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This past April I had the pleasure of speaking at Algood School in Cookeville, Tennessee. Apparently my visit made quite an impact, because this year Samurai Shortstop and I were nominated for three awards in their annual 7th grade OSCAR (Our Students Care About Reading) Awards ceremony last week. Says Carol Teeters, the Algood librarian,

All through the year they nominate books they are reading in categories such as Best Villain, Best Sci-Fi Character etc. At the end of the year after they have voted on the nominees they have a program with a red carpet, guest presenters such as Little Red Riding Hood, etc.

Right before leaving Atlanta, I received my author copies of the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine that includes my short story, "To Honor Ichiko and Defend Japan"! It's the June issue (the one with the rooster cover, at left), but it's on newsstands now! Don't miss your chance to read the closest I'll ever come to writing a sequel to Samurai Shortstop. It's not a sequel, of course - it doesn't even use the same characters. But as I was writing Samurai Shortstop, I kept thinking that the school, Ichiko, would make a great setting for a murder mystery. That story kept nagging at me, and I finally wrote it and sent it off. And Hitchcock's bought it! It's a pleasure and an honor. Hope you enjoy the story!

I'm not listed on the cover, but I'm mentioned on the AHMM web site listed above. As my mom was quick to point out, I'm mentioned in the same paragraph as Robert Parker and Anton Chekov.

I've known for a couple of weeks, but I've held off announcing until after the award ceremony - Samurai Shortstop was named to the New York Public Library "Books for the Teen Age 2007" list! The official reception was yesterday in New York, and I regret that I couldn't make it. Many authors I know from cyberspace were going to be in attendance, and I'm eagerly awaiting word on how things went. (Although I'm not expecting a Futoshi-style food riot or anything.)

I don't have a link to prove the veracity of this claim (the NYPL web site still has last year's list featured) but I'll add a link when I find one. In the meantime, you'll have to take my word for it.

Hey, have I ever lied to you before?

The Gratz Industries publicity department has been hard at work lately. First, Wendi got a brand-spanking new web site to feature her quilt projects. Now Alan gets a brand new web site too - featuring Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten, which starts stinking up bookstores this fall! Check the new web site out here, and let our publicity department know if you see any broken links or misbegotten typing!

(And if you don't get it by now, Alan is the publicity department.)

It's that time of year - when the "Best of 2006" lists come out for everything. Today I discovered two more "Best of" lists that feature Samurai Shortstop.

First, the 2006 CCBC Choices: New Books for Children and Young Adults recommended by the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (Whew, that's a mouthful.) The CCBC organizes recommended titles by subject or genre, and Samurai Shortstop is listed as one of their 39 recommended "Fiction for Young Adults." Thanks guys!

Samurai has also been recognized as one of 100 Librarians' Choices 2006 by Library Science students at Texas Women's University. They do half picture books, half novels - so Samurai Shortstop is among the fifty novels they selected to highlight from last year. Thank you librarians at TWU!

Team Bonzai Special Agent "Sundance" has just sent in this belated - but priceless - demonstration of how to effectively face out Samurai Shortstop in your local bookstore! Enjoy:

Today's "On This Day..." feature for February 3rd on the Wikipedia home page features the anniversary of Emperor Meiji taking the throne in Japan. The "Meiji Restoration" is of course a major historical element in my young adult novel Samurai Shortstop, and precipitates much of the conflict between Toyo, his father, and the new Japan. The picture they feature (shown here) is the one Toyo sees hung on the wall of the ethics lecture hall at the beginning of chapter two.

LibrariAnne, a hard rockin' librarian from Canton, Michigan, reports on her blog that Samurai Shortstop was one of only three books out of the 232 nominated titles to be unanimously approved by the committee! Here's what she had to say:

[A]t the final vote, titles must have 9 yes votes or more to be added to the list. As of tonight's straw poll, this would include 68 titles (out of 232 on the list) (this isn't counting any potential Michael L. Printz Award and Honor titles, which are automatically added to the list). There were only three titles which received 14 yes votes and 0 no votes in tonight's straw poll: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak, and Samurai Shortstop by Alan Gratz.

