How to use this Page

Someone You Can Love is Nearby
Browse Profiles and My Pics for Free!
[link]
Happy Dating :)
Kahayan
Supervisor
[link]

Speaking of audio for the studio, Sidebar is a fun way to learn about the artists whose works you've been looking at. Dwight Clark and Swain Hunt do extended interviews with the likes of James Jean, Adam Hughes, Peter de Sève, Brad Holland, Paolo Rivera, Berni Wrightson, and a million others in their "Barchives".

Well, they had a slow day recently, and, having pretty much exhausted the A-list, they dug down to the bottom of the potato barrel and found me! So if you don't have anything else to do or you need something to amuse yourself while you clean brushes or cut mats, check out this link to the official Sidebar Gurney interview!. Thanks, guys! You do a very thoughtful interview, and it's a real honor. Above, watercolor sketching in Yellowstone, photo by Mr. Fujimoto.

This whole thing started in the summer of 2008, when Neil Clarke reported the results of that year's Locus award poll, as published in the July 2008 issue of the magazine, and noted with alarm a retroactive change to the award's vote counting system.  "Non-subscribers outnumbered subscribers by so much," the magazine's writers explained, "that in an attempt to better reflect the Locus magazine

You know what I have loved most about the Zuma love-child debacle? The media is now using the phrase concurrent partners in conversations. When I first started to develop copy for the OneLove web site, I hadn’t even considered that someone you’re having an affair with could be called a multiple concurrent partner. The term is logical, when you think about it, but we usually used other phrases.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

Reviewed by Andrei Lankov
The Wilson Quarterly

There is no shortage of books on North Korea. Thanks to its nuclear ambitions, it attracts a surprising amount of attention for a country whose population and economy are roughly the same size as Ghana's. But little is said about average North Koreans. They come across as faceless people who obediently follow the orders of their Dear Leader, as Kim Jong Il is officially known, and his opaque inner circle. Nothing to Envy, by journalist Barbara Demick, rounds out the picture. Working in Seoul and Beijing as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, she interviewed numerous people who had fled North... Read the rest of this post

I have heard from two different people this week that reading is in decline. One was a friend on a writing forum who just had a feeling he was right. The second was in the Guardian, so I took it slightly more seriously... for about two seconds.

The theory is, that there are so many other forms of entertainment these days, the internet, video games, text messages, Sky plus boxes, bionic arms... that there’s no time left for books. We are all assaulted from every direction by things that yearn to amuse us. Our time is no longer our own and that like-it-or-not we will find ourselves playing Resident Evil 4 for three hours a night before switching on Celebrity Come Dining on Ice. The world has gone to hell in an electronic handcart.

But, it’s not true, is it?
For a number of reasons.

First of all, I’m not convinced that there ever was a time when we spent all our leisure time reading. Yes, sure, maybe some Victorian families read to each other after dinner, but only the ones who weren’t working shifts down in the cotton mines. Certainly, when I was growing up in the 1980s in Wales, the idea that we should sit down and read aloud to each other after a meal would have been met with disbelief, then laughter. After all, Coronation Street was on.

And, even if we did have leisure time for reading, I’m not sure how many people read for fun. My guess is that it has always been a minority interest. I was definitely the only one in my junior school who did. Admittedly, it was a very small school; there were 10 people in my year. So, 10% of us (me) read for fun; All the other kids had BMXs and He-man figures and Mr Frostys and there was one wondrous day when even I put down my book because Hayley got a ZX-Spectrum and we could play Space Invaders. I never saw anyone else in my street read anything other than the Beano for fun.

Finally, most crucially, just because we have Facebook and Avatar and iPads doesn’t mean you have to surround yourself with them. If you want to read a book, well, what’s stopping you? The digital world isn’t being beamed onto the back of our eyeballs just yet! As another of my favourites shows from the 80s said, ‘why don’t you just switch off your TV set and go out and do something less boring instead?’

Like read a book.


Elen's website is www.elencaldecott.com

One of the most common things I hear from writers lately is, "You've told us a lot about what makes you say no to a book. Now tell us what makes you say yes." So yesterday I wrote that I love when I can sense the writing is authentic and true.

Today I want to take it further and identify three basic things that are immediately apparent to agents and editors when we read and evaluate your work, and they make the difference between yes and no.

Craft.
. . . . .Story.
. . . . . . . . . . Voice.

Of course, the elements are intertwined, but it's helpful to artificially separate them in order to understand why a book is either working—or not.

Craft refers to the mechanics of fiction: plot, characterization, dialogue, pacing, flow, scene-crafting, dramatic structure, point-of-view, etc. I think craft is pretty easy to teach and it's easy to learn. It's technique, the foundation upon which writers use their artistic skill to build their story. Knowing the mechanics of craft enables you to use it to create the effect you want.

