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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Samurai Shortstop, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 37
1. Google Alerts Round-up

It's time for round of my semi-regular ego-boost. It's been a while, so I've got a bit of a backlog. Here we go!

Editor Liz reports that The Brooklyn Nine was named to the 2010 Kansas State Reading Circle Catalog with a starred rating. "The lists are distributed and promoted throughout the state of Kansas during the current year." (Thanks, Kansas!)

The Brooklyn Nine is also now for sale in Scholastic Book Fairs. Here's a brief booktalk they put together for it. (Opens as a PDF.) And here's the featured book page.

Media center coordinator Beth Martin writes a lovely appreciation of The Brooklyn Nine in the Wausau Daily Herald.

Stephanie Dethlefs, writing the Children's Book Corner for the Neighborhood-Kids blog, calls The Brooklyn Nine a championship-level book. 

The Semicolon blog names The Brooklyn Nine as one of the two best sports books of the year.

Angela Craft at Bookish Blather wishes The Brooklyn Nine had at least been a Newbery Honor book.

Doret at The Happy Nappy Bookseller had The Brooklyn Nine picked as a Newbery sleeper candidate...

...as did DaNae at Literate Lives...

...and the Arapahoe Library District...

...and Sarah at The Reading Zone. (Thanks, guys! That would have been incredible!)

O.W.L. (Outrageously Wonderful Literature from the Middle Grade) has The Brooklyn Nine in their mailbox...

...as does Mallory at Grammar Girl.

While Valerie at the I Should Be Writing Blog has Something Wicked in her mailbox.

Something Wicked has been nominated for the 2010-2011 South Carolina Children's Book Awards. (Thanks, South Carolina!)

Serious about Series plugs Something Rotten and Something Wicked.

Someone at Books for Sale would include Something Rotten and Something Wicked in a YA starter library if he/she was given $1,000 and carte blanche.

Mer at the Harris County Public Library recommends Something Rotten as a great mystery.

A Baltimore English teacher is going to use Add a Comment
2. The best Samurai Shortstop review EVAR.

I found this while posting my own reviews of other books on Kimberly Pauley's excellent Young Adult (and Kids!) Book Central. Word for word, it's the most entertaining review of Samurai Shortstop ever. (And yes, it's real.) Enjoy:

Title: SO BAD!
Author: yomama

An awful book. Don't take pressious time out of your life to read this. Terrible characters, a plot that a two year old could create, and any grade 8 that went through the canadian curriculum for Japan could have as much knowledge of japan to create this book. The writing stile is week and boring. Don't waste your money or time on such a terrible novel. I think I became more more stupid from this book.

Thanks, yomama! (link)

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3. We're going to Japan!



The big news here at Gratz Industries: we're going to Japan!

After years of dreaming about a Japan trip, we're finally going. At the end of last year, the American School in Japan invited me to apply for a scholar in residence position at their school, and I was one of two people selected to join them this year for an extended school visit! I'll be the guest of ASIJ for six weeks, all the while working with the middle school students on a school-wide historical fiction writing project that will take the place of their usual research papers they write at this time. (It's an English-speaking school, in case you're wondering.)

My first involvement with ASIJ came in the spring of 2009, when the seventh grade read Samurai Shortstop and posted responses to a series of creative and analytical questions on a school-sponsored blog. By invitation, I tuned in to read their work and make comments, and at the end of the project I did an hour-long Skype visit in which I announced the winners of each writing contest and answered general questions about Samurai Shortstop and the writing life.

I'm thrilled to build on that connection now by going on an extended school visit to ASIJ, which is located in Tokyo. I'll be staying in an apartment in Tokyo for six weeks, and commuting to my temporary day job via subway and bicycle (which they're loaning me!) Then, toward the end of my tenure at ASIJ, Wendi and Jo will join me to explore as much of Japan as we can see in a couple of weeks.

And the kicker: it's happening very soon! This spring, in fact--less than three months from now. I've already begun preparing my historical fiction lessons, and we've bought a book or six about traveling around Japan to prepare. Jo is even learning a bit of Japanese, via her Nintendo DS--we found a Japanese language game for her, and she's getting pretty good!

