How to use this Page

     OMG - are you on facebook? Well, they have a new language option you have GOT to see to believe.
     Go to your facebook page and scroll to the very bottom. On the left you'll see the link "English (US)" - click it. Lots of language options will come up... including "English (Pirate)." OMG. Choose that!
     Suddenly your "friends" will be "Me Hearties." Your "Mail" will become "Bottle o' Messages." And your "wall" will say "What be troublin' ye?"
     It's HILARIOUS!!! You gotta try it out!

Lately the kids have been doing so many cool things, and I'm not getting it posted in the blog. I'm going to lose track of the progress they make if I don't document it, and that will make me so sad later.

Mother's Day 2009


Today we went up to Kid City, which is free the 3rd Thursday of the month between 5 and 7. We didn't make it there till 6:30. But the kids had a BLAST.

Wandering into one space, sort of made up to be a fortune teller's room: silver ball, dark, mirrors at all different angles on the wall. Noodle says, unprompted, "That's Fan-cy!" I've no idea how she knew it was the right phrase to apply. Her favorite phrase lately is, "That's si-ee-y!" (silly)

Verbally, I think she's wildly precocious. She used the word 'tangled' the other day to describe a pretzel. Today she used the word 'gobbled' correctly. (That's assuming I understood her, which I think I did.) She uses 'I' and 'me' and 'you' often and in reference to the appropriate person. She also uses the third person to refer to herself ("Baby do it!") and other people ("Mommy help?"), but for a 2 year old, she's way ahead of the game. I'm blown away by her long sentences sometimes. Today's masterpiece: "Q's balloon way way up there."

The verbal competence seems to help a lot with her cooperation. We can get her to tell us most of what she needs, and we try to insist on this instead of whining/crying. We understand most of what she says...

Last night she was crying late at night. I went in and asked what she needed/what was wrong. She usually needs her pacifier, but she actually had it for once. She kept repeating something that sounded close to her "pass-i-fy-er" but not quite.

This morning I finally figured it out. She wanted her pirate shirt.

Q performed in his first concert last weekend. I was really looking forward to him singing. The kids were going to sing, then kazoo, then sing. Unfortunately, the kids had never met the kazoos before, and they were so exciting that some children, including Q, forgot about the singing part and kazoo-ed all three verses.

Coming home, Q asked me if I ever wanted to play an instrument. I told him I took piano lessons when I was little. Then I asked if he wanted to play an instrument. He repeated his musical desire, "I think I want to play the French horn." I don't think I had the foggiest idea what a French horn was when I was 5...

Saturday was busy. In addition to the concert and a birthday party (source of the beautiful face painting), we had the start of some serious septic problems. Which were finally resolved Tuesday with the kind assistance of a helpful and adorable excavator:


Q, of course, was thrilled by the septic guys. He and J hung around while they did the exploratory digging to determine the problem, whispering to J that he'd like to get closer to the actual tools, repeating and summarizing how the plumbing and septic system work. Earlier in the week, he'd helped the plumber at Grandma's house find a leak, trekking up and down stairs following Joe (seriously, he's named Joe) and asking questions. Joe offered him a job at the end of the day. His face lit up with pride.

Stephany Aulenback and Pasha Malla are two extremely talented writers I met years ago, when the literary Internet seemed smaller, after finding and enjoying their work online. Now Pasha’s The Withdrawal Method, a story collection highly acclaimed in Canada, is out in the States.

Below Steph (who posts an occasional Babies in Literature series at her site) admires Pasha’s depictions of children and childhood in fiction and asks him some questions. Pasha, being Pasha, asks some back. The conversation ends up being one of the best I’ve read on the subject.

At the end is a bonus video of the author reading from a poetry anthology he wrote in the 8th grade.

Pasha Malla does not write about generic children. His child characters are very vivid, very fleshy and real, if you will, and very different from one another. In some ways they are more vivid and individual than his adult characters, even when they make only fleeting appearances. In “The Past Composed,” a story mostly about the adult narrator, there is a very memorable secondary child character who is described as looking like “a mini-Richard Nixon.” There’s another very memorable secondary child character, Trish, in “Long Short, Short Long”:

Miss wasn’t really marking. Sort of, but more she was waiting to look up sharply and order some loud kid: “Out!” She hoped it was Trish. Trish in those stirrup pants like an acrobat, prissy, too eager with her head of perfect blonde curls and private voice training and hand shooting up fluttering to correct Miss on something Trish had learned at the Conserva-tree (like the Queen, she said it). “Miss, Miss!” and then, “Actually…” Doing harmonies when the class sung “Happy Birthday” even.

And when his children are the main characters, well, they are, in my opinion, his most memorable characters.

He places them in extremely truthful situations — it’s as if he remembers how dark, disturbing, and confusing being a child is. “Big City Girls,” for instance, features seven-year-old Alex, his older sister Ginny, and several of her fifth grader girl friends acting out rape scenarios (using Alex as the rapist) on a snow day from school. There’s a lot of that in these stories, actually — children acting out on each other adult behaviours, sex and violence for instance, that they don’t quite understand:

After a minute or so came the whisper of socks along the hall’s parquet. Alex waited, waited, and just as the footsteps neared the closet he swung the door open and pounced and grabbed the girl standing there and hauled her back into the closet, slamming the door behind him.

Alex was on top of the girl. He held his hook [ed: a toy plastic pirate hook] to her throat.

Can you be Jordan Knight when you rape me? said Heather’s voice in the dark.

Okay, what do I say?

Just be slow and nice, she said.

Okay, said Alex. Okay.

This kind of thing is common behavior for kids, of course, but it’s usually done in a very secretive way, and it’s the kind of thing that adults prefer not to see and not to remember. In the story “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out,” this taking on of an adult role happens in a different way — a fifth grade girl whose mother has died of breast cancer tries to act as a mother figure for her “slow” little brother. The strain of it all seems to be causing her to develop obsessive compulsive tendencies. This story is written in the first person, from the little girl’s perspective, and her voice is beautifully captured, something that is very difficult to do. In “Big City Girls” and “Long Short, Short Long,” Pasha uses a childlike close third person, and this works very well, too.

Yet while Pasha is relentlessly unsentimental in his treatment of childhood, he’s also hugely, hugely empathetic. When a child character behaves badly — as does Bogdan, a fourth grade immigrant from Bosnia who is both bullied and bullies — there is no blaming distance from the author, the way there often is when an adult character behaves badly. Instead, the character and the story are so carefully built that the reader, while certainly disturbed, also feels compassion and understanding –- I should note, here, that Pasha taught elementary school for at least a year or two.
 
 

Some people seem to maintain a connection to childhood, and others simply don’t. There are some writers whose work, whether or not they are actually writing about children, seems somehow childlike in the best possible way — I think it has something to do with the freshness of their vision and also with a refusal to try to be sophisticated, with language, with plot, with ideas, simply for the sake of sophistication. And yet their work often turns out to be more imaginative, more nuanced, more risky and therefore, in these ways, more truly sophisticated, more truly new, than the work of writers whose work you would never describe as childlike.

I don’t think retaining a connection to childhood and having a “childlike” quality are necessarily linked. In Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Robert Irwin comes across as curious, relentlessly inquisitive, easily delighted by simple things (like a good Diet Coke) — all characteristics I think we’d associate with some ideal of a “childlike sense of wonder.” But, despite being able to recall entire days from high school, Irwin claims to have no memories of his childhood. None. And it’s not because he’s repressing anything either; apparently he was a pretty happy kid.

