A lion-taming hat

Dead Ending (for real!) with a Small Observation about Voice....

2012-01-21T05:52:00.000-08:00

One thing I find endlessly interesting about Gantos-the-writer and Gantos-the-character is how entwined the voices are. His Jack-character doesn't quite sound like a boy...but he sure doesn't sound like a man, either.

Sure, I have to mention somewhere the semi-autobiographical nature of Dead End. So you'd think this book would have the annoying sound* of a grownup narrating from his remembered childhood---but it doesn't. It sounds mostly like a child, but sometimes not: maybe like a child with a couple of seeds of adulthood already starting to grow.

Those adultish seeds nearly get out of hand there on the last page,** but Gantos-the-writer manages to land the book's narrative-voice airplane mostly on the runway***. So, bravo! to Norvelt and Jack Gantos, both man and boy.

__________________

*The sound is something between a self-aware whiny and the bleat of one who thinks that childhood before the deluge of social media was just swell.

**The reader gets an unexpected snootful of moral rectitude. Fortunately, Dad saves the day.

***Mixed metaphors are best served cold.

Dead Ending with Spunky Old Lady Archetypes...and the Best Dad in the World

2012-01-19T09:05:00.001-08:00

Well, I came to the dead-end of Dead End in Norvelt last night.

It's a great book! Definitely read it! You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll get grossed out! But most of all, you'll* realize how tired your are of the spunky old lady paradigm.

The great big world of kiddie lit in deeply infested with 'em. In Dead End, we have a soft-hearted old-lady crank who is the plant for the historical vignettes sprinkled throughout the book. But it could have been an outspoken grandma (preferably from the South). An old lady down the street who makes it heck to be a kid, but then somehow through various, innummerable ways, means, plot devices, character markers and narrative arcs ad infinitum reveals her heart o' gold.** A librarians. A maiden aunt.*** A church lady. And they're all quirkier than anyone has a right to be: they hog the page, blurt out all the great lines and just generally steal the ending.

So.

Though I'm reeeeeeallly done with greeting yet another quirky SpOLA**** every time I crack open a mid-grade, (and I say this with all the love in my heart since I myself am of SpOLA-ish age, and lemme tell you, the inner weird stuff really does come flying out thick and fast. Mainly because your* looks are gone and therefore you* no longer give a yellow rat bastid what anybody thinks, but I digress), I am so glad---oh, so glad!---as a writer and a reader for Jack's dad.

So.

Why don't they give a Newbery for most distinguished character-contribution to fatherhood for children, huh huh huh? Because Jack the Elder is such a great character.***** In the course of this book he rebuilds an airplane, gets his pilot's license, goes hunting and moves the better part of entire town to the next state.

I make him sound like just another archetype---the emotionally-stunted-he-man-who-doesn't-understand archetype. But Jack's dad is FANTASTIC. All you have to do is read the hunting scene to know that this man is a complicated soul.

And the ending? The SpOLA is off taking a well-deserved nap while Jack and his dad get up to no good. At all.

Perfect!

_________

* Especially if you're me!

**Actually, Miss Volker is a bit of all of these as well.

***My Drags of Spratt has one of these. She's not particularly old, though

****Spunky old lady archetype. Thanks, dear H, for long ago straightening me out on the spelling of archetype.

*****The mom's pretty cool, too. She has a big scene with a gun and a deer, too. Kinda cool, both parents with the guns and deer motif. Don't run across that every day!

More Dead Ending...

2012-01-17T17:15:00.001-08:00

"I didn't come in here to talk about Jesus," (my dad) said, trying to sound stern. "I came in here to talk about gun safety."

From Dead End in Norvelt, Jack Gantos

Dead Ending at the Library

2012-01-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

After last week's disappointing field trip through the stacks, I am happy to report that I got the real deal at the my latest trip to the public library:

Tada!

I adore Jack Gantos. His Jack books are great. His Joey books are great.* And Hole in My Life is the sin qua non of sin qua noniness.

I can't wait to read Dead End.** It's just that...reading Jack Gantos puts me in the strangest moods....

____________

*The series just goes on about two books too long. You know this. I know this. I suspect Jack Gantos knows this. Apparently it is very hard work to resist the siren call of writing a runner-up to one's award-winning Newberino book. Just ask Louis Sachar, Jennifer Holm, Ingrid Law, Susan Patron...why, even our personal favorite for this year's Newbery sticker, Rebecca's dad couldn't resist.

**Which has yet another example of separated-at-birth covers so beloved by nervous publishing companies:

To India, the Brave and Beautiful....

2012-01-13T06:57:00.001-08:00

...kickin' polio in the arse.

Hooray!

More Blank Books with Bright Covers

2012-01-07T05:54:00.000-08:00

Boy. Rough week at the public library. Two books nearly killed me:

Book with an Orange Cover (or Book/Clone I've Read Like a Bajillion Times Before) is the heart-warming, mildly funny story of a kooky relative (in this case an aunt) doing One Big Plot Thing (like oh, I don't know---turning a big ol' house owned by a cranky but generous patron into a B&B). Much chaos ensues.

There's nothing wrong with this book---heck, it's well-written by a write who's way way more famous and deluxe than I'll ever be; it's in present tense and full of warm hearts and mild fun. It even has a warm and snuggly afterward---but goodness me. If writing for the great big world of kiddie lit really has drifted into a choice really between grindingly violent dystopias and warm and snuggly family stories, then it's a good thing I took that job full-time mixing paint.

Because my stuff is doomed.

Book with a White Cover not only nearly killed me, it drove me nuts. Again, another way more famous (and deluxe!) author than I writing a stream -of-consciousness type dealio with kids who write profoundly, meaningfully, subversively in their school journals.* No worries, though. You can keep every kid straight because they have different fonts, which strikes me as a terrific publishing idea, since you can't actually, technically, exactly discern any differences in the voices and points-of-view without the font shifts.**

After I finished White Cover, I knew it was a good thing about that full-time paint-mixing gig.

Thank goodness for Iva Ibbotson! I've been a fan of her writing since I stumbled across her women's fiction back in the 'eighties*** Now she's way more famous (and super-duper-dee-luxe!) for her children's books, all of which I have read and loved; none more so than The Ogre of Oglefort---which totally saved my reading week.

Thank you, dear Ms. Ibbotson!

"Your mother thought you might make me a familiar," said the Hag.

"It could be something quite simple---a spotted salamander perhaps?"

Dr. Brainsweller looked worried.

"Oh dear," he said. "Of course if Mummy thinks....

But I tried once and ...well, come and look."

He led them to a cupboard

and pulled out a plate with something on it.

It looked like a very troubled banana which had died in its sleep.

___________________

*Also known as the One Big Plot Idea.

**Well. There is one Shy Kid who writes shy stuff, subsequently getting his groove on toward the end.

***I understand a lot of these have been reissued as YA---track down a copy of Countess Below Stairs or The Morning Gift. Great stuff!

Bra. Vo. You.

2011-12-30T19:16:00.001-08:00

Once a year I check this blog's stats. The number of hits to the My Books page outruns the Bio page hits by two to one.

Which is darned near perfect.*

Blessed New Year!

_______________________
*Perfect would be three to one.

A Christmas Carol

2011-12-19T10:40:00.000-08:00

These days I always give up my spare change* to the first bum who asks for it, but it wasn't always so.

No no---for more years than I'm proud of I'd never cough up so much as a nickel, no matter how clean-cut the bum. I was a perfectly smug Scrooge busy asking, "Are there no homeless shelters?"

"Plenty of homeless shelters," said my ex-boyfriend,** laying down his pen again.

"The detox centers and the charitable organizations are in full vigor, then?"

"Both very busy, sweetie."

"Well, bums had better go there and stop bugging me. It's enough for me to write a check now and then and not interfere with my business."

But my ex-boyfriend continued to fork over whatever was in his pocket, honoring Christmas and keeping it in his heart all the year. It took me many years and multiple readings of The Christmas Carol before I finally got around to giving up my pocket change and a kind word.

Plus, the bums bless you. No really, I've been at this for a while and there is no denying it---I've gotten a boatload of terrific God bless you, m'ams*** even if the only thing I'm forking over is a couple of measly dimes.**** And blessings are hard to come by in this cold and indifferent world. But guys on the street, man. They give 'em away like they're some kind of pocket change.

Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old city ever knew. Me, I make no such claim. I'm just another shoved-slightly-toward-the-kind-side writer who forks over to everybody in every good old city, town or borough in the good old world the hope for a blessed, most blessed new year.

And a stick of gum.

____________________
*Seventy-two cents and a stick of gum.

**He of the plastic bucket fame!

***Along with a couple of sirs from some reeeeeeally drunken fellows. One said atta boy, and tried to scritch behind my ears. That must have been some drunken hallucination, boy.

****And a stick of gum.

We are surrounded by states with foolish aspirations...*

2011-12-15T06:20:00.001-08:00

...take Wisconsin, f'instance, which thinks it looks like a mitten.

Hmpf. Michigan is the Mitten State.

We have a children's book

We have a Mitten Award.

And now we have a campaign.

Fire up those knitting needles and donate!

___________

....like Wander Indiana. Really?

Alvin Ho!

2011-12-11T12:13:00.000-08:00

It's hard not to be happy. The sun is shining, we've had our first snowfall, and Lenore Look has put forth a new Alvin Ho to read during my lunch hour.

Yay!

Interesting, to compare and contrast Alvin Ho: Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals and Other Fatal Circumstances with the dread Red Book that Goes Ping. The very sorts of word play that drove me nuts (just nuts) in Red Book turn spritely and spare* under the light touch of Ms. Look. Alvin Ho's interior illustrations are energetic and fun and serve to move the story along, unlike the muddied and lifeless afterthoughts in Red Book.**

The only criticism I have with Alvin and his fear of death is the comment on page 65:

"How'd you get invited?" asked Nhia.

"Normally, kids aren't allowed at funerals."

Wha? Kids are absolutely allowed at funerals---the more kids, the better! The whole point of a funeral is to celebrate the life and mourn the death, and remember to be grateful for every day you've got. And who would you rather do that with---a bunch of old fogies who are going to stand around discussing the price of gas and wall-to-wall carpeting over ham-on-buns in the church basement, or a hand-picked squadron of ten year-olds who will sneak outside with you to speculate about the resurrection of the dead over an earthy grave and then try to scare each other silly running around the cemetery?

Enough said.

_________

*Very very spare---which of course is the whole trick!

**Interior illustrations make me passive aggressive. Man, I'd die happy to have a book published with interior art---the apotheosis of good taste and breeding!---but what if they were just stuck in there to make the book seem more accessible to non-reading boys, which I suspect was the case with Red Book? Woudl I die happy, or just plain die?

2011-12-06T07:19:00.001-08:00

Okay, so a tremendously great week writer-wise. One great story off to the agent; another beneath my fingers and just turning out great. Exactly like I dreamed.

Man. I gotta stop that. Stop all that dreaming*. Because it really never does turn out like I imagine. Not complaining, no indeed. Just remembering that the world moves strangely and complexly---and that I am constantly overwhelmed.

__________

*Hey! Dream big, right? I like to think I am the unsung Gustav Flaubert of kiddie lit, when really I'm more of an Oscar Wilde during his Irish days. Do you think St. Francis de Sales would approve?

The Book with the Red Cover that goes Ping Ping Ping....

2011-11-27T15:29:00.001-08:00

Okay. Go here, hit the play and loop button, then come back.

I figure we need a little incidental music for the following screed about an annoying bunch of writing called the Book with the Red Cover that Goes Ping ping Ping Ping ping ping ping ping PING.

Book with a Red Cover is a wretched joke-a-page novel about a boy who (and stop me if you've heard this before!) suffers under the slap-happy assignments of an odd-ball tutor and from unspoken tensions with his father. Sure, the story's a sleepwalk, but the real crime is that the reader is subjected to the same in-joking page after page after page after wearying page. By the 352nd page, the joke's not a joke anymore, it's---well, it's turned into this stupid little writerly ping. Joke, joke ping, joke, joke ping, joke, joke ping, joke, joke ping.

Stuff like this drives me nuts. Nuts.

Just nuts.

An Interview with OKAY FOR NOW's Rebecca Schmdit

2011-11-20T07:01:00.000-08:00

In our house, famed children's author Gary D. Schmidt (The Wednesday Wars, and this year's shoo-in for the Newbery* Okay for Now) is known as Rebecca's dad. Rebecca, squished somewhere in the middle of all those Schmidt kids, is a good friend of our oldest daughter. She graciously agreed to be interviewed:

Q: Rebecca, you grew up with both a mom* and dad writing---my sympathies.

Thanks! No---it was an incredible childhood full of C.S. Lewis, typewriters, book signings and stories. I had the best bedtime stories ever, so I wouldn't change it.

Q: So, tell me: are your parents the tweed-coat-with-leather-patches-and-a-pipe sort of writers---or more drink-with-Papa-Hemingway-and-shoot-at-the-moon-with-a-fully-loaded-semi-automatic scribblers?

My parents were more of the "You're late for school!" and "Eat your vegetables!" type of writers. They were writers, but they were parents first. (Besides, none of us are real Hemingway fans, right?**)

Our family calls you "Sarah's friend with the wacky sense of humor." Certainly, Okay for Now has some of that trademark Schmidt humor in it---are you your father's biggest influence for the comedic?

Yes, I am my father's biggest inspiration for all of his works. I'm the dog in Trouble, the teacher in The Wednesday Wars, and the First Girl who got cut out of First Boy. No, in all seriousness, my family loves to laugh together and always have. As for my dad's inspiration for his books, I can claim no ownership---although my name does show up a couple of times here and there.

Q: Rebecca, you're at the beginning of a brilliant career in the film and TV industry, with an insider's take on rising young stars. Tell, us, who do you see playing Rebecca Schmidt in the forth-coming bio-pic I just this second made up called: TULIP: The Gary D. Schmidt Family Unplugged?

My family is far too dull and normal for anyone to make a movie out of us! Although I do bear a striking resemblance to Rachel McAdams.....***

Q: One last question for our readers**** Rebecca: Harry Potter? Or Lord of the Rings?

You have to go Tolkien. There's no doubt in my mind. Sure, I love Harry. But for me, it will always be the books that this strange, very English gentleman wrote about Middle Earth. One of my most vivid memories of reading any novel is when I reached the end of The Two Towers and thought the world had ended. No--it's Tolkien.

_______________

*The writer Anne Elizabeth Stickney

**He's gonna struggle with winning the National Book Award. Not because Okay isn't perfectly okay (har!), but that the NBA for children's usually goes for the older young-adult titles. Still, if Holes won the National Book and the Newb, what's stopping Okay for Now?

You heard it here first.

***Too right. Hemingway wrote like a over-excited third-grader: It rained. I punched my girlfriend. It rained some more. Also death. whereas Fitzgerald wrote about rain and punching (and also death) like the genius that he was.

****The funny thing is---she really does!

*****Ukrainian spammers and one guy who assures me (repeatedly) he's a genuine Russian spy.

An Interview with THE AVIARY's Max O'Dell

2011-11-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

Kathleen O'Dell's latest book The Aviary is fresh off the presses. It's a wonderful book and sure to do well with girls of all ages.* After finishing The Aviary late one night, I couldn't wait to do an interview with a canine who could give us a writerly tail of those haunting yet lovely birds---Kathleen's adorable pug Max.

Q: Max, iza wizza good widdle doggie?

Thank you. It's good to be here.

Q: Max, there are a lot of wonderful animal characters in Kathleen O'Dell's The Aviary---most notably the birds, of course, but the story depends in key scenes on the backs of two different species: a declawed kitten and a cellar rat. Did the lack of dogs in The Aviary surprise you?

Though I sometimes confuse silicone earplugs with doggy treats, I have been trained to know better than to confuse fiction with autobiography. I still pee on Kathleen's furniture, and yet I am utterly respectful of her authorial "process." Sometimes I think it might have been more practical for both of us if she had concentrated on the doggy-training basics, but she is a slipshod mistress in many ways. I feel lucky that I get fed twice a day and flea treatment when SHE starts to itch. At least when she's writing, the house is silent. It's when she's doing her lady chores and being "industrious" that the singing starts. (And that is when I really regret eating those ear plugs...)

Q: That of course, brings up my next question: are you a barker? Did your barks, growls, snores or wheezes contribute to the squawks, bee-tee-wees and tsip-tsips used in the bird dialogues, or are The Aviary's intricate birdcalls simply a result of too much in-house "singing"?

I've given up barking for sleeping these days. However, we do have a giant flock of migrating parrots who pass through and interrupt my snoozes. I think they might have contributed a few squawks to the manuscript.

