By: Cheryl Klein,
on 12/6/2007
A really nice Publishers' Weekly article about the tenth anniversary of Arthur A. Levine BooksAn excellent time-wasting geography game. I can't get past Level 11 -- Geraldton, Australia? Really? But glory, it's fun playing up to it. A lovely, lovely picture book I edited and adore, The Light of the World: The Life of Jesus for Children, by Katherine Paterson and Francois Roca, has TWO starred
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 11/25/2007
Back from a nice five-day vacation in southern California with James. (More to come when the pictures have been developed.) I am thankful today, as I was on Thursday, as I am year-round, for him, my family, my wonderful friends, my health, my job, my apartment, my church, my books -- indeed, almost all the books in the world -- freedom, music, movies, good design, and Plain Chocolate McVitie's.
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 11/4/2007
Movie Reviews 1: The Darjeeling Limited and Dan in Real Life. Darjeeling is yet more familial whimsy from Wes Anderson, and after the overindulgence of The Royal Tenenbaums and especially The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I was prepared not to like it very much. But the director is working against a much wider background than usual -- the stunning beauty of India -- and with a much more
By: Susan Taylor Brown,
on 10/20/2007
2007 Poetry Friday Roundups | 2006 Poetry Friday Roundups | |
| 10/19/2007 Kelly R. Fineman 10/12/2007 Two Writing Teachers 10/5/2007 Whimsy Books 9/28/2007 AmoxCalli 9/21/2007 Read Write Believe 9/14/2007 HipWriterMama 9/7/2007 Semicolon 8/31/2007 Mentor Texts 8/24/2007 The Book Mine Set 8/17/2007 Kelly R. Fineman 8/10/2007 Big a little a 8/3/2007 The Miss Rumphius Effect 7/27/2007 Check it Out 7/20/2007 Mentor Texts 7/13/2007 Chicken Spaghetti 7/6/2007 Farm School 6/29/2007 Shaken & Stirred 6/22/2007 A Wrung Sponge 6/15/2007 The Simple and the Ordinary 6/8/2007 HipWriterMama 6/1/2007 Adventures in Daily Living 5/25/2007 A Wrung Sponge 5/18/2007 Big a little a 5/11/2007 HipWriterMama 5/4/2007 Big a little a 4/27/2007 A Wrung Sponge 4/20/2007 Big a little a 4/13/2007 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 4/6/2007 Big a little a 3/30/2007 Chicken Spaghetti 3/23/2007 Blue Rose Girls 3/16/2007 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 3/9/2007 Big a little a 3/2/2007 Big a little a 2/23/2007 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 2/16/2007 Big a little a 2/9/2007 Blue Rose Girls 2/2/2007 Big a little a 1/26/2007 Chicken Spaghetti 1/19/2007 Big a little a 1/12/2007 Big a little a 1/5/2007 Blue Rose Girls | 12/29/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 12/22/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 12/15/2006 Big a little a 12/8/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 12/1/2006 Big a little a 11/24/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 11/17/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 11/10/2006 Journey Woman 11/3/2006 Big a little a 10/27/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 10/20/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 10/13/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 10/6/2006 Big a little a 9/29/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 9/22/2006 Big a little a 9/15/2006 Big a little a 9/8/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 9/1/2006 Big a little a 8/25/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 8/18/2006 Mother Reader 8/11/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 8/4/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 7/28/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 7/21/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 7/14/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 7/7/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 6/30/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 6/23/2006 ***None 6/16/2006 Big a little a 6/9/2006 Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 6/2/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 5/26/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 5/19/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 5/12/2006 A Chair, A Fireplance & a Tea Cozy 5/5/2006 Chicken Spaghetti 4/28/2006 Big a little a 4/21/2006 Big a little a 4/14/2006 Big a little a 4/7/2006 Big a little a 3/31/2006 ***None 3/24/2006 Big a little a |
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 8/14/2007
I spent much of today reading and responding to SQUIDs, so if you sent one in the last, um, two months, you should receive a reply by the end of the week. Barack Obama -- the man who I sincerely hope will be the next President of the United States, for his vision, fairmindedness, honesty, and dedication to consensus, and because people do not actively hate him -- will be speaking in Brooklyn next
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 8/4/2007
This has not been a very good week -- I lost my keys and wallet somewhere in Brooklyn, I've had a touch of post-Harry depression, and work is neverending, even though it's August. So: no posts. However, I had a great dinner at Sorrel on Thursday and an excellent coffee with author Francisco Stork yesterday, and I saw "The Simpsons Movie," so things are looking up. I just accepted an invitation
