This Much is True

The sad facts are that women in Newfoundland and Labrador have one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in the country and the number of women who die from cervical cancer  is double the national rate. Screening is vital to catch this disease early or to prevent it by finding precancerous signs. Dr. Roxanne Cooper has created a mobile pap clinic which will be going to several communities over the summer. Check it out and see if it’s in your area and pass the word on.If you’d like to know more about the great work Dr. Cooper is doing in pap screening, check out this article from the NLMA newsletter. And, most importantly, get your regular pap test and encourage the women you love to do the same.

I, like many other people who tried to install iOS 4 from Apple, got stuck in backup hell where the new OS downloaded quickly but then a backup started and that is where I got stuck. And stuck and stuck. The backup progress bar moved slower than BP doing something about this horror in the Gulf. After three hours of this backing up, I gave up and started looking for workarounds. I found one. It wasn’t seamless and it wasn’t even that quick but it did move along, which is more than what I can say for the backup process after I’d downloaded iOS 4. I have found two ways around this. I used the first one but wish I’d tried the second (although I read conflicting reports about success with the second one). NOTE: I am just telling you what I did. Anything you decide to do with your device, you do at your own risk and I’m not recommending any one way of getting iOS 4 on your iPod Touch or iPhone.

1. My way was to restore the phone to factory settings and use the downloaded OS to restore from. Then restore my backup. To do this (in Windows) I,

• synced and did a  back up first
• I had already downloaded iOS 4 by using the update process in iTunes and then cancelling once I got stuck in backup mode so I had the new update on my laptop. (If you haven’t done that, the fab folks at Gizmodo have some links so you can download the update directly–remember where you save it because you’ll need it later.)
• Once that was done, I restored to factory settings by pressing Alt and Shift at the same time I clicked on the Restore button in iTunes. Then I was given the option to choose the file to restore to (in this case, my new iOS 4). Mine was located in “C:\Users\Tina\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPod Software Updates”. If you’ve downloaded the update and can’t find it , you can  just search for *.ipsw and make sure it says 4.0 near the beginning of the file name.

• My iPod Touch was restored. This took about 5 minutes maybe.
• Then iTunes said I had a new device attached and asked me  if Iwanted to set it up as a new device or use a backup from my old device. I chose the backup and then waited while all that happened.
• I had never used a backup before so I was disappointed that none of my apps or music were there when I started my Touch. I had to go to iTunes and checked which apps I wanted then did a sync and got all the settings back and even all my books on my various reading apps. That’s how it worked for me anyway.

2. I read in a number of forums that some people are having success unchecking sync for apps, music, videos, etc. in iTunes. Then they’ve done a sync.  Then once they have the new OS, they’ve checked sync for each of these again and did a sync.

First I told you I wanted Apple’s as yet unannounced Tablet. Then, when the details of the iPad came out, I told you how much I still wanted it. Well, now I’ve actually touched the iPad and things have changed a bit.  I fondled an iPad last week. I made a special trip to the electronics store, just to check the new device out. I touched the iPad and lifted it and surfed the web on it and perused through books and watched videos on You Tube and played a game and typed quite a lot and…you know what? I wasn’t overly impressed. I mean, I’m sure that if I didn’t already have my beloved iPod Touch which I depend on so much, then I would think the iPad was the most awesome thing in the world. But I do have little Touchie and I’m so used to touching programs to open them, zooming in and out with my fingers, flicking to scroll, tapping on books (in Stanza which I love), and tilting the device to maneuver in games, that the iPad was, well, meh. A big iPod Touch. Now, don’t get me wrong, if someone wants to buy me an iPad, I’m in.  And if I had buckets of money, I’d have one in every room. My life would be kind of like this.

But, if given the choice between getting a newer iPod Touch and a new iPad, I’m picking the Touch. Here’s why. Mostly it comes down to portability. When my two-year-old was recently getting his head stapled in the emergency room, after a fall off a chair, the nurse kept saying, “look at the fishy, Ben. Look at the fishy” while my husband held my iPod Touch over Ben’s head with a Koi pond full of fish on it. The koi pond app (Pocket Pond) had kept him entertained in the procedure room as we waited for the doctor.  The iPod Touch can save the day when you’re left with an unexpected wait and there are games, music, videos, and books galore on it. It can help organize tasks, create lists, write notes, check facebook, pass the time, research things, etc. etc. And the iPad can do all that too. But I can’t stick it in my pocket. I can’t whip it in my purse or put it in my glove compartment. iPad has all the cool stuff without the pocket factor and the pocket factor is as important to me in these busy days as anything. With a few improvements, I can see the iPad possibly replacing my computer someday but I don’t see it replacing my iPod Touch anytime soon. So I’m glad I played with the iPad because now I can let it go in my mind and start dreaming about a new iPod Touch. Or maybe even an iPhone.

