It's a small world, after all.

I just spent an hour using Google and Wordpress's search function to convince myself that I really hadn't used any variation of "that's what sidhe said" in a story/chapter title before. It seems like something I would have done.

Anyway...

Next Wednesday I'm going down to my folks' house on the lake again, though I won't be staying there long. Thursday morning we're hitting the road, heading down to the promised land... that's right, we're going to Disney World. A family pilgrimage. I've got my nice little travel friendly lappy and I've got a car charger for it, and something like twenty hours of car travel time. So, I expect to get a lot of writing done during the first part of the trip.

Maybe not as much during the second part.

But updates for both next week and the week following (the one I'll actually be in Florida for) will be about like they've been this week, with one good story a day. They may be spaced weirdly, depending on wireless internet availability, and some of them may be unexpected side stories, but five MUniverse stories per week. I'll be breaking with my usual standards and writing ahead a bit to make sure. I'm very happy with the way the MU stories are going and the way my extra effort in planning is starting to show.

The other stories are going to be on hold until I get back. When they come back, they may be changing forms, too. The "page a day" format works really well when I'm really hyperfocused on productivity, but it's not all that conducive to long-term planning (at least not with multiple stories) which just leads to more sprawl... taking a look at how long it took me to get through the Rhyme Running Amok plotline in SHN is kind of sobering. I'll put official notes of the hiatuses up on their respective webpages tomorrow. It's already later than I should be up tonight.

For those who've been playing in my weekly Dungeons & Dragons games, this means there's going to be a two week absence following this Sunday's session. I'll be getting back into town sometime on Sunday the 13th... don't know when, and I'll certainly not be ready to run a game.

Butterfly in the sky.

A love of writing often comes from a love of reading. I say "often", not "always", because there are some counterexamples and they generally speaking aren't very pretty.

My love of reading comes from several places. The first, biggest, and most obvious is my mother, who read picture books to me when I was very young and read The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia to me when I was not much older.

The second would be living in a town where I had free access to a good public library, with an entire floor given over to children's books. It was decorated, quite imaginatively, with a pumpkin theme.

The third would be my public school's library, which wasn't exactly a slouch, either. I first read A Wizard of Earthsea in the library on the elementary school side (it was one building for K-12, but split down the middle), and a few years later I read The Tombs of Atuan in the high school library and didn't realize it was a sequel until very near the end. I also read quite a lot of the Vonnegut canon, and Truman Capote, and I don't know what all else there.

The fourth thing that helped shape my love of reading was TV.

Yes, TV.

No, I'm not invoking the venerable spirit of old Groucho, who once remarked that he found TV very educational -- in that every time someone turned it on, he went into another room and read a good book. I mean that my mother, who read to me the great works of English fantasy for children, plopped me down in front of the TV on practically a daily basis and this instilled in me a love of books.

But you don't have to take my word for it...

Ah, Reading Rainbow. Every couple of years I would find myself stumbling over a current reference to it and be pleasantly surprise that it was still on the air.

It seems that won't happen any longer, sadly.

Twenty-six years is an impressive run, and the reasons for its cancellation make a little bit of sense... it's no good talking about the love of reading without also teaching children how to read. But one can recognize that the horse must go in front of the cart and still appreciate the importance of the cart. There is no learner like a motivated learner... as the saying says, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.", and yet, you can make sure the horse is good and thirsty when you get to the stream, nature will take its course.

I watched Reading Rainbow before I knew how to read. I loved reading before I knew how to read. As I grew up, I watched other children under my mother's care do the same thing. Those children grew up to be some of the brightest children in our little town.

Love of reading doesn't just lead to love of writing. It leads to love of learning. First with learning to read becoming a self-motivated task, and then because it's difficult--if not impossible--to satisfy the love of reading without learning. If the child who loves to read stops paying attention to a teacher's lecture, it's likely because he or she is reading ahead.

Teachers brought their own children to my mother's daycare because they wanted their children to excel. That was more thanks to her than LeVar, but Reading Rainbow was a useful tool. For parents who work outside the home, and for whom a small-town licensed day care where one person directly cares for a small number of children would be a luxury, it could be an essential one.

Anyway, I realize that there's limited funding for children's educational television and they have to put their money where they think it will do the most good, which right now is on the fundamentals. I think they'd get more bang for their buck if they paired that approach with LeVar Burton's... but with twenty-six seasons in the can and PBS as cash-strapped as ever, it's unlikely that Reading Rainbow will actually remain off the airwaves for long even if no one can pay to produce new episodes and regardless of what today's educational mandates are.