How to use this Page

We’ve added a new mug to the Thicklebit shop, just in time for Mother’s Day.

Forgot to link to yesterday’s Thicklebit. I’ll make it up to you by saving you the click.

Must be lunchtime.

Into the Thicklebit | Make kelp bed, organize seashell drawer….

New Thicklebit today!

Dorothy Parker and Julianna Baggott books for $1.99 on Kindle today.

San Diego folks, don’t miss the big event at Yellow Book Road this Saturday: Give a Book on Behalf of Sandy Hook. Some very fine children’s book authors will be there:

Scott and Chris cooked up a Thicklebirthday present for me.

Just in time for Christmas (if you’re quick)!

Into the Thicklebit meets the coffee mug.

Details here.

Lois Lowry’s The Willoughbys is $1.99 on Kindle today.

New Thicklebit!

And a very nice review of Fox and Crow Are Not Friends at Jean Little Library:

…a fun new easy reader with a great text and illustrations. I hope these two will collaborate on more stories. I strongly recommend purchasing the library bound edition, as this is one that will be read again and again!

All that nature study sure is paying off…

Four more days to nominate books and book apps for this year’s CYBILs! Lots of suggestions for possible book-app nominees in the links in this post—please nominate them so I’ll have an excuse to play with them!

New Thicklebit today: Lunacy. I blame the father.

Simon & Schuster has put up a sneak peek of my next Inch and Roly book: Inch and Roly and the Very Small Hiding Place. (They’ve also got a pretty substantial chunk of The Prairie Thief there, if you’d like to preview it before you commit.)

1) Thanks so much to everyone who turned out for the launch party on Saturday! I had massive amounts of fun. The Yellow Book Road was a perfect venue—what a gem of a store. San Diego-area folks, if you haven’t been down to Liberty Station to visit it, you really should make the trip. Lovely location and the kind of children’s bookshop you can fall into and never fall out.

2) It’s CYBILs time again! The Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards public nomination period opens today. Visit the site for all the details and nominate your favorite kids’ and YA books and apps of the past year in a variety of categories. I’m serving as a Round 2 judge in the Book Apps category this year—looking forward to it! Would love to hear about your favorite book apps of the year, too. (One of the many wonderful things about the CYBILs is that all the judging panels are self-contained, so that you may serve on one panel even if you have books eligible in another, as long as you have no conflict of interest with the specific panel you’re on. Whew!) Nominations are open through Oct. 15. Check out the CYBILs sidebar to see what titles have already been nominated.

3) New Thicklebit today!

First up: Into the Thicklebit | Overheard.

Next thing: We’re talking books in the comments of this post—Kristin Lavransdatter and Papa’s Wife. Got other Scandinavian favorites?

Next thing, for San Diego locals: My signing’s on Saturday! Yellow Book Road @ beautiful Liberty Station in Point Loma, 3pm. Come! Say hi! Eat cookies! Listen to me attempt a Scottish accent! (Serves me right for writing characters in dialect.)

Book reviews & interviews.

Other shareworthy links in my sidebar.

***

We have an excursion to City Farmers Nursery planned for this afternoon. Rilla is planting her own butterfly garden. (The one that spans the width of our backyard isn’t enough for her, evidently.) She’s making a list. Excuse me, I mean a LEIST. So far, she’s got:

1. MiLKWED

2. HOT PENK DRANEYOM (hot pink geranium)

I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Scott’s out of town, ergo I am out of steam. All I can do today is link to the new Thicklebit. This is the one for which one of Scott’s panel descriptions read:

Mom is working in the kitchen. There’s a bunch of fruits and veggies on the counter. (This is the least realistic panel description I have ever written, and two days ago I wrote a shot description in which the Hulk picks up Thor and hurls him into the sky.)

Next week after he comes home, I will totally think of a witty comeback. For now, I have to go fold some laundry. LAUNDRY, you guys. Preposterous. Frederick the Mouse never had to do laundry, is all I’m saying.

