Cloud-Writing

I'm overdue for a blog, but I've been so busy! Here's a quick update of what happened today, though...

My freshmen are reading an excerpt of Cloud Writing in class right now. This fits beautifully into our magical realism unit since Cloud Writing falls into the genre of magical realism, this novel is my first book written specifically for young adults, Cloud Writing was literally released a couple weeks ago, and the author happens to be the teacher. Plus, I've been working with a new narrator -- Abby Filsinger -- whose recording speed is fast... which means that she got the audio files to me super quickly because she wanted my students to be able to listen to the book in addition to reading it. How sweet is that?!

The excerpt we're working with is chapters 10 through 12, so when I listened to the files Abby sent, I went ahead and proofed them like I would any other audio file: I read my book while listening to the narrator read my book, I note any mispronunciations/speed issues/etc., and I send feedback. This time around, Abby wrote back and was like, "I'm so sorry there were so many mistakes!" (There really weren't that many mistakes.) "Will you still be able to use it for class? I so wanted you to have the audio version."

I told Abby that I loved the mistakes, because when I rolled out the lesson to my students today, we were able to talk about the importance of editing. No matter how many times you read through a piece that you've written, it's always good to get another set of eyes on it. And no matter how many times you listen through a piece that you've recorded, it's always good to get another set of ears on it. Editing matters... and getting my students to understand that has always proven to be a challenge. Here's hoping that today's lesson helps some of them to know that editing and rereading and relistening are still important in the real world.

Probably my favorite part that came out of today was when two of my fourth-period students -- we'll call them Christmas-Cookie Provider and The Future Historical Linguist -- told me that my writing is excellent. CCP actually said that he was going to see if Cloud Writing was available in the library yet, and then he started predicting what was going to happen with the kites in the story. That was a fun conversation. And TFHL told me that he thinks we should read one of my books, in its entirety, as a whole class instead of reading Fahrenheit 451. I really appreciated that compliment.

Today's takeaways:

1. Editing is important.

2. Reading your work out loud is important.

3. Hannah Rae's writing is (possibly?) on par with Ray Bradbury's. Ha!