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 5/19/2007
I am here at work on an overcast Saturday, trying to clean off my desk, and to keep things interesting, I'm going to liveblog every couple of hours (trying very hard not to have the blogging eat up my work time). Rachel's here too, and she just brought in cupcakes from Dean & Deluca as a reward to both of us for our virtue. Some men are installing carpet down the hall and listening to -- Eminem,
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 5/3/2007
I will be speaking at the Missouri SCBWI conference in St. Charles (outside St. Louis) on November 10. I've now done a big novel-craft talk and a big picture-book-craft talk -- is it time for a submissions speech again? I'd love to talk about characters and characterizations in some way, I think, or voice, but I'm not sure how much of those can be taught. . . . Hrmm. Suggestions? The Park Slope
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 4/25/2007
My friend Ben sent me a link today to The Golden Compass movie website's Find Your Daemon feature. After a twenty-question personality test, I have learned I am "modest, spontaneous, shy, competitive, and sociable," and therefore my daemon is an ocelot named Sereno. This would mean more to me if the three other people I know who have taken the test were not also judged "modest, spontaneous, shy,
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 4/18/2007
(some of which I had had before going to California and finally had the time to write properly on the plane; and yes, this consciously morphed into a blog post partway through, and has been edited and added to since) fantastic fact, the (n.) that one thing that, in entering a fictional world, alters it and the people who inhabit it so profoundly that the story becomes a fantasy. A dragon, a
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 3/24/2007
Tasty Bite microwave entrees -- Indian dinners that heat up in two minutes, are relatively nutritious (as two-minute dinners go), and are indeed tasty bites. Internet Scrabble games.James, le boyfriend, who just made a book trailer for HarperCollins that has almost a million hits among YouTube, MySpace, and various other websites. (I'm not linking to it here simply because it's very deliberately
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 1/20/2007
How long has this week been? So long I can't even come up with a clever title for a blog post. I had some friends over for chili earlier this week and made two of the recipes from the comments here -- both ones that involve chocolate, which I couldn't resist: Mrs. Pilkington's vegetarian variety, and the meaty "Laura's Chili" from facelesswords. They were both terrific, so thanks very much to
By: Cheryl Klein,
on 11/26/2006
The Milwaukee airport has a marvelous used and rare bookstore, of all things, where I picked up Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg. Perkins is the Ursula Nordstrom of grown-up books -- the editor of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, the architect of most of Thomas Wolfe's novels -- and thus far the biography is both entertaining and enlightening in showing how very little
This is awesome advice!"If your manuscript is in third-person limited POV, take one chapter, cut out all of the internal monologue, and stick it in a drawer for a week. Then go back and see how much of that monologue really absolutely HAS to be in the scene for said scene to make sense."Because isn't editing at least half of good writing? Most of my journey as a writer has been 1) learning how to
Every time I see a picture of Arthur, I'm always surprised when he's not a stocky cravat-wearing Oxford professor-sort of fellow. I think it has something to do with that one Christmas card you told me about years ago, and I simply cannot shake that image of him I built at that time.
Jon, every time my immediate family and my dad's brother's family get together, we play a vicious game of "Killer Klein Croquet," and the frog is the official travelling trophy. I won it at our most recent croquet match in September, and I taunt the other members of my family with it by posting pictures and correspondence. :-)
Oh. Now how am I going to explain all those frantic phone calls to Interpol and the Center for Missing Amphibians? If your next family get-together is crashed by guys in dark suits, don't blame me ...Jon
Thank you - I am now completely addicted to the geography game. By a strange twist of fate (or because of my insatiable reading habits) I've made it to level 10! Sigh...another way to keep myself from revising...
I wonder if you ever get sick of hearing this:In a strange sort of mood I am, and so I decided that it would be a good idea to reread Chapter 34 of Deathly Hallows. And promptly ruin my otherwise beautiful book with tears all over the pages. Fine, fine work. All of you.
That is a wonderfully nice article about AALB... although the photo of Arthur is rather curious in a "hand colored fifties photo studio" sort of way.Thanks for the Twain quote. He always seems like the cleverest person in the room. We are reading "Huckleberry Finn" right now for a bedtime story and I'd forgotten how good it was. That's interesting about the Influenza epidemic manuscript trend. I