LEGO Competition Week Two

Hey everybody! Sorry for the late post, today's theme is: Tower

You can join the meeting using this link.

See you at 4:30!

LEGO Competition: Week One Winners!

I am happy to announce our week one winners! Winners were selected based on the sum of their top two scores from the week. Full scores here.

Ages 0 to 5: Pepper

Pepper consistently packed her builds with stories and details, as shown in Thursday's "Doople Party"
Total score: 49

Ages 6 to 9: Violet

Violet's builds are polished and well thought through. She clearly has a broad LEGO skillset, including automated builds (Wednesday's space Winnebago) and action scenes (Thursday's police station escape).
Total score: 55

Ages 10 to 18: Thomas and Henry

Thomas and Henry were one of a few teams that competed this week (teams are categorized based on the oldest member). On Friday they gave us an unexpected spin on a classic western theme with "Food Wars," a battle of hot dogs versus corn dogs.
Total score: 50.5

Prizes!

Each of our winners gets a $30 gift card to a business of their choice from the list below! If there is another option you would like, let me know and we can do that too! 

• Izzy's Ice Cream (Minneapolis)
• Red Balloon Book Store (St Paul)
• Wild Rumpus Book Store (Minneapolis)
• Zenith Bookstore (Duluth)
• J Skylark (Duluth)
• Books and More (Bemidji)

Parents/guardians of winners, please contact me at smith.d.tyler@gmail.com to claim your child's prize.

LEGO Competition Day 03: Food!

Today's overall top score was Violet (6) with this awesome flying boat prison break! Violet is this week's current leader (each contestant's top two scores will be counted this week).

In the 0-5 age range, the top score went to Ari (5) with the existential crisis of a girl wishing to go outside.

The top score in the 10-18 age group went to Seth with a Mad Max inspired chase.

Tomorrow theme is Food!

On Saturday (or late tomorrow) I will announce this week's winners and contact their parents to arrange delivery of their prizes. The options announced so far are: Izzy's gift card, Matt's Bar gift card, and Amazon gift card. Prize suggestions are welcome!

Reminder: You can find the full rules here. A $10 entry fee per contestant is requested but not required.

LEGO Competition Day 02: Escape!

We had our first round of virtual LEGO building submissions today and the results were awesome! The overall highest score went to Louis (6) for his awesome underwater/driving/flying truck!

The theme for tomorrow is: Escape! Build something that tells a story about an escape, is a tool for escape, makes you feel like escaping, or something else entirely! I will try to evaluate video entries, but photos are preferred. 

As with today, you can submit by tagging me in a Facebook post or sending me an email (smith.d.tyler@gmail.com). Any pictures you submit may be posted publicly online. 

Watch the stream at 4:30pm on March 19!

Thank you to everyone who paid the optional entrance fee! We'll have three awards this week (one for each age category). The first award is: A $20 gift card to Izzy's Ice cream! 

Virtual LEGO Competition Day One: Trucks

I'm running a virtual LEGO building competition for everyone who's stuck at home right now. You can read all of the rules here.

The theme for day one is trucks.

Build something with LEGO bricks (or DUPLO) that involves trucks. You are encouraged to be creative (don't use a stock LEGO set) and to tell a story (you can build a scene around the truck).

I'll post the submissions and scores here starting tomorrow!

The Shepherds' Run (Christmas Spoken Word)

With the cold rapt attention around the watches of the night I stood back to back with my brothers against the darkness and the fright. ‘Round the clock we’d talk and watch the flock shoot the breeze and dream of seas and kings, trees and rings, of all the things youth and imagination bring slipping away day by day as my beard grew and the—-did you see that? 

Like a coal blown to flame a rolling stone down it came its intensity immense its resplendency relent less I be struck down I dropped my eyes from the skies to the hills to the ground. One shining foot touched the grass at my feet the blooming scent of new life pure and sweet. A voice full of power and song bade us fear not the light nor the throng. The angel spoke of a born child today mere miles away who would rend the foundations of creation and build them anew child born for us whose name would be spoken in unending chorus. 

A child called Immanuel. The angel spoke His name Her voice rang across the hills and with the echoing reply came a wave of harmonies that crashed over me as I looked up to see a million points of light descending from the sky like figs falling from a tree in the wind that brought a cloud of angels stretching to the horizon and making a sound so thunderous that the air seemed to shimmer with Glory to God in the highest heaven the host ascended and the night reappeared like a curtain drawn to bring peace on earth to those on whom His favor rests.