I'll still be blogging from Japan, and should have great pics and stories to share. I'm also expecting to be creatively inspired by the trip, and hope to have a notebook full of great ideas when I return.

Thanks again to ASIJ for the wonderful opportunity!

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4. Google Alerts Round-up

Time for another ego-stroking Google Alerts Round-up, this time, featuring The Brooklyn Nine on the cover of Booklist magazine!

Fellow scribe and poet laureate of Asheville, NC, Allan Wolf, sent me the link to the September edition of Booklist online, which focuses on sports. In addition to the cover, The Brooklyn Nine is featured in the issue's 2009 Top Ten Sports Books for Youth!

Meanwhile, I'm interviewed over at The Secret Adventures of WriterGirl, where reader/writer/blogger writer Heather Zundel asks me, among other things, where all the girls are in Samurai Shortstop. She also posts a very nice review.

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5. Summer of the Samurai

Dad sends in this pick from his iPhone--a summer reading display at the Knoxville, Tennessee Books-A-Million.

Key thing here: my dad has an iPhone and I don't.

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6. Live in Tokyo: Alan Gratz!



Last week I got to talk live to a group of students in Tokyo, Japan, about Samurai Shortstop! Not live in person, unfortunately, but live via an online Skype connection. At 10:30 p.m. my time (11:30 a.m. the next morning Tokyo-time), select students from the American School in Japan sat around a computer in their classroom and posed questions to my Max Headroom-like mug on a screen.

The virtual visit was the culmination of a month of online interaction between me and the students. The entire seventh grade at ASIJ read Samurai Shortstop for class, and then posted to one of six different creative blogs set up to test their knowledge on the book. The students could come up with chapter titles, write haiku, compare figures in modern baseball to figures in Meiji-era baseball, write the opening of a Samurai Shortstop sequel, write a newspaper article about something that happened in the book, or pitch a new novel idea to me. I checked in to read the blogs throughout the month and replied to their posts, and at the end selected what I thought were the best entries in each section. One of things I got to do in the Skype chat was to announce the winners.

Chris Rose, the great guy who put all this together at ASIJ, also edited together a side-by-side video of me and the students doing the Q&A, starting with the video above and continuing in the videos below. The picture on my end is grainy--I don't know what's up with that, since I could see them just fine, and every time I practiced this with my dad in Tennessee he told me I looked crystal clear. Maybe it's something to do with it being an overseas connection--but why one would look sharp and the other not is odd. Anyhow, with schools being even more strapped for cash lately, I think this might be a really viable way to do school visits here and around the world on the cheap. If you want to arrange a virtual visit with me, drop me a line! In the meantime, check out my Skype chat with the students at the American School in Japan....



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7. Google Alerts Round-up

It's time for my regular vanity check from the internets:





















Something Wicked is a SIBA award nominee.

Professor Nana's been reading more books based on Hamlet.

LJ at 75 o'clock is looking forward to the next Horatio Wilkes mystery.

Mr. Muldowney's class can choose to read Something Rotten for their 9th grade book project, but they have to discuss symbolism and irony in the book by April 21st.

School Library Journal featured Samurai Shortstop in a recent article on books for kids set in the days of the samurai.

Devaney Doak & Garrett Booksellers in Farmington, Maine, thinks The Brooklyn Nine would make a great classroom book.

Susan Harkins at BookPleasures.com thinks Something Wicked is a treasure.

And Linda Sue Park, author of the Newbery Award-winning A Single Shard, writes about both The Brooklyn Nine and Something Rotten on her Amazon blog!

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8. Samurai Shortstop + Something Wicked = ?

From Editor Liz: what do you get when you cross Samurai Shortstop with Something Wicked?

Click here for the answer.

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9. Oma gosh, Omaha!

Last week marked my first school event of the season--and it was my farthest afield to date: Omaha, Nebraska! It was also my first ever trip to the Cornhusker State. I amused one of the faculty there when I was able to count on one hand the number of times I've even been across the Mississippi River. (For the record, it is now five times.)