Maybe part of it is that associating any particular characteristic with children is false; it seems to assume that kids are a homogeneous species. If someone has a “childlike quality,” it’s generally meant to insinuate a sort of wide-eyed innocence in the way, say, William Blake wrote about kids — 250 years ago. It’s one of the big mistakes we make in thinking about childhood: we’ve idealized one aspect of it, which is limiting. Being a kid is much more emotionally complex than that.
 

Well, I agree and I disagree. I think you can assign a few, a very few, qualities to children in general. But great fiction doesn’t come out of generalizations, does it? So yeah, I do agree that every child is as different from every other child as every adult is different from every other adult. And it’s clear from the variety of kids in your work that you recognize this. I started to count up all the children in the thirteen stories that make up your book — there are a lot of them, and they are very different from each other. Why are you so committed to writing accurately, truthfully, about children in your work?

Well, there’s just so much going on when you’re young, and kids feel everything so deeply — mainly because, I think, their understanding of time is so different from ours. If there’s one major difference between adults and kids it’s that as we age it becomes increasingly difficult to live in the present: we’re either working our way through the past or thinking about the future, how our decisions and actions now will either reflect upon things that have already happened or things that are still to come. (In Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk there’s an amazing essay, “Aces and Eights” about exactly this.) With kids — and this is one generalization I feel pretty comfortable in making — there’s only now. Think about how, when you’re young, you can fall in and out of hopeless, desperate, gut-wrenching love in the span of a week.

There’s this fantastic, perfect story of Graham Greene’s, “The Innocents,” which is maybe the best thing about first love I’ve ever read. Check this out; the kids he’s writing about are 8 years-old: “I remembered the small girl as well as one remembers anyone without a photograph to refer to… I remembered all the games of blind-man’s bluff at birthday parties when I vainly hoped to catch her, so that I might have the excuse to touch and hold her, but I never caught her; she always kept out of my way… I loved her with an intensity I have never felt since, I believe, for anyone.”

And that to me is why I want to write about kids: if “childlike” means anything to me, it’s a heightened state of experience, whether that manifests in joy or fear or happiness or shame or whatever. This is why childhood makes such amazingly fertile ground for fiction. And I think I’m still close enough to it and have decent and vivid enough memories of being a kid that I can do a decent job of writing about it – or I try to, anyway!
 

That really resonates, that you tend to feel things more deeply and more fully when you’re only there, in the present, and not projecting yourself into the past or the future by worrying about it. Except maybe the emotion of fear, actually, which is often requires a projection of the self in time. And kids do seem to feel a lot of fear. I know I did. And I’ve noticed it in my own little boy, Luke. What is fear but a kind of anticipation? So while I generally agree with the notion, I think it might be too simple to say that for kids there’s only now.

But here’s another thing about being a kid that’s rather at odds with his or her experience of the passage of time as slow – kids change more, and more rapidly, than adults do. I mean, you can feel pretty certain that a two-year-old experiences only the now – but eight years later, when the two-year-old is ten, that’s no longer as true. There’s such a distance travelled in those eight years in pretty much every way. Whereas I feel as if I’m pretty much the same person, with the same perceptions, I was eight years ago. So there’s this weird juxtaposition of slow time with rapid change.

Right, and in that tension is a world of possibilities for any writer who’s willing to think about it. What I’m wondering, though, is how writing for kids differs from writing about kids?
 

Wow, that’s a difficult question and I think you’re in a much better position to answer it than I am. Aren’t you working on a novel for adults right now and also on something for children? What do you think?

The YA book is on hold for now — and, with that said, Brian Doyle, a great writer of books for young people, told me this: never say you’re writing a YA book; let readers decide who the audience is. It’s good advice.

I think in fiction for adults about childhood there’s always this shared nostalgia that the author is trying to tap into; the stories are told from an adult perspective, with an adult’s knowledge and experience. That results in dramatic irony, which, even if not made explicit in the text, can create realizations that are shared between writer and reader about childhood or how the kids in the book are experiencing the world — I guess a subtle sort of winking over the heads of the kids. That sounds exploitive, but I think the best books about childhood are the ones where this is least obvious, where the reader is swept up into the children’s world and forced to keep up. Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is one (albeit horrifying) example of this.

I don’t really know what writing for kids is like, since I’ve done so little, but I’ve been thinking lately how unimportant the details and logic of narrative were to me when I was young. When I rewatched Star Wars as an adult, for example, I was completely astounded to discover that the movie had a plot — even though I could remember exactly what happened in every scene, and even entire passages of dialogue. And think about popular kids’ books like Goodnight Moon and even Where the Wild Things Are — so often the story, if there is one, is peripheral to mood, tone, imagery, and feeling. Those seem to be the things that attract and stay with kids about a book, far above what actually happens.

Has having a kid changed your experience as a reader and writer?
 

For the first seven months or so, Luke didn’t sleep. He cried around the clock and fed constantly. So initially, in my case, having a kid meant I didn’t have one spare minute to read or write. After that horrible time passed, I started reading again — like a starving woman. Writing didn’t start to happen again until Luke turned three, really, and then, soon after, I got pregnant again.

I must say that I am much more drawn to depictions of both motherhood and childhood in literature now and that I am much more sensitive to the tragic/traumatic, particularly if the trauma or tragedy has something to do with childhood. I’m absolutely blown away if it’s done well and I’m much more disgusted if it’s done poorly — for example, if I think it’s done to be sensationalistic. I guess I’m more emotional as a reader.

What are some books you’ve read that depict childhood honestly and truthfully?
 

Last year I started trying to compile a list of books that remind the adult reader what it’s like to be a child, classics not of childhood but about childhood. Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows was the book that started me thinking about that. And I’ve always loved A High Wind in Jamaica, a book that is certainly not for children but beautifully evokes childhood for the adult reader. How about you?

I love “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” but that’s a story, and more about teenagers. I think Robert Cormier is one YA (sorry, Brian Doyle!) author with an unbelievably astute sense of what being young is all about. I reread The Chocolate War, a book I loved when I was younger, recently; it totally held up. The Butcher Boy, as I said, is another amazing portrayal of a certain type of youth, and so is Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero, although it’s completely different. The first section of Portrait of the Artist is pretty amazing in how it uses language to capture childhood experience – and then there’s Joyce’s story “Araby,” which does the same thing without so much linguistic experimentation.

Lastly, back to thinking about people as children: I find child stars the most difficult people to think of as kids – or at least normal kids who might have been students at the school where I used to teach. There’s this weird performance of childhood that goes with that territory, I think, and it feels so false – they’re like these odd little reversed Victorian versions of kids, like adults playing kids.

Which makes me think, somewhat digressively, about aging in the public eye. Those 7-Up films are interesting for that, and I know a few of the participants have dropped out because as adults they’ve found the experience too invasive. It must be impossible to be yourself when your childhood is so easily accessible: millions of people want to see Drew Barrymore at 9 years old, they rent ET. I wonder if instead of feeling robbed of your childhood, as people seem to say of child stars, this fabricated version of your childhood feels inescapable. It’s not so much that they didn’t have a childhood, but that they had one created for them.
 

I agree about the child stars – you’ve put your finger on it exactly. They’re just like adults playing children. I love those 7-Up films with a passion but I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be in one or have one of my children as the subject of one. The directors have done a terrific job of imposing a narrative structure on the lives of each of the children — but that’s the kicker. I think a proper narrative structure can only ever be imposed on a real life — real lives are too complicated, inexplicable, messy to be pressed tidily into a story — and I feel it’s up to the individual to decide on his or her own narrative structure. There’s something that feels a little dangerous, a little wounding, when it comes from outside.