Only the star remained.

I turned and said

Run my brothers, 

We race the sun my brothers

To see the one his mother’s 

Struggle’s done clothes cover

God’s son 

so brothers we run

I cringed my lungs burned but I turned on my ball of my foot and dashed through the darkness just enough light from the star to see how far I’d run how far to go the heavenly glow was fading fast I had to make it before this moment was past the shadows grew shorter until we knew we’d found His quarters overhead the star that led us to this ramshackle hovel-falling down panting this isn’t the place for a grand king.

I stumbled forward into the run-down structure. His eyes were closed as he lay snug against his mother’s chest his breathing soft one hand resting on her breast that I’m not supposed to see I slipped stepped and stuttered out of the room, realizing suddenly that we three kings of decorum had invaded this family’s intimate space like camel all up in your face red with the shame I knocked soft on the frame and her voice held no heat and no blame as she welcomed us to the manger as if we weren’t three sweaty strangers we could be dangerous but the peace in her voice said she feared no nightly noise ‘cause God watched her boy. 

I moved closer, close enough to reach out and touch his hand. His eyes fluttered open I had woken him from sleep He saw me and in that moment I felt like one of my sheep, my past present and future thrown at his feet. My every trial was known no defeat would touch this child who would grow to unseat the pillars of men and then He closed his newborn eyes and went back to sleep I began to weep with joy the world must know of this boy so

Run my brothers, 

Tell everyone my brothers

We’ve seen the one his mother’s 

Struggle’s done clothes cover

God’s son 

so brothers we run

My name will never make the histories but my life’s defined by the mysteries that just confounded Bethlehem town did you see what I saw can this be the sky wrought with angels and the child that will shake the world.

On the State of Abigail Beson

A few people have asked what the plans are for a follow up to The Siege of Abigail Beson, so I decided to write this status update.

Scope and Schedule

Abigail Beson is a fictional teenage girl born in 1852 and living in rural Virginia outside a small (also fictional) town named Nottowell, about 15 miles from Appomattox.

I published The Siege of Abigail Beson in 2016 via KickStarter. The published book consists of two novellas, The Siege and The Excursion. The former tells of the the surprise attack on Abby's family home and the latter describes her journey to meet her older brothers they returns home following the conclusion of the war.

I have since written drafts of two further novellas, The Subversion, which centers around her relationship with her brother Jackson and his struggle to move on following the cessation of hostilities;  and The Forging, in which Abby finds herself at war with Rose Greenhow, a notorious (real) civil war spy. 

Sketches of Cover Art for The Subversion of Abigail Beson by Emily Krueger

All four novellas touch on historical themes and events. Siege and Subversion are heavily influenced by the boots-on-the-ground perspective of individual soldiers as described in Bruce Catton's Reflections on the Civil War. Excursion and Forging touch on Civil War era cryptography, as I describe here. In telling the story from the perspective of low ranking, non-slave holding people in the south (as a writer living in the north), I hoped to humanize the individuals who were caught up in the war regardless of which side they were on.

My objective has been to complete Subversion and Forging in 2019. However, after reading through the drafts my brother observed that the story is rather whitewashed. Slavery was the driving political issue that led to the American Civil War, and telling a story about the war without touching on the topic of slavery would undercut an issue that is still pertinent today. The goal then is a challenging one. In the first two novellas I strove to humanize soldiers of the confederacy, in the following stories I want to address the legacy of the Civil War.

This is no small challenge, and it's one I am not yet equipped to properly address. My goal for 2019 has thus shifted from completing the book to improving my understanding of the nuances of the Civil War era, particularly what life was like for newly freed slaves in the postwar American south. I will not, of course, be able to address every issue associated with the legacy of the civil war, but I hope to at least touch on two points:

• The memory and legacy of figures like Robert E. Lee (This piece in The Atlantic was a big viewpoint changer for me).
• The experience of freed slaves after the war. 

The overall goal of humanization remains the same; a story that simply casts all confederates as evil will only foster division. I hope instead to cast both the citizens of the north and of the south as people while simultaneously denouncing the practice of slavery and the systemic racism it begat as abhorrent and evil.  At this time I cannot commit to a completion date because I want to be confident that it respectfully and appropriately addresses these issues. 

I will update you as I read and learn more.