Off the Road, Back in Front of the Keyboard

by AJ Gulyas Posted on May 1, 2012

Unlike the friendly man on the plane, I am—apparently—unable to to write while traveling.  Throw in the end of the Winter semester with its frantic meetings and more frantic grading and my time decreased more. Thus, sadly, April was mostly a planning/reading/organization month than a writing one.

Which is not, all told, a bad thing.  I think I’ve figured out a way around some of the structural problems I’ve been running into.  I’m at a good point to slow down and figure out if all this stuff I’m writing actually goes together the way I think it will, or if a different approach would better serve the ideas.

Of course, this would have been a swell thing to do before I started writing (and I do have a fairly robust outline).  This is just a good point at which to find problems (and fix them) before there are simply too many words to safely rearrange.

I also keep finding cool stuff, such as Elizabeth Klarer’s memoir which is, perhaps, the best of the Contactee romances (not that there were many).

But now, during May and June, I need to get the words down and hammer them into shape.  This may, in fact, destroy my mind.

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Visiting the Gray Barker Collection

by AJ Gulyas Posted on April 1, 2012

Door to the Barker Room

Visiting The Gray Barker UFO collection, based at the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library in Clarksburg, West Virginia, was not a dream come true.  It was a dream come true ten years ago on my first visit.  This time, it was work. 

Of course, Ten years ago, it was work as well.  I was finishing the research phase of my MA thesis for the history department at IUPUI.  The problem, back in December 2002, was that that I was

(a)not as a good a researcher as I am not (and I’m still not great) and

(b) I was overcome by the awesomeness of being in the town where Gray Barker wrote They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.  I was unfocused—not having started the writing on the thesis, I wasn’t entire sure what I needed—and pushed for time. 

This time, however, I had more than enough time (a day and a half), resources (better laptop, a scanner, 3G hotspot for quick research), and focus (I needed correspondence with a number of people I’m writing about).

A stack of zines

The trip was a success (not least because of lunch at the Ritzy Lunch, home of the best Italian sausage sandwich I’ve ever tasted)—I found some great letters between Barker and figures like George King and Truman Bethurum.  I also examined some books that I hadn’t been able to track down myself—Marla Baxter’s My Saturnian Lover is probably the best find, although Bethurum’s Voices from the Planet Clarion is  exceedingly useful as well.

David Houchin, who’s in charge of special collections at the library, was a great host; very helpful and full of great stories about Gray Barker and information about the Clarksburg area. 

But now that I’m home…back to work.

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40k Words

by AJ Gulyas Posted on March 18, 2012
Space Brothers on Patrol
40,686/85,000

The actual title isn’t Space Brothers on Patrol, but I do need to think about shortening the working title.  It would be nice it it fit on the spine.

I (barely) met my Spring Break goal of getting past 40,000 words.  Things sped up when I finally accepted that I had already scheduled extensive revision time into my schedule, so I should concentrated on getting the words down.  I can make them prettier later.  This is probably one of those things actual writers know and do naturally.  Still feeling my way around here…

The research continues along-side the writing.  I’m heading down to the Gray Baker Collection at the end of the month and am continuing to track down weird saucer books and  begging nice people for photo permissions.

Back to classes tomorrow, heading full speed toward the end of the semester.

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Slow Grind

by AJ Gulyas Posted on February 24, 2012
Mostly Untitled Saucer Book
32,202/85,000

The word count moves slowly, mostly because I’ve been in research mode over the past few weeks, tracking down old newsletters and out of print books as well as negotiating photo permissions with various entities.

The upshot is my writing time has been swallowed up by reading endless channeled/New Age books.  It’s been painful.

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Public shame as motivator

by AJ Gulyas Posted on January 28, 2012

When I mentioned on the Facebook that I was under contract to write a book about saucer contacts, I was not intending to brag.  Instead, I was trying to create a situation and environment in which people who knew me personally would be in a position to ask questions like, “How’s that book going, Aaron?  Given up yet?  Planning to admit you’re a failure?”  Thus, here is the first of a series of periodic word count updates, leading up to the impending manuscript deadline of August 31.

Saucer Book
28,258/85,000

This week’s work was undermined by a nasty stomach bug, but I’ve gotten the Preface into a decent shape and have been working the interlibrary loan people like my personal serfs.  Next up: some editing of early chapters and setting up some research trips.

