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©Johnny Ryan

I play a weekly game of spoons with Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson and the guy who wrote volumes 3, 4 and 9 of Truly Tasteless Jokes (he’s told us his name a million times, but we still just call him Skippy, an homage of sorts to the gangly neighbor on Family Ties). They’re fierce contests, these games of spoons, draped in cigar smoke and filthy language. A grand time is almost always had.

And almost always, talk turns to wordsmanship and literature or, as Skippy likes to say, the biz. A few years back, I made the bold statement that “any old schmuck can publish a novel for young people” and Marilynne, half in the bag from peppermint schnapps, called me on my bluff. “Well then friggin’ do it you namby-pamby pissant,” she slurred.

Well, I did her one better. I published two. DWEEB, a madcap little adventure of escape and camaraderie among the weak and wedgied, came out in 2009 and appeals to what’s known as the “middle-grade” set. The Only Ones, a dark but funny apocalyptic fable, comes out in a couple months and speaks to a slightly older crowd, the young “adults,” if you’re willing to call them that. Marilynne has conceded that I more than met the challenge, but I see no reason to boast. Because what I did was the easiest thing in the world. You can do it too, if you remember the following things:

1. Kids are stupid. Plain and simple. Look at all the paste eaters in the world. Majority are kids. Nose pickers? 60% are below the age of 16. Ask a third grader his thoughts on Baudelaire and I guarantee the response will be some non sequitur along the lines of “I can make poo poo in the potty.” Teens are even worse. Let’s run through some notable examples. Bobby Fischer? His use of the Poisoned Pawn Variation was overrated at best. King Tut? That joke of a pharaoh died of a broken leg. Joan of Arc? French. Exceedingly French. I could go on, but why bother. Just invite the cast of Degrassi over someday for some edamame and count how many of those googly-eyed Canucks eat the pods.

2. Stupid is as stupid reads. Since these numbskulls like garbage, give them garbage. Name your main character Star. Or Astralique. Or Luminicitus. Something stellar and nonsensical. Start the book with a line like, “Third period Math suckz!” because z’s are perfectly acceptable s’s for this “smartphone generation” and just about everything “suckz!” Speaking of which, pepper the manuscript with plenty of sex, preferably between a southern debutante and some sort of centuries-old man-beast. Thanks to MTV, teenage pregnancy is totally rock-and-roll. These days, every girl aspires to be either Bristol Palin or one of those ancient Greeks gals that Zeus knocked up with a demigod.

3. Make sure to include a heavy-handed message. Read a couple middle-grade or YA novels so you can get the formula down. All middle-grade novels essentially follow the same template: Nerdy boy/girl moves down south to live with a crotchety aunt/uncle, befriends a local cripple, opens a lemonade stand, accidentally knocks a baby into a well, hits puberty, joins a junior spy league, and learns that Pol Pot wasn’t so cool after all. Get a fart in there somewhere. There’s always a fart or two. As for YA, make sure your main character is raised by a methed-up hillbilly and a preening former beauty queen wh

I like talking with you a lot. I love it, actually. You make me laugh and you say nice things and you ask important questions.

I'm pretty great (if I do say so myself) at responding to comments on my Facebook Fan Page. Please go 'like' it!

And now there is a BRAND NEW AWESOMELY FUN way to talk to me -- through my VYou.com page. It's the next best thing to being at a book signing.

You don't need a profile to ask a question -- you just type it in and send, and no one will know the question is from you, so don't be shy. A couple times a week I'll answer a bunch of questions via video. How fun is that?

Read more about me + it in a great piece by Jeffrey Trachtenberg right here in the Wall Street Journal. Click on the top article title "Writers Get Close on Web."

And for those of you who are doing book reports on my books -- this is the perfect tool for you! Just look to see if I've addressed your questions already. If I haven't, type in your question and give me a few days to respond (I'm looking at you, procrastinators, lol).

And hey -- let me know if you see me on the show SEARCHING FOR... on OWN. My episode airs Monday, March 7th, 9/8 central.

Thanks for being awesome!

Wall Street Journal's It Was, Like, All Dark and Stormy had some factual errors in it. The article itself was discussed on this blog.

I emailed them (thrice) about these errors; I'm sure others did, also.

Guess what? The article now has 3 of the 5 corrections made to the article! From the article:

Corrections & Amplifications
In the novel “Thirteen Reasons Why,” published in October 2007, the main character kills herself when she is a high-school junior. A previous version of this essay said the book was published in March 2007 and said the suicide happened freshman year. Also, in the novel “Hunger Games,” one teenager of each sex from each district competes in a competition to the death. Previously, the essay incorrectly said one teenager from each district competed.

What two things remain unchanged?

