Notes from the parental battlefield

[bjornwilde]

Her Ladyship is currently in a writing bootcamp sponsored by her middle school. This is a 4 days summer thing and not really graded; everything is peer review & critic. Yesterday the class was given a picture of four ducks, one with a snorkel, as a writing prompt. Everyone in the class wrote about ducks. My daughter wrote about a girl who had fire powers and who had a best friend with ice powers. They had to fight a super villain who had a rubber duck theme to his mania. At the end, the protagonist's best friend and all her class mates got turned to rubber ducks by the bad guy, but the protagonist got the bad guy.

The most common criticism my daughter got was that she didn't write about ducks.

I pointed out that these people were idiots who needed to not take a writing prompt so literally. Plus, how did they miss all the ducks? I also encouraged her to pay more attention to the positive critics and keep in mind JK Rowling had to go through something like 12 publishers before Harry Potter was made. This was the evening after the first class and so it was just my daughter and myself, I wouldn't be so blunt if any of the literal kids were around. Unless they were really upsetting my daughter maliciously that is.

In other news, I am having a migraine morning. It is starting to fade now that is it after lunch. I still wish I could take a nap.

Comments

[camwyn]

Oh, hey- I had my playlist on shuffle the other day and ran across a song that had me thinking of you. More specifically, of your Sam Wilson headvoice- Larry Greene's "Through The Fire", from the Top Gun soundtrack. There's a reasonably decent youtube vid for it here, but it helps to have the lyrics, too.

[bjornwilde]

Oh thanks. I'll check it out. = ]