My trip began on Wednesday, with one of the longest days I've ever spent "flying." And by flying, of course, I mean missing flights and sitting in airports all day long. Really, I can't remember the last time I had a completely smooth airline trip. I would quit flying all together if I could, but really, what option is there? It's not like I was going to drive to Omaha, and trains are actually more expensive. (And take longer.) We're a jet-set nation, and we're at the mercy of the airlines. And the inane TSA regulations. But I won't get into that here.

My first flight, from Asheville, North Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia, was supposed to leave at 11 a.m. But when the plane landed, they found a "white liquid" on the propellers, and had to call in a mechanic to take a look. The problem: there is no mechanic on duty at the Asheville airport. You read that right--an airport without a single certified airplane mechanic. A local mechanic had to be called--but he couldn't be reached. So the airline flew a mechanic in from Atlanta. (Yes, again, you read that right.)

I sat and waited to fly to Atlanta while the airline flew in a mechanic from Atlanta to check out our mysterious white substance which, upon review, turned out to be the cleaning liquid squirted into the engine at the last point of departure. How do I know this? Because I sat next to the mechanic on the airplane when we finally took off for Atlanta. That's what this guy does--flies out to regional airports to fix planes.

And the airlines can't figure out why they are burning money like jet fuel.

So of course, I missed my original connecting flight from Atlanta to Omaha. My new connecting flight, one of only two flights left that went to Omaha that day, took off half an hour after my scheduled arrival in Atlanta, and the Asheville gate agent assured me I'd make it. This was important, because I was told the later flight to Omaha that evening was all booked up. My other option was to wait in Asheville for an eight o'clock flight to Cincinnati, connecting to Omaha, but that was risky--if I waited that late and something went wrong (perish the thought!) I'd be totally screwed for making Omaha that day. I haven't missed a school event yet, and I didn't want to start. So I took the flight to Atlanta.

We landed right on time, but because Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta is located on the Seventh Circle of Hell, it took us a full fifteen minutes to taxi to our gate. That left me with ten minutes to sprint from my gate in Concourse D to the Omaha flight's gate in Concourse A, and though I am woefully out of shape and constitutionally opposed to any kind of running, I gave it the old college try. It was all for naught, of course, because the doors had already closed. The plane was still on the ground beyond the gate, but that didn't matter. Rules are rules.

It is moments like this when I wish I could shoot laser beams from my eyes.

As I contemplated how long a drive it would be from Atlanta to Omaha (15.5 hours, for the record) the gate agent told me there were still plenty of seats on the later flight, and she could put me on it. Why then, I pondered through gasping breaths, had I made like Pheidippides? I might as well have asked a rabbit why it zig zags in front of a car rather than just running off the road. Assured that I had a flight to Omaha at eight o'clock (assuming, of course, the plane actually left the ground) I went to forage for over-priced, under-cooked fast food.

I arrived in Omaha, Nebraska at 10:30 p.m. eastern time (9:30 local time), making it fourteen hours since I had left home that morning for the Asheville airport, and just beating the sixteen and a half hours it would have taken me to drive to Omaha from my home. Skipping out on the oma-izzle of Omaha's nightlife, I opted instead for the second-showing of this week's new Project Runway on Bravo, then passed out in bed.

The event, at all-boy private Jesuit school Creighton Prep, was a blast, and went off without a hitch. Samurai Shortstop was the high school's all-grades summer reading book, and from everything I heard it was a hit with the boys at Prep. The guys had great questions throughout the day, and I signed a lot of books. The students and faculty at Prep were terrific hosts, and it was an honor to be the author of the book they all read together this year.

After the school day was finished, Matthew, one of the Creighton Prep English faculty, gave me a brief driving tour of Omaha, which was most welcome, as all I had really seen of it had been a quick night drive to the hotel and a sleepy, gray five-minute drive to the school in the morning. Omaha is a great city, with a lot going on. I saw a vibrant downtown, Rosenblatt Stadium (annual home of the NCAA College World Series), a totally Silent Running domed biosphere at the Henry Doorly Zoo, a neat riverfront area on the Missouri with a groovy-looking (and controversial) pedestrian bridge, and a tree-lined neighborhood where Warren Buffett lives. I even visited Iowa on this trip, briefly, as the drive to the airport cut through Council Bluffs.