I feel like I’m heading into the direction of pseudo-psychology here, and I don’t really know much about psychology. But your dad’s a psychiatrist, isn’t he? Does he talk about his work with you and do you discuss yours with him? Has he, or his field, influenced your fiction? How about your mother?

My folks are great readers (and writers — they’ve both been threatening to write books for years), but I think if I inherited anything from what they do professionally it’s a sense of inquiry and a deep, abiding interest in people. Both my mom and dad are also very excited about discovering new things, and — to return the conversation to childhood a bit — that was something instilled in me from the time I was very young. So I guess all that’s mirrored in my fiction, or I hope so, anyway.
 

Whew, that's a long-ass title for today's Women Who Rock Wednesday! I'll explain that in a minute, but first thing's first. Last week's winner and recipient of Danielle Joseph's Shrinking Violet is Angel from MySpace! Angel please send your address to stephanie at stephaniekuehnert dot com and I'll pass it along to Danielle and get you your book!

One month after his rescue, the ship captain kidnapped by Somali pirates and saved by Navy snipers has almost landed a book deal.

According to Publishers Weekly, Captain Richard Phillips (pictured via) has garnered offers of $500,000 for his story. The book auction began last week, and his "life rights" are being represented by CAA. GalleyCat also wonders if Phillips' chief engineer, Michael Perry, will also write his dramatic story.

Here's more from the article: "Since 'hero' airline pilot Capt. Chesley Sullenberger landed over $3 million from Morrow for his story, it wouldn't be shocking if Phillips walks away with over $1 million." (Via Book Bench)

Hi Everyone! It's been a busy couple of months. I think that at the end of June I will post a photo showing all of the paintings I have created since April 1! I've been averaging about 15 paintings per month. Whoo! Anyway, I took a short break this past weekend to participate in my local library's children's book festival. We had many Indiana authors and illustrators involved. We each got a table from which to sell our books, and several of us also did programs for the kids. For most of the day, I sate next to Jeff Stone, author of the "Five Anscestors" series. It was great to be able to talk to such a successful author about his experiences. Plus, I think I got some extra traffic to my table just from all of the kids lined up to meet Jeff!
Later in the day I gave a "Create a Masterpiece" program, wherein the kids learned how to draw Pete and Vicky from the "Pirate School" series. I was surprised by how many kids participated (I had practically a whole classroom full!). The children were great! They were very engaged, and asked questions that just cracked me up. One little boy was particularly interested in Pete's feet (we were just drawing heads, and the boy was VERY concerned about Pete's apparent inability to walk!). Another girl had commentary about the tooth fairy, and whether or not she makes rounds to pirate ships to collect pirate kids' teeth. It was awesome! One thing I did differently with this drawing program as opposed to those I Have done in the past is that I created coloring book sheets. In the past, I noticed that some of the youngest children struggled to follow along with the drawing demonstration, and sadly became frustrated. This time, I gave everyone coloring pages in addition to white drawing paper. This way, even the youngest attendees were able to create art that they were proud of during the lesson. It was great to see all of the kids have a great time!
Well, everyone, I'm heading back to the drawing board! I just have 2 more paintings to do for my "Reuben Wells" picturebook, and have to scan some finished art.

Guess the Plot

Hound in Blood and Black

1. When 5th grader Sindy Snowden arrives for her second day at school everything is really freaky. She soon realizes that's because her teacher opened a portal to a cartoon world and was replaced by Huckleberry Hound.

2. Louie is the last werehound in Nashville. He spends most of his time listening to old Elvis tunes, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, brooding over the past. Except, of course, when the moon shines and he goes crazy chasing cats and rabbits. Which is exactly how he meets Elvira, Queen of the Night, a washed-up harlot with a kind heart, who thinks he has a future in show business.

3. Thirteen year old Gwendar has made a terrible mistake; he has insulted the dreaded High King Dreadmost. Dreadmost casts Gwendar into the royal kennel for punishment. There, Gwendar must fight amongst the hounds for his very survival. But Gwendar does more than survive, he rises to become leader of the pack.

4. Her nickname: Hound. Her occupation: zombie poacher. But on this futuristic Earth, zombies aren't killed; they're captured and pitted against each other in gladiatorial combat. When Hound gets bitten by a zombie, will she lose her humanity and be forced to fight other zombies for the entertainment of the rabble?

5. The Hound of the Baskervilles is not dead, merely in hiding. It's going to take all the wits of Dr. Watson's ten-year old descendant, Emma, to deal with this one - and where's Holmes when you really need him? Reincarnated as a rabbit! How is he going to survive this time?

6. When reporter Vali Thorres finds artist Luke Klaus's most vocal critic with his throat ripped out, he follows the blood to one of Klaus's paintings. Before he can call the police, both trail and body vanish. Thorres must find a way to restore Klaus's soul before the creatures he bargained with are unleashed.


Original Version

Dear Agent,

Kumari is a wrangler; a poacher [a puppet, a pirate, a poet,] and a gambler who catches zombies and fights them against one another as gladiators. All she wanted to do was live and die without becoming a monster. [As the rest of the query is in present tense, that sentence may as well be, too.] In a broken Earth populated by undead, slavers, drought and greed, this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Kumari’s simple life changes from one of survival to something much more complicated [Can a life centered around capturing zombies and pitting them against other zombies in the arena really be called "simple"?] when she wins a girl in a risky gamble – a child-slave desperate to find something to live for in the world Kumari has forsaken – [What is the world Kumari has forsaken?] and is forced to kill her closet friend when he is bitten by an undead. [This wouldn't have happened if her friend had come out of the closet.] When running to a new city in hopes of escaping her pain causes more problems than it solves, Kumari faces the loss of the only thing worth living for when she is infected by a zombie bite: her humanity.

HOUND IN BLOOD AND BLACK, complete at approximately 100,000 words, is science fiction/horror. Kumari’s story explores a new kind of future where existing isn’t just about running from and killing zombies [like it is in most other books about the future], but fighting them against each other in gladiatorial combat – the only way left for mankind to prove to themselves that they aren’t the real monsters.

In January 2009, my short story Savage was published in Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror by Permuted Press. Recently, Savage was republished in the April 2009 issue of the Apex online magazine. [Now I've expanded it into this novel in hopes of milking it for yet another paycheck.]

Thank you for your consideration,

Author's note (not part of query): The title comes from the following: Kumari's nickname is Hound, black marks are the highest ranking matches for a wrangler to participate in, and the blood refers to how the zombies are prepped for combat (coated in human blood to make them fight each other). [Coated in whose human blood?] When Kumari becomes a gladiator herself, and fights the zombies in the pit, she's no exception. So Hound in Blood and Black refers to Kumari when she fights under black marks, painted in blood.


Notes

There's too much about the world and not enough about the story. No need to tell us it's a world in which zombies fight as gladiators in both the first and third paragraphs. Instead, give us more about the child-slave, who I assume is a major player.

When it takes almost as many words to explain your title as it does to summarize your plot, it's time to find a simpler title.

If the hound in the title is your main character, you might want to refer to her as "Hound" at least once in the query. Of course this action won't be necessary when you change the title to Zombie Gladiators of Lorkha Tau.

On the other hand, you will have to change your setting to Lorkha Tau.

Everyone knows vampire bites turn you into a vampire and zombies eat your brains. This is like writing a book in which sharks solve crimes and detectives eat surfers.

Do zombie fights take place in a coliseum, with wranglers just providing the zombies, or is it more like cockfighting, where the wrangler brings her zombie to some pit in the boondocks where people gamble on fights?

Do zombie gladiators need swords? Can't they just plod around waiting for their opponents' limbs to fall off?