 

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2012: Goals and Targets | Week One

by AJ Gulyas Posted on January 2, 2012
Tempus fugit landscape by Alancleaver 2000. CC-BY.

Don’t want to call them resolutions; sounds too governmental.  Instead, I’m noting down—publically—some things I’d like to accomplish personally and professionally this year.  I’m going to attempt (sort of a meta-goal) to note my progress weekly for my own record-keeping, motivation, and accountability.

  1. Read 150 new books (made it through 200, barely, this year.  Being more realistic).
  2. Eat less meat, more vegetables; at least one meatless day per week.
  3. No candy or sweets.
  4. I will drink only beer that I’ve brewed myself, when at home.
  5. Continue working on tech tools for my classes; learning some programming to accomplish this.
  6. Write more, whether for public consumption or not.
  7. Continue my current trend of not bringing work home with me in excessive amounts.
  8. Do more with my family.
  9. Acknowledge that I’ve hit my realistic workload ceiling.
  10. Say “no” more (see above).

Some of these are going to be more difficult than others.  Stay tuned.

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Abstract for MSU Comics Forum

by AJ Gulyas Posted on December 16, 2011

Abina and the Important Men (Getz/Clark, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Crecy (Ellis/Caceres, Avatar Press, 2007) are both graphic novels dealing with historical events. The differences between these two works are significant.  These books’ presentation, intent, and—one could argue—appropriateness to the introductory history classroom are polar opposites.  Abina is specifically aimed at the educational market while Crecy is aimed at the comic-buying market.  Abina contains a vast array of background prose reading and pedagogical tools.  Crecy includes none—not even a foreword or afterword.  by examining the differences between these two works historians and eductors can trace a best-fitting line between the often conflicting spheres of art and pedagogy.  by extension, a discussion of Abina and Crecy blends into the larger question of how to engage history students with a variety of historical sources—can graphic novels be a way forward?

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Teaching: Successes and Failures

by AJ Gulyas Posted on December 11, 2011
FAIL stamp by Flickr user hans.gerwitz

I’m one of a group of faculty taking part in a workshop at the beginning of the winter semester.  Part of our preparation for this is to come up with an example of a success and a challenge in our teaching.  I thought it would be useful to throw it out into the world and—possibly—get some feedback or ways to clarify.

A Success
One success I’ve had is encouraging students to have a hand in creating their assessment activities.  In my early world history class, I’ve put students into groups and asked them, for each chapter, to come up with 3 to 5 questions that would be good short answer exercises on an exam.  Then, as a class we discuss each question  discussing what makes that question a good or bad question

How do we determine a good versus bad question?

  • Does the question address what they need to know about the material covered in that particular section of the course?
  • Does the question make sense (grammatically, stylistically)?  Is it clear?
  • Is it answerable given the information to which students have access (Have I talked about it in class? Is it discussed in the textbook?  Did we read a document that covers the information?)?
  • Are potential answers concise enough for short answer questions or would it be more suited to a longer essay?

And rarely, but crucially:

  • Is the question based on an utter misunderstanding of the material?  If so, how do we fix it?

The end result of this is that students then have a section of their exams that are crowdsourced, giving them some ownership and removing some avenues for complaining about the content of the exam.

A Challenge

I’m going to be honest.  I’ve never liked using the euphemism “challenge” when we often mean “problem” or “screw-up”.  Thus, I’m going to discuss–not challenges–but rather failures for which I repent and for which I have been attempting to atone.  There’s a whole truckload, revolving around student assessment.

  • Assessments that build on previous ones–I would like to create a system of historical document analysis instruction that leads students to ask gradually more complex and nuanced questions of sources as we go further into the semester.  Failures result from poor planning, lack of time, and my failure to adjust projects to account for shifting class ability (a project that worked well in one section bombs in another and I, usually, don’t pick up on the warning signs until too late to adjust effectively).
  • Exam essays should be the result of a series of practice essays written and critiqued.  Failures resulted from poor time management in the classroom which, in turn resulted from poor scheduling at the top of the semester.

I want to do two things in my classes (regardless of the time period or place covered):

  1. Train students to think critically about the past.
  2. Train students to communicate their conclusions about the past.

I’ve got notions of how to do this more effectively, but developing ways to operationalize these notions continues to be a critical failure point.

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