All in all, a great trip--airport troubles be damned. And now I'll have something else to remember Nebraska for besides Peyton Manning and the Tennessee Vols losing to Nebraska in the 1998 Orange Bowl. Not that I'm still bitter.

*The pics were scanned from the Omaha visitors guide I found in my hotel room. I couldn't resist.

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10. Guys Read at Salem Middle

I visited Salem Middle School in Apex, North Carolina, last week, and in addition to talking to all the students about Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten, I got to spend time with the Salem Middle guys read group. I did a podcast interview with them, which they've posted on their blog. Check it out - they asked great questions!

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11. The Book Report interviews Alan

Yesterday wasn't all about Project Runway around here. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Pat Grant and Elisabeth Grant-Gibson of The Book Report, a weekly podcast sponsored by Windows: A Bookshop in Monroe, Louisiana. We talked a lot about Samurai Shortstop, Something Rotten, and a bit about my next book, Something Wicked. You can go directly to the archived interview here. My interview follows their chat with Meg Cabot. Meg Cabot, for cripe's sake! Talk about following the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show . . .

I usually take interviews like this in stride, but besides having to follow Meg Cabot I was a little anxious about this one. I've listened to Pat and Elisabeth's podcasts before, and they always ask great, thought-provoking questions. I was worried I wouldn't sound half as smart in my answers!

Turns out they did ask great, thought-provoking questions (as usual). You'll just have to tune in to see how well I handled them.

Thanks Elisabeth, thanks Pat! I had a great time.

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12. Happy Samurai Spring Training Valentine's Day!

It's February 14, 2008, and the first thing on most people's minds is Valentine's Day. Wendi and I are exchanging gifts later, and Jo is already enjoying the gift I got her--her very own lightsaber. (Here she's posing very seriously, she tells me, like Luke.) We're already enacted a few scenes from Star Wars, and one, unintentionally, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But it's not just Valentine's Day--it's the first day pitchers and catchers can report for spring training! Ah, the return of baseball season. Could this day get any better?

Oh, but it can! Today is also the day Samurai Shortstop is officially available in paperback!

Happy Samurai Spring Training Valentine's Day!

And to help promote Samurai and their other baseball books this spring, Penguin put together an awesome baseball card promotion featuring each of the titles. Check it out:

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13. Rotten Samurai News


It's been a good couple of weeks for Something Rotten and Samurai Shortstop here at Gratz Industries. First, the mail brought copies of the Rotten audio, produced by Listening Library. It's a fun listen, as we found when we put it in for a drive down to Asheville recently. Jo even enjoyed it; I turned it off after the first chapter, thinking she wouldn't really be following it, and she asked to keep listening to see who killed Hamilton's daddy! Later she fell asleep, which I won't take too personally.

The same day I got a package from editor Liz--advance copies of the Samurai Shortstop paperback due out this February! They kept the same great cover, but the spine is black, which I think looks great.


And this week, both books won national acclaim from YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association! First, the Samurai Shortstop audio (also by Listening Library) was named to the 2008 YALSA "Selected Audiobooks for Young Adults" list. The same day, Something Rotten was named to the 2008 YALSA Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers list!

Thanks once again to the librarians of America for showing me and my books the love. Right back at you!

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14. Wearing Project Runway

Alan here, posting from the road as I visit five Birmingham-area schools in five days to talk about Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten. The horrible truth: I do not have Bravo in my motel room! (Checking the channel lineup card was among the first things I did when I arrived late Sunday night.) I am faced with three options: read the continual updates on Blogging Project Runway without seeing what's really happening; miss the show and watch when I get home the tape Wendi is making of it; or go to someplace like Mellow Mushroom and ask them to switch over a basketball game to Project Runway, which ought to go over really well. There is always a fourth option, too--I'm putting out the call for Birmingham-area PR fans! Anybody got a Project Runway party I can crash!? I am recently bathed and reasonably well-kempt, and will not talk until the commercial breaks. Throw me a frickin' rope here, people!