A charitable opportunity I’ve donated a signed copy of Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells plus a critique of the first 50 pages of a novel to Brenda Novak's On-line Auction for Diabetes Research. The page is here. Look around, there are many writerly things to bid on. 

Free critiques & conversations with proof of purchase of my book-- a free critique of some pages or a phone conference about writing. Details are on my web site—the free stuff button in the section on Flogging the Quill. I hope you’ll check it out. To order it from Amazon, go here.

Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.

What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below.

Some homework. Before sending your novel's opening, you might want to read these two FtQ posts: Story as River and Kitty-cats in Action. That'll tell you where I'm coming from, and might prompt a little rethinking of your narrative.

A tangency is a point of contact between one shape and another so that they just touch without overlapping. A tangency can also happen when a shape touches the frame of the composition.

This picture by Howard Pyle is full of tangencies:
1. The pirate’s hat with the top of the picture
2. The ship with the shore
3. The chin of the far pirate with the dark hillock
4. The tip of the sash with the head of the digger
5. The tip of the shovel with the frame
6. The head of the kneeling man with the digger’s elbow
7. And the stock of the rifle with the man’s head.

Tangencies cancel out the illusion of depth. They reinforce the flatness of a picture. They’re often regarded as a common beginner’s mistake.

So why did Pyle use them? He was a master of composition and he usually knew exactly what he was doing. The idea of deliberately flattening a picture was very much in vogue at the time Pyle did this picture. His pen and ink works were influenced by Walter Crane and Aubrey Beardsley’s decorative approach to line. Pyle must have wanted the piece to be flat like a playing card.

Do the tangencies help this particular picture? As much as I admire Pyle, in my opinion, they don’t here. They call attention to themselves and get in the way of the larger ideas of story, characters, or mood.

This week in the publishing.

Not as many links this week! We can savor the few we have. Ahhh....

First off, there's an ongoing charity auction benefiting author Bridget Zinn, who at just 31 was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Please check that out and bid if you can.

In friend-of-the-blog news, a major congratulations is in order to Aprilynne Pike, whose debut novel, WINGS, landed at #6 on the NY Times bestseller list! Congratulations, Aprilynne!

And in other friend-of-the-blog news, have you ever wanted to see your name in the acknowledgments section of a book? Check out Anne & May's new contest, and you too could see your name in print.

The New York Times recently published and article about growing e-book piracy concerns in the new Kindle/Sony Reader era. Kassia Krozser at Booksquare was not impressed.

Meanwhile, the French unsurrendered their fight against Internet piracy and passed a law that cuts off Internet access to people who repeatedly pirate copyrighted material, and creates a government agnecy to enforce the rule. Tres interessant.

Sarah Palin got a book deal. No word on the advance, but I'm guessing it could buy a whole lot of moose meat.

My awesome client Jennifer Hubbard recently posited a really fascinating question about children's book writing. Click over to see what it is.

And finally, in case you need proof that I have strange interests, behold this engrossing video that models all of the world's plane flights in twenty four hours.

Have a great weekend! See some of you in Washington!

The following comes from Terese Svoboda, the author of ten books of prose and poetry. Forthcoming this fall is her fifth collection of poetry, Weapons Grade, and the reissue of Trailer Girl and Other Stories.  In 2010, Dzanc Books will publish her novel, Pirate Talk. 

Somewhere under How to Pay for College Without Going Broke hides my copy of Maile Meloy’s Half in Love. I read it last summer with great awe. I remember Meloy’s having been published in the New Yorker, named a Granta Young Novelist, and won the Paris Review Agha Khan Prize, but I put all that aside and thoroughly enjoyed her concision, her expert exploration of character, her authority. Okay, so her plots are old fashioned but her understatement “never becomes mired in minimalist obscurity” as one critic put it. She has Penelope Fitzgerald’s acuity. I’m not going to tell you what the book’s about however, when it’s the writing that so excites me. She’s also published two novels and Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, a new story collection, is coming out in July from Riverhead.

The other collection I admire, The Man Back There and Other Stories was written by David Crouse. It won the 2007 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande. Crouse won the Flannery O’Connor Award a couple of years earlier. Of course the stories are beautifully written, but it’s his style of epiphany that really impressed me—once he’s built the world, you’re caught and it’s over, a kind of encircling rather than the chugging forward of narrative. I was also impressed by how self-aware his protagonists are. Myself, I blunder forward, surprised by any revelation. He also writes comic books, which certainly can’t hurt the development of story.

This fall, my own Trailer Girl and Other Stories is being reissued in paper by Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press.  The New York Times said "Trailer Girl has the surreal poetry of a nightmare. ... Svoboda has written a book of genuine grace and beauty,” and Vanity Fair wrote: “Unnerve thyself: the violent and enthralling short stories in Trailer Girl detonate on contact.” So if you’re in the mood for a nightmare or even some genuine-grace-with-detonation, it will be available in October.

Yay New York Times, you have discovered book piracy! And it is everything your dreamed and more. Oh and look: it’s authors who have never authorized their books for the digital marketplace who are being pirated.

Piracy has been a fact of our lives for as long as we’ve had marketplaces.

The NYT starts with a wide-eyed description of author Ursula Le Guin discovering a digital copy of her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness on Scribd.com. To date, there is no legal electronic version of this book. I’m surprised by the lack of analytical thought accompanying this revelation. If the posting and accessing of books on pirate sites (Scribd is not a pirate site, though people misuse the service) tells us anything, it’s that there is consumer demand for books that aren’t available digitally.

So do you respond by wringing your hands or by meeting this demand?

That was a rhetorical question.

Research shows that piracy exists but isn’t conclusive on the negative impacts. There is some evidence of increased sales, increased awareness. Just because a consumer accesses an illegal digital copy, it doesn’t mean it’s a lost sale. It could be a supplemental sale (a digital version to complement an already purchased physical book), it could be a new reader sampling an author, or, yes, it could be someone sticking it to the man by going for the pirated version, viruses be damned!

This is something publishers — like the music companies and motion picture studios before them — need to address honestly.

Publishers will need to be vigilant in the pirate world. They will need to develop and utilize tools that protect their copyrights. At the same time, now more than ever, publishers must also engage in practices that reach readers where they live. It’s going to be a delicate balance, one that will never work as long as publishers continue to view digital books as “cannibalizing” print.

There is strong evidence (Exhibit A: iTunes) that consumers are happy to pay for digital product…as long as certain conditions are met: price, selection, and convenience. The book world, in some ways, is managing to fail on these three things. Yesterday, Dan Gillmor talked about Kindle price hikes and how he wasn’t going to play along (aka voting with his dollars). Prices are a huge topic of discussion among consumers and they have done an excellent job of articulating their position.

Publishers? Not so much. Or maybe that’s “not at all”.

If you follow digital topics on Twitter (and you should!), you’ll hear endless complaints about staggered releases — how does it serve the consumer to hold back the digital release of a book? How does it serve the author and publisher to create a vacuum in the marketplace that a pirated book can fill? Guess what? These customers are not going to shrug and say, “Guess I’ll just go ahead and the print version”. No, they’re going to wait for the digital book if it’s a book they must have. Or they’re going to buy something else.

You’ll discover total frustration surrounding purchases. Anger over DRM. You want to hear screams and curses? Listen to the reader who can’t read the book she purchased because the Adobe Digital Editions authentication server is down. Spend some time with a reader who, due to extreme confusion, bought the wrong format of a book and has to deal with the bureaucracy of rectifying an error that shouldn’t have to happen.

