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Somebody recently found my blog by googling “mudville hard words,” which I guess was a blank in a book report. I’m not a big fan of book reports, but it set me to thinking about how for me some words are inexorably linked with the books where I learned them. To me, radiant means shining like a milk-washed pig and curious is how you feel when you’ve just seen a waist-coated time-conscious rabbit.

One I remember particularly well is tedious, which is how Mr. O’Brien describes the chore of chewing through a rope for a field mouse in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I rarely do some tiresome task without thinking about that little mouse gnawing at the rope. For me that is the very definition of the word. I am even encouraged by remembering her diligence.

And so might you be, as you page through Mudville in search of hard words. Let me know if you find any.

Like Chuck said, Mudville is now in paperback. It officially went on sale today! So if you still haven’t read it, or you’ve been meaning to pick up an extra copy for a pal, now’s your chance to pop over to an independent bookstore and pick up a copy. You’ll probably also find it at Barnes & Noble or Borders. And of course you can get it from Amazon.com.

1. In the summer of 2004 I was watching the Little League World Series to get inspiration for my work in progress, which was bout a catcher named Roy and a pitcher named Sturgis Nye. In one game a kid named Sturgeon struck out all but a few batters in a complete game shutout. He was lanky, dark haired, and pitched in the mid 70s, an unthinkable speed for Little League. He practically had my character’s name and was just as I imagined him.

2. In Mamba Point, I imagined I’d made up a character named Roger, a hippie scientist in Monrovia studying snakes. That was before my dad sent me this picture of “Charlie the Snake Man,” whom I’d completely forgotten (and still don’t really remember). Another character in the story, also fond of snakes, is called Charlie.

3. In the first draft of Wake, ME (and, I expect, the final book) there is a woman by the unlikely name of Howard. Without getting too much into it, she’s well connected to a famous writer of horror fiction, and is discreetly named for H.P. Lovecraft, whom looms large in the story (there are both oblique and explicit references to Lovecraft throughout the story.) Today my wife told me about an actual woman named Howard. I had no idea there ever was one, and this one turned out to be so perfect that I’ve been chuckling all day. I’ll leave it unstated to see if any of my commenters want to have a guess the name by which she is better known.

Baseball season is underway and the "Opening Day" issue of the fine literary journal Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review is on newsstands now. Included in this issue is David Shiner's excellent review of The Night Casey Was Born, titled "How Mudville Found America." The Night Casey Was Born, written by John Evangelist Walsh, tells the true story of the great American ballad Casey at the Bat. "A pleasant and informative read," writes Shiner. "The pace is brisk and appealing, and there's enough diamond action to keep fans happy."

Whoa. What are the chances of this happening again?? We set up a poll for you to vote on the guilt or innocence of Evil Ell...I mean, the accused Ellen. You remember that she stood accused of the heinous crime of putting a princess book in the Sacred Shrine of Guyhood (our Boys Read book display). We held a fair and impartial trial in the Cosmic Court of Justice but ended up with a hung jury (which means they couldn't decide), so we put it out there for you to decide. Well, the time was up at 4 pm today. At 3 pm the votes were going against Darth Bill. Then somehow, I don't know how, there were 6 votes in one hour that said the Carlman did it, which made it exactly 11 votes against Darth Bill and 11 votes against the Carlman!!!! What a coincidence!!!! Never in all the eons of the galaxy has the Carlman seen such a coincidence. Now some might say that it was a sith plot to throw suspicion off Darth Bill, but I say it is just an amazing alignment of the stars and planets. That means, of course, that we have another hung jury and we must declare Ellen INNOCENT. There--once again you have an example of the great fairness and justice of BOYS.

Now that we've got that settled, I can tell you about Mudville, the new book by first-time author Kurtis Scaletta. 12-year-Roy McGuire lives in Moundville, loves baseball, but has never played a game in his hometown. Why? Because it's been raining there for the last 22 years!! Yep, 22 years. It all started when Roy's dad was playing for the Moundville team against their old rivals, the Sinister Bend team. Moundville had never won against the other team but, when rain clouds started moving in, Roy's dad saw that they could keep Moundville from losing if he could delay the game until it rained, when the game would be called off. So the rain came, the game was called off--and it kept raining for 22 years!! What would happen if the rain stopped? Could Roy and his friends finish the game his postponed?? You gotta read it to find out!! And the ending--knowing what happens at the end, would YOU do the same thing Roy did? Don't know what I'm talking about? Then you gotta read to find out!!