Now on to why I'm blogging tonight when I should be working on the edits for Something Wicked. Wendi and I stopped by Steve and Barry's in Asheville on the way home from Thanksgiving at her parents' house so we could check out the winning Victorya/Kevin design on sale. Other bloggers have reported the photo police chasing them from the store, but we were lucky enough to snap some shots without anyone noticing. In fact, there were so few employees at this mall-anchor-store-sized-Steve and Barry's that we felt as though we could have walked right out the back door with armfuls of merchandise and no one would have noticed. Luckily we are made of starcher moral fiber. That and we didn't find much we wanted to steal . . .

So here's the dress:

Click on the image to see it larger. As promised, the price was a whopping $19.98:

The dress came in black and burgundy, and we, like other bloggers, liked the burgundy better. Which begs the question--why were so many of last week's designers afraid of using color? The burgundy is a far cry from the teal blue we got from Elisa/P and Christian/Carmen. I suppose it was closer to the red Ricky/Jack used, but still--bring on the color! I hope this week the designers get to let it all loose . . . although signs point to no. I'll have a preview soon that collects some of the speculation for this week's challenge. Which I cannot watch. Did I mention I don't have Bravo in my motel room?

For the sake of completism, here is the top of the outfit:

Neither of us tried the outfit on (though I was sorely tempted) but it was fun to have it promised in the store and then be able to drop by that weekend and actually see it on the shelf. It was certainly a real kudo for Victorya to have her design in a mass market retailer. I hope she and her family and friends had a little "let's go shopping party" to enjoy it. I know when I have a book hit the shelves I go around to as many bookstores as possible to bask in the glow . . .

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15. Home again, home again . . .

I'm back from my week-long Alabama Library Tour and my weekend-long appearance at SIBA, the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association trade show in Atlanta. Both proved to be very successful trips. I met a ton of librarians on the tour and handed out a LOT of school visit brochures, which I hope turn into invitations!

At SIBA I participated in a panel that included Deborah Wiles. Even though Deb and I both lived in Atlanta for the two years I was there, and both haunted the same bookstores, this was the first time we had met. She was great, and her new book, The Aurora County All-Stars, looks great. (I'm forty pages in and it's terrific so far!) This year you were only guaranteed one of the free, signed books by the panelists if you attended a panel. That meant a lot of people looking for a free, signed copy of Deb's book got mine too. Thanks for letting me share in your glow, Deb!

While I signed copies of Something Rotten for booksellers, I also handed out little packets of bookplates. Wendi and I had the idea that we should offer something else with the books, and we realized that bookplates would be a great giveaway. The idea is for booksellers to take these back to their stores and put them in copies of Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten, thus instantaneously creating signed copies. As my writer friends say, "A signed book is a sold book!" That's the hope, anyway.

Here's how we created the bookplates. First, we printed out bookplates eight to a page on sticker paper, and I signed and stamped them.


Then they got cut out.

Five of each kind got put together in a plastic baggy, along with a postcard thanking the booksellers for their support and telling them to e-mail me if they want more bookplates. (Click on the pic to see them larger.)


They were a hit! I gave out every packet I created. Some folks from the HarperCollins publicity department who were there with an author one table down were salivating over them. They said I was clever. Time will tell if they're right . . . but I'm always trying.

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16. Samurai Shorstop: Compare and Contrast

I just got done with a lot of nitpicky little web site updates to www.alangratz.com--changes that most repeat visitors wouldn't even notice--but one change I made that is noticeable is the addition of an audio player link to the first chapter of Listening Library's version of Samurai Shortstop, as read by Arthur Morey. If you haven't heard it, it's really fabulous. I listened to the whole thing absolutely spellbound once on a long car trip. (Not because I didn't know what was going to happen of course, but because I couldn't believe how fabulous the reading was!)

So until now the only clip of Samurai I had available on my web site was Chapter Seven--a strange choice for a clip, but the one Listening Library chose for promotion. Then recently the Books on Tape folks--which, if I have this right, are a different division of Random House with their own separate packaging and distribution but exact same product--posted a new clip from Samurai: Chapter One.

I added the new clip to the Media page on my web site, but then Wendi had the bright idea to include it also on the Samurai Shortstop Chapter One excerpt page. It was an easy add, and now you can either listen to Chapter One, read it yourself, or read along as Arthur Morey reads it to you.

Only, it's not the same chapter.