Q: The book world is abuzz about your role in introducing Ms. O'Dell to two important cultural influences---lots of walkies past a certain Glendale backyard full of birds, and the Gutenberg Project. Care to elaborate?

Kathleen and I walked past that old estate for years before she noticed the backyard aviary full of lime and lemon-colored parrots. This was back when I was barking, see, and I tried to alert her. But I'm no Lassie (and, apparently, she's no Timmy). Anyway, that house around the corner could appropriately be called a mansion. It must have been here when there was nothing but orange groves. It's a real beauty! No wonder it inspired THE AVIARY book.

If you like oldy, moldy out-of-print children's books and illustrations, go to Gutenberg and poke around. There are primers on good behavior there that show children bursting into flame or losing limbs or being just slightly naughty. It's gives you some perspective on old fashioned child-rearing and makes you grateful for living in a home with a cushy dog bed by the stove, plenty of chewy treats and "owners" with loose standards.

Q. Ms. O'Dell's been compared to E. Nesbit, Agatha Christie, Francis Hodgson Burnett, C.S. Lewis, Zlipha Keatley Snyder and Neil Gaiman (whew!). What about you? Can we draw any famous-dog comparisons?

Well, there's a new book out about Rin Tin Tin. He was a movie icon. He was oversized, athletic, capable of 12-foot leaps and easily trainable. He knew, like, a thousand tricks. Frankly, I like to think of myself as his exact, mirror opposite.

Q: One last question for our readers, Max. Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings?

Harry Potter. Do you know that on Goodreads, Harry Potter's ratings outrank Twain's Huckleberry Finn? The people have spoken! (And the dogs take no responsibility...)

_________

*Go read it! Right now! I'll wait.

A Survivalist Reading List for Spawning Salmon (a couple of books to tide them over the rocky spots...)

2011-10-27T06:11:00.000-07:00

Plaster Creek is awfully shallow and rocky; a terrible place for a big fish to swim upstream, no matter how blissful the shenanigans that await him. There's a spot under the Madison Bridge that's particularly rough going---the shallows are long and narrow. The rocks are relentless. Lots of fish get hung up under the bridge, the approximate halfway mark between the Big Lake and the Shenanigans.

I suppose I could draw a nice, poetic insight on the struggle of the salmon halfway through* his final journey,** but it's really quite grim to watch. On his side in the bare trickle of water between the rocks, one gill submerged, the other open to the suffocating air. His mouth gasps. His lidless eye stares up at the moon in the early evening sky---is he searching for God, the Creator of Fish?

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you soft as words?***

Poor fish. What he needs are some great stories. Some post-survivalist kiddie lit to help him over the worst of the rocks. And since he's a fish, I'm guessing he's not much a one for s/f, fantasy or a thoughtful analysis of the dystopic future heading our way**** so I've stuck to three realistic survivalist tales that are sure to get him out of his own skin for a moment or two---long enough to catch his breath, tense his muscles and flip himself into the deep pool just east of the bridge:

I read this as a nine-year-old, and have never quite given up the dream of living in a tree and training a peregrine. Perhaps when I retire?

Best. Book. Ever.

And here's one from my daughters' generation. Plenty of water in this one for our slightly dried-out fish reader.

And though I'm slightly cheating with this one (it takes place in post-apocalyptic Minneapolis*****), it's a darned great adventure tale. I, for one, have been waiting for the sequel for years.

_____

*Oh so like the plight of the writer, hung up on the Faraglioni smack in the middle muddle of her novel, but it's hard work, that poetic insightfulment business. I will just point out that I have never, in the ten years of watching fish labor up Plaster creek, seen one simply roll over and expire on the rocks. They always manage to keep going, going, going.

**Because our Fish Protagonist, post-shenanigans, is gonna die up there at the head of Plaster Creek and what kind of shenanigans are worth that?

***Job 41: 1-3

****He is a fish, after all.

*****Is this an oxymoron? The Minnesotans are just too darned polite to develop that whole on-a-post-apocalyptic-rampage mindset.

2011-10-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

Give me an underground laboratory....

....half a dozen atom smashers....

....a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee....

....and I care not who writes the nation's laws.

S.J. Perelman

Im Westen Etwas Neues....aber keine Bilder!

2011-10-09T12:54:00.000-07:00

... which is the wry literary way of saying that I haven't worked on my zombie-dog story* much this week, but instead worked on the ending of my sea-monkey caper.**

Endings are kind of tricky. I like a big smash-and-crash and bring-the-story-to-an-end-without-a-lot-of-boring-unravelment, but according to my agent, editors*** at publishing companies are crazy about ravelment, so I usually end up writing another chapter explaining all the smash-and-crash.

The one I wrote this week is named "Chapter Twenty-two", an auspicious number**** It is 1,278 words long. The first sentence is:

"About time,” shouted Henry above the boom and blast of the arctic blow screaming past the shattered window in Thomas Goldberg’s childhood bedroom.

And the last is:

“The invention of chocolate,” murmured Mara Pulaski aloud. “OOOoo.”

Honestly, this story has everything. Faulty wiring, sea-monkeys---the invention of chocolate.

I have had just the best time writing.....

_____________

*Ha! I knew it---you were just hoping I really *was* working on a zombie-dog story. Which I'm not. Regular dogs are hard enough for me, thanks.

**ha HA! This one really does have sea-monkeys in it, but in a supporting role only.

***I'd like an editor from a publishing company criticize my ending! That'd be nifty!

****And yeah, according to Wikipedia number 22 really isn't all that lucky. Poo.

The Competing Universes of my Next Story....

2011-10-01T08:44:00.001-07:00

Well.

I have finally gotten back to the first draft of my latest new story [insert your favorite celebratory noise here!]* and already it's shaping up to be a puzzle of a puzzlement. Seems I have written the same story in two alternate universes: one a tragic and solemn literary world full of insight and pathos and the hope of a Newbery. A totally serious work. But it's not very funny.

Which means I'm gonna mope through the writing. Alas.

Universe Redux on the other hand is a slap-happy place full of lawyers, guns and money. It's great fun but unless some editor somewhere understands an ambitious mid-grade write who means to tell about truth and beauty within the contextual framework of weird, funny stuff, then I'll have a transcendent time writing only to face the alas that is going to be waiting for me the second I start submitting:

Dear Ms. Zinnen:

While your story I-went-for-the-fun-universe-because-what-writer-wants-to-drag-her-whiny-moany-self-through-solemn-and-bathetic-literary-HELL? has much merit, I am afraid, alas(!!!!!), that the realities of the postmodern** children's market and so forth and so on.

Still, the notion that I'd even consider writin' serious is a tremendous sign of how much I've grown as a writer.*** I'm totally impressed!

But I'm also going funny.

_______________________

*Mine is the cozy mix between a snort of disbelief and a yodel of happiness made by my youngest daughter.

**postmodern = after zombies

***Maybe it's also a sign of sheer desperation since I haven't sold anything for nearly a decade. But I digress.

New Improved Writing----Now with Febreze!

2011-09-25T18:12:00.001-07:00

I like my job, which has nothing to do with writing, reading or publishing (why I like it!), but I do work with an extremely creative bunch. There's the sales specialist who sings 'forties show tunes in a rich be-bop that makes me swoon. There's the creative-writing senior with a piercing stare who works and works and never says a word.* Then there's the young guy who does the most amazing doodles in our work-notes book.**

He'd make a great picture book illustrator!

"So," I said last night after he turned my dinosaur-eating-a-daisy into a surfboarding cat hanging ten beneath the starlit sea, "have you ever thought about the children's market?"

Apparently he has. We talked for a while about agents and dummies and submitting and how the writing is harder than the drawing for him.*** And then he told me about his secret trips to the children's department in our local Barnes and Noble.

"But so much of the art is digital. So I see maybe one or two things that I like," he said.

Well. Going into the Barnes and Noble Children's Department, I told him, is a lot like wandering into our store's cleaning products aisle expecting to find something that smells of the deeply mysterious perfume of Scheherazade Herself.****

Frankly,all you're going to get is a snoot-full of Febreze.

Don't get me wrong, I said. I like Febreze. I just don't like Febreze in the morning, Febreze at night; Febreze Febreze all day long. To start with, it's kind of an icky word---half fabric, half breeze with that faint, sickening hint of febrile. And it's a smell that smells good but not great.

It doesn't smell of anything or for anything or because of anything---it's just a chemical absence of extremes. It smells like an illusion.

And let's face it, the commercial marketplace is heavily (heavily) redolent of writerly Febreze. Febreze sells great because Febreze is easy and it reads well at the beach and there's not much to wrestle over late at night when the lights are out and you're having trouble sleeping what with trying to figure out if there's a god and what the meaning of life is and who will you love and will he love you in return? Febreze just don't enter into it, man. Febreze is inconsequential---which is pretty much how we like our children's books. Undemanding---but not outright stinky.

"Have you been to the downtown library yet?" I asked. "They have a mammoth children's collection."*****

"Nah. Isn't that just full of old stuff?"

Yup. Our public library, has a long, odorific tail of writerly smells---authors like George MacDonald and E.L. Konigsburg and Jean Craighead George---ready to be cracked open and give the reader a big ol' whiff. But it has tons of new stuff too, and not just the Febreze-ladened, nossir. You'll get plenty of brilliant writing with top notes of citrus and lavender; you'll get the off-beat, the quirky and the just-about insane You never know what those librarian mischief-makers are going to buy next. Lots of books, though. Lots and lots of books that smell like heaven and hell and Lake Michigan in between..................******

_________

*We'll all end up in her novel. I just hope I'm unrecognizable, but if not I'll be the aging-hippie-with-a-foul-mouth-and-encyclopedic-knowledge-of-deck-stains-God-help-her.

**I like to doodle, too. I can draw a mean dinosaur-eating-a-flower. I am awfully good at tulips.

***This is, of course, a good sign. Good writers find writing great stuff incredibly hard. He also told me that he is drawn to organic shapes, like da Vinci's deluge or Van Gough's trees.

I love 'em too!

****Or the aftershave of Gustav Flaubert!

*****Their collection is so large in fact that it encompasses several copies of my books, which are donkey's years old.

******I love the smell of the lake. Some people say is smells like dead fish and sunburnt feet but I say it smells like joy.

The Last Word

2011-09-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the last four paragraphs of my latest (and best!) story.

Ahhh, they're hard! Very hard to get the last words perfect, so I fiddle and twitch and skew.*

I settled on the word project. Prrrroject (a woody sort of word). I was hoping to use scuffle, with its enticing whiff of best-selling sequel;** or harbinger and go paranormal goth, but project is the antithesis of prank and it's that kind of Hegelian summing up of my latest story Life at School which is sure to pull in readers.

Project. It will stand humbly 'midst literature's most famous last words. Words like honor (Madame Bovary), stars (The Divine Comedy) and horses (the Iliad).

Upward! (David Copperfield, with original punctuation).

Multiply (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), and toast the-kind-that-you-eat toast (Three Men in a Boat)****.

Yes, yes. I think---project is quite the right sort of last word.

A good couple of weeks' worth of work, if I do say so myself...

_______________________

*All of which would make wonderful last words Now all I have to do is write the stuff that comes before 'em.

**And if that did well, trilllliogy would be on everyone's lips.

***Aufhebung really means I'll have another one.

****To Say Nothing of the Dog

The Lost Girl in Bankrupt Borders....

2011-09-11T12:06:00.005-07:00

Yup, I was there in Ann Arbor, presiding over the everything-must-go sale of the flagship Borders bookstore. Ahead of me in the very very (very) long line were many oddities; the oddest of the odd was an apparently Confused Young Man buying not only a pictorial calendar of John F. Kennedy and a copy of Glenn Beck's Broke, but also a copy of The Carrot Principle, which I was very happy to find out is NOT about juicing.

Me, I stood in that very very (very) long line rubbernecking to beat the band (two bookcases to the gentleman with the goatee and the PAWS dog! A chin-high stack of graphic novels to the giggling middle-schoolers! A bargain basement copy of The Feminine Mystique for sixty-nine cents to the woman possibly yearning for the good ol' days before acrylic nails and werewolves for boyfriends!) and waiting for spend my five dollars on:

Backing into Forward by Jules Feiffer

and

Samuel Johnson, by the

(adorable!) Peter Martin.

I got through the very very (very) long line just as a little girl turned around and realized her parents were nowhere to be seen. She burst into tears---hot, hard, painful tears. The security guard walked over; so did a couple of store employees. My ex-boyfriend G* and I hovered for a minute or two, watching. You know. Just to make sure that everything was all right.

I had to hug G tight. The poor man's eyes were filled with tears.

_______________

*He of the plastic bucket fame!

2011-09-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

I have taken a road along which

without ceasing and without labor

I shall proceed

as long as there is ink and paper

in the world....

---Michel de Montainge---

This Week There Will be Plenty of Essay....

2011-08-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

...but not a lot of cake.

I almost totally agree with this here report on the state of boys and reading. Lipsyte is writing about (mostly) the high school end in his lament; I would say that much of the same applies to mid-grades as well. Though there's lots of material* here, I want to think about two quotes: one direct, the other indirect---snugged up together like Thing One and Thing Two, which I fear alas! alack!---they are:

Michael Cart, a past president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, agrees**.
“We need more good works of realistic fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, on- or offline, that invite boys to reflect on what kinds of men they want to become,” he told me. “In a commercially driven publishing environment, the emphasis is currently on young women.”
And then some. At the 2007 A.L.A. conference, a Harper executive said at least three-quarters of her target audience were girls, and they wanted to read about mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies and vampires.

So. In this commercially driven publishing environment, we are (directly) sad, very sad that boys are not being invited to reflect on what kinds of men they want to become. On the other hand, we don't seem to be particularly sad that the target audiences for all this commerce---girls---are (indirectly) invited to reflect on the kinds of women they want to become: mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies and vampires.

Ironic.

Lypsyte also points out that a lot of guy reads are superficial sword-and-space epics*** or sports novels with preachy moral messages****, but I think the point is clear:

If I have to be superficial to be published, I'd way WAY rather write about swords and sports than mean girls and vampires, any day.

And what the heck is a frenemy? Sounds suspicious.

______________________

* and a couple of potshots like this one: The current surge in children’s literature has been fueled by talented young female novelists fresh from M.F.A. programs who in earlier times would have been writing midlist adult fiction. Ouch.

**...that "the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys might not see reading as a masculine activity.” (Jon Scieszka, as quoted in Lipsyte's article).

***and superheroes by the bucketful.

****the male equivalent of dating a vampire, apparently.

This Week There Will be Plenty of Cake, but No Essay

2011-08-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

I wrote a wee essay for today.

It was profound and meaningful as could be---really cutting the Gordian tangle between science and theology and writing for children.

Fortunately I am easily bored with doing the whole Lord-on-high bit. I hit the delete and good riddance key---making the world safe again for people who like to horse around on their own terms.

Whew!

And now for the cake:

Thanks, Sarah!

The Summer of May, Cecilia Galante

2011-08-14T09:32:00.001-07:00

A lot of times when I'm slumped over an open book in the breakroom at work, I'll bet it looks like I'm reading it. In fact, I know it looks like I'm reading it, because of all the people who stick their hands between my eyes and the pages and wiggle their fingers. "Oops. Don't let me bother your reading," they'll say with a smirk on their faces.

"Oh---you're not bothering my reading at bit," I say. And I mean it, too. Because I'm not reading the book---I'm rewriting it!

Take The Summer of May, by Cecilia Galante. I spent some time noggling about with this snippet between May and her dad:

"How's summer school going?" (my dad) asked.

"Okay...it's not how I wanted to spend my summer, but I'm doing it."

Dad uncrossed his feet. "Well, you'd better keep doing it. And do it with a smile on your face tool Because if I hear about you getting into one more incident up at the school, I'm telling you right now, May---" (p.136)

And off they go, into an argument.

See, the thing is, books are filled with setup moments like these---the moment where the write pins up a big blank sheet of paper (how's summer school going?) and picks out a fabulous colored marker (it's not how I wanted to spend my summer, but I'm doing it) and stands back to let the fun begin; all the endless possibilities to fill up that white inscrutable space.

Galante quite properly gave the space over to a grieving-dad-who-doesn't-understand-his-equally-grieving daughter (and do it with a smile on your face...).

But it doesn't have to be that way.

----The Tender Moment with the Understanding Fun Dad:

"How's summer school going?" (my dad) asked.

"Okay...it's not how I wanted to spend my summer, but I'm doing it."

"Nobody wants to go to summer school." My dad stretched out his feet. "It's like wanting the 'flu."

"And the bubonic plague."

"And frostbite."

I said har through my nose. "Dad? do you think I'm pretty?"

