Saturday, July 19, 2008

Time management, tongue tattoos, & video

This morning I went to Austin SCBWI's monthly meeting to see P.J. Hoover talk about goal-setting and time management. She gave out the coolest thing after the meeting: personalized "tongue tattoo" fruit roll-ups with the name of her upcoming book, The Emerald Tablet, printed on them, along with her name and Oct. 2008 (the release date)! A friend of hers won personalized fruit roll-ups and gave them to her. Too fun!

Here are P.J. Hoover and author/illustrator Mark Mitchell showing off one of the fruit-roll ups. Unfortunately, the color in this photo is awful so you can't really see it! I don't think the fruit roll-up, which was reddish pink, was really the color of her shirt, which was somewhat orange. Oh well! P.J. (Tricia) and Cynthia Leitich Smith took close-up pics of a roll-up and will probably post those later. 



In other news, I pushed past my inexplicable bias against online videos and watched the much-ballyhooed Dr. Horrible videos last night... which turned out to be right up my alley. 

Then, probably because of that breakthrough in online video watching and my memory earlier this week of making lots of cassette recordings as a kid, it occurred to me that my digital camera will take short videos. I've used it many times to take family videos, but I just realized that I could do other things with it. So while my husband has been out swimming with all 3 boys this afternoon, I've been using it to practice reading my manuscripts out loud, and even doing some silly voices, singing, and all kinds of goofy stuff just to practice public speaking, etc.

Why didn't we have stuff like this when I was in theatre??? Okay, a couple of families had their own video cameras, but it wasn't common. They were new then, and I didn't really get to use them. I even bought a strange video camera in college so I could make my own short films, but it was bulky and didn't work with regular lighting, so it really wasn't useful. But if I could have taped myself rehearsing or working on stuff years ago, I think it could have made a big difference! Interesting... I can't see myself doing video blogs because (a) I don't really like them, and (b) I write partly because I'm more comfortable communicating in writing than in person. But every time I can see things in a different way, it inspires me!

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