By: tanita davis,
on 10/2/2012
It's like we were just waiting for September to get out of the way, so we could launch: **The 30th annual Banned Books Week, September 30 - October 6th (and do check out these amazing Hunger Game themed posters, hat tip to Leila), ** Guys Lit Wire's... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 9/26/2012
In case you missed it, we had a lovely read through THORN this week for our Diverse Universe reading tour post. Other notable bloggers have reviewed LUCRETIA AND THE KROOMS by Victor LaValle, SO LONG BEEN DREAMING, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, THE... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 7/27/2012
Yeah, remember when we talked about the YA Steampunk Anthology, REAL GIRLS DON'T RUST, with the deadline of SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 for story submissions? Or, remember when we talked about the Buzz Books seeking novella/novel length subs for HONEY, their... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 5/1/2012
An article which might have sneaked past you this weekend, Macmillan's Heroes and Heartbreakers blog added a new post to their section of YA Crush, titled, Are you there God? The Mysterious Disappearance of Religion in YA Fiction, by Brittany... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 4/13/2012
Each of us walks a different path when finding wonderland. For us, it has largely been the flight of fantasy which has fueled our imaginations. We delight in other faces, other worlds, the "what if" of science commingled with the "of course we can"... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 11/23/2011
All The Weyrs of Pern, by Michael WhelanThis was my computer desktop picture for much of the early 90's.Have a seat. Close your eyes.Go back in memory to your favorite Anne McCaffrey book.Does it include dragons?(Were you into dragons about the time... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 4/12/2011
D.E.A.R. Day!Be a DEAR and don't disturb us - We are reading books today!We have forts of sofa cushionsOn the floor in disarray.We'll read Ralph on motorcycle,Cows that type on desks of hay,Gilda's mysteries need solvingCalcifer would like to... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 4/9/2011
Behold the humble executioner, with a little entertaining gore...Be told, as the Scots say: this is going to be one of those think-y sort of blog posts wherein I share something that's swimming through the brainpan. It has no conclusion, and no...... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 3/12/2011
When you move, do you end up moving boxes that you never unpacked? I do - but only very small ones. I have a box that contains postcards from a friend who spent his gap year in New Zealand the year he recovered from cancer; I have boxes that contain... Read the rest of this post
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 2/28/2011
I’m singing an old Erasure song as I scoot my barstool up to the counter next to him.
“Oh, baby, refrain…from breaking my heart…”
“Ouch.”
“Ouch?”
“A little bit.”
“Refrain from breaking my heart?”
“Refrain from crushing my toe.”
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 11/25/2010
…a revisiting of one of the first posts I ever wrote for this blog, and one of the many reasons my cup runneth over.
She finished the last round of high-dose chemo on Thanksgiving Day of 1997. We ate Boston Market turkey and stuffing in the hospital playroom while her meds finished running. There were two more years of low-dose chemo to go, but we expected to spend most of that period as out-patients. When we got home that night—home, where we hadn’t spent more than ten days in a row since March—it was late, a cold, clear night, with as many stars as a New York City sky can muster. I remember thinking I couldn’t imagine ever being more thankful for anything than I was to be carrying that little girl up the stairs to our apartment that night.
(Thirteen years later, the Boston Market logo still fills me with a sense of overwhelming gratitude.)
(But then so do a lot of things, including this face.)
Happy Thanksgiving, friends, wherever you may be.
By: tanita davis,
on 10/20/2010
We don't jump on a lot of memes here at Wonderland -- frankly we tend to find our way here and mostly blog about books, and not much else. But we wanted to dress our blog in purple today. Here's why.R-E-S-P-E-C-T.We need to have it for every human... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 10/30/2009
We're a little sad today to bid farewell to our buddy Eisha from 7-Imps. There aren't too many duo girl blogs in our "age" group (i.e., that started when we did), and we sort of shared a kinship with the neighbors at Seven Impossible Things Before... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 9/28/2009
Seems weird that it would take a presidential speech to get this point across: information is free, and you're free to disregard it, too. What's the point of burning a book? It just generates unnecessary smoke, it won't make the information... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita davis,
on 3/12/2009
Yeah. That's how not to do it.I found that poster today at a great interview with our very own cool-shoe-wearing Librarian to Lord Vader, Adrienne. The very awesome Jules interviewed Librarian Adrienne on how she has risen to the heights of the... Read the rest of this post
By: tanita s. davis,
on 2/24/2009
...was the go-live day for WritingYA. We knew exactly ...four people, thought our blog would only be read by our writing group, and most of our sidebar links were to author blogs -- people we admired but with whom we had never conversed.And four... Read the rest of this post
By: TadMack,
on 1/28/2009
Most of us have learned to disagree strenuously with the phrase "write what you know."Maybe the new advice is "know something before you write."After all, aren't the best books the ones which have details of other worlds than we know? Worlds where... Read the rest of this post
By: TadMack,
on 10/2/2008
It's always cool to find a little bit of gorgeous in an unexpected place.That's kind of what readergirlz and GuysLitWire are -- a little bit of gorgeous. As people go on and on about how, in this economy, publishing is dying, books are dying, young... Read the rest of this post
By: TadMack,
on 9/22/2008
It was a buzz, and today it's a launch. YA for Obama is a ning group started by "best-selling young adult authors," according to a Condé Nast blog, who are concerned with creating a place for the under-18's in the democratic process. Their goal? To... Read the rest of this post
By: TadMack,
on 7/22/2008
“...with a few exceptions, the critics of children’s books are remarkably lenient souls. They seem to regard books for children with the same tolerant tenderness with which nearly any adult regards a child. Most of us assume there is something... Read the rest of this post
By: TadMack,
on 7/21/2008
Just after college, I published my first book. It was a paperback with a small press and has since gone out of print -- probably a good thing, because though it had its moments of beauty, it was fairly awkwardly written, and showed how young I was.... Read the rest of this post
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/15/2008
A Bonny Glen reader wrote me with a whole bunch of really good questions. Actually, I’ve had several emails come in recently with suggestions for topics or questions to answer. I’ll be tackling some of those in the days and weeks to come. But this is a lazy Saturday morning so I’m starting with the easy one.