Story refers to the page-turning factor: how compelling is your story, how unique or original, does it connect with the reader, is there that certain spark that makes it jump off the page? Is it sufficiently suspenseful or romantic (as appropriate)? Does it open with a scene that intrigues and makes the reader want to know more? Story comes from the imagination of the writer and is much more difficult to teach than craft (if it can be taught at all).

Voice is the expression of you on the page—your originality and the courage to express it. Voice is what you develop when you practice what we talked about yesterday—writing what you know. It's the unfettered, non-derivative, unique conglomeration of your thoughts, feelings, passions, dreams, beliefs, fears and attitudes, coming through in every word you write.

Without a doubt, whenever I read a new manuscript and fall in love with it, the deciding factor most of the time is the voice.

So how do you find your voice? You can't learn it. You can't copy it. Voice isn't a matter of studying. You have to find it. And the way to do that is by writing, and experimenting, and seeing what kind of response you get from others, and writing some more. And some more.

Putting it All Together

I receive numerous projects that show strong technique, but no originality or heart. In a way, this is good because it shows that writers are paying attention to their craft. They're taking the time and making the effort to learn to write, which is fantastic. But some of them lack a strong story, and others don’t have a compelling or unique voice. These writers just need to keep working on it.

I think some writers find craft easier, and others find story comes more naturally. A few writers have a strong voice right out of the box; most writers have to work for years to develop one.

When you read published books that don't seem to "follow the rules" of craft that you've worked so hard to learn, instead of getting mad and throwing the book across the ro

Checking the Macmillan catalogue, I just noticed that Mokie and Bik has won two awards that I hadn't known about: Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year;
and
CCBC Choice (Univ. of WI)

A nice little discovery!

(I already knew about - and celebrated - the NYPL Book for Reading and Sharing. But it's still nice.)

I've finally sold my first novel. Eleven books, but only one novel as such. I wrote it some years ago and nearly - nearly! - sold it several time. And each time, I got comments and re-wrote on the basis of those comments and sent it somewhere else and almost sold it.

This time it has happened. Leonie Tyle, who used to work for UQP, knows me because I actually sent her the first three chapters some years ago and she rang me - rang Melbourne from Queensland! - to say that she liked it a lot, but they didn't publish this genre and did I have anything else? I wrote something else, but it didn't work out.

Now, I got a totally unexpected email from her saying she had heard I had a novel and could she look at it? Is the Pope Catholic?!? ;-) She heard because of an as-yet unpublished interview in Magpies magazine, by Edwina Harvey, meant to promote Crime Time: Australians behaving badly, which Magpies had reviewed favourably in 2009. Apparently, she had a hole in her schedule due to a novel that had had to be put back to 2011.

Only a few days after that interview, the thing has gone through the acquisitions committee and it will be out later this year. It does need re-writes, but hell, I'd stand on my head to get this one out! I cared about it when I was writing it and had planned to get it out and re-work yet again and see if I could sell it this time.

Who would have thought the publisher would approach ME?

And just for the record, after all I have said about fantasy novels, this one is a fantasy novel, a YA werewolf tale. But it's not fat and it's not part of a trilogy! And it's inspired by a mediaeval romance. Yay!

On October 7, 2009, INK THINK TANK: Nonfiction Authors in Your Classroom launched a FREE, searchable database of hundreds of in-print books written by 22 award-winning I.N.K. authors. The database is designed to produce lists of books for every grade level covering content mandated by National Education Standards and state curricula. Instead of feeding kids material from bland, uninteresting books, INK offers a cornucopia of delicious, appetizing titles guaranteed to nourish both reading and learning. No single book can be all things to all students, but the LISTS of books generated by our database will come close. We believe that if kids learn through high-interest, well-researched books that have been vetted for accuracy, they will perform better on the required assessment tests.

Now our big news is that INK THINK TANK has formed a partnership with Mackin Educational Resources , a well-established educational distributor with 26 years in business. Their job will be to fulfill your book orders directly from the INK Database. Currently, if you want to buy a book from our database, we include a link to Amazon.com as a convenience. Each link produces a separate browser window and there is no way to build a shopping basket if you want to purchase all the books on a list produced by the database. This will all change when the Mackin/INK shopping basket goes live at the end of February. During this interim period, if you log in to use the database, you will be prompted to update your profile. This will please a lot of our out-of -the-country users who have told us that they can't register because there was no place to enter a foreign country. Now there is.

In addition, Mackin will be featuring INK THINK TANK in its promotional materials and catalogues. All of this will help focus attention on the best in children's nonfiction and will help get it where it can do the most good--classrooms.

Kitty and Randal Heise, the owners of Mackin sent us this welcoming message:

All of us a Mackin are very excited about our new partnership with the wonderful folks at INK THINK TANK. And what a wonderful partnership it will be as we are truly in concert with one another! As the owners of Mackin, Kitty and I would like everyone to know that our dedication to education has always been on the individual teacher level. We know how important it is for educators to have great resources and to know that they can count on us to assure their value and usability.

0 Comments on Mackin Educational Resources Becomes a Partner of INK THINK TANK. as of 1/1/1900