BTW, Mr. Scaletta is writing more books. Read an interview with him here. I'm glad Mudville won't be his last book!

I'm off until Monday. I've got The Sword Thief, the latest 39 Clues with me, plus The City of Ember, and James and the Giant Peach. PLUS--the ACC basketball tournament is on TV. Carolina plays at noon tomorrow and Florida State at 2. Ahhh---good books, ACC basketball with chips and salsa!! This will be a good weekend!!

Carl

Sung to the tune of a Rodgers & Hammerstein tune: The author and the rock star should be friends! Oh, the author and the rock star should be friends! One person likes to tell a tale; the other likes to dance and wail, But that's no reason that they can't be friends! I wrote up a bit about the songlist for Mudville for the book notes series at Large Hearted Boy, where authors… (Read More)

If you plan on giving a friend or loved one Mudville for Christmas or Hanukkah, a December birthday, New Years Day, Festivus, or anything else…. Just let me know. While supplies last, and within the U.S. only, I will send you a personalized bookplate so you can fancy up the book. Just use the contact me form to let me know who is receiving the book and where I should mail the bookplate.

Here’s an actual blog round up, which I haven’t done in a while, but there was a minor flurry of activity last week.

I visited the St. Michael, Minnesota middle school last week and met a bunch of cool kids and a very cool teacher, Jill Foltz, who blogged about it better than I could. As usual I appreciated the kids telling me about what they like to do, and what they like to read. One thing I noticed is that easily half the kids, maybe more, were carrying recreational reads… from my buddy Carrie’s zombie apocalypse novel, to a baseball novel I’ve read, um, once or twice.

But Bertie is more of a star this week, outshining me in this interview by Sharon, and also appearing on the Friskies blog (you have to download the PDF newsletter at that URL to see a picture he took).

Mudville the paperback will be released in four weeks. In many regards the paperback is exactly like the hardcover, with some important exceptions.

1. It’s smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more supple.
2. It’s got great review quotes slapped all over it.
3. It’s got a picture of a horse (the Yearling logo) instead of a picture of a dog (the Knopf logo).

I love the dog, but I love the horse too. I have good associations with paperbacks bearing the little horse logo. The little horse was on a lot of my favorite books, from Encyclopedia Brown when I was in first grade to Where the Red Fern Grows in sixth grade, and who knows how many in between. I love that little horse.

I preferred paperbacks as a kid because they were easier to read, easier to stuff into a hip pocket and tote somewhere, and cheap enough that I could buy one once in a while with my allowance. I’d walk a few blocks to a little store on North Fifth Street and pick up some life-changing treasure like The Pigman for maybe sixty cents. To be honest, I think some of the books piled up on the teen table had been sitting there a while so were sitting with the prices of ten years ago. There was a coke machine in that store that sold only bottled coke for a dime a pop (so to speak), so maybe the whole bookstore was in a time warp.

Anyway, paperbacks are inexpensive but awesome things to give someone, so I’m going to hand off a paperback of Mudville to somebody. Here’s the catch: I’m going to pick up a cue from Shaun Hutchinson and give it to a kid. So if you know a boy or girl who might like Mudville, let me know in the comments, and in a few weeks I’ll pick one commenter at random and send off a book with an inscription  to you or directly to the kid. Just make sure you use a valid email address when you leave your comment so I contact you if you win. 

 And you might want to take Shaun up on his suggestion to give a kid a book, too — especially a kid who might not read that much, otherwise, but would if you walked up out of the blue and handed that kid a book. That’s a great value for the cost of a paperback.

When Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise awareness about man-made climate change, his acceptance speech featured a new word, or rather a new sense of an old word, that Oxford lexicographers have been watching closely: carbon, in the sense of “carbon dioxide or other gaseous carbon compounds released into the atmosphere.” As I wrote back in July, this extended sense of carbon can be found in all sorts of novel lexical compounds: carbon-neutral (2006 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year), carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon trading, and so forth. In his speech, Gore introduced another compound into the mix: carbon summer.
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