now, I want to imitate this penguin:
Happy Feet on YouTube.com

On an unrelated dance note, I was just thinking my ballet shoes need to be replaced and wondering if there wasn’t an altar to lay them upon. They’ve been good shoes.

Darren posted these photos of Sergei Diaghilev’s Grave on Flickr. Maybe one day I’ll take them to Venice.