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Well it's almost March...which means April can't be that far off (31 days to be exact). And what happens in April besides baseball season kicking off (Go Sox!)?

My new book, THE AWESOME ALMOST 100% TRUE ADVENTURES OF MATT AND CRAZ will be published.

Here's the first trailer that I made!

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Oh, why not.  Let’s just start with what is undoubtedly the best thing ever.  Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the 90-Second Newbery and James Kennedy, the author and organizer, was clever enough to know how to start things off.  It seems that Aaron Zenz and his Boogie Woogie kids have made another video.  And darned if it isn’t even better than their previous (genius) efforts. I liked it so much I’m including the Making Of film as well.

Those of you already familiar with the PBS Digital Studio’s remixes of Mr. Rogers, Julia Child, and Bob Ross (boy is that catchy) know that no one is safe when it comes to classic public television.  They did a nice job with LeVar here too.  It’s fun to watch based on his shifting facial hair alone.

Seems to me that LeVar Burton had his way of recommending books.  Iron Guy Carl of Boys Rock, Boys Read has a different method: Scare them away with a PSA.  Works for me!

Now here we have a movie coming out based on a YA novel I never read.  I did listen to the Read It and Weep podcast episode about it, but now I suppose that was insufficient.  I dunno.  The creepy kiddo looks interesting but I may just hold out for The Last Apprentice film that’s coming out soon anyway.

Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

Oksey-doksey.  New publishing model time.  It happens.  Seems Rebecca Emberley and Deidre Randall are creating a new “hybrid children’s book imprint” called two little birds (something about that name just speaks to me).  They’re pairing a picture book in print form with an app of the same title and publishing them simultaneously.  The first book is the sure-fire winner The Itsy-Bitsy Spider, catchy song in tow.

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Here’s a treat from Alan Silberberg. If you are NaNoWriMo-ing, he is planning a series of short inspirational (sorta) videos for writers.

If you can’t see this video, click here.

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Taking a break from the fun of writing my *new* book, which is top secret stuff that I'm having way too much fun doing because I just got a batch of notes on THE AWESOME ALMOST 100% TRUE ADVENTURES OF MATT & CRAZ from my fantastic art director at Simon & Schuster (Karin Paproki you know who you are!)

Now I have a couple of weeks to move from my comfy chair ( dog on legs included)...

To the desk chair.... where the drawing MAGIC happens! Note: magic is subjective and may cause drowsiness.


The task is to clean up some of the cartoons I've already done for the book. But even better -  I've been asked to add a bunch of new cartoons, which is a blast because I get to go back in the heads of my main characters, Matt and Craz.

I'll keep you updated on the progress but for now want to share a new cartoon that I drew yesterday.

FYI: Matt and Craz are a cartoonist duo who try unsuccessfully to get their comics into the school newspaper. Here's one of their cartoons about super-smart babies who do movie reviews.

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Alan Silberberg holds the paperback version of Milo: Sticky Notes & Brain Freeze

Sid Fleischman was one of the founders of SCBWI and a master of comic invention. He died about a year and a half ago, and the award continues in memory of Sid and in honor of humorous writing.

Lin Oliver, no slouch herself when it comes to funny, introduced us to the delightful and warm-hearted Alan Silberman, who won this year's award for his book MILO: STICKY NOTES & BRAIN FREEZE, about a 12-year-old boy who loses his mother, sneezes on the girl he secretly loves, and learns to live with both.

"Like all great comedy, it has its basis in the human heart," Lin Oliver said. "From the moment we meet Milo we know we're in the presence of a hero who teaches us that humor and hope are the antidotes to grief and isolation.

He shared episodes from his writer's journey with us.

"My first book was pond scum," he said, not clarifying that POND SCUM was the title of the book and not his own personal post-publication review.
 
After that, he had a couple of false starts. He felt waves of panic until a bookseller asked him why he hadn't tried combining his cartooning and writing. Sort of like that little Wimpy Kid series.

That's when Milo was born. To get into the headspace of a 13-year-old, he had to travel back into his own memories ... to the time when he had braces and ate a forbidden Baby Ruth (with disastrous results), and to the death of his mother when he was 9 years old.

That's when he got the idea to combine humor and heartbreak so that he could tell the story of a funny kid living in a fog-filled emotional world. He wanted kids to laugh even as Milo dealt with that sadness, and to win a humor award for that means the world, he said.

For a description of his working relationship with editor Liesa Abrams, check out our recap.

He dedicated the award to his mother, Audrey Silberberg. And then we all cried.

• Visit Alan's site.
• Follow him on Twitter.

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Liesa Abrams and Alan Silberberg teamed up to discuss how authors and editors can best work together. Liesa is executive editor at Aladdin, and Alan is the Sid Fleischman Award-winning author of MILO: STICKY NOTES AND BRAIN FREEZE.