Go there and listen to the clip and read along, and you'll soon start to hear subtle differences. "Koji" in the text is now referred to as "Uncle Koji." And Toyo's father--Sotaro--gets named much sooner.

I didn't listen to the whole thing to hear all the differences, but I know what happened. I used the latest manuscript I had on the computer to post the text, but there is always one more copy-edit after that--the one actually done on the typeset pages! At that point we must have had the discussion about the names.

I had deliberately not introduced Sotaro's name until almost the very last line, because I didn't want readers to be confused by too many Japanese names. I was already throwing Toyo and Koji around, and didn't want to confuse the matter. Then we decided, late in the process, that calling Sotaro "Toyo's father" all the way through the chapter was confusing too. Why didn't he have a name? So we changed that. You can see other minor changes as well--like clarifying that Koji is "Uncle Koji" more often.

If you're interested to see the differences between the last manuscript I sent off and the last round of edits done directly on the typeset manuscript, get yourself over to my web site and have a listen/look. This is a limited time offer, because soon I'll have to fix it!

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17. Home Alone 2: Day Six

Well, this week didn't turn out anything like I had hoped. I got a lot of writing done on the front end, but very little (read: none) on the back end. Wednesday and Thursday were a wash due to home things combined with preparations for my weekend speaking engagement at the Harriette Austin Writers Conference in Athens, Georgia. Today has been spent on the phone and on the e-mail, "taking care of business" as the King used to say. I also have to pack for the trip, and make the last adjustments to my Hagrid costume for tonight's Harry Potter release party at Malaprop's! I'll post pictures if and when I can.

In the meantime, here's a great review of Samurai Shortstop on Gail Gauthier's blog, Original Content. Enjoy!

And here are your totals for the week:

Days home alone: 6

Chapters written: 4

Pages written: 30

Average pages per day: A sorry 5 pages per day

Wii baseball: Within 50 points of pro

Wii bowling: Bowled eight games; maintained pro status

Wii tennis: Still pretty hopeless

Wii golf: Shot another 3 under and a 2 under; maintained pro status

Mellow Mushroom pizzas eaten: 2

Miles walked: 5.25 - I walked down to the mail box today

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18. Alan is interviewed on PaperTigers.org


In perhaps the best interview I've ever been a part of (either asking or answering the questions), PaperTigers.org has posted a thought-provoking Q&A with me. PaperTigers, a part of the Pacific Rim Voices Project, is a website that features books for young readers, with a special focus on books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Their site is an amazing resource. Check it out!

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19. Samurai lives!

A nice review of Samurai Shortstop has just been published on bookpleasures.com.

Check it out here.

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20. Something Rotten's first good news

Something Rotten doesn't hit bookstore and library shelves until October, but I've just gotten word from Editor Liz that my YA murder mystery has been picked up by the Junior Library Guild! This is great news. The JLG has great taste in books, and often their picks predict what will be well-reviewed and popular in the coming months. And of course they had the great taste to choose Samurai Shortstop last year. :-)

I suppose it's getting on toward that time when reviews and buzz (if there is going to be any) will begin to trickle in. I'm glad I stopped biting my fingernails back in eighth grade. They'd be stumps already.

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21. All booked up


I've added a few new events to the calendar!

First, I'll be at the Annual ALA Conference this weekend (June 23 & 24) in Washington, D.C. for a VERY limited engagement (all day Saturday and half of Sunday). Penguin plans to push Something Rotten galleys from 11-12 on Saturday morning, and I'm going to be there to shake hands and sign books.

Next up I'll be one of the judges at Malaprop's Bookstore's Harry Potter Party on July 20th before book the seventh goes on sale at midnight. If all goes well, I'll be going dressed as Hagrid (as I'm fairly Hagrid-sized) and I'll post pictures for you.

I've also added the Haywood County Book Mania festival on August 3rd and 4th, sponsored by the good folks at Osondu Books in Waynesville, NC. I was invited to this event last year, and look forward to it again (especially since it's now a lot shorter drive!)

And last but CERTAINLY not least, I've added two "launch parties" for Something Rotten this fall - first the o-fficial launch party at my hometown Carpe Librum Booksellers in Knoxville, TN at 2 p.m. on Sunday, October 21st, and then a reading and signing at my NEW hometown bookstore, Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville, NC, on Friday, November 2nd at 7 p.m.