Piracy is and has been a fact of our lives for as long as we’ve created marketplaces. Books are as subject to thievery as any other product. Same thing, different realm. How you deal with piracy is changing, even as it stays the same (physical piracy still exists). It’s going to be an ongoing battle for the entertainment industries, but unlike your predecessors, book publishers have the chance to get so much right while the market is young.

Right now, more than ever, it’s time to listen to your customers.

(Didn’t the NYT write this same story years ago?)

I was reading this article on the NY Times about book pirating. Seems like there is an increase of people posting digital books on the web for free—sort of like Napster did with MP3’s. I didn’t realize that this be could be an issue since books are such a different format from music. But technology is making it easier:

Now, with publishers producing more digital editions, it is potentially easier for hackers to copy files. And the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon or the Reader from Sony make it easier to read in digital form. Many of the unauthorized editions are uploaded as PDFs, which can be easily e-mailed to a Kindle or the Sony device.

Some authors like Ursula K. Le Guin are pissed with good reason, while authors like Stephen King don’t think it’s worth the effort to track down the pirates. Then, you have other authors like Cory Doctorow who don’t seem to mind or even cater to free digital access. Her offered his latest young adult novel Little Brother as a free electronic version on the same day it was published in hardcover.

Hmm…I don’t know. I remember when all that Napster stuff went down and the music industry went all Supreme Court because it was hurting sales. Not sure if this could possibly go the same way.

Personally, I do still like to actually hold a book in my hands. So I’m not sure if I would be interested in a pirate digital book. I have lots of friends who adore their Kindles and so if digital books are the wave of the future—then more hackers may start posting these online editions for free.

But I can see how authors would get pissed that they’re not getting paid for their work and the copyright infringement isn’t cool either.

You can check out the NY Times article here.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Recently Daphne and I read The Peril on the Sea, which is coming out later this month. A high-seas historical adventure set during the English battle with the Spanish Armada in 1588, this book has romance, pirates, and quite a few chuckles. So we were pleased as peaches when author Michael Cadnum (a National Book Award finalist, woot!) agreed to stop by for an interview.

Lisa: I have long been afraid of writing historical fiction, because it seems like so much work and there are so many details to get wrong! But you pull it off with a seamless flair. Do you have any tips for authors wanting to dip their toes in historical waters? And how on earth do you do your research?

Michael: The essential principle in writing a novel is: live in the world of your characters. When my characters take a drink, I taste that sleeping potion, or that bitter medicine, or that honeyed wine--I almost absolutely experience the flavor as I write. When Sherwin nearly drowns at the beginning of the novel, I know how he feels, struggling to survive. And I feel the chill in his body, and his wonderment at being alive. This is why I stress that I don’t write for an audience. I write through my characters and their experiences. It is like being alive many times over—an intensely rewarding and deeply challenging experience.

As for research: I have been interested in the high seas, and knights and sword fighting since I was a child. When I embark on a book like The King's Arrow or Peril on the Sea it is more a question of what to leave out rather than what to put in.

Lisa: What parallels do you see between the long-ago setting of Peril on the Sea and the world we currently inhabit, particularly in regard to the wars we’re each fighting? Did you specifically set out to create these allusions, or did that all arrive more organically?

Michael: I’m concerned that some people today feel empowered to kill human beings in the name of religion. This was a problem during the Crusades, it was a problem during the Elizabethan era, and the problem continues. This was not a motivating force behind my writing—my love for my characters and my zest for adventure were foremost. Even so, this issue was often on my mind.

Daphne: You also write contemporary fiction. How are the processes different for each type of project, and what are the unique challenges of each?

Michael: Try thinking of historical fiction as stories about a future that you can visit. You can look at tailors' books of clothing, and practice fencing and read love letters from the absent era. As though the future endowed us with artifacts! Similarly, think of a contemporary novel as being about the very near future—the events have not yet happened, but can. In this way, all writing is about an imaginative future—one with secrets that you can discovery.

Daphne: Sometimes male authors write clunky female characters but Katharine was spot on. How do you get yourself into the mindset of a girl, especially one living back in time?

Michael: I love to pour my awareness into the vessels of various shapes—young. old, historical, contemporary, male and female. People are shockingly different from each other, and sometimes my compassion falters, but that is all in the adventure of writing. For me, one of the most challenging characters in Peril on the Sea was the salty, crusty mariner Tryce. His manner and voice struck me as so crotchety and foreign that I could not perceive him. And then one day he began to amble and talk, almost exactly as though a drawing took on animation, and walked right off the page. By the time Tryce suffers his violent misfortune, I felt that I knew him well, and I hoped—and continue to hope—that he fully recovers from his injuries.

Lisa: So do you think of writing characters who are very dissimilar to you in the same way you think about writing about places you’ve never been to—that it’s all a matter of a writer’s imagination? Do you think there are any stories a particular writer could never write, based on his experience, or lack thereof?

Michael: We live in an era when people are all working hard to sound like everybody else, and use the same speech patterns and the same vocabulary in text messages, email and conversation. But the fact is that people are very dissimilar from each other--we try to be alike, and we almost succeed. But our inner self, our real, true voice, is very often unique. This means that a writer has to have faith in his talent and his compassion, and go ahead and take up any subject that seems alive.

Daphne: My favorite character was probably Captain Fletcher, the pirate with the deep-set morals. Where did he come from? Is he based on a real historical figure?

Michael: That is a question best put to the good captain himself. Why did he allow me to write about him? In fact, many of the Elizabethan pirates were contradictory scoundrels. Drake would not allow swearing on his ship, and he had a reputation for being even-handed with his prisoners, but he was little more than a terrorist where the Spanish were concerned. Drake’s attack on Cadiz—which I depict in Ship of Fire—and his piracy during the battle against the Armada won the disapproval of many of his countrymen.

This is not say that Drake or Fletcher were hypocrites—they were beyond such a simple designation. They were killers, with heartfelt scruples about their own morality. Don’t we know people who believe in God and yet champion war? Fletcher is a fictional creation, and Drake was a real person, but they are both complex, sometimes ruinously contradictory people, like many of us.

Lisa: You wrote this book before the recent headlines made pirates more of a reality in our everyday lives. Did these events make you look at your characters in a new light at all?

Michael: The people that remind me most of the pirates in Peril on the Sea are the hired security forces in Iraq, and the politicians who tacitly or explicitly allowed them to have so much power. Another piratical group would have to be some of our recent financial masterminds. The way harm has been done to civilians in the name of security, and the way damage has been done to our economy in the name or profit, is in a way little different from the zealous and energetic misbehavior of the Elizabethan sea captains. Remember that the key element of Elizabethan piracy was that the government not only forgave the crimes--the crown profited. Many people made money off the privateers.

Similarly, a lot of us have thrived, until recently, in an economy puffed up and made counterfeit by greedy schemers. When I look at myself, at my fellow humans, and at my government, I wonder if we aren’t all, in some way, just a little bit those men and women who used to make money off the proceeds of pirates.

Daphne: Which character do you most identify with and why?

Michael: All of my characters must come right out of me, being made of my breath and my blood. So I don’t pick favorites, at least not in public. But the strange and most dynamic aspect about characters is that they seem more alive than I do, and more insistent in being heard than I would ever be. And they do escape my control—I have to let them. Captain Fletcher and Katharine began to develop a dangerous and guarded relationship right under my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to caution Katharine or to warn off the formidable captain. The captain realizes that one of the threats he must defend Katharine against is own passion.

Lisa: This is a historical novel but it's also an adventure story, a coming of age tale and a romance. What kind of book did you originally set out to write (maybe one or all of these) and how did it change as the process went on?