Even before the session started, we could see the deep rapport these two have. No wonder they fired their therapists.

MILO is about a quirky, weird wonderful boy coming to grips with the death of his mother, something Alan related to because he experienced that loss as a child. Initially, he thought the book was going to be funny, but as he delved deeper into his memories, the book got more serious.

"The book has changed my life in so many ways," he said. "My life changed because my agent was able to take this manuscript and hand it over to Liesa."

Liesa related to the book because it was her husband's story, as well. His own mom died of cancer, and he'd spoken about it in similar ways. The closest thing she could come to healing her husband's loss was to work on this book. She really, really wanted to work on it and felt anxiety that it might not come to pass.

"This is the book that will make me feel my entire career has meaning if I can edit this book."

He read from the editorial letter Liesa wrote him, and we all got choked up. "I hadn't just found a way to get Milo published, but I had found this connection with this personal story."

One challenge was to separate themselves from the story a bit. Alan, who illustrated MILO, experimented with characters that looked less like him. Being able to have Liesa put a little distance between himself and the material allowed him to edit it from a safer place.

"I don't mean to get all therapy on you," he said, "but I really needed to feel safe to go back into these memories."

Liesa gave an example of how they shaped the story: the Milo character wrote about headaches making him think of drafting a will. It's not a kid point of view to think that way, so he wrote that Milo felt scared instead.

Liesa never asked which scenes were autobiographical (they were all emotionally true, but some were fictionalized). She was glad to have that distance, which let her look at it as a work of fiction.

"The reader only knows what's there on the page. They're reading that book. You're not there. It's not that actions can't be contradictory--you have to understand why the character is contradicting themselves."

"It's not just about the advance and the royalties," Liesa said. "It makes a world of difference to have a relationship like this... the writing is the most personal thing you can do."

Alan and Liesa made us all cry when they talked about the healing this book had brought about. “Not every editor relationship requires tissues, you know.”

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Readers can connect with Milo, by Alan Silberberg, in very different ways. I suppose that’s true of any book, we all bring our disparate selves to the text, but it seems especially true for Milo, a story for middle grade readers that embraces broad goofy humor on one end, and authentic, emotional grief on the other. Actually, that’s not true. Those qualities aren’t on separate ends, but are intermingled throughout. It’s a book where a boy can sneeze on someone’s neck in class, then return home to a house of fog and loss, where no one has quite figured out how to move forward after a death in the family. For me as a reader, it wasn’t the humor that hooked me. It was the humor combined with real emotional depth.

That rare thing in children’s books: a boy in full.

After I read Milo, I wanted to meet Alan because I sensed that he and I shared things in common. So I contacted Alan through his website and requested an interview. There was much I wanted to discuss, and our conversation flowed so naturally, that our Q & A went on slightly longer than The Reagan Years. I decided to break it up into two parts. I’m indebted to Alan for his time and patience and for the care he took in answering my questions.

(Whew. I’m relieved he’s not a Yankees fan.)

Alan! Hey, thanks for stopping by all the way from Montreal. Which is still in Canada, right? Could you please leave the soggy Uggs by the front door? Yeah, the moose, too. That’d be swell.

It’s true, Montreal is still in Canada. But you know, I’m from Boston (Go Red Sox!) so my heart — and shoveling technique — is from New England.

I gather that you didn’t initially set out to tackle this huge, daunting topic –- the death of a parent.

You are so right! When I started writing this book my goal was to write a pretty silly book that would include my cartoon illustrations. What started as a goofy look at a 7th grade kid starting a new school turned into something much deeper once I realized I had my own story to tell.

I know that this book grows out of your own personal experiences. Could you give us a little background on that?

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Yup.  Had me bawling like a wee babe, this one.  A little disappointing to realize that no matter what the actual movie does, this fan film of a scene from The Hunger Games will probably be more moving than anything Hollywood could produce.  After all, I can’t imagine that the actual film will spend this appropriate amount of time on Rue’s death.  I could do without the Linkin Park song, but even that sort of works.  Of course, I never would have found this without the Huffington Post’s piece on Book Videos: 19 of the Best and the Worst.  They’ve a fair amount of children’s stuff, but also some amazing pieces like this one from Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From:

I could call this next video A Bunch of White Guys Making Origami, but I’ll restrain myself.  In any case, it is rather neat.  Particularly when you get into the medical applications of the form.

Watch the full episode. See more Independent Lens.

Truth be told, I just like how that one fellow says the word “elephant”.  Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

Next up, one of my favorite books of the year.  It’s good old Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze.  This gives you a very mild sense of the book itself.  Probably the rock joke conveys the feel best.  Just sayin’.