Okay, I love Lost, the series. Great character development, cliffhangers, spooky, creepy, mindbending things. And the finale of Season 3, Through the Looking Glass was one of my favourite TV episodes of anything ever.  It was just brilliant.  From the beginning of the series and all the way through it, though, I kept thinking how are they going to explain all this? Really.  I’d never be able to write a series like this because the great thing about writing novels or short stories is that you can go back and change things once you’re finished. Instead of leaving loose ends, you can go back and take them out completely if you want. Or put a section in earlier that explains it. But the Lost creators threw so much into the story as they wrote, I can’t imagine how they could have explained it all. And no way to go back and cross off the whole Walt as important/mysterious in so many ways story bits, as but one example. So they left a lot of questions hanging, I’d forgotten many of them until collegehumor.com did this fantastic compilation. If you really liked the finale (and I was okay with it but a little disappointed–or maybe that was just the idea of no more Lost), be prepared to realize how very much was left hanging.

(Movieline attempts to tie up these loose ends in this great post.)

The thing about blogs is that the more you post, the more you think of to post but the reverse is also true and most days I can’t think of much to say. Well, okay, I can but usually they would include long, rambling rants about things in the news or things that annoy me. And most of them probably annoy you too so you’d agree. Like the slaps on the wrists people are getting for everything from sexual assault to drunk driving to abusing children and animals.  So it becomes  kind of like the inane facebook groups I see all the time. Do I really need to publicly tell you I’m against the abuse of animals or cancer? Do you really want to hear my ranting about these subjects? Do you?

But it’s just a matter of getting back in the habit and I will definitely be blogging more because I have something to procrastinate and you know that writing blog posts is one of my favourite forms of procrastination. Much, much better than procrastinating by cleaning the toilet or deciding to gut out the toy box (which I just did). So what, you may ask, do I have to procrastinate? Well, I’m very pleased to say that the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council has kindly given me another grant. This time it’s for a new novel tentatively called Rewriting History (see, that’s where the title of this post comes from–I knew you were wondering).  And it’s not that I’m not enjoying writing this book. You know that. I just procrastinate the writing. Like if I let it stew longer and wait to put pen to paper, it will come out in a great flood of words, easy as rolling balls down a hill. And it does.

This new book is as much fun as I’ve had writing. There are three main characters whose lives are entangled in complicated and not nice ways. It is full of black humour so far and that will continue. But that’s about all I’m willing to say about it now. I hate talking about things like that when they’re new which is one of the disadvantages of applying for grants. In order to apply, you have to tell the Arts Council about your project and even include a writing sample, preferably from the book you want to write. You have to think ahead a bit and figure out what the book will be about. And I like to just have an idea and then see where the idea takes me. No plotting or mapping or anything. But I looked ahead, saw, in broad strokes, where the book would be going and worked hard on a writing sample. And now I have something to procrastinate.

I am also, perhaps as another form of procrastination, still revising my mystery/thriller novel which I first finished in 1997 and needed a good overhaul. And now is the time. It’s just one of those books that I had to hone the craft of writing a bit before I could go back and make it what it needs to be. But it’s very different, in tone and content than anything I’ve had published or the other book I’m writing so it’s an excellent form of procrastination for me.

So, that’s what I’m doing and that’s what I will be doing for the next while. And wrangling Ben, who really requires complete wrangling concentration (I had to stop writing this post so I could get him out of a dangerous situation AKA he was standing on his tippy toes on the edge of a chair saying “tada”). And helping Sam with homework, swimming , Tae Kwon Do and all the many other parts of his life. And  all the other stuff that I can either procrastinate or use as a form of procrastination, depending on the day and the mood. Like laundry. That’s measurable and I can definitely tell you I’m procrastinating that. Oh, and I’m reading an amazingly fantastic book but I’ll tell you about that on another day. For now, I have to go wrangle and procrastinate something. The one consistency in life is that there’s always something to do and always something to put off doing.

Well, it’s been a while but I have good excuses. Really, I do and I’ll tell you about them later. But some of those things still continue so this will be brief.  Just a heads up on some upcoming events and to let you know about a couple of new reviews from Novel Escapes and The Current. I am grateful for the opportunity to read and share about A Few Kinds of Wrong, but, as always, am nervous about speaking in public (no matter how many times I do it, it doesn’t seem to get easier) so friendly faces are always welcome (not that there are ever any unfriendly ones at these things) and I hope I’ll see you at some of these events.