----The Action-Packed moment with the Science-Fiction Dad:

"How's summer school going?" (my dad) asked.

"Okay...it's not how I wanted to spend my summer, but I'm doing it."

"Well, you better keep doing it." He jumped to his feet and fired. "These Daleks are no dummies. They'll hunt you down the second you flunk out."

I shrugged as I pulled the phason charge and threw the grenade. "They're hunting me now. And I just got a B+ on my Algebra quiz."

---The Weird Moment with the Strike-it-Rich Dad:

"How's summer school going?" (my dad) asked.

"Okay...it's not how I wanted to spend my summer, but I'm doing it."

Dad looked at the ticket in his hand, then at the TV. It was on, the sound turned way down, but numbers scrolled across the screen. 3 7 89 14 6 56 23. He fell off the couch and waved his sock feet in the air.

"I'll buy you the school---hell, I'll buy you a whole summer! I've just won 283 million in the Powerball!"

I thought he was joking. About the 283 million, about buying the school, the whole summer. But you know what? He wasn't.

My advice to you---don't ever let your dad buy you a whole summer. By August you will be in a whole bunch of deep and dark and extremely dangerous crap.

THEN, by Morris Gleitzman

2011-08-06T17:06:00.000-07:00

Yup. I have an college degree in German---ratty as an old bathrobe and nearly as neglected---but there was a time when I ran, skipped and jumped auf deutsch, hurra hurra!

Life's a funny old thing.

In any event, I know more about German history and political philosophy than the average children's literature write in America, and the one thing I've learned is that I can easily (easily!) jettison most of what I know.

Forget das Niebelungenlied.

Nix Goethe. * Max Planck?** Pfft!

But I'll have to keep my old university notes on the Nazis, worst luck. This makes me cranky. I don't like the Nazis. National Socialism was a communal psychosis on the part of the German people, who forgot that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men do nothing. Of course, it's crucial to understand history in order not to repeat it, which is why Nazis get such an ocean of dramatized ink in children's literature.***

Still, I'd rather read about Beethoven or Bertholt Brecht any day,**** so most of the time I give Nazi books a miss. For some reason, though***** I picked up a copy of Then, by Morris Gleitzman.

In my usual ends-before-the-means, I read Then before Once. It works as a stand alone---it works, in fact on just about every level: voice, character, story.******

Read this book!

________

*Licht! Mehr Licht!

**a founding father of quantum physics alongside that other guy---you know, the other German guy...oh, what was his name? Albert Einstein?

***This is by no means an exhaustive list. And it's an older one too, missing several newer books such as The Devil's Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen...and the ones I'm gonna talk about!

****Kepler gives me a headache, though.

*****It was the cover. The cover's perfect.

******A small quibble: the story has a bit of the composite-of-incidents feel so common in well-researched historical fiction----you know, where the story feels strung together out of vignettes culled from archived letters attached to the footnotes found in Appendix B of Authoritative Tome on the History of the Germanic Peoples, Volume 27---das dritte Reich.

But the characters! Ah, Gleitzman's characters certainly make up for any appendixed story-boarding! A very wonderful book.

Dombey and Son

2011-07-30T07:55:00.000-07:00

The summer days are streaming like pinwheels from my fingers, but I am reading Dombey and Son on my lunch break.

Man, Dombey the Elder is one callous dude, and Dickens can still write his way out of a paper bag. Here's a snippet from Dombey the Younger's school days:

'Now Dombey,' said Miss Blimber. 'How have you got on with those books?'

They comprised a little English, and a deal of Latin - names of things, declensions of articles and substantives, exercises thereon, and preliminary rules - a trifle of orthography, a glance at ancient history, a wink or two at modern ditto, a few tables, two or three weights and measures, and a little general information. When poor Paul had spelt out number two, he found he had no idea of number one; fragments whereof afterwards obtruded themselves into number three, which slided into number four, which grafted itself on to number two. So that whether twenty Romuluses made a Remus, or hic haec hoc was troy weight, or a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus a bull, were open questions with him.

---From: Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens

_____________________________

Hey, Archer---I closed my hiya email account before I remembered that I had your email there---give me a post at the new one (lindatakethispartoutzinnen@g(eeee)mail.COM)

---much love,

Flory

Our Dreams are Not Forgotten. That's the point....

2011-07-26T18:22:00.000-07:00

....still, seeing Cave of Forgotten Dreams makes me glad to be both an artist and a person with a crooked finger.

Wonderful.

Bashing and Burnishing and the Last Flight (Sob!)

2011-07-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

...okay, so I just finished Yet Another Book (with a Blue Cover) by Award-winning Author---a book that deserves some serious fun-poking.*

But then I thought, aw, c'mon. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. A-W. Author's never written speculative fiction before, and frankly, I'm bored to tears with all the negativity floating around (so last year. And the year before that and the year before that) in this bad old world.

Besides, I've been writing gangbusters. So, instead of reviewing some very bad s/f, I give you a very nice snippet of pure fun, bright and burnished as the time-space continuum itself:

Henry continued his innocent gaze upward. “And what’s so hard about chronos rays, anyway? Even I understand ‘em.”

He fitted his elbows to his palms and nodded. “The sun has been shining on the earth for billions of years. Every day a bit of sunlight is absorbed into the chronos ray belt beneath the earth’s crust. That means the ray belt contains light particles from yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Light from the Protozoan Era, light from 1066; light from last week. Particles of light from every moment since the sun began to shine. Right?”

Mara stared in surprise. “Right.”

“Well then. Eventually, the pressure from the past builds to the boiling point. And chronos rays, saturated by all that old light, hiss out of the ground and mix with the sunlight from the present. That’s why every brand-new day seems so familiar. It’s got a little bit of every day that’s already happened mixed up in it. Right?”

“That was—well, that was right, Stupe. How do you know that? You cut every class except Ancient Cultures.”

__________

*It's a three-drink book what with two kill-that-mockingbird and a Shakespeare reference---though to be fair, there's some big love for L. Frank Baum as well.

Parts of it read like a bad social studies textbook. For instance, there's the evil Land of the Fathers---North Korea-ish in its drab awfulness----versus the Western Province which..."we're informed, is a beautiful place, still partly wild, where animals roam freely and the people try to live in harmony with nature. The families build their own homes, choose their own livelihood, and coexist peacefully with the red natives (sic) of the land. Their government is a democracy, operating within the framework of a robust Constitution...Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Suquamish tribal chief Seattle hold equal positions in the executive branch. The legislative and judicial branches are similar to those in the United States, blah blah blah (p.217).

The Tale of drumstik...

2011-07-10T18:00:00.001-07:00

I live two blocks from an elementary school, where the kids are always losing their papers. Permission slips, arithmetic tests and vocabulary lists blow into my yard or are dropped, Hansel-like, on the sidewalk in front of my house.

I'm always glad to find a bit of street litter with childish handwriting on it. It's a great way to review math facts or finally nail down the difference between farther and further. I never know what to expect.

My favorites, though, are the pictures doodled in the margins (spaceships and dinosaurs have lost none of their appeal through the years; also copious amounts of tattoo designs featuring guns and blood) and the personal notes. OOOOooo, the personal notes! the personal notes!

It will be a sad day for my sidewalk when texting drifts down to the fourth grade. Clean---but sad. I will have nothing to read during my morning run.

I have one of the notes in front of me. It says:

drumstik farted

followed by an odd sort of pencil scribble that could (with a little imagination) be an artistic attempt to pin down what, exactly drumstick's fart looked like.

Frankly, I wouldn't mind meeting drumstik.

And I would certainly like to meet the author of drumstik farted (Newbery Honor, 2032). Imagine the conversation! Full of writing and farts. Fartable writing. Writable farts.

Well.

Somehow, instead of writing true and noble and right (et al), I got sidetracked into writing about farts. This is not all bad. I need to write more to the market; and the market---as I understand it---is currently chockful of things like steampunk and the paranormal and heartfelt tales of spunky girls. I feel sure farts must fit in there somewhere, right?

Otherwise, what is all the commotion about drumstik and his gas?*

_________________

*Notice drumstik has morphed into a boy of some sort. Spunky girls do not fart; not in today's marketplace, nossir.

The Importance of Plastic Buckets in World Building...

2011-07-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, so 'tho my latest story is not my newest story,* it is the only story I've ever written that takes place three hundred years in the future.

What will society be like three hundred years from now here in good ol' the Mitten State? I'm having the best time speculating. Bio-genetics! Time-shifting! High school entrance exams! Chocolate!

It's all coming to a Great Lake near you.

One of the reasons I really love this story (and keep coming back to it) is that it reminds me in some complex non-linear way of a conversation I had with my then boyfriend** about Israelis, nation-building and plastic buckets.

Like this one.**

He was in Israel, studying Hebrew and picking apples at a bare-bones kibbutz on the Lebanese border shortly before the Litani Operation, and was taken with how plastic buckets were used for all sorts of vital, nation-building activities---milking goats; carrying babies; storing ammunition. People turned them over and used them as stools at the dinner table, took them out to the bomb shelter at night in case they had to---well. They even used them to pick apples***

The lowly plastic bucket. A linchpin of Mid-Eastern family, commerce and society****. Who knew?

The same sort of deal is going on in the gentle sort of world-building of my story,***** My plastic buckets include the aforementioned bio-genetics and chocolate, of course---but also schools made of Time and Light; north-county woods crammed full of gnats and bears.

And a very bad motorcycle accident.

It's quite an idea,isn't it? Trying to figure out when there's enough plastic buckets in the backstory of your world building? Public transportation...the juvenile detention system... a national beverage.*******

I was going to wind this up with a poignant (but funny!) meditation on life, the world and our work here in the wide world of kiddie lit, but I decided that sending y'all over to this site would be a fitting close----because of course it is a great example of an entire world being built----one ugly, dysfunctional and flimsy piece o' plastic at a time---right! this! second! everywhere around us.********

Enjoy!

___________

*been working on it since 2005. It's either gonna flop or be my best one yet!

**now husband

***plastic bucket, not Israeli.

****after a nice sanitary wash, I'm sure.

*****You also need duct tape and a squarish plastic dish-pan sort of thing, according to the Israeli kibbutzniks of the early 'eighties.

******cleverly entitled A Long Time from Now. And why am I using so many footnotes this morning? the sun is shining; it doesn't seem particularly like a footnoting sort of day. (but I digress).

*******vodka! (Thanks, Priscilla!)

********who would intentionally buy this stuff anyway? Not me. And yet, my cupboards are filled to bursting with plastic crap.

Heavy-Handed. Please Recast....

2011-06-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

Next up:

The Candymakers, by Wendy Mass

So, with The Candymakers, we have Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meeting Spy Kids with a Rashomon-ic point of view via Millicent Min, Girl Genius.

Whew!

I liked it fine, though at four hundred fifty-three pages. it's about fifty pages too long---and has some very weird sentence structure, especially toward the end.* "Eventually Philip, growing weary of the others' attention clearly drifting off, went back to the lab..." (p.370). Mrs. Brink, my eighth-grade teacher, would have circled that dependent clause with her red pen and written Awkward firmly in the margin.

Mrs. Brink would have also cast her red pen upon the myriad exclamation points that are---well, they're everywhere! In one memorable paragraph (p. 396---keep going! Almost there!) of five sentences, there are three sets of exclamations in parentheses (like this! no kidding!) and "a lollypop wrapped in bacon!"

Which got me to wondering what my composition quirks are. How my stories are full not only of my unique writerly voice but also of nervous tics which would have Mrs. Brink squinching her nose and writing heavy-handed, please recast---in the margins.**

Well:

I find I like...a good ellipsis now and then.

And I'm not totally immune to the lure of the exclamation!

There is---of course---the em dash.

And sentence fragments. Which are fun.

And if a paragraph starts out with a question? You can spend the next three and a half pages answering it (don't forget the parenthetical exclamations!)

Also.

One sentence paragraphs are dramatic.

---combined---judiciously!

They make your writing

look like an Emily Dickinson poem---to make---

editors swoon!

Frankly, I have an enduring love of the semicolon; surely a tale for another day...

______________________

*My guess is that it was 2 am Tuesday morning of Deadlinesville, those last pesky fifty pages still to write, and like Gustav Flaubert, Ms. Mass didn't have time to write shorter.

**She would've started with this sentence.

Shoot! I should have never started on archive.org....

2011-06-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

...because I...just...can't....stop!

Why can't I live in this world????? I'm just asking...

Trying to Wedge it into Writing...

2011-06-19T19:52:00.002-07:00

Okay. I really really (really) want to post this picture. It has nothing to do with writing. A picture that makes me happy! And I can't even say why!*

But perhaps it is time to sing out the blessings of my favorite spot on the 'net.

I know, I know. Some people like that Facebook stuff. And Netflix can be fun. But if you want sheer strangeness**, I don't think archive.org can be beat.

Go ahead. Be happy. Lord knows, Iam.

___________

*Is it because of all...that...hair? You never see that anymore, such a pure celebration of angst and hair. Why is that?

**Along with the random and the sublime.

My Credo of the Moment

2011-06-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I chucked in all that arduous stuff I'm always working on---answering The Four Great Questions*, writing 'til the blood oozes out of my eyeballs, wondering what the %$#! to make for supper. I thought I'd enjoy a wee mind-vacation whilst letting others do the heavy lifting. Consequently, I have temporarily ripped my personal philosophy straight off the song lyrics playing over the intercom system at work.

This, in no particular order, is My Credo of the Moment:

1. That dark clouds blow away eventually.

2. That I am amazin' just the way I am.**

3. That I am halfway there.***

4. That I've got an (unintelligible) kind of love.

5. That the first cut is the deepest.

6. That I'm alive and

6b. That I don't want to die.

and last but not least:

7. Ooo, baby. Ooo.****

It's kind of a mixed bag, but surprisingly workable. Actually, the only real disappointment is that sometime between the dark and the dawn, the sound tape at work got changed from prog rock to Top-40 favs from a couple of years ago, and now I'll never get to hear the real reason I thought my vacation was gonna work out swell:

________________

The four Great Questions that we spend our whole lives trying to answer: Is there a god? What is the meaning of my life? Who will I love? And who will love me?

**This is easy enough to believe. Amaze: from mazen, the Old English word for bewilderment.

***I'm only halfway there??? Good Lord.

****Which goes without saying.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers. Or Dog Hair, However That Works out for You.....

2011-06-05T06:28:00.000-07:00

...two girl-with-dog books (cute covers!) this week:

Star in the Forest, by Laura Resau

...and...

A Million Miles from Boston, by Karen Day

Lots of stuff going on in these books*--- on the one hand there's a tres leches birthday cake, driving without a license and ten thousand dollars in ransom. On the other, there's an annoying boy, a dead mother and...kayaking!! which takes away the sting.**

But if I wasn't precisely spellbound, spellbound, alla time spellbound, I was brought to a dead stop in admiration*** of something every reader longs for----the perfect words at the perfect time.

From Star in the Forest:

"I knew where her dad really was. But it seemed too late to tell her now. It seemed like something a person shouldn't do to her best friend. So I decided to let myself believe her dad really was a sled-dog-training, lemur-studying, polar-bear-saving world traveler. Who got sad sometimes." p. 72-73

This is so perfect---especially the "who got sad sometimes". It tells us as much about the character speaking as it does about the dad. The phrase also sums up the book---a mushroom-hunting, dad-ransoming, dog-saving book. Which gets sad, sometimes.

Beautiful.

Then there's this snippet of conversation from Million Miles to Boston:

"But I wonder if he's overcompensating. Covering up for something....(t)here's always the other side of you, right?" p.143

Which I thought was a perfect way to reword St. Paul's admonition to himself**** in ten words or less. I've had looooooong and difficult struggles with the other side of me, but never so succinctly!

Beautiful as well.

Thus, I raise my glass (soy latte over ice) and pour libation to the gods of the Well-Turned Phrase.

Are you listening, gods?

Monday morning, as I dive back into turn to my work-in-progress, I hope to meet you nesting in the green weeds of Chapter Two or soaring high and lonely over the dreary bog that is currently Chapter Ten---but I suspect you're off fluttering around the BEA or chirping in the ear of John Green. Leaving me hard at work on the ol' manuscript and burping up not hope and feathers, but dog hair.....

___________________

*Yeah, well if you want plot summaries and and teacher discussion guides and I know not what else, you can go here and here.

**The sting being that there's a very strong whiff of the Babysitter's Club about it---think mashup of Maryanne and Kristy with her aging dog Louie thrown in for good measure.

And what's with the bit of Lake Superior-bashing? "Dad told me that the first time he brought Mom (to this sea-side cottage in Maine), she ran to the water and burst into tears. It reminded her of where she'd grown up, on Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula only she loved here much better" (emphasis mine).