Michael: Writing for me as an adventure—an extended act of discovery. Because this particular novel follows a genuine, violent ten day period of bloodshed and stormy weather, I was freed to depict actual events—I didn‘t have to make up this sweeping calamity. It really happened. But as to the creation of the novel, and the hopes and fears of my characters—I had faith in them, and I knew that they would tell their stories through me if I let them.

Daphne: You have written a lot of books that have been very well received. What advice do you have for newbie writers like myself?

Michael: Seek a mentor as dangerous and as demanding as Captain Fletcher. To encourage Sherwin to write the story of the captain’s life, he advises, “You keep on with me, and mark me as I speak. I’ll inspire your powers.” Let fascinating characters find a place in your life, and listen to what they have to say.

Lisa: If you could have any profession other that writer, what would it be?

Michael: Maybe you could let me try to be a hawk, or a cat, or a horse. In some safe way, so I wouldn’t fall out of the sky or run into anything. I wish I could see through the eyes of the animals I have known.

Did you guys hear about this? The best job in the world? The Australian tourism board is paying some lucky shmo $100,000 to live in a villa on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef for six months, explore the region, have lots of fun, make discoveries, and blog about it all. Um. Yeah. They just chose the winner out of some 15,000 applicants. (Only 15,000? I'd have thought there would be a lot more.) Here is the full job description. Hm. I think I need to see some pictures before I decide if I'd do that job . . .




Okay, that's enough. Yeah, I suppose I'd take that job. In a heartbeat!

When I was a young traveler, both post-high school on my big solo Eurrail expedition, and on various trips post-college, I fantasized about being much more adventurous than I was, and more resourceful too. I heard about backpackers who worked at youth hostels that were converted castles, or who hobo'ed about taking seasonal work on farms and at ski resorts, doing whatever, drifting along gathering fascinating life experiences. The closest I came to doing anything daring was staying over in Paris for three months and getting a job babysitting a six-year-old French boy after school. Well, Antoine was sort of an adventure -- he had the worst temper tantrums I'd ever seen! But that wasn't quite the kind of adventure I had in mind.

I wanted to have a fascinating life! In my early 20s I took sailing lessons and read accounts of solo sailing trips like the classic Dove, by Robin Graham who set off on his around-the-world sail in 1965 at the age of 16. And Maiden Voyage, by Tania Aebi who set out in 1988 at age 18. (I believe her father saw her aimlessness and offered to pay for college OR a sailboat, the catch being, if she chose the boat, she had to sail it around the world alone. Um? Was he trying to kill her?) Both books (entirely TRUE!) are full of adventure and romance and peril, and when I was young, I so longed for that kind of transformative experience. Without the near-death parts, though -- but I think the near-death experiences are part of the package when you're talking about adventure on that scale. I mean, I never in my wildest dreams wanted to solo sail around the world. Maybe just crew a big ritzy boat on which experienced sailors were making the decisions. A big, ritzy boat with satellite navigation, I should add, which neither Robin Graham nor Tania Aebi had. Tania Aebi, if I recall correctly, was doing her celestial navigation wrong and missed her first landfall, only finding her way by chance to an entirely different island -- she could easily have died on the very first leg of her trip! Oy. Yeah. I loved the idea of such adventures, after the fact of them having been lived through, you know?

Anyway, my sailing adventures never made it out of San Francisco Bay; I've still never sailed on the open ocean -- well, I suppose I did that one time off the Turkish Coast, with Jim, but we were just passengers, lolling and swimming and getting the worst sunburns of our lives. Plus, the coast was always in sight. So that doesn't count. Sailing's not a featured dream of mine anymore, really. My National Geographic Adventurer "Tours of a Lifetime" issue was delivered last week, and that always puts me an alternately dreamy and grumpy mood. This year = more dreamy, less grumpy, since adventure travel in the near future is not realistic anyway.

The kind of life-adventure-travel dreams I harbor now are:

--in future, when there are a couple of kids in the picture (hopefully), and they're big enough for some moderate adventure: a year off school to travel around the world. That trip would include things like: a camel trek in Morocco; various festivals in India; tracking tigers through a jungle on elephant-back (if there are tigers left by then -- did you know there are less than 5000 wild tigers in the world?); maybe a horse-trek in Mongolia (yep, that's one of the National Geographic-featured tours. Can you imagine?) For whatever reason, the romance of sailing seems to have been usurped in my mind by these exotic animal treks. Here's another: a reindeer trek up to far-northern Scandinavia to see the Aurora Borealis. And: a cross-country ski expedition somewhere far north on which dog sleds carry the gear and polar bear are sighted. You know, while there are still polar bears, which probably won't be long. And I really want to go to Borneo, while there's still jungle left there, before it's all palm oil plantations and wasteland. Sensing a theme? Hang in there, world, we haven't gotten to see you yet!!! (I know this trip sounds very expensive. Don't worry. My plan is to discover pirate treasure at regular intervals along the way.)

--in the nearer future, and this isn't really an adventure exactly: rent an apartment in Rome for 3 months or 6 months, and just live and work there, falling into the Italian rhythm of life, taking little trips hither and thither. Completely within the realm of the possible, yes?

-- not to neglect my "Mango World Tour"! Tasting every variety of mango in existence, on every land mass on which they grow. tee hee. I think this one can be a lifelong footnote to all exotic travel destinations. Footnote=go during mango season!

And more. And more. Do you think some tourist board will pay me a salary to do these things and blog about them? Is there an Earth tourist board? Trying to attract extraterrestrial tourists to boost the ailing Earth economies? Hey, now there's an idea . . .

What are you adventure dreams? What is your "best job in the world"?

P.S. Silksinger ARC is up for auction at Bridget Zinn's auction site! And lots of other cool stuff too.

A few months ago I read the first Olivia Kidney book, and I really enjoyed the experience. The book is very different, full of quirky characters, bizarre encounters, and strange adventures. Olivia herself is a tough little person who has an uncommon gift, and who has been dealt some very unfortunate cards in her short life. Wanting to better understand where Olivia Kidney came from, I decided to interview Olivia's creator, Ellen Potter.

Marya: The characters in “Olivia Kidney” are almost all very strange indeed. What prompted you to make them this way?
Ellen: You want to know the funny thing? Nearly every character in Olivia Kidney is very loosely based on a people I knew as a kid, growing up in an apartment building in NYC. There really was a woman who had a “farm” in her apartment, with chicken and rabbits (it was the adoption of a rooster that was her undoing). There was a family with eleven children, all of them fabulously freckled. The frightening Sidi was based on my friend’s tall and intimidating mother who kept her apartment roasting hot for her beloved plants. And as for the vicious but tiny pirate Master Clive, there was a little man who lived in the building—no taller than the average nine-year-old—who was always so dapperly dressed and adorable that as a child I imagined he must be deeply sinister. I’m still not convinced that he wasn’t.

Marya: Though she does not fully understand it, Olivia is grieving the death of her brother. Why did you add this component to what is a mostly funny book? El;len: It wasn’t a conscious decision. I almost never know what’s going to happen to my characters when I first start a book. Instead, I begin with a character that interests me—in Olivia’s case I admired her dry sense of humor and her aura of self-possession—and then I “stalk” them to find out what they are made of. It’s a fairly terrifying way to write since I never know what’s going to happen next.
In the first chapter of Olivia Kidney, Olivia’s book on séances literally fell out of her knapsack. It sounds disingenuous to say that I had nothing to do with it, but honestly, the thing just appeared and I was surprised to see it. “Oh, that’s interesting,” I said to myself, “Olivia must have a dead person she wants to contact. Now who could that be?” At first I thought it might be her mother. In fact, I began to steer the story in that direction, but Olivia let me know I was wrong via a bad case of writer’s block. Once I let go of my stranglehold on the story, I realized it was her much-loved older brother who had died. And yes, apart from this tragedy the story is pretty humorous, but as my grandmother liked to say, “If you laugh in the morning, you’re going to cry at night.”