Well, it's been a crazy few days here at Gratz Industries. In the midst of everything else, I learned that Samurai Shortstop just made the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults list. Not only that, it made the top ten on that list!

This is huge. Massive. Ginormous even!

Check out the other authors and titles on the list:

Anderson, M.T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

Gratz, Alan. Samurai Shortstop.

Hartnett, Sonya. Surrender.

McCormick, Patricia. Sold.

Sayres, Meghan Nuttall. Anahita’s Woven Riddle.

Smelcer, John. The Trap.

Turner, Megan Whalen. The King of Attolia.

Werlin, Nancy. The Rules of Survival.

Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese.

Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief.

Holy. Crap. Six of those titles were National Book Award finalists or Printz Award winners. That sound you hear is me passing out and hitting the keyboard. I was just hoping Samurai Shortstop made the BIG list of Best Books of the Year! It's an incredible honor just to be an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, let alone make the top ten.

The ALA and its subsidiary YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association) have shown Samurai much love already, but this is major. If I weren't already married, I'd be looking at buying a ring. Thanks so much to all the librarians who voted for Samurai and supported it in Seattle this year at ALA, and a very special thanks to this year's BBYA committee members:

Karyn N. Silverman, Chair, Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, New York, NY
Rose M. Allen, Mount Prospect Public Library, Mount Prospect, IL
Lynn E. Evarts, Sauk Prairie High School, Prairie du Sac, WI
Ashley Flaherty, Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH
Caroline Kienzle, Coppell, TX
Holly Koelling, King County Library System, King County, WA
Jeanette Larson, Austin, TX
Gregory Lum, Jesuit High School, Portland, OR
Rick Orsillo, King County Library System, Shoreline, WA
Sharon Rawlins, New Jersey Library for the Blind and Handicapped, Trenton, NJ
Hollis Rudiger, Cooperative Children’s Book Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Lynn M. Rutan, West Ottawa Public Schools, Holland, MI
Edward A. Spicer, Michigan Reading Journal, Allegan, MI
Deborah Taylor, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD
Jennifer Mattson, consultant, Booklist, Chicago, IL
Amy Chow, Administrative Assistant, New York Public Library, New York, NY

The next time you're in Atlanta guys, look me up.
I'll buy you dinner! :-)

Our second day in New York was a working day for both of us. Wendi was off to Random House, where she had her first day of pre-sales. During pre-sales, a few of the field reps come home to roost to meet with the folks at HQ to talk about an upcoming season. They're always working ahead, so this was the fall pre-sales. There will be a real sales conference - often held in some summery locale - later this season, when ALL the sales reps will gather. At this point, the feedback Wendi and the other few reps give can still be used to tweak things before the real deal. Hence pre-sales. Now you know.

I on the other hand got to do something much more fun - go meet the editor of Something Rotten! After a casual wake-up in the hotel room and a quick croissant and water at one of the two hundred Starbucks locations in Manhattan, I headed off in search of the subway line that would take me south to Greenwich Village, where the Dial offices were located. The thing with my map was that it would have a little red M for the Metro red line in the middle of a city block, and when I would arrive at that exact location on the planet earth, there would often not be any magical stairs leading down into the mass transit warrens. The day before I had become familiar with an orange line station or two around our hotel, but today I arrived and found no stop.

I finally found a red line, but it was headed only uptown. I consulted my map once again, and marched off down another street. It was ass cold that day, and as I lost feeling in my ears I began to despair that I would not only have to walk many freezing blocks to return to my familiar downtown orange line, but that I might conceivably be late as well - and this after starting off with an hour and a half to spare. Tracing the red line with my finger, I realized that this was the line that once served the World Trade Center. I had read that the stop was now closed, of course, but I began to wonder if that didn't mean that the entire southbound line was closed.

I doubled back down another street, resigned to hitting the orange line (which would dump me off in Soho, not the Village, requiring a further blistering walk) when I stumbled onto the entrance to the downtown red line. A Solstice Miracle! I hurried inside and boarded the metro for Greenwich Village.