Balderdash. No one who'd grown up on Lake Sup could ever love a mere Atlantic Ocean full of oil tanker crud, ooky jellyfish blobs and all. that. salt. washing up on a rocky beach---not when you know the brilliance of the more than three QUADRILLION gallons of brisk, enticing freshwater that is our beloved lake.

The first time you get smacked in the mouth with the tail-end of a six-foot wave and swallow the water, you'll know you're not in Kansas anymore, bunkie. Hmpf.

***with a sneaking sense of envy

****the good-that-I-would-do-I-do-not-and-the-evil-that-I-would-not-do-is-that-which-I-do. Say it three times, fast.

I Have a Readerrrrrrr!

2011-05-29T08:01:00.002-07:00

Yup, I got an actual email from a reader who is not in any way related to me.

Exciting!

Of course, it would've been even more exciting had MY READER said something along the lines of "you go, girl".* Alas, he/she/it was a bit unhappy.

I have read your blog, and am wondering about the wisdom of writing such critical book reviews? I was able to piece together the names and the authors of Black Book, Blue Book and Yellow Book using Google and its keyword search.

I know, I know! What did we do before Google? Well, we had endless arguments at parties involving made-up statistics ("I was just reading that 67% of all children's authors write their books on notebook paper left over from the Eisenhower Administration")---whereas now, when someone posits such a statement, three smartphones are whipped out and and Google cuts to the chase:**

Which is too bad. Parties were a lot of fun back then. Now it's all drink drink drink and stare off into the middle distance, afraid of opening our mouths because it's embarrassing to be Google-corrected in front of our peers.

But I digress.

You are doing a disservice to young adult literature by hiding behind this flimsy anonymity. I'm surprised that you haven't been slammed by irate writers, or blackballed by publishers. But perhaps you have been? You have disabled your comments and there's no where to complain about your unfair reviews except via this email, which you probably don't read.

Well, though I suspect this particular commenter might be a kiddie lit author him/her/itself, I have to say that the chances of someone in the biz actually reading any of this is slim to none. Don't forget, I am a well-published out-of-print author with no prospects on the horizon. Why would anyone bother? No no---this blog is a bit of writerly coughing for my own amusement, nothing more.

Besides, I don't think I'm slamming any individual authors per se. I admit, I do poke the bear cage vis a vis publishing trends, sentimentality and writers in general, drawing examples from recently released tomes---but hey. I take my job seriously*** as you can see from the sort of purple piffle post-its I write as I read a book.****

_____

* Because any reader of mine would be sure to speak in dead sea scroll lingo.

**Hunter S. Thompson is right below me. Cool!

***Interim Gadfly.

****Book with a Green Cover, orrrrr.....Close to Famous, by Joan Bauer! A bit cheesy. Or cupcakey as the case may be, but not a bad book.

Whoa. A Tough Week for Families....

2011-05-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

Three mid-grades in three days and not a dad between 'em. Then there was the dead mom, the mom who got punched by her abusive boyfriend, and the bi-polar mom who abandoned her kid whilst on vacation.

All three protags were only children. One of them had a wealthy grandmother---the rest had nary an uncle or a weird second cousin to call their own.

Boy. Happy families may still be all alike, but they are getting scarce as hen's teeth in the great big world of kiddie lit.

Is There Anything Better Than Writing Something True and Noble...and Funny??

2011-05-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

I think not.

....While the vice hustled over to the girls and applied first aid, David peeled the sponge from the door. He examined it carefully. The center of the sponge had been carved out with a knife and corn syrup poured into the depression. A couple of drops of red food coloring added at the last moment made the slimy red streaks as the syrup dripped over the door.

“Uh oh,” said Jane at his elbow. “Food coloring. That’s really going to stain the varnish.”

“Property damage,” sniffed David. “Plain and simple. Somebody got carried away.”

He glared at the sponge. It was fine when the other kids tried a prank. Their pranks were usually terrible---slipshod and uninspiring---and absolutely no challenge to his masterful prank ninja mind. The problem came when some fool crossed the line between pranks and vandalism.

Because everybody loathed vandalism.

Especially David.

Vandalism was pointless. Destroying school furniture, clogging up bathroom sinks, staining the varnish---how did that make life at school better? Vandals were nothing but people who smash everything in sight just to send the message: Hello there! I am an idiot. But I am a powerful idiot, so Fear me. Oh, and ha ha to the janitor who has to clean up after me.

Pranks on the other hand were like…telling a story. A rich and mysterious fable about life at school. A good prank had a beginning, a middle and an end. It featured a genius mastermind and his smart-alecky sidekick. A great prank included important life themes: themes of struggle and triumph and the occasional ignomious defeat.Take the noodle incident, for instance.

“Noodles,” said David to the sponge. He heaved a sigh.

Jane whapped him on the elbow. “Listen, pal. You gotta stop sulking about the noodles. The whole thing was a freak accident. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

“Yeah. But it happened to me, “ he said despondently.

“Aw, c’mon,” chirped Jane. “Those stupid noodles taught us the meaning of the word ignomious, right? So it wasn’t the complete loser move I was totally opposed to from the beginning.”

“Shut up,” said David. “And stop hitting me.”

To Kill a Mockingbird, By William Shakespeare

2011-05-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Busy reading books left and right, right and left.

The public library is my friend.

The Mid-grade with the Black Cover featured a spunky (shudder, shudder) protagonist paired up with Charles Dickens in unraveling a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. In point of fact, it was Sherlock Homes debunking the supernatural shenanigans in this atmospheric historical novel----but the write apparently thought by finding-and-replacing-all Sherlock Holmes for Chas Dickens would make the whole thing more cutting edge.

I hated The Blank Verse Novel with a Misty Rainy Face on It---but then, what did I think would happen? I hate novels in verse. Why did I take it home with me? Because it was sitting there, all literary and blank-versey, surrounded by brightly-colored picturebooks, succulent YA vampire novels, a torn copy of Mad magazine---and I knew that tumbled among that brash, loud crew there was no way Misty Face would ever be checked out by any sane child.

I loathe blank verse, but I also have a thing for outsiders. Perversely, I both checked out AND read the damned Face. This obviously makes me both a better and more cultured person than anyone on the near horizon, so neener neener.

The last Mid-grade with a Red Back Cover made me realized how. deadly. sick. I am of mid-grades that mention/quote/have the mom character curl up and read aloud from either:

The Collected Works of William Shakespeare (edited by Christopher Marlowe)

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Apparently, these are the only two books in the English-speaking world worth referencing in the modern mid-grade novel.* Truly---I've read four or five books in the last month where Jem, Scout, The Bard of Stratford, or that damned mockingbird make more than a cursory appearance.

It's an epidemic, it's....a drinking game. For the next ALA meeting. Every mention of Shakespeare or Mockingbird, and it's a drink. Two drinks if both are mentioned in the same book; three drinks if they're both mentioned in a same chapter.

If Dante Alighieri and Madame Bovary were a mid-grade drinking game on the other hand, we'd all remain sober as parsons. This observation allows me to include a nifty rendition of Dante and his Purgatorio:

What a cutie pie, huh? The kind of guy who could write in rhyming tercets and not once lose his composure**....

____________

*Though the Book With Charles Dickens Cleverly Disguised as Sherlock Holmes, above, did indeed reference various scenes from Dickens' work: Miss Havisham's wedding cake in Great Expectations numerous David Copperfield and Oliver Twist imagery, and only one Will Shakespeare mention, so very nearly kudos there.

**...'cos he wrote the Comedy in three cantos! Which is Italian for songs! Which are composed! By composed composers!

Whew.

The universe

2011-05-01T17:53:00.001-07:00

...go here and remember why it is good to be alive at the dawn of a new age of exploration...

A Tall Story

2011-04-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

People, people, people. We writes have got to stop writing books that have been written (and overwritten) ten times before. We've got to stop using the shopworn devices of syndromes and dead mothers and heartfeltedness.

But most of all we've got to stop recycling the old stuff.

Why are we wasting the precious few hours of our lives writing books that say the same thing? Was King Lemuel right? Is there truly nothing new under the sun?

Enter my last Book with a Blue Cover, by Candy Gourlay.

There's much to admire here. The thing that I loved most as a writer, though, was the near perfect blend of two world viewpoints: the rational, scientific explanation in London for Nardo's giantism (the mom's viewpoint), and the natural philosopher's* account coming from his Filipino village community (the aunt's viewpoint).

I'm struggling to avoid using either superstition or magical realism here, because I want to honor Gourlay's intent about Nardo's tallness: it is both a tumor on his pituitary gland and the matter-of-fact legacy from the first giant Bernardo Carpio.

So, hooray for A Tall Story! After getting beat up a little by Yellow, Black and Blue, I'm happy to say that Bernardo and his sister gave me courage to rise up in my chair and keep faith with we few, we happy few, we band of brothers...

_____

*doesn't come near to describe it, I know, but I've been reading Aristotle again and so I see form and substance lurking around every corner.

...One Blue Book....

2011-04-11T15:25:00.002-07:00

Well.

If I seemed a bit tetchy about Black Book (not to be confused with Black Books), it's nothing to how cranky the first of our Books with a Blue Cover made me.

Let's start with a contest: In thirty seconds or less, name the national-award winning children's books that feature a character with Asperger's or autistic spectrum disorder (bonus for narrative characters with Asperger's; bonus BONUS for first-person viewpoint.)

Annnd go!

Bing!

Okay. I got:

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Bonus, bonus!)

Rules

The Danger Box (Bonus, bonus!)

Mockingbird (Bonus, bonus!)

Anything But Typical (Bonus, bonus!)

I do not at all mean to make light of Asperger's in the real world. Asperger's is a serious disorder that distorts childhood and strikes terror in the hearts of parents; it is a source of national shame that most health care plans do not cover the enormous costs of early intervention for diagnosed children.

In the great big made-up world of kiddie lit, however, I'd like to point out that somewhere within the publication continuum of that list above, we writes have gone from exploring the Asperger's viewpoint in order to bring something new and valuable to the table of our national literature banquet, to using Asperger's as a convenient device to explain why all our ten-year-old protagonists sound like well-read post-docs with extensive vocabularies instead plain ol' fifth graders.*

And also somewhere in the above continuum, Asperger's has also ceased being Asperger's and become a symbol for all that is insightful, all that is perceptive, all that is profound and worthwhile in human interactions. Aside from some pesky social miscues that get sorted out by the last heartwarming chapter, these kids got it goin' on, I'm telling ya!

Which brings us to our first Book with a Blue Cover. It's a bonus-bonus book--actually, it's a bonus bonus bonus book, because the Asperger's protagonist collects words---yes, in all their glorious obfuscations. Add to this a dead mother. a dead brother (bonus!), school killings and fine furniture cabinetry, and we have a darn-tootin' award-winning annoyance.

The annoyance here is that we have a well-written, affecting book and brings absolutely nothing, zip, zero, nada new or innovative or even (sorry) interesting to the banqueting table of kiddie lit. It's a nice book. It's a heart-felt book.

It's a book with a blue cover.

Which just about covers it.**

________________

*This is really starting to bug me. We write as if all children diagnosed Asperger's are also unreconstructed geniuses. And while many have above average math skills, most children with Asperger's have problems decoding even the simplest piece of fiction; a fact that ought to chill the most ardent kiddie writer's heart.

**Covers...get it? Sometimes I just crack me up.

Black Book

2011-04-09T05:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, so The Book with the Black Cover hit several of my annoyance buttons. The first is---well, it's the concept, which is a childish take on the iconic adult bestseller The Godfather (Mario Puzo).

I loathe recycled concepts. They add nothing new to the great writerly conversation. How many retellings of---oh, say---Beauty and the Beast do we really need? Boy turns into beast, beast meets girl, much chaos ensues. B & B's already gone magic realistic, gritty urban and steam punk heavy. What's next: deconstruction modernist, tone poem polemic----the Twitter novel? Please.

The only thing---the gosh-darned only thing most retold tales have going for them is that agents love the familiar, editors love the familiar, readers love the familiar (worst luck). Recycled stories sell tons. That's why poor starving writers love them, too. They pay the bills. Especially if they get turned into after-school movies.

Sigh.

But writers---creative, ingenious, curious, inventive---ought to run screaming from recycled concepts. I know I ran screaming after three chappies of Black Book. I mean at least I can be polite to recycled concepts from stories that have appealed to generations of children, like oh say--- Beauty and the Beast.* But Black Book puts a kiddie twist on an adult bestseller from the days of yesteryore...which is another way to say that Black is covertly written for the gatekeepers---agents who chortle at the subtle echoes of Puzo, editors who see the cover as a hilarious mashup of the iconic Godfather images and toilet paper, and Aunt Mary, who buys what she knows---and she knows she's seen all this somewhere before.

But I digress.**

The real problem with Black Book is the humor. Truly funny books find the wellsprings of humor not from situations, but from their characters. While I kinda like some slapstick as much as the next reader, a steady diet of stupid stuff makes me itch. And there's a lot of stupid stuff in Black. Principals butts glued to toilets, third-graders who bite, a beneficent patrone who organizes lemonade stands and takes a tithe of Halloween candy as payment for services rendered. There's lots of running around and plot stuff, but the characters are not much more than a running-gag collection of their twitches, tics and character tags.

Why can't funny books be well-written with lively and deep characters? Why can't the humor come not out of what the characters do, but who they are?

Why can't we humor writers just...take it all a bit more seriously?

Next up: Those two Blue Books

_____________

*Hey, I was a writerly paragon of patience and gentleness when writing my screed about B & B, above.

**Also rant and rave. Sorry.

A Yellow Book, A Black Book, and Two Blues...

2011-04-07T15:16:00.000-07:00

Reading and writing. Writing and reading. And then writing some more.

The best reason for keeping the day job is lunch time, where if I gulp my food down quickly enough, I have about thirty-five minutes for reading. I can read a lot in thirty-five minutes, which is why I have four books to review.

The thing is...I only liked three of them. So I'm going to judge the books by the color of their covers AND the content of their characters.

Ya with me?

The Book with the Yellow Cover was by a debut author. It was the first book I've ever read about bowling. Picking a fun-but-a-little-different sport (I also recently read which featured a bridge-playing cardsharp, for instance) is a well-worn path to write about a character and give him some interesting quirks.

The problem Yellow Cover has is with the plot. It's a kitchen-sink kind of deal what with the quest for a girlfriend, the bowling thing, dangerous pranks, stealing computers and a punch-out by the older brother. Three books worth of plot were jammed into less than 250 pages---whew!

But hey, I read every word. And that's saying something. Because The Book with the Black Cover didn't fare so well.

Next up: The Book with the Black Cover

An Alternate World...

2011-03-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

And yup, it's time for School Library Journal's annual Battle of the Books. This is a big deal, usually---all the tomes of excellence face off against each other for the winna and champeen in the great big world of kiddie lit

These are all books which are widely thought of as well-written books by literary authors. Heavy-hitters, if you will. The judges are heavy-hitters literary writes as well. It's yet another chance for all these well-written, literary types---man and book---to hold forth: sometimes wittily, sometimes wearily, sometimes incomprehensibly.

Sometimes the search for the literary winner sounds an awful lot like that ol' wheeze about porn: I may not know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it.

You should follow it. Go, go, go and be enlightened.

On the other hand, you have to wonder how a book earns a reputation as "well-written" or "literary". (okay fine. You don't. I do, though, since I write a darned pesky things), I mean, I never see Twilight vs Octavian Nothing in the brackets. for instance.

Why? Because Twilight is kind of clunky and Nothing is---not? Really?

That's the only criteria?

2011-03-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Today I'm a little sad. From my window I can see three different dumpsters parked in the driveways of three different foreclosed houses on our little street.

Every house had school-aged kids.

a good horse (But Watch that Right Foreleg. The Perspective is Off)...

2011-02-22T07:46:00.000-08:00

I like the way Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres, Moo, and The Greenlanders, to name but a few) writes. So when I saw the sequel to her foray into the great big world of kiddie lit)* in the library, I got my card stamped** and off I went to read of thirteen-year-old Abby Lovitt and her horses young and old.

I quickly realized that I was in over my head. I've never been a horsey person, woman or girl, and this book is h.o.r.s.e.y from beginning to end:

...Miss Slater told me to circle at one end of the arena, then trot down over the double crossbar...then halt, turn and canter back....It was easy---eight jumps: down over 1 to 2, through the middle, around 3 and back over it, then a wide turn at the end and up over 4 and 5. Short turn back over 3, another short turn over 5, and around the end and down over 1, except I got confused after 5 the first time...(p. 50-51)

Yeah. Me too.