Can I ask how you pronounce Lissa? It is like the second half of Melissa or the name Lisa?
Like the second half of Melissa. If you want the whole scoop on my name, it goes like this. Melissa Wiley is, as you know, my pen name. But the Melissa part is real. My middle name is Anne-with-an-e and that e was always very important to me as a child, so that when I first read Anne of Green Gables at age eleven, I loved her instantly and devotedly from the moment she made the big deal about having her name spelled correctly even in people’s minds.
When I got married, I kept Anne as my middle name instead of making my maiden name my new middle name as many women do. But I love my maiden name, Brannon, too.
When I was growing up, my family had two names for me. (They still do.) Well, three names if you count Melissa, which was only used when I was in trouble, usually in company with Anne. My official first name with the family has always been Missy. I am still Missy to my parents and sisters (Merry and Molly) and cousins and some of my high-school friends. And that’s fine; Missy is a comfy and friendly name, I think.
But at home, growing up, I was always Lissa too. Casually, unofficially, in a “Lissa, dinner’s ready!” kind of way. My parents would introduce me as Missy (and that’s how I signed my papers in school, and what teachers called me), but when they were just speaking offhandedly, affectionately, they usually said Lissa. So I loved that name too.
And by the end of senior year, I was tired, for a while, of being ‘little Missy.’ (I have always been the shrimpiest one in the class.) I kept meeting people with dogs named Missy. (I actually had a dog named Missy myself, when I was a baby. She was named Missy before my parents got her, and she was older than I was. They changed her name to Sissy. She was a dear little doggie.) Missy felt like a little girl’s name, and some of my drama club friends had picked up on Lissa from hearing my parents say it, so when I went to college I just introduced myself as Lissa, not Missy. And it stuck. I met Scott in college, so that’s the name he’s always known me by.
But actually he almost never calls me Lissa. He calls me L, and so do his brothers. If you’ve known me online long enough to remember my old “[email protected]” address, you might know that “tisell” meant ’tis L.
One thing about “Lissa” is that lots of people mis-hear it as “Lisa,” so in recent years I have introduced myself more and more as just Melissa. But it really throws me when people call me that in person. I jump, because that’s still the “teacher is mad at me” name.
Another high-school friend nicknamed me “Misery” as a joke because I don’t tend to be a miserable sort of person. And it became the stuff of high-school legend one day when that friend offered me a ride home from school, and I was walking with another friend who was kind of an endearingly arrogant guy, and he assumed the invitation extended to him, and the car-driving friend informed him curtly that no it did not. And he said, “Aw, come on, you know Misery loves company!”
She gave him a ride. 
It’s true, too; I do love company.
I get a lot of letters addressed to Mrs. Wiley. Once, at a conference where I was a speaker, the organizers gave Scott a nametag too: “Scott Wiley.” That made us laugh and laugh. Sometimes if he forgets to do something and I ask him about it, he says, “Go ask Mr. Wiley.”
Most of my friends’ children call me Mrs. Peterson. I am still young enough, at age 39 and coming up on 14 years of marriage, that it feels funny to be called that. In Virginia most kids called me “Miss Lissa,” and Scott was “Mister Scott,” which cracked me up and generated a lot of Star Trek jokes on my part. Alice’s kids call me Lissa and mine call her Alice.
Here in San Diego, people startle when they hear that my husband’s name is Scott Peterson. That name will forever be linked to the wife-and-baby murderer, here and in lots of other places. But my Scott Peterson’s name was in print long before that guy started making headlines. There’s a Scott Peterson who writes books about Rwanda, too, and one who works in film production at Warner Brothers. If you see his name in movie credits, that’s not my guy. (Although his name does come up on a computer screen in the Batcave in the first Batman animated movie, and that’s a reference to my Scott.) If it’s in a comic book, that’s my beloved Mr. Wiley.
Wiley was the first name of my great-great-great-great- I-can’t-remember-if-it’s-four-or-five-greats-grandfather, Wiley Tyler, who died in a Confederate prison camp. He was an Alabaman himself, and there’s a big story there, but I’m saving it for a novel. When HarperCollins asked me to choose a pen name beginning with W so booksellers wouldn’t be so confused about where to shelve my Little House books (Roger MacBride’s books gave them fits—shelve them with Laura’s books because they’re sequels? or shelve them under M for MacBride?), I chose Wiley in honor of my fine old ancestor, so that my pen name would be a family name too.
Although I quite liked Alice’s suggestion at the time that I choose “Willard” as an homage to Betsy’s sweetheart, Joe Willard, from the Betsy-Tacy books.
I once published a poem (and won a literary award for it) under my maiden name, Melissa Brannon. I’ve published lots of things under my married name, Melissa Peterson. Scott and I collaborated on a beginning reader science book about ants once, and we used our middle names as a psuedonym: Anne James.
There you go, more than you ever wanted to know about my name. My names. All of ’em.
By: a. fortis,
on 2/28/2008
It's hard to believe, but the 24th of February--that's right, this past Sunday--marked THREE YEARS since the very first blog post on Finding Wonderland, entitled Just Who the Heck Are These People? And our sister blog, Readers' Rants, began exactly... Read the rest of this post
Thanks for these, especially the Brown Book Shelf shout out.
Cheers for Banned Books Week!