I popped out of the subway almost directly across from the Holland Tunnel, which I felt obligated to photograph:


I was no doubt captured on some sort of video camera, my face forwarded to the FBI as someone "casing" the Holland Tunnel. Having considered this gigantic hole in the ground (somewhat reminiscent of the Hellmouth on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) I'm not sure I would ever want to enter the Holland Tunnel. I'm not even sure where it goes. I studied my map a few more times though, and I'm fairly sure that it does not, in fact, lead to Holland.

Despite my misadventures looking for the Metro station, I was significantly early for my appointment. Knowing how heavy the security is at the Random House building where Wendi was working that day, I figured that crashing in the lobby of the Dial building for an hour or so was probably out of the question, so I hiked around what I think was Greenwich Village. There were many record stores - selling real vinyl - so I think I'm fairly safe in this assumption. I expected a lot of hippy folks walking around smoking pot and wearing Birks, Che Guevara t-shirts, and worn-out corduroy pants, but as I said, it was very cold, so perhaps they were all inside. I did see this rather ingenious way to park one hundred cars in a lot that would ordinarily only hold twenty:


I suppose when these folks say "no in and out," they really mean it. Seriously, how many days in advance do you have to let them know you're going to need your car? I cannot imagine how extracting one of those vehicles is an easy thing to do. It's like an automotive Rubik's Cube.

After futzing around as long as I could, I hit the Dial offices. Approaching it from afar, I was able to appreciate the really cool reliefs up at the top:


Okay, so it's kind of hard to see them here. But here it is: 345 Hudson, home of Dial Books for Young Readers. (And all those lesser Penguin imprints that haven't bought anything from me and so don't matter.)

There I met Liz, editor extraordinaire. Knowing we were going to see Avenue Q during our visit, she gave me a copy of the soundtrack, which we've already enjoyed a few times. After we chatted for a little while Liz took me around to meet folks. We burst in on a meeting of the entire marketing staff, and I thanked them profusely for helping spread the Samurai gospel. Then it was off to the den of Tony Sahara, the guy who created my terrific cover illustration. (And who let me use the full illustration on my baseball cards!) His office was loaded with Star Wars toys, so he won more points in my book. We also dropped in on the gals who handle the bookstore and convention promotions.

(I should probably not say this, but that feeling has never stopped me before: if any guy was ever looking to find the single largest concentration of intelligent, attractive women in New York, all he really has to do is go work for Dial Books for Young Readers. Internships are available now. Many intelligent, attractive women are standing by. I kid you not.)

Our penultimate stop was to meet Lauri Hornik, Vice President and Publisher of Dial Books. I laid it on pretty thick when I told her that Dial was one of my A-list publishers and that I was thrilled to have landed there, but I wasn't lying. We talked about Something Rotten, which comes out this fall, and even discussed further ideas for more Horatio books. (Yeah buddy!) Then, to my surprise and delight, Lauri remembered and asked about my Fasting Girl project, which has sat by the wayside lo these many months as I finished editing Something Rotten and began writing the first draft of The Brooklyn Nine, my middle grade generational baseball book. I'm afraid I broke the rule I gave the attendees at my very own recent marketing seminar and went on and on about the Fasting Girl story, rather than just giving her a two-sentence blurb. What was I thinking? Well, she seemed interested, even when her eyes glazed over and she put her head down on her desk. She told me she was just resting her eyes, so I kept talking. (Kidding.)

Our last stop of the day was Brad, who is the guy in the office who makes sure the manuscripts are where they need to be at every step in the process. I liken his position to that of the folks in traffic when I worked at the radio station. The traffic department didn't follow vehicular traffic, they organized the on-air commercials and drops, and made sure that everything that was supposed to play hit the airwaves at the right place and time. I didn't know publishers had such a position, but considering the number of manuscripts they must be juggling at one time, it makes perfect sense.