There was a helpful diagram outlining the jumps, which I puzzled over as I pondered this whole category of knowledge that has passed me by. Ah, well:

Ars longa,

vita brevis,

occasio praeceps,

experimentum periculosum,

iudicium difficile.***

_____

* What is it about women writes of a certain age and forays into the great big world of kiddie lit? Ms. Smiley joins Joyce Carol Oates, Isabelle Allende,Toni Morrison, et al.

**Women writes of a certain age have the thunkachunk of those metal library stamps imprinted on their bones. A happy thought.

***Though it was terribly fun to have Amy's father and mother earn the family income pursuing what to any right-thinking child is one of the more perfect jobs on the planet: raising and training ranch horses. The Lovitt family spends a good deal of time in the book taking trail rides. It's not goofing off---it's real work, man.

In my own misspent youth I read way too much of The Happy Hollister books series. Their dad owned a sporting goods store, and the Hollister kids were constantly borrowing kayaks and bows and arrows and I know not what in order to corner the bank robbers hiding in the ol' forgotten mine shaft down the street. (Doesn't every self-respecting cul-de-sac have one?)

Authors Who Should Know Better....

2011-02-16T06:29:00.001-08:00

Okay, so it's Wednesday morning and I've got a headache already; did I really have to go and start the latest book I Wrote This Kiddie Book on the Back of an Envelope!!!, by a semi-famous author who should be kicked in the seat of his/her/its pants rather than rewarded by a book contract? (add hyphens as you see fit. Hey, I'm in a hurry! Plus there's the headache).

Okay, I'd be the first to admit that I'd love to be in this person's shoes in the great big world of kiddie lit---semi-famous enough around the book shelves so librarians and our well-read Aunt Marys buy his/her/its books fairly consistently; yet not too famous----because famous authors regularly get pilloried by their fickle fan base for writing a crappy book.

But ah! Being a bit of a somebody and enough of a nobody gets you the luxury of churning out a mediocre series that regurgitates the same old, same old. Clueless tryin'-to-be-your-pal father, wacky neighbor, business-savvy mom, cute little sister who says the most adorable stuff about the power of friendship, believing in yourself, and how one must reach always for one's dreams.

It's pretty awful.

The critics liked it well enough---"(Semi-famous author's) fans will devour the fast-paced writing and heartfelt lessons embedded in the text" (which is kind of damning with faint praise now that I think about it. I mean...who the hell wants to write up some heartfelt lessons and embed 'em in the text---much less read 'em? Our poor children. How they suffer!), but I did happen to notice that though the book is a mere two months old, its Amazon ranking is in the low 7s.

That's 700,000.

Enough said.

Okay, Okay!

2011-01-29T06:34:00.001-08:00

...enough with the Kate Beaton adulation, I know---but this entry has some Korean students filling in the bubbles of her comics!

The world is today a luscious place...

Kate Beaton for Queen

Hey! Archer! Get a Load o' This!

2011-01-26T09:15:00.000-08:00

Someone is impersonating you. But exactly.

http://lawyerworldland.blogspot.com/

Expecting Your Writerly Life to Treat You Well Because You Are a Good Person...

2011-01-26T08:47:00.000-08:00

...is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian."

(with apologies to Shari R. Barr)

Not dead, but reading and writing...

2011-01-23T15:22:00.000-08:00

...and didn't Christmas and New Year's happen as well?

Perhaps my life could be called My Life as a Book, but that title's been taken by Janet Tashjlan (with an artistic assist by her son):

"I killed one of my first baby-sitters," I say. "So I wouldn't try anything if I were you."

"I'm really scared," she says, then tears off a corner of my sandwich without asking.

"Seriously. Babysitting for me can be lethal. I feel I should warn you."

"For ten dollars an hour, I'll take my chances," Amy says.

A Wonderful Book I Just Read....

2010-12-16T08:39:00.000-08:00

...and just right for the last few days before Christmas.

This book preaches no sermons, solves no crimes, rights no wrongs.

Thank goodness.

Plus, nobody saves humanity in time for next spring's block-bustin' sequel (and Audrey? You get a double 'thank goodness' for that).

It's just a great story about the smell of Camel cigarettes and how a kid named Jake finally gets to the bottom of an old memory: figuring out who used to bounce the edge of his bed until

I'd lift off the mattress, and all the time I was laughing like a maniac. I wish I remembered my dad better...

God bless us every one.

It's snowing....

2010-12-01T10:10:00.001-08:00

...lake effect snow, those big fat flakes that can fall and fall for days and cover everything with a mad, bad layer of white....

A Handy Use for Butter Knives

2010-11-19T12:53:00.000-08:00

Cheapskatedness is a big reason why I decided to become an unknown children's writer.

Writing costs me next to nothing. To write the first few drafts, I use the fifteen odd mechanical pencils and stack of half-used spiral-bound notebooks my children abandoned at the end of middle school.* They bought newer, pointier mechanical pencils and even more spirally spiral-bound notebooks for high school, which were jettisoned in favor of college pencils and college notebooks.

Man. I am set with paper. For life.

Eventually I have to face the fact that it's time to type up the damned thing and even I am not such a Luddite that I use a typewriter.....though if I still had my Olympic Elite.....oooo.

(Isn't he a beaut?)

In any event, I use a computer. Here the savings are again, sustainable. My computer was a hand-me-down from Steve (hiya, Steve!), who built it state-of-the-art. In 1998. My computer has not one, but two USB ports, two CD drives, a floppy disk drive, and a funny clanking sound in the custom-made cooling fan system. It also features a monitor that I eventually had to stick a butter knife in the shortcut buttons so the (#@%!) screen wouldn't flash the menu options off and on and off and on and off and on and off and

Okay. You can be one or you can be the other, but you cannot have a quality life if you are being cheap and annoyed at the same time.

I am no longer annoyed. It goes without saying that I got a great deal; it also goes without saying that I had a heck of a time getting it in sync with our router; but the new computer is pretty darned great.

"Welcome to the twenty-first century, Mom," said my daughter Sarah.

Okay, so where's my jet-pack?

_______________

*Plus, every writing session gives me the chance to review vastly important middle school facts. Polynomial trees, the geological ages, a Socratic discursive on why Tyler N. is the worst boy in the history of the school.

The End of Nickleby and the Porkies....

2010-11-12T18:31:00.003-08:00

Well. Nicholas Nickleby had his ups and downs, ups and downs. Virtue is rewarded, evil vanquished und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch.

Right? Right?

Right.

But my favorite book ending of the reading I've done over the last few months is not from Dickens, but Eliot. It's a gift of a book from a gift of an author---and the moment I saw this picture, I thought about Dorothea Brooke:

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being good on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Middlemarch, George Eliot.

The Only Voters' Guide You'll Ever Need!

2010-11-01T05:20:00.001-07:00

If (the voter) engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they find it.

(The voter) may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust; he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive. Nowhere shall we find greater candor, consideration, indulgence; he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.

With apologies to Cardinal Newman and his Idea of a University.

Almost Done with Nickleby and the Porcupines

2010-10-26T08:27:00.001-07:00

....with a last word about marriage:

'Come!' said Tim. 'Let's be a comfortable couple. We shall live in the old house here, where I have been for four-and-forty year; we shall go to the old church, where I've been, every Sunday morning, all through that time; we shall have all my old friends about us---Dick, the archway, the pump, the flower-pots, and Mr. Frank's children, and Mr. Nickleby's children that we shall seem like grandfather and grandmother to. Le'ts be a comfortable couple, and take care of each other!

'And if we should get deaf, or lame, or blind, or bed-ridden, how glad we shall be that we have somebody we are fond of, always to talk to and sit with! Let's be a comfortable couple. Now, do, my dear!'

Okay, Now I'm Just Annoyed Again....

2010-10-21T08:06:00.001-07:00

...'She is not equal to it, sir,' said Mr. Kenwigs, striking the table emphatically. 'What with the nursing of a healthy baby, and the reflections upon your cruel conduct, four pints of malt liquor a day is hardly able to sustain her.'

Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens after a long night of writing

In Which all is Forgiven...

2010-10-18T11:00:00.001-07:00

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues---faith and hope.

---Charles Dickens being preternaturally insightful in Nicholas Nickleby

The Thing about Dickens, Though...

2010-10-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

...is that he always beats up his mothers. Dickens' moms are either cruel or drunk or silly (or dead). What's up with that? Children's literature, by contrast, is chock-full of mother who are hard-working, honest and sober (also dead, come to think of it.)

Mrs. Nickleby isn't dead, but she is silly:

'...for soon after I was married, I went to Stratford with my poor dear Mr. Nickleby....and after we had seen Shakespeare's tomb and birthplace, we went back to the inn there, where we slept that night, and I recollect that all night long I dreamt of nothing but a black gentleman, at full length, in plaster-of-Paris, with a lay-down collar tied with two tasssels, leaning against a post and thinking; and when I woke in the morning and described him to Mr. Nickleby, he said it was Shakespeare just as he had been when he was alive, which was very curious indeed....in fact, it was quite a mercy that my son didn't turn out to be a Shakespeare, and what a dreadful thing that would have been!'

Still Riding that Nickleby Train...

2010-10-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

...plus, one of the things I adore about Dickens is how he makes me think, think, alla time think beautiful thoughts about the meaning of life.

So...is it enough to become rich and famous and the toast of children's literature?

Or should I aim higher, broader, deeper---in short, should I strive to achieve even half so much as Miss Petowker:

'Dear me!' said Nicholas. 'I know that lady.'

'Then you are acquainted with as much talent as was ever compressed into one young person's body,' retorted Mr. Crummles, rolling up the (play) bills again; 'that is, talent of a certain sort---of a certain sort. The Blood Drinker,' added Mr. Crummles with a prophetic sigh. ' The Blood Drinker will die with that girl; and she's the only sylph I ever saw, who could stand upon one leg, and play the tambourine on her other knee, like a sylph."

From: Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Hey-Mr.-Tambourine-Man Dickens

Why Reading Nicholas Nickleby Was Like Looking in the Mirror...

2010-10-06T06:16:00.001-07:00

...because this is the PERFECT explanation of why I do the things I do, say the things I say and---most important---why I recline upon the couch every afternoon:

'Your soul is too large for you body,' said Mr. Wititterly (to Mrs. Wititterly). 'Your intellect wears out out; all the medical men say so; you know that there is not a physician who is not proud of being called in to you. What is their unanimous declaration? "My dear doctor," said I to Sir Tumley Snuffim, in this very room, the very last time he came. "My dear doctor, what is my wife's complaint."

"My dear fellow," (Sir Tumley) said, "be proud of that woman; make much of her; she is an ornament to the fashionable world, and to you. Her complaint is soul. It swells, expands, dilates---the blood fires, the pulse quickens, the excitement increases---Whew!"'

From: Nicholas Nickleby, by that kidder Chas Dickens.

Here's another nice picture from the Beautiful North:

Nicholas Nickleby Tours the Porcupine Mountains

2010-10-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

Just got back from what to my mind is blissful vacation: a week of hiking and reading and hiking (and reading) around Lake Superior, then sitting down to a blazing inferno of a campfire in the evenings and (in the spirit of Paul's admonishment to Timothy to take a little wine for your stomach) drinking beer.

Really, it was all:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.* You know? Nicolas Nickleby is a perfect book for a short tour of the north woods---it's sweeping, it's episodic---and it's Dickens. I saw myself in it; and I saw you (and you and you over there, in the corner) in it as well. Because Dickens never leaves anybody out. _________________ *Pied Beauty, Gerard Manly Hopkins, 1883.

Is This What's Bothering You, Bunkie?

2010-09-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

...so your kid's just cracked open Twilight: New Moon for the twenty-third time this week and you can feel your heart sink because God knows, a little Twilight goes a long way?

Not to worry. Oscar Wilde's already been there and done that...

"For my part, I think the most exquisite thing in reading is the pleasure of forgetfulness. It is so nice to think there are some books you cared for so much at a certain epoch in your life and do not care for now. There is to me a positive delight in cutting an author and feeling I have got beyond him."

I owe $6.15 on Nicky Flynn and His Dog...

2010-09-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

...so I have this great little meditation upon logic and whimsy and the authorial prerogative (and also the meaning of life) but I just can't get to it because I'm writing the new story and it's the same old thing: all I want to do is write my own stuff. I don't want to talk about books, I don't want to pontificate about logic and God knows I can't give up my job and write full-time, so I'm reading and thinking and writing and thinking some more....and in the meantime the fines pile up on this very fine library book, and I'm running out of pontifical gas, so to speak.

Who wants to talk about it, when you can do it, huh huh huh?

A motto for life. In the meantime, here's a great big photo of Nicky Flynn....

and a link to his website.

Read his book! Good stuff!

Whimsy in Place of Logic...

2010-08-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

Once upon a little while ago a bunch of us children's writers were hanging around not writing.

This is a bad thing. Writers should write. If they're not going to write, they should under no circumstances be allowed to congregate at the bookstore. Because they will whine. They will moan. And after one too many coffees, children's writers will bash books that have won the Newbery.

So there we were, kinda hanging around bashing this book and smashing that story. Nobody was saying anything that hadn't been said a hundred-and-eleventy-six times before (remember, we were writers-who-weren't-writing, a pretty uninspired bunch)...until someone brought up the despicable BLERG.

Of course I jumped right in.

BLERG is just a terrible book. Terrible. How BLERG ever acquired a gold sticker is beyond me. The protagonist's voice veers between a sweetly innocent ten year-old (circa 1928) and a philosopher addicted to the Reader's Digest version of On the Nature of Things. At the end of the book there's a huge hole in the plot...and all the author does is wrap it up in some lousy symbolism and shove it down our throats. I mean c'mon, gimme a break, for crying out loud, you can't be serious, and so forth and so on.

And then right in the middle of my most insightful comments (Newbery, my Aunt Fanny), one of the writes leans back and says quite thoughtfully, "Yeah. It's got a pretty random ending. The kind of thing that happens when the plot turns on whimsy instead logic."

"Symbolism," I urged. "You mean symbolism. Up the whazoo."

"Um. No. I meant whimsy." She eyed me. "Gosh, look at the time."

Whimsy instead of logic. Whimsy instead of logic. This has stuck with me both as a reader and as a writer. If a story has an internal logic which maintains the rules of whatever world it's part of----then it's going to make perfect sense that the main character recovers Aunt Edna's stolen jewels only after being chased through the sewage tunnels by a man with a carving knife.

Because the tunnel chase will be an organic part of the story: the main character will find a clue about the jewels or perhaps come to a better understanding of himself (Whoa. Who knew I could run so fast? Like the wind, baby! So maybe I am athletic after all. Boy. Wait until Monday and gym class and Coach Dubrovnev with his mouth hanging open as I zoom around the track. Finally, I have come of age, found my self-worth and got this terrific new hobby.)

But if the man and his carving knife is there simply keeping the tension high or the middle from becoming a muddle* but isn't carrying the logic of the story, I'm sorry but he's gonna look whimsical---nothing more than a curious happenstance popping out of nowhere for a couple of pages, then fading back into oblivion, taking the carving knife with it.

Next Up: A review of How I, Nicky Flynn, finally get a life (and a Dog) by Art Corriveau

_____________

*Or stuck in there as a nod to current trends in kiddie lit---super powers and dead mothers and trilogies. Also, dog books with animal traps in them. And sidekick girls with curly red hair. Did I mention animal traps?

Hark to Kate Beaton

2010-08-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

Why doesn't this woman...

...have a big splashy contract for a children's book?

Hark! a vagrant is the most wonderfullest online comic ever. Go over and take a look at a couple of breathtaking moments in history. Ben Franklin and his editor. Mystery-solving teens. The French Revolution. Edward Gorey book covers.

If I could draw like that, I'd rule the world. No kidding.

It's a Good Thing I'm Cheerful About It...

2010-07-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

In the space of mere hours, I heard some very welcome news, had someone whom I love very much hang up on me in mid-sentence, and then spent a couple of very deep and profound moments trying to make heads or tails (or anything in between) out of what the heck makes a guy tick. Or a girl tick. Or anything-in-between tick

I know, I know. It's all bad grammar and run-away sentences and far too many verys.

Verily, I'm clueless.

What makes life hard is the certainty of failure.

---Anna Volgonevya

Sustainability as a Writer (Dedicated to Kelly and Aimee)

2010-07-23T12:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I know the world is going to hell in a handbasket and so forth, but I must tell you that the whole sustainability movement has really worked out well for me.

In years gone by it was a tough life, sustainability. You were really nothing more than a cheapskate: turning hems, saving seeds, fixing windows and pinching every nickel (as my sainted granma used to say) until the buffalo moaned.