Saying Mary went blind in Little House On the Prairie, when the blindness occurred between two later books; and saying "1999 novel “Speak,” about a deeply miserable girl who is raped at a party." I can understand, kind of, why the didn't change the part about Speak, but leaving the LHOTP reference sustains the impression that the author is talking about the TV show, not the books.

Anyway, thanks WSJ for making these corrections!

© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

The Wall Street Journal has a look at the dearth of books that appeal to boys, which is why you are now seeing more books like Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger and It's Disgusting and We Ate It! True Food Facts from Around the World and Throughout History,

Read the story here.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I feel like I’m in the sweet spot. I write mysteries and thrillers, so while the main character is usually a girl, she’s a kick-ass girl who has to save the world, or herself, or both.

Most of the booktrailers I’ve seen seem very slow paced – words over clip art. I guess they have to be slow so people who read slowly can still follow along. One I’ve really liked is from Don Bruns – he hired actors, and that makes it interesting .

The Wall Street Journal took a look at book trailers. “There is scant evidence, however, that the average book trailer actually has much impact on book sales. Despite Doubleday's recent video upload for the self-help book "We Plan, God Laughs," by Sherre Hirsch, the book has sold only about 3,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70% of U.S. book sales. And even though Jami Attenberg's trailer for her novel "The Kept Man" is reminiscent of Miranda July's short films, only 3,000 copies of Ms. Attenberg's recent book have sold. Most trailers cost about $2,000 to produce.”

There’s a flipside, too: “Jen Lancaster's publicist suggested that she film a trailer to promote her latest memoir "Such a Pretty Fat," which could be sent out to television producers. The trailer, which shows the Chicago author wearing gym clothes and collapsing on her face during a personal training session, seems to have paid off: Her publicist was able to use it to book morning-show appearances for every stop on her 14-city book tour.” [Full disclosure: the difference here might be that it is so much easier to get media coverage for non-fiction than for fiction.]

Read more here.

Or, if you don’t know what I’m taking about, go read this story: Discord Over Dewey. It’s loosely about the Arizona library that decided to get rid of Dewey and make the shelves more bookstore-like, you know the one, but it gets bigger. To quote the article

[T]he debate, say many librarians, is about more than one branch’s organizational system. It feeds into a broader, increasingly urgent discussion about libraries, where a growing number of patrons, used to Google and Yahoo, simply don’t look for books and information the way they used to. Some are drawing on cues from the Internet in proposals for overhauls of cataloging systems, but others are more hesitant, saying that the Web’s tendency to provide thousands of somewhat-relevant results flies in the face of the carefully tailored research libraries pride themselves on.

And if the Wall Street Journal can end a sentence with a preposition, we know the times are changing, right? I’m quoted a little in the article. I had a nice long chat with the writer — as with the NYT piece — and just a tiny bit of it got quoted which I think confuses a few issues, but hey it links here so I can spell them out now in more detail.

1. The difference between research and looking for information for other purposes. There are much stricter requirements for research — what’s citeable, what’s a good source, what’s authoritative — and a lot of the agitation has been about less-authoritative sites being used more and more not just for people looking up things that interest them, but also for research or attempted research. Is it okay to cite Wikipedia as long as you can prove that you understand that it’s not authoritative? Isn’t there research value to saying that some fact is in Wikipedia, even if it’s not necessarily the same value as that thing being true?
2. The age gap. People not raised with Google are often more okay with their searches being iterative processes that take longer. Some aren’t. Similarly, younger users are often impatient with iterative searching or the very familiar “try these sources and let me know if they’re okay and if not we can fond some others” approach.
3. Google slicing. I was making a point that because Google is so popular, people forget that information can be indexed by different things than Google decides to ndex it under. So, searching for content by filesize, by “most recently added to the catalog”, by date added, these are all things Google could do but doesn’t. The problem is that we are forgetting that there are other ways to determine relevance, or relevance to US.

In any case, I liked the article and it had good quotes from a lot of people, some you will recognize and a few you may not. They end the bit with a good line from Michael Casey “Librarians like to think that we’re indispensable,” he said. “While I think that is true to a point, I don’t think we should continue to propagate the idea that we’re indispensable by keeping a complicated cataloging system.”

Simon Chamberlain’s VALIS blog points to a bunch of responses to the Wall Street Journal piece about what they see as aggressive weeding. He gives two nods to MetaFilter, one for the discussion about the WSJ thread [which I participated in] and one for a related thread in Ask MetaFilter asking when libraries started being so … noisy. One of my favorite things about these discussions is the interactions between librarians and non-librarians in a non-library setting. The other thing I like is that thanks to MetaFilter’s use of the XFN protocol I can link to every library worker I notice in these threads as a “colleague” and then keep track of their posts and comments. Look at all those librarians talking to each other, and to their once and future patrons.