Marya: Olivia encounters a ghost is very matter of fact – and not at all spooky – way. Why did you choose to make the ghost so normal?
Ellen: I’m glad that you didn’t find Branwell at all spooky. That makes sense since he doesn’t know he is a ghost at first. In fact, I didn’t know he was a ghost at first either. That was another piece of the story that took me by surprise. I just figured Branwell was the good-natured older brother of the Biffmeyer gang. I didn’t realize he was a ghost until nearly halfway through the book, when his “mother” didn’t seem to be able to hear him. Once I realized his secret I did have to backtrack in the story to make him more invisible to everyone except Olivia.
The other reason I wanted to keep Branwell un-spooky is that most people I know who have seen a ghost say that it was not a scary experience at all. Okay, I’ll fess up, and hopefully your readers won’t think I’m a crackpot: Years ago, I also saw a ghost. While I was in college, I lived in the basement room of an old house. One night I woke up and saw a face on my wall, looking at me. Then it vanished. It sounds very creepy when I describe it, but in fact it felt perfectly natural and not at all spooky—and believe me, I’m a mega-chicken!
As the late Hans Holzer, a famous ghost-hunter, once said, “After all, a ghost is nothing more than a human being in trouble.” (I’m doing an awful lot of quoting of deceased people in this interview)

Marya: The stories that are woven together in the book are quite involved. How did you keep track of all the threads so that you could give your readers a clean conclusion?
Ellen: I’m a big fan of “strange connection” stories. I love hearing about couples who met in tennis camp when they were 8, and then lost track of each other until someone set them up on a blind date twenty years later. Or twins who were separated at birth and wound up stuck in a busted elevator together. Stories like that make me want to pay more attention to everything and everybody.
Since my mind naturally seeks connections, I think I was hyper-attuned to possible ties between Olivia’s neighbors. Still, the story threads seemed to connect themselves, and I only realized how these people’s lives intersected a few pages before the actual revelation. For instance, I had no idea who the mysterious passenger was on the SS Rosenquist until the old lady next door told her story to Olivia’s father. Of course, once these connections revealed themselves I did have to go back and edit previous sections to make it all seamless, but I was often surprised at how little editing needed to be done. The connections were there all along, I just never noticed them. The added bonus of working this way is that I’m not telegraphing anything to my readers, since I’m pretty clueless myself, so they can be genuinely shocked by what happens in the story.

Marya: You give a lot of classes and workshops. What do you like about doing this work?
Ellen: I’m always astounded by how many people—both kids and adults—want to write. I’m also astounded at how many of these same people feel like they don’t have the time or they’re not smart enough or creative enough. I love being able to prove them wrong in these workshops.

Marya: What do you enjoy about visiting classrooms?
Ellen: Classroom visits are simply one of the great perks of being a children’s book author. What’s more fun than walking into a room filled with a hundred people who are really happy to meet you, and are not too inhibited to screech?
During these visits, I try to convey that the act of writing is at once magical and every-dayish. Yes, writing can be very witchy, and you have moments where you feel you are connecting to the divine or whatever you want to call it. But that doesn’t mean you need to be a “sensitive genius” in order to be a professional writer. You only have to be curious and interested and as tenacious as a pit bull. Also, you have to not mind waiting tables for several years.
My favorite part of classroom visits is always the question-and-answer session. I especially love the totally random questions like, “If you had a dwarf hamster, and the hamster had a funny black spot on its ear, what would you name him?” Or the ever popular question that makes all the teachers cringe with mortification: “So um, how much money do you make?”

Marya: You have a busy life. What kinds of books do you like to read when you have a little time to yourself?
Ellen: I keep trying to read books for grown-ups, I really do. But they are often so relentlessly sad that I put them down and pick up my beloved children’s books instead. Of course, some of the children’s books are sad too but at least the characters seem to have some fun before the sad parts come along.
Lately, I’ve enjoyed Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator by Jennifer Allison and Anne Mazer’s Sister Magic series. And ok, I’ll admit it . . . the Twilight series too. I especially love dead authors like E. Nesbit’s, Ellen Raskin, and Edward Eager.

Marya: Do you write every day?
Yes, I absolutely write every day. Then I run on the treadmill for an hour, and after that I eat a hardboiled egg with whole-grain toast. Then I meditate on the wisdom of living in the sacred present.
Okay, I exaggerate. It may be closer to the truth to say . . .
I try and write every day, but sometimes I just don’t feel like it so I don’t.
Also, I occasionally walk on the treadmill for about 15 minutes at a pace that a senior citizen would find snoozy. Then I eat a hard-boiled egg chased by a handful of whatever cookies are in the cabinet. After that I meditate on things I can worry about. Then I call my husband and he tells me not to worry about those things.
Really, though, it is best to write every day if you possibly can. I think it’s a lot like a relationship with a friend. When you talk to that friend every day, you are so entrenched in their world that the conversation is instantly easy and flowing. However, if you wait several weeks, or months, to talk to that friend, there is going to be a “catching-up” period that lacks the flow of the every-day conversation. It might feel awkward until you can get back into the groove, and by the time the groove is back your friend might have to leave to get her sofa re-stuffed.
That’s why writers should write every day if they possibly can.

Marya: What did you like to read when you were Olivia Kidney’s age?
Ellen: I was a maniacal reader when I was a kid. Some of my favorite books were Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And when no books were available I read walkie-talkie instructions, the back of Cocoa Puff boxes, and the washing instruction tag on my scarf.

What a delightful interview. You can find out more about Ellen on her website.

Eve Donegan, Sales & Marketing Assistant

While regular blogger, Gérard Prunier is off exploring Africa, I have rounded up a quick update on the Somali Pirates.

- Abduwali Abdukadir Muse is currently being tried in New York under a federal law that has not been used in decades. The law would require Muse to fulfill a mandatory life sentence in prison. Muse was the only survivor of the three men who boarded the American cargo ship, Maersk Alabama, off the coast of Africa on April 8th. The pirates held the ship’s captain hostage causing an international uproar.

- On Sunday, 11 Somali Pirates were captured by a French naval vessel when they mistook the ship for a commercial vessel. The pirates were captured in three small boats off the coast of Somalia. Rockets and guns were found aboard the ships. At this point it is unclear what the European Union plans to do about the capture, but it is clear that the Somali Pirate attacks have disrupted United Nation aid and led some companies to consider routing cargo between Europe and Asia a different way.

Check back next Tuesday for more Notes from Africa!

Arrrree those brussels sprouts on ye dinner plate? Have no fear! Captain Cook is here and calling all hands on deck to show young mates how veggies and other healthy foods are friends, not foes!

From now through May 17, Please Touch Playhouse is proud to present "Eat Like a Pirate," a fun and interactive show designed to help parents and kids learn about the importance of a healthy lifestyle and the benefits of good nutrition and exercise.

Aboard their trusty ship, The Flying Lunch Bucket, brave Captain Cook and his crew, the Low-Sodium Dogs, sail past the Sandwich Islands up to the Great Food Pyramids a-searching for good nutrition, the proverbial free lunch and the ever elusive Berry Treasure! The show runs approximately 25 minutes.