A furtive and dirty thing it was, rummaging through thriftstores (or rag saling! Squee!) in the 'eighties and 'nineties. Though I'd score a fifty-dollar L.L. Bean sweatshirt with the tags still on it for two bucks, I'd have to mumble and look at my feet because everybody else---good, decent, church-going middle-class profligates---were aghast at the faint scent of Goodwill* wafting from one of their own.

But no more, baby! The world's caught up with me; I'm not cheap, I'm sustainable and the only odor that originates from me anymore is cutting-edge urban and faintly sanctimonious.**

Yeah, so I just got back from one of my favorite thrifties (four pairs of jeans, three shirts, two china plates for cat food and five books---two biographies, a book of poems, a collection of short novels, a Pushcart Prize anthology from 1993---twenty-two dollars plus tax), and I wanted to pause a moment and reflect on the inscription on the flyleaf of the twenty-year-old Pushcart:

To the newest member of

FFEOA!

(Future Famous Editors of America)

Happy Birthday, Aimee!

My love, Kelly

1993

Aimee. Kelly. To me, they will always be locked in that moment of inscription: fresh out of college with a couple of literature degrees under their belts; junior year abroad in Kent England, senior year a couple of prizes for short fiction and poetry from the school's literary magazine; the English Chair (National Book short-list) knows them by name of course. Kelly and Aimee. They babysit her kids; she underpays them, then squints her eyes and critiques their narrative arc and character-driven lives.

Kelly and Aimee. Aimee and Kelly. Aimee's off to New York and William Morrow; Kelly's going to drive the whole night through to Wichita and her parent's house---more particularly her parent's basement, where she will hole up for the next year and a half to write her book. The characters are a man and a woman. And their love story is real and true and unsentimental and perfect and resounding and Kelly feels it in her heart and hears it in her head and she hasn't written a word yet and already she's crying because suddenly? There's a little watermark blossoming next to her signature, next to

My love, Kelly

Man.

I hope she did it. Seventeen years ago, I hope Kelly drove all the way to Wichita and didn't leave her parent's basement until she finished. her. book. (And I hope Aimee read it and fought for it at acquisitions.) I bet Kelly wrote another book, and then maybe a couple more; and I hope with all my heart she figured out how to sustain herself as a writer: how to eat cheap, wear Goodwill and keep that resounding, unsentimental love story alive and well and within a reasonable page count.

Writers (and their songs) grow like plants, like trees, like children, like disease, like love. They go through stages of fragility, woodenness, pubescence, death, and passion. You'll note that I have put death before passion. This corresponds to the crucifixion, burial, descent into hell, and resurrection that befalls all literary careerists who keep the faith. Fitzgerald's noted line "There are no second acts in American lives," was cockeyed and trivializing. He was talking about stardom. Resurrection has come to many American writers---Melville, the most egregiously belated case, and Faulkner, and Henry Jame, and Kate Chopin and Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton, and Fitzgerald himself, (though he was dead at the time); and it it now happening with Hemingway. It even happened to Faulkner when he was still alive, the problem being that no one knew he was alive, his books all out of print....

From

Writers and Their Songs, William Kennedy

The Pushcart Prize, XVI (1993)

_______________

* Hey. I wash everything first. Mostly.

**Although being cheap for its own sake is evidence of a small mind, everybody embraces sustainability. When our nineteen-year-old garage door opener recently quit (stripped gears, totally replaceable for about thirty-five, forty bucks, though it might've been a hassle trying to get replacements for old metal gears in this modern plastic-sprocket world), I happened to remark, "You know, it's more sustainable to simply install a handle and open the door manually...." and my daughters bought it. They totally bought it. Twelve ninety-five for a shiny new garage door handle, a side lock and a little old-school heave-ho.

Bring Out the Coffin, Let the Mourners Come

2010-07-13T11:52:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Mark Biel, Executive Director of the Chemical Industry Council of Illinois

2010-06-26T09:15:00.002-07:00

Dear Mr. Biel:

I read with interest your reaction to the disclosure that a 19-pound Asian carp was found in Lake Calumet---beyond the electrical barriers and about six miles downstream from Lake Michigan. You were quoted as saying:

"A few isolated incidents of Asian carp

in this small section of the Illinois Waterway

does not mean existing barriers have failed."

Thank you, Mr. Biel, for demonstrating once again the care you titans of industry have for the small people on the down side of you and your.....sanitary canals.

And I think I may safely demonstrate what, precisely, all of us small fry in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ontario would like to do with that single, 19-pound beauty:

I drew a line/I drew a line for you....

2010-06-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

'And since I've took to general reading, you've took to general writing, eh, sir?' said Mr Omer, surveying me admiringly. 'What a lovely work that was of yours! What expression in it! I read it every word---every word. And as to feeling sleepy! Not at all!'

Bless you and good night, CD....

Armando Galarraga's Perfect Game....

2010-06-07T13:31:00.001-07:00

And Tom Rademacher's perfect ten commandments...

Been Working! Been Writing!

2010-06-05T06:34:00.000-07:00

“So,” said the vice-principal. “I had a nice weekend. Sue---that’s my wife---Sue and me went to the botanical gardens down in Grand Rapids. You guys all been there? It’s nice. Flowers and trees and a whole lot of modern art. And Leonardo da Vinci’s horse. In bronze.” The vice raised his arms, palms upward. “I spent the afternoon walking around and around the biggest metal horse I’ve ever seen. Admiring it from all angles. So yeh. A nice weekend.”

He exhaled and lowered his arms. “And then I come to school. Happy about da Vinci’s horse. Ready to buckle down and be an agent for positive change around this place. And I open the door and find everybody’s running around screaming about a dead snake. Total pandemonium."

From: David and Jane

And (on this Memorial Day) a Salute to Our Writerly Veterans of Yesteryore...

2010-05-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

...I give you Chas Dickens for regularly winding himself up into a tangle of both semi-colons and ecstasy:

"I may claim the merit of having originated the suggestion that the will should be looked for int he box. After some search it was found in the box, at the bottom of a horse's nose-bag; wherein (besides hay) there was discovered an old gold watch, with chain and seals, which Mr Barkis had worn on his wedding-day, and which had never been seen before or since; a silver tobacco-stopper in the form of a leg; an imitation lemon, bull of minute cups and saucers, which I have some idea Mr Barkis must have purchased to present to me when I was a child, and afterwards found himself unable to part with; eighty-seven guineas and a half, in guineas and half guineas; two hundred and ten pounds, in perfectly clean Bank notes; certain receipts for Bank of England stock; an old horse-shoes, a bad shilling, a piece of camphor, and an oyster-shell. For the circumstance of the latter article having been much polished, and displaying prismatic colours on the inside, I conclude that Mr Barkis had some general ideas about pearls, which never resolved themselves into anything definite."

From David Copperfield

Why I Love Michigan (in Ten Words or Less...)

2010-05-24T14:01:00.001-07:00

War and Peace, by Linda Zinnen (writing as Libba Bray!)

2010-05-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

So. I've just changed jobs (better pay! weirder hours!) for the first time in a decade and I realized a couple of things:

1. I had lost my Social Security card.

This meant a trip to the local Social Security office. Which meant a beautiful Tuesday afternoon spent in a room where time regularly stands still. Still, I didn't mind. I spent those frozen hours chatting with my bench-mates Amee and Shamika and oohing and aahing over Amee's seven-month-old son James Dodson. (Hi, guys!)

But I digress.

2. There are some excellent reasons I don't tell anyone I like to write.

Because when your co-workers find out that maybe you do a little writing on the side, they either tell you the entire plot of the fiction novel (Good Lord!) they've been working on for the last twenty years*---or, if they consider themselves big readers (as opposed to fiction novelists, I guess) they'll ask you for your published titles.

And after I do the usual song and dance about how I had three titles come out in four years but unfortunately everything's out of print though they could still pick them up online or at the library, they'll continue to nag and and nag (and Big Readers can be completely annoying over the course of a genuine hour for lunch) until finally I throw in the towel and tell them the titles.

"Yeah," the Big Readers will say after a long smirky pause. "You're right. I never heard of your books."

"Yeah, well that's okay," I will say. "I write for kids."

And I bet you can imagine what happens next.

Uh-huh.

Their eyes grow round.

Their breathing grows tumultuous.

Their mouths open and their hands fly into the air as they exclaim,

"Really? Like that Harry Potter mom?**"

"Yep," I say. "Exactly like."

____

*This will take multiple lunch hours...which turn out at the new place to be an actual hour in length.

Frankly, an hour for lunch is about half an hour too long if you are too cheap to go to a restaurant and forty-five minutes too long if someone's twenty-year world-building involves gnomes, elves, dwarves and humans at war for The Talisman of Ultimate Power.

**Trust me. Unless you're that Harry Potter mom, they've never heard of your books. I once told someone who was badgering me about writing and titles and stuff that my pen name was Libba Bray (hiya, Libba!). "Maybe you've heard of me," I said humbly. "Great and Terrible Beauty. Going Bovine. War and Peace."

"Nope," said the guy with a smirk. "You must not be very good."

Sorry, Libba. Sorry, sorry sorry. But you gotta admit I tried!

Why Some Good Things in the Final Analysis Turn Out Not to be so Hot...

2010-04-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

Because a lot of good things are---well, they're sort of like reading Eli the Good, by Silas House (Candlewick). House's writing is wonderful, shining out of the very first two sentences:

That was the summer of the bicentennial, when all these things happened: my sister, Josie, began to hate our country and slapped my mother's face; my wild aunt, Nell, moved in with us, bringing along all five thousand or so of her records and a green record player that ran on batteries; my father started going back to Vietnam in his dreams, and I saw him cry; my mother did the Twist in front of the whole town and nearly lost us all. I was ten years old and I did something unforgiveable.

Wow, huh?

Well, the book at this level is pretty wow. Like that heady, old-timey mix of baby oil and iodine we Midwesterners slathered on our poor defenseless pre-melanomic skin cells, the authenticity of time, place and manner fairly ooze from the pores of Eli the Good. The summer light; the patriotic stars and stripes on the backsides of young girls; the fire hydrants painted red, white and blue---that endless '76 celebration of sparklers and fireworks and the cultural schizophrenia called Vietnam---all there, all accounted for, all perfect.

House can also delineate a character, no question. Listen to Eli tell about his father:

People didn't question (my father). They looked up to him. Of course we looked up to him at home, too, but usually with a seed of doubt in our throats. He was not very good at explaining himself, and we were a family that like to have things clearly laid out for us.... (p.114).

Nice, huh? That fistful of sentences clues the reader into what Eli's Daddy is like---but it also tells the reader a bit about how the family works.

So there's lots and lots o' good in Eli the Good and for a while I galloped along reader-wise thinking Boy o boy o boy. I can't wait to blog about this. This is good. This is real.

But then I started thinking. Thinking, thinking, alla time thinking.*

Because Eli quickly turns into my least favorite kind of kid; the kid who lurks behind doors, around corners, hidden among the branches of gigantic sno-ball bushes. Like a bicentennial Harriet the Spy (only good. Very, very good so he's not nearly as interesting as Harriet), Eli writes down his observations and feelings and stuff in a notebook. He too reads other people's letters (which moves the story along in this kind of heavy-handed big-wheel-keep-on-turning sort of way) and ramps up the eavesdropping...culminating on page 162 in a real triumph of spydom, when Eli stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the screen porch and listens in on both the men (screen porch) and the women (kitchen, natch).

So okay, I get it. This isn't a book about a ten year-old. This is a book about the men and the women: about their sexually promiscuous teenagers, their child abandonments, their breast cancers and war protests; their post-traumatic stress disorders and suicide attempts and how they stay groovy by dancing around in the pouring rain.

Technically this story isn't told by ten-year-old Eli, witness narrator to it all. Nope, it's told by the Eli all growed up, a divorced father of one in New York City who's come back to the hometown at the death of his now elderly dad, all of which explains why the story's got that annoying little eye-twitch of adult pontificating every ten pages or so.**

Even more technically, it's got that icky of ickies in the great big world of kiddie lit: it's being promoted by Candlewick as author House's YA debut.***

Plus an epilogue. Man, I hate epilogues, and this one's particularly whiny and moany.

So. Eli the Good is very good---but I really really (really) got to wonder if even your average bright-girl-at-the-front-of-the-room-who-always-does-her-homework-and-reads-a-ton-of-everything is going wade all the way through it. ****

On the other hand if the first presidental election you ever voted in was the one between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford? Read and discuss, please.

_________________

*Bad habit. Must break.

**Mostly at the end of chapters. Here's an incomplete sample: Ultimately reality is far worse and far better than anything that either adult or child can ever dream...Sometimes just being still is the best thing you can do for yourself.....And then I knew that this was my life...

Well. You get the picture.

***A YA.

With a ten year-old protagonist.

No, wait.

A YA with a forty year-old protagonist commenting on his ten-year-old self.

A book that has precisely two teenaged secondary characters: Eli's sister Josie and her boyfriend, Charles Asher (go Charles! You are cool, man!)

****My advice? Skip the epilogue, pal. Ew.

The Blog to the Left of Me..

2010-04-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

The last thing I do before leaving the ol' taming hat on stool and turning off the lights around here is play a game called The blog to the left of me; the blog to the right.

I think of blogs as lined up in a long, lovely row---like tulips or navel-gazers. And when I click on the Next Blog> in the toolbar, I'm actually bowing to the writer on my left, the writer on my right, enjoying for a moment all the various lives that are filled to bursting with the new baby, drooly pictures of chocolate cream cupcakes or sagas about the lousy yellow shirt Macy's wouldn't let some guy's wife return.

Today however, it's raining, I have a headache and I find myself wedged between this rock and hard space...

Hey! Kindness is My Religion, too!

2010-04-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

Well shoot.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama tweets.

I'm a little deflated about it. I always had His Holiness to bring out in triumph during those pestering you-should-tweet-it's-great conversations.

"Hmpf," I'd say, "That may all be true. Twitter may indeed be the path to World Peace, but until the Dalai Lama gets it going in under one hundred and forty characters, I remain an unenlightened skeptic."

So, you can imagine how upset I was when His Holiness starting twittering away. I pouted for a whole week---until I noticed that while the Dalai Lama has nearly a quarter of a million followers, he's apparently not following anyone.

Not one single twit, not one single tweeter.

Now I say: "Hmpf. That may all be true. Twitter may indeed be the path to World Peace, but even the Dalai Lama can't find one decent feed to follow..."

Been Sick! Been Writing!

2010-03-31T14:25:00.001-07:00

And a tip of the hat to Jamie Oliver....

Monday morning the lunch bell rang. Finally.

David steered between the tables and sat down at his usual table in the middle of the room. Jared and Michael were already there. Talking earnestly, seriously, solemnly about (David rubbed his aching forehead)

Basketball.

Jared held out a sheet of paper. “I’m telling you. It says thirty press oms.”

“What the heck is a press om?” demanded Michael.

“Dude,” said David loudly. “Chili dogs.” He took a huge bite. “They're pretty good.”

“Big deal. They serve chili dogs every day.” Jared rattled the sheet David’s face until he wiped his hands on his shirt and took it. “Coach Dubrovnev’s conditioning schedule. For basketball.”

Oh joy. David dropped it on the table and returned to his lunch.

“Today’s Monday,” droned Jared. “We gotta do thirty of them.”

“So, what the heck is a press om,” repeated Michael blah blah de blah. The two of them went on and on while David wolfed down the last couple of bites. He leaned back in his chair and poked idly at the dense purple rectangle on his tray. “I think it’s jello.”

“Yup,” said Jared. “See the chunks? Diced peaches. My dad went to school here. He told me about stuff like this. And that marshmallow fruit salad thing. With coconut. Brr.”

“Ambrosia,” murmured David. “My mom went here, too.”

“Dad said the lunch ladies have a big refrigerator in the basement full of leftovers. Stuff from the eighties.”

“Dude,” exclaimed Michael. “Don’t eat that!”

The Future of Kiddie Lit in the Washington Post....

2010-03-22T06:45:00.000-07:00

...or The Continuing Triumph of Sustained Narrative.

So.

The agent guy pointed out this article , which is supposed to have all us book-loving traditionalists running around in a tizzy, but I say: Wow! What wonderful, glorious news about the reading habits our Millennials!

I mean, think about it. So, ostensibly The Post interviews our hero Kinney on the eve of the Wimpy Kid movie release and the tone of the article is pretty sniffy; all over how it's impossible to get kids to read today without the internet, the movie, the visuals---you gotta have all that extra-easy cheating stuff anymore because kids' attentions are going to hell in a handbasket and besides most of the market is going to adult readers anyway. Take TWILIGHT. And HARRY POTTER. Adults readers in droves. End of story. Neener, neener.

Uh-huh. But TWILIGHT and King Harry did pretty well with kids, too.

