Pulling It Out with Lemonade Mouth
At last weekend's SCBWI New England annual conference, Mark Peter Hughes, author of the teen novels I Am the Wallpaper and Lemonade Mouth, offered an energy-filled workshop on character development. Now his website offers the character-building exercises from that workshop.
Mark also served as conference registrar, and he lent me his laptop for my Powerpoint presentation on Sunday morning, helping me set up and--even more important, as it turned out--close down.
I'm a Mac person, so I've been trained to eject every data storage device on the desktop before daring to touch the hardware, at the risk of damaging the device, or the computer, or the fabric of the universe. Therefore, at the end of my session, with my sister's college graduation an hour away (both by the clock and by the highway), I was stuck, trying to figure out how to tell Mark's PC to stop thinking about my flashdrive. That's so easy on a Mac, so hard on a PC--because you don't actually have to do that on a PC. Finally, Mark came over and yanked out my drive, for which I'll always be grateful.
This summer Mark and the whole Hughes family (stars of the Friday night dance party) embark on 28-city van tour to promote Lemonade Mouth. As I understand it, public radio will give us regular updates. And I'm sure that trip will build character in many ways.
2 comments:
In the last month, I gave three presentations on different schools' laptops. Neither the Macs nor the PCs required a specific shutdown procedure--at least the teachers pulled out my flash drive without fanfare or fuss or extra shutting down.
On my PC at home, I'm supposed to click on a shutdown icon, which I usually remember to do (and if I don't, nothing evil happens).
Thanks for sharing your experience. Despite my worry, I've never actually suffered any damage from yanking my storage devices away from my Mac, ejected on the desktop or not.
But when I wasn't using my own laptop, and I knew Mark needed his in good condition for his own afternoon presentation and, well, life, I was extra-antsy.
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