For the last few weeks I have been writing to you about First Book’s partnership with eBay Foundation and the Community Gives campaign.
Last Thursday, I was given the chance to see the first ripples of our powerful partnership’s impact when we delivered the first of 333,000 new books that will be distributed this year to First Book children nationwide in celebration of First Book and eBay Foundation’s ambitious goal: to identify, connect and serve 50,000 of the most under resourced programs nationwide with access to an ongoing supply of new books.
On Thursday morning eBay employees and eBay community members came together to read to First Book children in bicoastal reading parties — one held near eBay’s headquarters at Dorsa Elementary School in San Jose, CA; the other near First Book headquarters at Anthony Bowen YMCA in Washington, DC.
I have shared a few photos from the event below. Please take look!
Today marks the last day of the campaign, which closes at midnight tonight. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of so many of you, we have nearly reached our goal.
For those who have not yet donated, I hope you’ll take a moment to do so now. This is your last chance to have your gift to First Book matched by any extra dollar from the eBay Foundation.
Please donate now at www.communitygives.org.
At the end of each chapter of The Graveyard Book I've drawn a little headstone, with the number of the chapter on it.
I just drew the little headstone for Chapter 7. After one hundred and eleven handwritten pages. There's a lot wrong with it, there are bits that need to be expanded (or, in the case of one scene, written) bits that mean that I need to go and change or expand moments earlier in the book. The prose is a bit more pedestrian than most of the other chapters, and I'll need to play with it or leave it. But it's done -- and it's huge. Which, for something that, if this was a film, would be the entire Third Act, is not really surprising. As I said, it's done, and I got back to the house from the gazebo to find my assistant Lorraine still typing out from photocopies what I'd handwritten earlier in the week, an hour after she would normally have gone home, and only still typing because she wanted to know what happened next. She glared at me, and told me I had to keep writing...
Right. Now I have to think about Chapter 8 a bit. I think I may need to sit down and list everything that has to happen before the book can end. Plotting by list can sometimes be extremely useful.
(The oddest moment of today was finding a slip of paper in The Graveyard Book book I'm writing in, on stationary from the hotel I was in in Budapest in June, which listed everything that needed to happen in Chapter 7, including the climactic denouement which I was very proud of having come up with last week. Not sure whether this says something about my rubbish memory, or about the sometimes inevitable nature of storytelling. As in, "Of course it went there, because that was where it was going to go.")