Your kids, my kids, the neighbor down the street's kid---Millennials are in point of fact THE HARRY POTTER GENERATION---those kids who came of age through the decade-long release of the Rowling books. Boys and girls who celebrated birthdays number ten through seventeen right alongside Hermonie and Harry and Ron. Boys and girls who read every single word of those great big books. Every. Single. Word.

And though nowadays there's movies and online games and fan fiction and all sorts of visuals going on...I still see them everywhere I go. Underaged weightlifters carrying around these great big ol' door-stops of a book around. Dog-eared hardbounds passed down from their annoying older brothers and sisters, I imagine. Noses stuck in a book all day. Hey! Go outside and get a little fresh air, for pete's sake!

In the last fifteen years we've raised a generation of readers who've cut their readerly eyeteeth by downing on a regular basis* huge swaths of narrative fiction in support of story. Characters. Evocative settings. A ton and a half of description. Good triumphs. Justice is served. A bit of bittersweet ending.

And yeah? May I belabor the obvious? Online as we know it can't support something that big and that involved over that long a time. A narrative arc with the space and duration of Kinney's Wimpy Kid could---and did--easily spring originally out of the internet.

But if we long for the good ol' days when kids read books like reading mattered---and read books with heft and weight and breadth, then we have to write books with heft and weight and breadth that (here's the hard part) matter to kids

I'm going to say it again: Millennials are a writer's dream. They've grown up reading reams and reams of words in support of a story and cast of characters. Evocative settings. Tons of description Captivated by everything that goes into a huge narrative arc where good folks triumph, evil-doers are banished; where they close the book and wipe the odd tear and live their lives just slightly better person for having read it...

Honestly. Dickens would've just loved the readerly millennials. Plus just see who's playing young David, above! Bonus!

______

* Over a decade, people! SUSTAINED READING OF THE SAME NARRATIVE ACROSS SEVEN-HUNDRED PAGE BOOKS RELEASED OVER A FREAKING DECADE. Sorry, but the rest of us used to run screaming from any book that topped more than two hundred pages when we were their ages and you know it.

Yeah, your Mom's on Facebook, sweetie-pie....

2010-03-19T05:37:00.000-07:00

...and a bit of middle-aged lady jubilation as I see that Back of the Class, (whom you've met already on this blog vis a vis Harvard University) has the goods in their hair-metal anthem My Mom's on Facebook.

And while the writer in me can't resist pointing out that the serial mentions of waxing various anatomical portions really needs to be revisited (since the image of wax per se is never expanded in any meaningful way--serving as neither leit motif nor cri du coeur---the repetition strikes this hearer as just an eensty bit lazy) I can't help but snort a little coffee (decaf) out my nose.

Bravo to the Class!

Been Busy! Been Writing!

2010-03-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a snippet and an admonishment:

"Frankly, David had never played basketball in his life. Except that one round of HORSE in fifth grade.

A terrible year. His dog Buster had run away and then Grandpa Jim had died and it felt like winter had come to stay forever. And then suddenly it was spring, the sun bright, the air smelling like the sea. So he’d gone outside, bounced a basketball up and down on the asphalt a couple of times and joined a game of HORSE. Just for fun.

HORSE turned out to be more complicated than it looked. He’d almost gotten up to the O when short, fat Lily Dubrovnev sunk an unbelievable E from way outside the free-throw line and ran around the playground screeching, “David Nickel is a HORSE turd!”

Secret silent tears had filled his eyes.

Of course he chased after Lily’s screeching horse-turd self. Across the basketball court, behind the backstop, around the dumpsters. David grabbed the back of her jacket and yanked her to a halt in the deserted corner of playground where rusty swing sets go to die.

Not that he hit Lily. But…he hadn’t exactly not hit her either. Just grabbed her elbow and ground his knuckle into her beefy arm until she backed into the chain link fence and yelped, Ow! You jerk!

He let go of her arm. Don’t call me a horse turd, he hissed.

Sure, he had been a lot moister back then---tears welled up easily during that terrible year of losing Buster and Grandpa Jim. And since he towered over everybody, even the teacher, it was possible that maybe a little spit accidentally flew down into Lily’s upturned face.

You spit on me. She had wiped her eyebrow in astonishment. You spit on me and you punched my arm."

Everything for a Whole Lotta Dogs

2010-03-12T04:58:00.000-08:00

So. If in Flawed Dogs the story deserts its characters and in Dog Days! the character deserts his story, then what about Everything for a Dog, by Ann M. Martin?

Everything is the kind of book I usually steer clear of: a sweet and gentle cover, a dedication to an elderly aunt, the faint whiff of writerly brussel sprouts.* It’s also a companion book to A Dog’s Life, so I’m coming in during the middle of the author’s intent, something that is a bit unfair.

Everything is everything as advertised (sweet, poignant, you’ll thank me for it later), which means over the course of a week I pick up the book and impatiently put it down; pick up, impatiently down and so forth. However, I do finish Everything which is a huge endorsement right there.

Or maybe I should say: it’s a huge endorsement of a story with good writerly bones, because while the story line is certainly well-trodden and brings nothing new to the banquet table of kiddie lit**, the structure of the novel---which alternates the father’s and the son’s story (with a dog acting as the idée fixé )---is well done. The characters inhabit the story and propel the story along; the story reveals the characters more fully: we come to empathize with both Charlie’s dog-refusal and Henry’s dog-yearning; and we rejoice in the end as both Charlie and Henry change and are changing, as both protagonists indeed in a spiritual sense give up everything for a dog.

But huh? No interior illustrations? Everything has two very appealing and beautiful dog characters in Sunny and Bone. Readers of a certain age want to turn the page and see them race around until they fall over in big, golden heaps of doggie smiles. So c’mon, MacMillan. Ann Martin’s one of your brand-name writers---she deserves a couple of well-drawn dogs. Don’t be so stingy next time, okay?***

______________

*I’m-gonna-stand-here-until-you-clean-your-plate-because-it’s-good-for-you-you’ll-thank me-when-you’re-older.

**The Olympian older brother dies, leaving the deeply flawed younger brother alive! A dog dies, shot by an evil hunter! (As a resident of a state where the white-tail deer outnumber the human population two to one, I’d like to point out that not all hunters are the cowardly gits so beloved of kiddie-lit writers these days.) A dog runs afoul of an animal trap! (Gosh, my second dog in-a-trap story this week alone! I'm a lucky reader!) The secondary characters include: The perceptive old farmer! The witch-in-the-scary-house-next-door-who-turns-out-to-have-a-kind-heart old neighbor! The overwhelmed yupper-dom couple with a new baby who give away their rambunctious dog! And (my personal favorite) the librarian mom, a character who lets the write wedge in any number of childhood book classics (Treasure Island! Hardy Boys! All-of-a-Kind Family!) with impunity!

***I hereby certify that where ere she may go, and what ere she may do, my dog character will not tangle with a trap. Come to think of it, both dogs afflicted with trapitis were males, so I will insert the observation that my dog is a girl, thank goodness, and hence smart enough to know the difference between a trap and a hole in the ground. But I do it in a footnote, so it offends the mere handful of folks who actually read footnotes. Do you think MacMillan reads footnotes? Because I’ve got my writerly heart set interior illustrations for my boy-and-his-dog book, baby!

Another Day, Another Dog Book

2010-03-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

Juxtaposed against all the Flawed dog fights and duüglitz tufts is Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, by Jeff Kinney, wherein our hero Greg shuts the door, closes the curtains and plays video games in the dark all summer long. Boy, talk about your cutting-edge realism, your man vs. self thematic elements, your pretty cool interior illustrations, huh? Long-time Wimpy fan here because of Kinney’s spritely wit and drawings. But worst luck if, lured by the title (Dog Days!) I didn’t manage to pull off the shelf what is probably the weakest link in the series.

Seriously, there is a gentle ebb and flow of story in Greg’s summer days: water parks and lawn-mowing and so forth. There’s even a dog in the mix (while the dog doesn’t suffer, he’s also not the best thing that’s ever happened to Greg, har de har)---but c’mon---do you buy a seventh-grade guy who convinces his mom to rent a double stroller at the water park so he can ride shotgun with his little brother Manny? A middle-schooler who calls himself an “an ordinary Joe” or a twelve-year-old who’s all “burned up with Rowley for bailing out on our lawn care business”? I don’t know. This sure isn’t the kind of stuff which makes me think yeah boy, isn’t Greg a scream? Now here’s a character who’s both changing and being changed by his actions.

It’s more like: Huh? Did I miss something? Is our loveably finicky middle-schooler morphing into somebody’s elderly Grandpa Jim? Good Lord. I do hope the character isn’t turning his back on the narrative arc, playing for easy laughs rather than terrible truths. That would be a shame especially now, what with the movie! Coming out 19 March!

Frankly, I’m suspicious. And if Greg calls Roderick a nancy pants or some other wheezer from the 'fifties in the next book then this reader will be disengaging from the story as well.

But ooo! Interior illustrations! And witty ones, to boot!

An Aristotelian Writer Reads the First Dog Book

2010-03-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve attained many of life’s most pressing goals (quit smoking, raise the kids, ferret out the meaning of life) and usually feel sort of okay about everything, but there is one darned pesky goal that has eluded my yearning heart so far: a book published with interior illustrations.

Yes, cover art is wonderful and very fulfilling meaning-of-life wise, but when it comes to decorated chapter pages, calligraphed capitals or the odd illustrated half-page in a children’s book, I swoon. And with the rare occasion of color interior illustrations, I’m a veritable pushover. So you can imagine I snatched Flawed Dogs; The Shocking Raid on Westminster (Berkley Breathed) out of the library stacks, barely suppressing a joyous squeal.

If you’re a personna of a certain age (and I am! O, I am!) you may well remember reading Bloom County (Opus! Bill the Cat! Yeow!) in that kinder, simpler pre-cell phone life of big hair and hangin’ at the mall and wishing Oliver North would take himself off somewhere---covertly, overtly; we wouldn’t be picky, honest. So I was all ready to be bowled over by Breathed---a funny writer who can draw, man. But sigh. Sigh, sigh, sigh.

The writer in me sighs.

Because I always heave a deep, soulful sigh at books which read like a pitch to Disney movies. What an unfortunate sub-trend in the big wide world of kiddie lit today: books covertly written to directly adapt with the least amount of fuss into a big screen thingamabob starring Dakota Fanning (as Heidy!). A book written with the screenwriter’s filmed-minute-per-page stopwatch a-ticking in the background; a book stuffed with pratfalls, non-stop action and The Big Thematic Moment.*

Non-stop action resonates in my writerly soul because I am an Aristotelian rather than Platonic writer and I just adore all that story stuff revealing who the character is and what the character is becoming. Flawed’s action dwells so much on the superficially/cartoonishly brutal at the expense of the revelatory however, that I’m not sure I exactly dig this book either as a reader or a writer. Dogs are shot, maimed, starved, beaten—and gee, the humans don’t do much better. Eventually the dogs stop getting their asses whupped just in time for the Big Thematic Moment (stop me if you’ve heard this before, but one must be-lieve in oneself, not forgetting of course the power of friendship whilst reaching for one’s dream) but we’re left dangling until page 214…of a 216 page book.

Still! Interior illustrations! And many of them in color! Ooo.

____________

*My perceptive daughter once summed up a Disney movie as: 93 minutes of be-lieve in yourself. The power of friendship. Reach for your dreams. She also used the word moronic. Twice.

A Boy and His Dog

2010-03-04T17:58:00.000-08:00

I'm writing a boy-and-his-dog book.

Sure, children's literature probably doesn't need another ripping yarn about the boy/dog thing. Were a lack of good reading material the only criteria though, then odds are children’s literature could soldier on without one more vampire natter---and yet don’t we just find ourselves up to our wee ears in nosferatus these days?

Another potential problem is that not only does the dog not die in my story, the dog is not harmed in any way. The dog is loved and well-cared for: fed, watered, played with and taken for walkies at regular intervals. No no---it’s the boy who misses meals, the boy who does the dangerous exploits and saves the day. The dog is just a slap-happy companion who…well, okay maybe not just.

Even worse there’s not a breath of the fantastical; no zombies, werewolves or the Fey which is terribly embarrassing because I know I’m shooting myself in the foot already what with this dog who will not die*. But if I’m going to be truthful about this story for these characters then I’m gonna be truthful: the dog doesn’t die. Nor does the dog fall into a vat of radioactive creosote and come out just oozing canine super powers. Sorry, sorry sorry.

I don’t read other folks’ books while I’m writing because it’s hard enough to listen to the characters, much less find the time to write their story (besides I’m a very slow writer, easily distracted by the ridiculousness of my life), but inevitably comes the moment when I have written the story completely through. It’s a nice moment, very satisfying. The story is told, the characters in place and all I need to do is go back and revise like fury, convince my agent that it’s a worthy investment of her time and energy and then get down on my knees and pray that some where in the great big world of publishing there’s an editor who really gets dogs and boys and funny bits; an editor who won’t miss the vampires.

And since my story is written through as the first complete draft, I can go back to reading, reading, alla time reading. Though not as a reader. Until the moment I send my book off to the agent I read as a writer, and a mongo-analytical anything-you-can-write-I-can-deconstruct-to-pieces write at that For instance this week I’ve read three recent boy-and-his dog books. (Well—two boy-and-his dog, one girl-and-her-dog, but you get the picture.**) Wanna hear about them?

Good.

Next up: A writerly analysis of Flawed Dogs (Breathed), Diary of A Wimpy Kid: Dog Days (Kinney), and Everything for a Dog (Martin)

______________

*It’s a shame that I can’t figure out how to turn my dog (who will not die) into a dog-who-will-not-die---you know, a zombie dog? Boy, what a difference those couple of hyphens would make. The difference between the six-figure-auction zombie-dog book and the turned-down-flat regular-dog book, I assure you. O brave new world/ That has such marketing departments in’t.

**And the picture ain't pretty---that even boy-and-his-dog books are being invaded by the spunky girl protagonist. Grim.

The Dutch Twins, by Lucy Fitch Perkins

2010-02-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

Finally we get to Lucy Fitch Perkins.
There are many reasons to shake Mrs. Perkins out of her Junior Author slumber, some of which mirror my own writerly journey: she was a woman of a certain age (fine, she was forty-eight) when her first book, The Dutch Twins, was published in 1911:

(Here is her photo.

I carry the same sweet and

soulful expression wher'ere I go.)

she lived in Chicago and she wrote about twins. Yup, Dutch Twins, Mexican Twins, Norwegian Twins, Eskimo Twins, you name it. Perhaps if she'd known about my two youngest she might've penned The Cincinnati Twins, interior illustrations by the author.

But I digress.

The thing that attracted me most about Mrs. Perkins was not just our uncanny parallel lives but the very forward-looking things she chose to write about herself in Junior Authors:

"At this time I became deeply impressed with two ideas...

One was the necessity for mutual respect and understanding

between people of different nationalities if we are ever to live

at peace...

The other idea was that a really big theme can be comprehended by children if

it is presented in a way that holds their interest and engages their sympathies. " (p.242)

Now, if you plug Mrs. Perkins' really big theme about the necessity for mutual respect and understanding between people of different nationalities if we are ever to live at peace into Google, you will get her ideological separated-at-birth sibling The Dali Lama:

"I am sure many other share my wish that

world leaders meet at the conference table in such an atmosphere

of mutual respect and understanding of each other's humanness."

As well as a crucial bit from the mission statement at the Palestine Center for Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation:

"To...build self-respect and peace between different races, religions and groups."

But it is that boots-on-the-ground authority in one of the world's hot spots of racial and ethnic conflict---the Embassy of the United States in Ottawa, Canada---in which we really pluck the ripe fruit of Mrs. Perkins' why-can't-we-all-just-get-along philosophy:

"By mutual respect, understanding and with good will we can find

acceptable solutions which exist or may arise between us."

Boy, that Lucy Fitch Perkins was on to something, huh? But I digress yet again.

Onward.

Okay. So I went to the doctor not too long ago, and found out my fasting glucose levels are a very healthy 82 mg/dl. A good thing, since there's just a whole bunch of sweetness and light in The Dutch Twins; such sweetness and light that you might not need to eat or drink for the rest of the day after reading. Twins follows the wee story of Kit and Kat, those unearthly fraternals as they try desperately to reach four (and a half) feet high so they might grow into their full names---Christopher and Katrina---before they inadvertently kill themselves by falling into a dyke or being trampled by the cow, pecked by the gander, run over by the dog cart or...well. You get the idea. Each moment, each chapter more adventurously sweet than the last. And while there are some very fine illustrations...

...and some awfully blatant proto-feminist thinking for a book published in 1911...