The artist, working extremely hard

New Thicklebit: Tats for Tots.

New interview: Writing on the Sidewalk.

Foreign language app we are finding irresistible, with a deliciously mockable edge: Earworms. (I learned about it at GeekMom. Rose and Beanie are using the German; Jane, the Japanese. Rose likes it so much she ponied up her own funds for the Arabic.)

Other resources Jane is using to learn Japanese (answering Ellie‘s question from my learning notes blog): Pimsleur Approach audio program (check your library for these); Free Japanese Lessons; Learn Japanese Adventure (another free site).

I had such a fun time yesterday recording a Brave Writer podcast with Julie Bogart and her son. I’ll let you know when it goes live! The Prairie Thief is the October selection for Brave Writer’s Arrow program—a monthly digital language arts curriculum featuring a different work of fiction in each installment. Brave Writer is one of the first resources I ever gushed about on this blog, way back in 2005. And as you’ll discover in the podcast, Julie Bogart was the blogger who inspired me to start Bonny Glen in the first place!

“That was so three seconds ago.” One of my favorite (and most bewildering) parenting moments ever.

Today’s Thicklebit comic is a particular favorite of mine…you may have heard the story here on Bonny Glen at some point.

And I was delighted to read my fellow GeekMom writer Amy Kraft’s take on Thicklebit at Wired today:

Each comic features one of those weird little moments. You know the ones I mean. Your kid says something strange and hilarious and you think, “How did I get here, in this moment, in this situation?”

We appreciate the shout-out!

In case you missed it, Scott wrote a post last week about how Thicklebit came into being. (I earned the title of webpixie over there because I’m always sneaking into his site and uploading pictures and reviews, since he never does it himself.  Ahem.)

A non-Thicklebit piece of news: tomorrow, yippee!, is launch day for Fox and Crow Are Not Friends. So excited to get to share it with everyone. But more on that tomorrow…

Emphasis on story.

New comic at Into the Thicklebit today, and it’s one of my personal favorites.

And I’ve got a review of kids’ math apps at GeekMom. Fun stuff!

Thursday means a new Thicklebit.

This week, it also meant a morning at the park. I took a zillion sundrenched photos of happy kids running wild under the old trees and along the grassy paths, but at the end of the day my favorite is this rather melancholy shot of my two youngest, exhausted by freedom.

How was your day?

I know, I know, I’ve been AWOL! When’s the last time I went a week without posting here? (I know when: summer of 2005, when Wonderboy had surgery. Yeesh.) Well, my absence here is because I’m plugging away elsewhere…sometimes the supply of words is limited, you know?

But a few bits of news:

• A new strip at Into the Thicklebit

• A lovely Kirkus review of my friend Anne Marie Pace’s about-to-launch picture book, Vampirina Ballerina, illustrated by the talented LeUyen Pham.

• Vampirina shares a pub date (August 7) with my early reader, Fox and Crow Are Not Friends. It got a nice review at Kirkus, too (yippee!), which is now viewable by everyone, not just subscribers.

• This month, my upcoming Inch and Roly series gets the spotlight at the Ready-to-Read website, including a letter from me to readers. Whee!

…is always something of a blur. We’re wiped out. But the weekend was lovely. Exhausting, noisy, hectic, but lovely. A recap to come. Presumably. For now, a long happy sigh, a thwarted nap, and a very tall photo. Oh, and we posted a new comic at Thicklebit today.

Remember that time Rilla thought the phrase “into the thick of it” was “into the thicklebit”? And I loved it so much I threatened to rename this blog after it? Well, we’ve decided to go one better. Voila…Into the Thicklebit, a webcomic cowritten by Scott and me, and illustrated by the impossibly brilliant Chris Gugliotti. We hope you’ll enjoy it. You may recognize some Bonny Glen moments here and there. (Hair color has been changed to protect the obstreperous.)

I’ll add a button to the sidebar after SDCC madness is over. We’re aiming for new strips twice a week, when time permits. Tomorrow’s is one of my favorites. (And 100% true.)