In addition to being the managing editor, Brad is also going to co-edit The Brooklyn Nine with Liz. The idea for the book was originally his, and I was tapped to write it. He had a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia when he was a kid (just like I did - and still do) and we immediately found common ground when it was revealed that we had each programmed the stats of Dead Ball era baseball players into computer games and played out seasons with long-gone teams. In his honor, I've made a point of dropping some of the better players of the 1908 season into one of the stories in the book, including Three-Finger Brown of the Chicago Cubs. (In the last year the Cubs won the World Series, by the way.)

The three of us did lunch at John's Pizza, where we had a waitress who will have to appear in something I write someday. She talked like she was out of sync with the universe, but I couldn't decide if she was ahead of us or behind us. Liz asked for a refill on her Diet Coke and I asked for one on my regular Coke, and our waitress says, "Right. Okay. One regular Coke, one regular Diet Coke." I couldn't tell if she was messing with us, or just kooky. Maybe both. The pizza was great - well worth the hype - and I had a great time chatting with Brad and Liz. They made the mistake of asking me about other ideas for sequels to Something Rotten, and I launched into my take on The Tempest, my favorite Shakespeare play. (I hope I get to write that one some day!)

I have no pictures of any of this, of course, so you may think I made the whole thing up. I didn't, I promise! I briefly debated pulling out the camera and getting pics of Liz and Brad, but somehow felt it would be a little too amateurish. So here I am without illustrative graphics.

After I left the Dial offices, I met up with my friend Brian from New Jersey. He and I hit Forbidden Planet, a massive comics shop near New York University. It ROCKED. I could have spent all day pouring through the indie titles. I picked up a Tick omnibus I had missed out on the first time around, and Above and Below, two shorts by James Sturm, author and illustrator of the phenomenal graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing. Brian made off with that Sonic Screwdriver he'd been looking for. That led to, oddly, the first of two Dr. Who conversations I would have with two separate people in two consecutive days in New York. Brian and I hit a diner afterward, where I regaled him with my plans to take the DC Comics company by storm, unbeknownst to anyone at DC Comics or anywhere else outside that diner.

Wendi got through with her meetings around four o'clock, and I took a train uptown with Brian, where we parted. Wendi and I had planned on going out to eat at a fancy restaurant, but we had both had big lunches and were pooped, and so opted instead for a stroll down to Times Square and cheesecake (for Wendi) at Junior's in the Theater District. One thing I have observed about New York is that the closer you get to Times Square, the more quickly the waiters try to turn your table. Standing up signals an army of busboys who swoop in like winged monkeys. I have seen a table completely bussed and reset before I have even donned my coat. While I admire the efficiency, it does give one the impression that you are not allowed to linger or loiter anywhere in Midtown Manhattan. Everything there is in constant motion, with brief pauses for eating and drinking. Another New York lesson learned: always always always use the bathroom before you leave a restaurant. It may be your last chance until you return to your hotel room.

Our plans for a big evening together on the town petered out with our flagging energy and our aching legs, so we went back to the room where Wendi crashed and I watched Star Trek: TNG and The Daily Show with the sound muted and the closed captioning on. After reading a little television I hit the sack. It was an odd end to a great day in the city, and I went to sleep dreaming about the next day's destination: Brooklyn.

More goodness from the inbox: friend and fellow kidlit author Mary Ann Rodman reports that Samurai Shortstop was named the Book of the Week for the week of January 8, 2007, by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Here's the link. Visiting their Book of the Week archives, I see that I'm in fantastic company! Many thanks to the CCBC, and to Mary Ann for the pointer.

Catching up on e-mail after our week-long trip to New York. Here's a good find from mom: a mention of Samurai Shortstop on a librarian's blog called Proper Noun. The topic of the post was "First Lines." Here's what she had to say about Samurai:

Last year at the AASL conference, I was watching an author panel and someone brought up beginnings. First lines, specifically. One of the authors, I can’t remember who now, mentioned that when writing for teens, the goal is for the first sentence of the book make the reader ask “why?”

I thought of that as I picked up Samurai Shortstop and glanced at the first page. It opens: “Toyo watched carefully as his uncle prepared to kill himself.” It definitely piqued my curiosity.

Here's the link.