"I think I'll be a sea captain when I'm big," said Kit.

"So will I," said Kat.

"Girls can't," said Kit.

But Grandfather shook his head and said: "You can't tell what a girl may be by the time she's four feet and a half high and is called Katrina. There's no telling what girls will do anyway." (P.14)

...all in all it's kind of a diabetic coma book, so for me the lasting question posed by The Dutch Twins is not Gosh, will Kit and Kat ever get to be four feet and a half? but Good Lord. Are my books gonna sound like this in ninety years?

It's a disturbing thought. The idea that my immortal words and deathless prose are truly just that---stories which no longer live and die a natural death but like some preternatural Flying Dutchmen of Kiddie Lit* are doomed to sail o'er endless twilight seas of The Library Project, black masts and blood-red sails in tatters---makes me feel a little faint. Ninety years from now some smart-alecky write will stumble across The Truth About Rats, Rules & Seventh Grade and call it wootsie-poo using the vibrant and cutting-edge slang of the near future (a string of %#?! followed by a naughty video, probably).

On the other hand.

Dante! Flaubert! Waugh...and ZINNEN! Thanks to the long tail of Google I have just been forcibly joined forever at the hip to the greats who've gone before me; to the greats who will come after. Frankly, I find that both comforting and pretty damned silly as I struggle this day to tell the truth for this set of characters.

So, what do I think about the Espresso Book Machine, The Library Project---heck, even The Dutch Twins? Hey---pretty cool! My place in history has been prepared, my authorial immortality** assured. And thus while I wait for this bright shiny future---no longer in print, but never quite fully out of it, either---to sneak up from behind and clout me a good one over my writerly ears, I would like to insert a nostalgic bunch of %#?! like a string of my old gram's Wooworth's pearls

%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!%#?!

and a video with some naughty bits:

___________________

*Or zombies!

** Lucy Fitch Perkins is all over Google. Seriously. I can't imagine ever compiling the sheer numbers of texts, images, cites, scans, archives and hyperlinks she and her vasty number of twins have generated. Dare I hope of achieving such huge fame? I better get cracking.

Safety can be Fun!

2010-02-24T08:18:00.000-08:00

And now, a tone poem dedicated to East Coast attorneys who worked themselves into law school via easy stages such as banking (or music!).

Words, thanks to the cloud of common words and phrases ripped straight from the Google Library Project: pictures by Munro Leaf. Notice the inclusion of Michigan. Was Mr. Leaf trying to hint at something?

Start the hum in B-flat....

Animal Automobile

awful beds better BOOK

bottom break

Breath

Building

bump Chair Tipper Climbing cold corner danger DARE DUMB door doubt

Downstairs drinks eats Edition

electrical faster fell

floor foolish furniture girl goes

going

happen

head hits hurt

(idea illustrated)

Introduction to Science

keep landing legs lollypop look

pretty LUCKY MANNERS medicine mess MICHIGAN

monkey mother mouth MUNRO LEAF neck

Never Nibble night Nit-Wit Nit-Wit doesn't nose

OH BOY Parents

Pictures by MUNRO

piece pills played probably pull put its hands quick race rest Revised road SAFETY Say goodbye scared Seat

sense serious silly simple slip soap

stand starts stay steps stick stop stupid teachers things thud

Tool toys traffic train tried truck

UNIVERSITY Unless Wait walk

WISHING wonder

Written wrong side

The Espresso Machine

2010-02-24T07:32:00.000-08:00

When I walked into our local indie bookstore Schuler Books & Music and asked at the information desk for the Espresso machine, the guy directed me into the café.

“No no, young man,” said I, brandishing my copy of Junior Book of Authors beneath his nose, “I’m not here to take my usual table to drink a bunch of fashionably over-priced lattes and hobnob with Grand Rapidian intelligentsia---I’m here to raise a couple of writers from the dead. You know---like Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones?* Only what we got here”---more Junior Author brandishing until the guy took a tiny step backward---“is a whole lot of writerly bones laying inert in the valley of Google.”

See, I just adore underpaid booksellers---you can give them all manner of brandishments and instead of calling security they just shrug and say, “You better speak to Pierre.”

Pierre Camy is Schuler’s Espresso Book Machine Operator, and a fine person to speak to about Lucy Fitch Perkins, Irmengarde Eberle and the whole raft of out-of-print Junior authors. We shook hands, then I turned to admire the Espresso Print-on-Demand, waving my arms and exclaiming, “Hey, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine sandwiched between two printers!”

“Don’t forget the computer interfacing a growing catalog of 3.8 million books,” added Pierre politely taking just the tiniest step backward, “including in-copyright, public domain and out-of-print titles. Two million of these titles are public domain Google Books. Thanks to the Espresso Book Machine, books long out-of-print are once again available.”**

The machine’s pretty simple. Select a book and download the scan (if it’s public domain) or file (if it’s from the growing Espresso POD database.)
Selecting the book was actually sort of fiddly. Like any new and worthwhile variation of Gutenberg’s printing press, the bugs have yet to be worked out. It was frustrating to search the Espresso database via subject (children’s authors) or keyword (adventure), so at this point you have to know the title and author of the book you’d like to print.***

After a bit of horsing around on the Espresso database, we both threw in the towel and headed over to dem dry Google bones, er, public domain. The download of Lucy Fitch Perkins’ The Dutch Twins took about twenty minutes—longer than usual, Pierre explained, because of all the interior illustrations. This particular copy had been scanned as part of the Google Library Project; originally donated to Harvard College due to the generosity of Mr. George Fillmore Swain, the Gordon McKay Professor of Engineering (1909-1929).**** Quite naturally, a little song began in my head:

Mr. George Fillmore Swain

Deigned

To donate the book

Of which I sing

To Harvard (o vey).

Perhaps my song career might have ended right there, but fortunately the Espresso developed a slight hiccough glue-pot wise and a second copy had to be printed.

Pierre cannot yet print multiple copies from one scan so he had to download the whole damned thing again---yup, one twin after another---which gave me another twenty minutes to come up with the second verse of My Little Song which I repeat herewith (so it’s a Little Unfortunate for you all):

Oh Gordon McKay was an engineer

An engineer an

Engineering Professor

At Harvard (o vey).

This time everything worked beautifully. The printer on the left printed the cover; the printer on the right printed double-sided copies of text and illustration. (The cover was a bit of a disappointment: had the book come from a POD press, then the cover would’ve been the original, printed in all its glory (and full color!)*****, but from skeletal ol’ Google all I got was two boring blue stripes. Hmpf.) Cover slid onto a plate in the Rube Goldberg middle; an adhesive roller applied glue to the edges of the text and the pages were lowered onto the cover and clamped for thirty seconds. The book was then trimmed with some reeeeeally sharp knives****** and the book popped down a chute into my itchy little fingers.

My new book, like Max’s supper, was still warm.

Next up: Mrs. Perkins’ first review in fifty years!

_________

*Did Ezekiel know about zombies?

**Okay fine, so technically I copied this speech from Schuler’s Chapbook Press site.But Pierre said a bunch of stuff whilst I was busy admiring the bands, gears, arms and glue rollers of the Espresso so I may have missed a couple of details.

***alternatively, you can go into Schuler and stand there shouting out ever more random keywords (expletive! zombies! Irmenegarde Eberele!) while underpaid Pierre does his best.

****Whew, huh? You ask me how I know this? Because the file is a digital scan of one particular physical book. Everything is scanned---inscription pages, scribbles in the margin---everything. So, you know who gave the book to whom and when and why. You also know about the stain on page 15---is it jam? Or something more sinister?

*****I adore cover art.

******Definitely the most exciting part. Zombies would have a field day with those knives!

The Junior Book of Authors

2010-02-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, a writerly friend sent me a discarded copy of The Junior Book of Authors (1934,1951) from her sons’ elementary school library. She sent it to me not only because she is a dear old thing, but---more to the point---I am a dear old thing and she knew that I'd waste a bunch of dear old hours mooning over the authors of my childhood: those odd ducks who, though there’s a million things to do* chose to write books for the Children’s Department of the Chicago Public Library system**.

Funny, looking at those author photos so many years later. As usual it’s the immortals of Kiddie Lit---Kate Greenaway, William Du Bois, H.A. Rey and Marguerite Henry, et al---who are annoyingly well-groomed and perky, knowing even then that half a century later, children will still be bouncing down the sidewalk to their cadences.*** The midlisters (The Right Dog for Joe! Edra of the Islands! Away Goes Sally!) are pensive to a man, scenting the doom of a life lived quietly falling to pieces on the lower shelves in the dank basement of a Cook County library. Prisoners with no hope of parole.****

And so went the story for a very long time. A write was born and for a brief time maybe flourished with a bit of a series, the attention of librarians, the sweet thanks of children. But all too soon the books went out of print. The copyright lapsed*****, and when the poor fading write died from a sudden head cold or not looking both ways before crossing the street, that was that. Sorry, sorry sorry.

Yet time marched on and we writes marched with it. We were graduated from high school and dropped out of college and wrote in a bajillion notebooks until computers were like totally rad, man; in an eyeblink we simply could not get enough of the internet and texting and so forth and so on.

With one more blink we were suddenly up close and personal with the Google Library Project, digital media and a lot of authorial jumping up and down and screaming about copyright and fair use and the Supreme Court and I know not what---and yeah, really I know not what because um, I turned the comments back on (below), but really, all I wanna discuss right now is my recent afternoon with Pierre Camy and the Espresso Machine.

Next up: Printin’ with Pierre!

___________
*You know that there are.

**Located in the basement of the building. Next to the coal-fired boiler room. Take a deep breath and plunge down the dirty linoleum stairs; turn right in the stygian darkness and grope your way down the hall to the scarred wooden door and push on the grimy brass handle. Smell the mold from yesteryore; peruse the gently rotting books letting go at the spines; pictures of authors smoking pipes or holding cats---where’d they dig up these old fossils? Grab a couple of books for those blank Sunday afternoon hours stuck in the apartment between church services, get ‘em stamped and clear out, breathing hard, happy to be out in the sunshine again.

***Some of my favorites?
“Hundreds of cats,
thousands of cats,
millions
and billions
and trillions
of cats.”
(Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág)

“But Ferdinand would shake his head. ‘I like it better here where I can sit just quietly and smell the flowers.’ His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.”
(The Story of Ferdinand, Munro Leaf)

“In an old house in Paris
That was covered in vines
Lived twelve little girls
In two straight lines.”
(Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans)

****C'mon, it’s Cook County. I’m allowed.
*****yeah, it's different now.

Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice...

2010-02-17T14:59:00.002-08:00

...addtionally, if you're looking to fix the accelerator pedal on your Toyota before you crash headlong into a tree, we'll be happy to accomodate:

Grand Rapids Spring & Stamping supplies fix for Toyota accelerator recall

What I think...

2010-02-17T14:59:00.001-08:00

...which brings us to Part Three

The best thing about writing crappy books is how much you learn about the world, the flesh and your very own writerly demons.

You can expect too much of your writerly self. Must write every day! Must write deathless prose! Must keep up with current events, trends, thoughts; befriend the influential, mentor the unpublished. Must be original. Must be commercial. Must be funny yet profound. Must ride the next wave----no no----must BE the next wave. Write must. Write must must. Write write, must dammit! must must.

That way lies madness. Little by little you’re persuaded that channeling Orsen Scott Card’s narrative arc really is the way to go. You get up in the morning, you sit down at your desk and before you can say Eric Robinson you’re churning out your own private hell of a Bandersnatch War.

But.

You can expect too little of your writerly self. You can write every day. There can be some deathless prose. A little profundity. (And tons o’ funny!). There can even be success: you can sit at your desk one morning to discover that because of all the hard work and kindness toward every one you've met along the way*, you’ve got your board up and pointed in the right direction---atop the biggest writerly wave since Romantic Realism.**

Cool, huh?

But the second you stop wrestling this very day to tell the truth in this story for this set of characters, you are one dead writer. Because that's what we do. We tell the truth. Or die trying.

So, I speak tenderly about my cardboard characters, my confusing plots, my sidetracked themes. And while I can only applaud the publishing world for justly rejecting (hmpf!) that which deserved rejecting, I also know I wrote some wonderfully truthful stuff mixed in with all the crappy. Yes yes yes---it's a boatload of crappy to a bucketful of wonderful, but listen I'm looking at the manuscripts right here in front of me with all the wonderful parts highlighted in yellow so they look both important and nauseous, poor wee things...

_____________________________
*Conan O’Brian
**Or zombies!

So! Been Doing! Part Two

2010-02-10T10:14:00.001-08:00

Now, it’s embarrassing but true---my husband and I are a couple of storm crows. We join a bustling, thriving church…which implodes under heresy and schism as the minister runs off with the petty cash fund before our backsides settle into the pew. We get hired---and the business folds within eighteen months. We settle our kids in a new school system just in time for standards to collapse, bomb-threats to be called in daily, teachers to leave in disgust and that nice, grandfatherly superintendant to be arrested for drunken driving. For the third time.

So we’d like to apologize to the great state of Michigan for moving here. After we bought our cute little house on the western side, the entire state economy promptly tanked. Further, we hope the auto industry will learn to forgive us (um, yeah, we were the ones who in late 2008 short-sold those last hundred shares of GM stock which tipped the company into insolvency) and we also take full responsibility for the unemployment rate, which hovers at a breath-taking 15%.* Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But hey---I suffered, too! I read, I wrote, I submitted---und gar nichts. Though I’d like to blame the drear ecconomy, the misfortunes in children’s publishing---heck, even the great state of Michigan itself!---for my latest…rest…between published books, I must observe a truth universally acknowledged: that even an author of modestly successful fortunes may sometimes write a stinker of a book.

And I wrote two. Back to back.

Oh my Lord. May I may fun of them? First, I wrote Clarity, yikes, yikes, yikes. Clarity was anything but. That poor book was an inchoate mashup of alien adventure vis a vis time-travel, office politics and Alfred Noyes’ poem, The Highwayman. Dante himself couldn’t make heads nor tails of such material. I know I certainly couldn’t and I spent a whole. Year. Writing. The. Darned.** Thing.

Then there was The Bandersnatch War. Great title, lousy book. Really lousy. Getting in touch with my inner Orsen Scott Card was a bad idea, I can see that now. But I didn’t certainly didn’t see it then. Why o why didn’t I see it then?***

Next up: What I think

_________________________
*And while we’re both extremely sorry about the Asian carp, someone else is stormcrowing the Supreme Court. Denying Michgan’s petition to close Calumet River’s sanitary canals? Idiotic. I say---let’s egg the Chief Justice’s house! Who’s with me?
**Damned.
***Damn.

So, what have I been doing, exactly?.

2010-02-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

Part One*

Although I haven’t been blogging per se, I have been reading them. Reading, reading, alla time reading. Years of following blogs, listening to their voices: The Song of the Slightly Hysterical Debut Novelist. The Melodious Hum of a NYT Bestseller. The Yippee-ti-yi Of The Movie-Optioned Author. And above them all, the Valhalla-Voiced Thunderings from the writerly mountaintops of---well, of our Thors-upon-High of children’s literature.

The big names.

The huge successes.

The glorious pasts.

The incredibly bright futures.

But that’s not me. No no---my name is not big; I certainly don’t thunder.** And I though I am a writer with stars, lists and awards under her belt, my publishing past has been more humorous than huge.

Because I had the singular luck to have published my first book about a girl and her dog---The Truth about Rats, Rules & Seventh Grade---the same year another debut novelist published her version of the well-crafted, realistic, and heartwarming dog story. She called it…Because of Winn-Dixie.

My baseball book, Holding at Third, came out to excellent reviews and ground-swell notice which was encouraging---but the truth is that every year only one book wins the World Series of baseball novels…and that year it was The Boy Who Saved Baseball.

But honestly, it was poor wee Dragons of Spratt, Ohio which got clobbered by all things Christopher Paolini (along with a couple of final-nails-in-the-ol’-remaindered coffin from Cornelia Funke and her bringing it to American shores, baby! translation of Drachenreiter).

Darn, huh?

Fortunately, I have my health, my talent and my good looks. Things aren’t all hard bread and stale water to the sound of gnashing teeth, not by a long shot. No no---I continue to read. I continue to write. I continue to submit.***

Next up: I apologize to Michigan.

__________________
*This is really going to be long and in multiple parts. I’m pretty sure it’s also going to be somewhat whiny in spots. Feel free to move on.

**I have an acceptable screech, though.

***Plus, now I blog! Yippee!

I have the best readers in the world!

2010-02-05T14:11:00.000-08:00

How can I not swoon, finding my book snugged between Scott Westerfield and Charles de Lint?

A thousand thanks, Sarah!