• WANL Spring Tides Reading featuring Enos Watts and Tina Chaulk (St. John’s) will be held at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 26, at The Ship Inn off Duckworth Street. There will be a Q&A period following the reading. Free and open to the public.
• NL Writers and Friends talks about A Few Kinds of Wrong by Tina Chaulk: On Monday, May 3 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., Tina Chaulk’s second novel, A Few Kinds of Wrong, will be the featured book in NL Writers and Friends (Book Club), offered by MUN’s Division of Lifelong Learning. Discuss A Few Kinds of Wrong and then chat with the author about it. To register, call (709) 737-7979 or visit http://www.mun.ca/lifelonglearning/.
• The Salon I will also be part of The Salon on May 29th, where you can come listen to me read and chat with me as well as listen to some live music as well. I will post more about this as info becomes available.

Happy International Women’s Day to all you phenomenal women out there.

A fantastic poem but one that is better when it’s read by the awesome Maya Angelou.

I’ve said here before that I like reading about the process of other writers. So, buying a book about writing or writers is always a safe bet for a gift for me, (you know, if you’re wondering) and my husband was certainly well aware of that. I usually give him lists of possible books I’d like and he can pick but one Christmas, after Sam was born, he gave me one I didn’t ask for, one that, the truth is, I was a bit taken aback to receive. It was one of a series of books I had kind of rallied against, had definitely ranted against. He bought me Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. Now, I had nothing against the Chicken Soup for the Soul books when they started. Good bathroom book, probably, although I didn’t read them. Little stories, inspiring stuff, how could it be a bad thing? But then I started to see more and more of them and soon I felt my soul sucked away a little every time I saw a new one. There was something to soothe every soul. I think Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul put me over the edge. I just googled and found titles like Chicken Soup for the Chiropractic Soul and Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul. All souls, it seems, seek inspiration and the creators of the Chicken Soup series have really taken that to heart and maybe over the top.

So I took the book my husband had kindly bought for me and put it away, feeling a bit lesser for owning a Chicken Soup for the Soul book. But, as is often the case, my close-minded opinions are usually turned around to show me how wrong I can be and such was the case when I needed a book to read in the bath and there, in the pile was Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. I was in the mood to read about writing so I picked it up. And I enjoyed the stories. But there was one in particular that changed things for me. Me, who at the time, had two novels completed and safely in a drawer, another two well on the way to getting finished and portions of more in boxes and drawers and shelves all over the place. Me, who had never tried to get any of them published. I read the story of Dierdre W. Honnold and her mother. Honnold’s mother wanted to write her own story, a novel, and it would sell big and they would be rich and famous, at least that’s what she kept telling her children. But as she got older, Honnold began to get impatient with her mother because she knew that in order to be a writer, you had to write. Talking about it wouldn’t do the trick. When her mother died, on a snowy night surrounded by family, Honnold wrote, “her book died too”. Her mother never followed her own dream to write that novel, and this inspired Honnold to write and to ensure that her children could read their mother’s stories.

So, there I was in the bathtub, tears rolling down my face as I read, and while some of my stories were no longer inside me, they’d made it onto the page, but they weren’t doing much in my drawer. And I was doing nothing to get them out in the universe. I knew that I didn’t want the little napping baby in the next room to ever think I had let the things I wanted to do, craved to do, die with me. And I started to write more and work harder on stories I liked. When my friend Kathy called me, later that year, to tell me I should pitch one of my books at the Pitch to the Publisher event at the Word on the Rock Literary Festival, I at first dismissed it outright. The thought terrified me. But Honnold’s story about her mom had stuck with me and inspired me to actually do it. The idea of my child not knowing my stories or that I’d even tried to follow my dream of having them published made me draft a pitch. And although threats from Kathy and my friend Pam to physically drag me to the Pitch to the Publisher were very inspriring and immediate, down deep the thoughts of having my books die with me someday, having never tried, was the real impetus to stand in front of four publishers and tell them about a partially finished novel called this much is true.

So, with book number two out there now, my youngest child points and says “Mama” when he sees the cover of A Few Kinds of Wrong. At almost two years old, he knows now, even before he has the words to understand it, that this is my story I wrote. And recently at school, that baby who’d been napping when I first read Honnold’s inspiring story, had a chance, during literacy week at his school, to write the name of his favourite author on a big piece of paper in the school hall. Two teachers–one who didn’t know me or Sam–contacted me to tell me how this sweet, six-year-old boy wrote “Tina Chaulk” on the wall.

So, don’t let your story, or the painting you’ve been dreaming of trying, or the poem you imagine writing for your child, die when you do. I really do know how easy it is to procrastinate, and I certainly know how hard and scary it is to try, but isn’t it scarier to have your story or your painting or whatever it is you want to do or create, die still inside of you? It was to me. I hope the idea gives you a kick in the pants to get going on your dream. Or maybe you’ve set about doing it already. If you have, what has inspired you to follow your dreams?