Hope to see you at one of my upcoming events. And as always, you can keep up with where I'll be (and when!) on my calendar at www.alangratz.com!

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22. I've been two-timing you

Author and writing instructor Darcy Pattison asked me to guest blog for her while she's on the road, and my post about revising Samurai Shortstop is up at her Darcy Pattison's Revision Notes blog. Check it out!

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23. The Father of Japanese Baseball

My friend Judy Eastwood sent me a newspaper article from the Maine Sunday Telegram of May 20th, which tells the story of a Gorham, Maine man who went to Japan in the late 1800s to teach English, and ended up teaching them far more:

On a day in 1872 or a year later, depending on who's telling the story, Horace Wilson decided his students at the First Higher School of Tokyo needed to get away from their class lessons. A little physical exercise in the form of hitting a ball, throwing it and running would get the blood pumping.

The game was baseball, of course. If you've read the end notes to Samurai Shortstop, you'll know that Horace Wilson is credited with introducing baseball to Japan--although the sources I had said that Wilson wasn't a teacher at First Higher, but at Tokyo University. (Otherwise I might have used him as a character!)

What I find most interesting about the article is how Japanese baseball officials went looking for someone from Horace Wilson's family to represent him during Wilson's induction into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001:

A century passed before a representative of Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's national newspapers, showed up at the Wilson farm, now owned by Abigail Sanborn and Balcomb. "We didn't have any idea what he wanted," said Balcomb, who teaches calculus and contemporary math, among other classes, at Saint Joseph's College of Maine.

The Japanese weren't satisfied with the notion that baseball just happened to take root in their country. They wanted the man responsible for planting the seed. Their evidence pointed to Horace Wilson. To honor him properly and promote baseball in Japan, his family had to be found.

In June 2001, a small delegation arrived at the farm to formally invite Wilson family members to Japan. The newspaper, along with Japanese baseball federations, planned a ceremony to recognize Uncle Horace before the 83rd National High School Baseball Championship Series at the famed Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Dice-K had pitched his Yokohama team to the championship at Koshien three years earlier.

"It was a terribly hot day," said Balcomb of the second visit. "We were haying. I was in the barn, up to my knees in manure, milking, and one of the Japanese came in to watch. He didn't speak English."

Click here to read the whole article.

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24. Samurai gets the scholarly treatment

Check out the great review of Samurai Shortstop at The Age of ______? blog written by Tom Philion, and Associate Professor at Roosevelt University in Chicagoland. Inspired by a writing prompt observed during another teacher's lesson that encouraged students to fill in the blank with the one word they thought best defined their age, Tom began to think about ways English teachers could encourage that kind of examination all the time. The answer, he thinks, is in contemporary young adult literature.

I happen to agree.

Here in Tom's words is the motivation for his project:

[T]his project is an effort to explore how young adult literature might be used to encourage deeper, richer, and more critical thinking about the contemporary world in middle school and high school English courses. Like many teachers, librarians, and publishers before me, I believe that young adult literature is a powerful tool for inviting teens to critically examine and take seriously the social roles and responsibilities that they are on the cusp of assuming.

Good stuff. His blog is fascinating. He's working his way through four Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) lists from last year - the 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults (which is where he found Samurai Shortstop), the 2007 Alex Award winners (ten adult books recommended for teen readers), the 2007 Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, and the 2006 Teens Top Ten (a list of outstanding literature selected by teens themselves).

Tom has even returned to Samurai Shortstop in a more recent post, in which he examines the influence of seppuku on suicide rates in contemporary Japan. The whole blog is great reading, and I love the scholarly attention he's giving young adult literature as a whole.

I also can't go without sharing Tom's Video Booktalk for Samurai Shortstop, which he has posted to YouTube and to his blog:



Thanks Tom!

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25. Samurai a Bank Street Best Book of the Year

This just in from Editor Liz: Samurai Shortstop has been named one of the Best Children's Books of the Year by Bank Street College of Education. I'd offer a link to the list . . . but the list is published in book form, and thus not free on the internets. Here's a link instead to where they sell it. Thanks so much to the folks at Bank Street!

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