If you have followed the blog for a little while, you may be wondering how my sleepiness works with Book Camp, particularly with early starts and late stops each day. It’s a bit of worthwhile struggle. Yesterday I experienced high-sleep-pressure that hit suddenly in the early afternoon. My blood felt like glue. My brain felt like mud. My limbs and eyes felt too heavy to manage.
Per my work arrangement, I contacted my manager and let them know the situation. They allowed me to take immediate leave. I then slept for two hours and forty-five minutes, after which I arose (with all the same old feelings of guilt and grossness) and put the day back together.
That’s the big difference. Before treatment, I wouldn’t have been working. We would have started camp late morning and I would have napped in the afternoon and all evening would be as vegetative as I could make it. The A.D. really pitched in after work. Now, our first camp event of the day is at 7 am, the kids work while I do, we lunch together, we continue an array of work (theirs being instruments and assignments and group write and then fun like X-Box and anime), we reconvene for a book camp intensive when I get off work, we prepare dinner, and we have an inning before scuttling everyone off to lights out.
All in all, the treatments are making a tremendous difference. So when a sleep attack strikes, as it did yesterday, I feel on the one hand I ought not complain. On the other hand, I also feel like it’s an imposition on my workplace with cascading impacts on the rest of life.
But enough about me and my sleep.
Thursday began with a sleepheaded start for a few campers, but we managed to get in our 7 am time. Today is our last day studying A is for Adapt, and the campers adapted themselves. They used a worksheet to describe their lives as they currently exist and then used the same worksheet to choose a genre, descriptors, and characters for an adaptation of their nonfictional lives into fiction. Next, they each wrote a fictional story that adapted themselves (individually) into a fictional setting or situation.
Day four in B is for Business had the campers learning the roles of literary agents and subsidiary rights agents. Their exercises were to 1) write and email me a query letter based on their own work of fiction or a published work and then 2) evaluate their query letters based on some specific questions. When did you get bored reading the letter? When did you stop or want to stop reading? Why? Was it a typo? An offense? A ludicrous story? Bad grammar? What would compel you to request more material?
As I type, the campers are eking out some last drops of anime watching, their assignments all turned in, while they forage for leftovers to satisfy their gnawing hunger.
After dinner we will play games and eat candy and laugh and probably someone might cry. Five alpha campers plus two competitive directors equals someone might cry on game night. It might be me!
But before I go I must share with you what Cheese Ball did last night. He (with permission) cut apart an old pair of very skinny jeans. Then he hand-sewed them, cut in a thumb hole, and cut holes for laces. He scavenged laces from shoes that no longer fit and laced up these lovely gauntlets modeled for a character in the group write. They are adjustable so all the campers can wear them. How cool is that?
