Super-de-dupery

Today's post comes from the Department of Better Late Than Never.

It turned out to be a pretty good day.

Despite the fact that it was yet another day of waking up to sub-zero temperatures, and that I could not get my act together in time to get a post out this morning, the day got off to a good start. Early this morning, I had one of those moments--A Moment, in fact. I was looking at a news story on the web and I had An Idea. Not a full-blown idea with a fully-realized story (stories don't come to me quite that way), but something to put in the hopper, something for the Back Room. It was intriguing, and it's got potential, and I shouldn't even talk about it right now, because we know how fragile these things can be.

I had other good things happen today, too. One of them was getting to read a whole bunch of essays by middle school students, one of whom used the word that makes up the title of this post. I added the dashes; it just didn't look right the other way: superdedupery. Yep, it needs the dashes. Amazingly, the young man's teacher did not put a single mark on the page at super-de-dupery, though she marked other things on the page. Anyway, I'm appropriating it, and encouraging all of you to do the same.

Reading the essays gave me a certain appreciation for what agents go through when attacking the slush pile. Many of the essays had such a sameness to them, that you could read the first paragraph and just know where it was going and how it was going to get there. Others started out in a way that made me sit up and get excited, only to fizzle and leave me disappointed. Out of some forty essays, maybe four were really good. On the other hand, I suppose only about four or so were really bad. The good news is I did not end the day despairing for the future of the human race. Kids today do care about important things; it's not just all video games and texting their friends.

Forgive my rambling; perhaps the cold is getting to me. Let's heat things up a bit:



Have a Super-de-dupery weekend!