***Showtimes are Mondays-Saturdays 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.; Sundays 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. unless otherwise noted.***

For those of you who don't have a crew of hilarious puppets or a wealth of catchy songs at home, there are tons of other ways that parents and children can have a great time while practicing healthy habits when they aren't playing here at Please Touch Museum!

Here are just a few ideas for ways that parents and children can play their way to healthy eating:

• Cooking doesn't have to be a job just for parents. It can be a fun and exciting activity for kids too! Invite your child to help you prepare meals and let him or her wear a chef's hat and apron and pretend to be a real chef! Recipes that involve tossing, mixing, or mashing are especially fun and encourage physical activity. Let your child shake up a zip-lock bag full of salad ingredients while an adult cooks up the main course or turn on some music and dance around the kitchen until dinner is ready! Activities like these can help make everyday meals an occasion for play.

• Parents can also make a big adventure out of the grocery store by letting kids help out with the shopping. Make a grocery list for your child using pictures of healthy foods instead of words. At the store, let your child take charge of finding those items. This activity will help keep them busy, active and engaged.

• As summer approaches, there are more opportunities for families to get outside and enjoy the nice weather. If you aren't playing with us at Please Touch Museum, we encourage you and your child to go outside to get your daily exercise. Bringing healthy snacks like fruits or trail mix along with you are great for when you're ready to take a break from playtime and might even curb your child's enthusiasm at the sound of the ice cream truck.

I forgot, with all the hubub about 4/20 [Hitler's birthday, the Pirate Bay decision, other stuff] that my blog is now ten years old. Older than most, younger than some. I’ve become a much less frequent updater, and often on Fridays for some reason, but I’m still enjoying writing it, reading it, interacting on it and being immersed in blog culture generally.

Thanks readers, for a decade of sharing library information here. Here’s a link to the first ten days of librarian.net.

When looking for a book that falls between the age range of middle grade chapter book and young adult novel, The Mousehunter would be a great choice to pick up. Easy to read, filled with adventure, and a bit longer than your average middle grade title, Alex Milway has created a book and a character in Emiline, that kids are really going to enjoy.

Emiline is a mousekeeper. And although being a mousekeeper is a rather prestigious position in her city, collecting mice for the wealthy, leaving them to trade and collect at their own will, Emiline isn't great at her job. Wanting to someday take on the coveted position of actual mousehunter, Emiline joins a sea expedition to catch the pirate, Mousebeard, and really gain a name for herself, all while keeping her pet mouse safe.

A bit of irony and lots of thrills, The Mousehunter is a huge book of adventure! It's predictable at parts and sometimes a little too convenient in the plot flow, but overall a really nice, adventurous, thrilling story. With a fabulous girl heroine!

And don't let the large page number turn you off (or your kids), it's a fast read and would make a great family read aloud.

To learn more or to purchase, click on the book cover above to link to Amazon.

The Mousehunter
Alex Milway
448 pages
Middle Grade fiction
Little, Brown
9780316024549
February 2009

Shredderman #1: Secret Identity
by Wendelin Van Draanen, illustrated by Brian Biggs

Synopsis: "Fifth-grader Nolan Byrd has suffered at the hands of school bully Bubba Bixby for too long. Inspired by a class project, Nolancreates a "cyber-superhero" alter ego called Shredderman, and sets out to avenge himself and his fellow Bubba-sufferers. Our likeable but nerdly and put-upon protagonist spots his shot at redemption when Mr. Green (Nolan's pony-tailed teacher, a.k.a. "the Happy Hippie") assigns the class's monthly project: Students must create a newspaper page, complete with stories and photos, on a topic of their choice.

"In a flash, Nolan realizes he has the perfect subject: "I had an idea that would make Bubba Bixby sorry he'd ever called us names. Or swiped our stuff. Or breathed his trashy breath down our throats. I’d do my report on Bubba Bixby!" Shortly thereafter Shredderman is born, and Nolan springs into action, armed with a computer, a cleverly concealed digital camera, and his own top-secret Web page, Shredderman.com, "where truth and justice prevail!"

I've got a bunch of books to review, so I better get started. All my book ideas end up being somewhat complex and geared for older middle-grade levels, but I'd really like to write something simpler, for younger audiences, so I've been trying to read more book in that vein.

I really liked this one, and it's a good example of a simple idea told well, with a fun protagonist. My only complaint would be the fact that the main character is once again the typical "nerd" (I've talked about that in other posts), but he's still likeable, and hey, there's always Brian Briggs' illustrations, which I always love. Visit the web site here.

Grade: A

Beastly Rhymes to Read After Dark
by Judy Sierra, illustrated by Brian Briggs

Synopsis: "DANGER! WARNING! KIDS beware! Bound in the bilious green-spotted fur (100% fake) of an unidentified weird beast, here is a book that kids will love—quite literally—from cover to cover. In the macabre spirit of the Halloween season, funny rhymes range from “Parasite Lost” to “Leap Halloween,” and are illustrated with gruesome graphics. Elementary school kids will want to be the first to own this outrageous fur-clad book, but librarians may prefer the standard library bound edition, minus the fur!"

I'll make this short and sweet: great poems, great illustrations. Two complaints: Not nearly long enough (it was shorter than most picture books; it should have been three times as long, at least), and my library copy didn't have the cool fur cover. =(

Grade: A (would've been an A+ if it had more content!)

Stone Rabbit: Pirate Palooza
by Eric Craddock

Synopsis: "When his coffee table’s leg breaks, Stone Rabbit replaces it with the cursed peg leg of a long-dead pirate—and inadvertently unleashes the ghostly fury of Captain Barnacle Bob! Suddenly, our hero finds himself clashing cutlasses with salty specters and fleeing from scary sea beasts. Will Stone Rabbit escape with both of his long ears intact? Or will he end up as a squid’s snack?

"Pirate Palooza is the second book in a full-color series of riotous, riproaring graphic novels that chronicles the zany of adventures of a quick-tempered and quick-witted young rabbit."

I think it's so cool that more and more artists are making comics/graphic novels/whatever for young kids these days. I liked this one overall (visit the web site here) although I'm not sure what the "stone" part of the name means? Fun, silly, but not really... I don't know. Ground-breaking. I should do something like this...

Grade: B

I am so sold:

Once a Princess (Sasharia En Garde)"contains a kick-butt mother-daughter team, a wicked king, a witty pirate with an unfortunate taste for neon colors, inept resistance fighters, a dreamy prince who gallops earnestly hither and yon, and a kick-butt princess in waiting."

I just discovered Sherwood Smith last fall, and am so happy to have done so. Jo Walton over at Tor has an interview up with her today, which is where I saw Once a Princess. It is a fascinating interview, by the way, with lots about world building, and writing, and publishing, and all those good things.

But that cover. I do not like that cover. I so deeply do not like that cover. If it weren't for the cover I would seriously consider buying this on spec as a mother's day gift (reading it myself first, of course, so as to be sure).

On May 1st, which would be tomorrow, the sequel comes out! Twice a Prince, it's called, and I do not think it is fair that he gets to keep his tummy covered. Although why bother to wear a shirt at all if you are going to expose that much chest.

Two videos about penguins from different ends of the spectrum.

First joy:




And then despair:



Actually, perhaps better to watch those in reverse order. The BBC one isn't new, but we've been watching it alot around our house over the past few days. Just something "uplifting" about it.

And to tie this in to my children's literature theme, here are the three books about penguins: Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers ( a boy-meets-penguin classic); Penguin and the Cupcake by Ashley Spires; and the yet-to-be-released The Pirate and the Penguin by Patricia Storms.

I once wrote a story about a penguin and a polar bear meeting up in Stanley Park. I wonder where I put it.