People have been asking me what I think about the iPad and so I thought I’d let you know, even though most of the world seems to have already weighed in. I still want one. It’s pretty much what I thought it was going to be: a big iPod Touch. I actually watched the big announcement event live, well, I tried but video and audio was sparse and I ended up listening to audio from Leo Laporte’s Ustream and looking at Engadget’s coverage in pictures and words. There was an air of waiting and expecting a big reveal of some super-amazing thing that the iPad would have but I doubted it. What were people expecting? Oh, I know what they wanted. They were hoping for multitasking, which it doesn’t do, and flash, which is doesn’t have but neither does my iPod Touch and I still use it a lot. I read on it and listen to music with it and use twitter on it and surf the web on it and check facebook on it and play games on it and occupy my toddler with Elmo videos on it during long car trips and on and on and on. And I would do the same thing with the iPad and will because by hook or by crook, I plan on getting one.

There was one surprise for me, during the great reveal of the iPad: the price. Wow. I expected $1000 and hoped upon hope for $799, but a starting price of $499 was totally unexpected, although I assume it will be more in Canada. I really liked the iBooks on it and fear this may be it for the poor printed book industry, much to my chagrin as a writer and my pleasure as a reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still love a printed book–the feel of it, the smell of it, the look of it, especially if it’s one of my own I’ve written but I love the convenience of having twenty-odd books in my iPod Touch and knowing I can flick from The Lovely Bones to Twenties Girl to I Feel Bad About My Neck to an unpublished manusript by one of my friends who wants my opinion on her book, is a pleasure. The big problem is the bathtub so I keep some books for reading in the tub but I also put my iPod Touch in plastic baggy so I can read it there too. I figure I can find a big one for the iPad.

That’s not the only drawback of the iPad, though. There are others and it is not the perfect device quite yet. It’s mostly all screen so, just as my iPod Touch, I will be nervous of cracking the bloody thing. And I will probably have to get a case  to make me feel safe with it and probably a big screen protector, which I haven’t gotten yet for the iPod Touch. The truth is if I had a lot of money, or even a moderate amount, I’d have tons of iPod Cases because there’s something about them that I like. So, now a new obsession may be checking out the huge variety of cases for the iPad, no doubt being developed as we speak.

And where will I put it? The iPad won’t fit in my little purse or my coat pocket or my kid’s diaper bag. How will I carry my iPad? These are all questions to be answered and I think I’ll have fun figuring it out. So, what do I think of the iPad? iWant!

I’m looking around my house for things I can sell to make money. Not because things are that bad here but because I want to buy something. I want to buy something really, really bad. And I don’t even know exactly what it is. Apple will announce what “it” is tomorrow. But everyone says it’s going to be an Apple tablet with touch interface and its name is the iSlate or the iPad or the iDontReallyKnow. Apple has called it, in their invitation to tomorrow’s announcement, their “latest creation”. Now, if you’re a geek, you know this already. The Apple Tablet is to geekdom what the Sex and the City movie was to women in their forties, and then some. There is so much speculation around this thing, it’s actually getting a bit boring. Yawn, bring the damn thing on, for God’s sake. But, if you want to know all the speculations and rumours, Gizmodo has their “Exhaustive Guide to Apple Tablet Rumors” and  their Jesus Diaz has done a great job speculating about the interface. I can synopsize much of the speculation for you though and tell you that most of the rumours are about telephone companies, magazines, newspapers, and booksellers who may be teaming up with Apple and  their “latest creation” and that the Apple Tablet will be bigger than an iPhone and smaller than a laptop. It  also looks like it will have the following cool features:

• able to run iPod/Iphone apps
• WiFi and 3G capabilities
• a 10-inch color display (which has newspapers, magazines and book publishers all in this deal because that’s the perfect size for their digital versions)

I’ll be checking out all the details tomorrow for sure but since I already love my iPod Touch more than any other device I have ever had and have basically forgone my laptop for it, and since Apple’s new tablet is bound to be like a grown up version of the Ipod Touch/iPhone, I know I want it. And I know it will be expensive. The big question mark for me is going to be battery life. My iPod Touch depletes the battery way too fast for my liking and my laptop is worse. So, what’s Apple going to do about that? A pretty, portable thing like an Apple Tablet plugged into the wall? That’s just not right.

I gotta go now and hunt around and find some stuff to sell. Let’s see. The laptop looks like a likely place to start. Oh, but I have time. I’m not an early adopter. I let other people deal with the bugs in the system and then when they’re straightened out, I’ll try to find some money to hop on the bandwagon. But I’ll be watching and wanting. Really, really, really wanting.