How to use this Page

As you may or may not have heard the offices of School Library Journal moved/are moving to a new location here in NYC.  As such, a fair number of folks have been cleaning house.  One such person wrote me an email letting me know that they had extra copies of “my” SLJ issue and they wondered whether or not I wanted them.  I most certainly did (my sole copy was water damaged years ago) but boy, talk about something that makes me feel old.  Remember this?

Published in November of 2009 it was a piece about the rise of children’s and YA literary blogging (and, for the next 30 seconds, it appears to be the picture on the Wikipedia entry for School Library Journal).  As you can see, it was me alongside Monica Edinger (Educating Alice), Cheryl Klein (Brooklyn Arden), Jennifer Hubert-Swan (Reading Rants), and Liz Burns (A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy).

The cover was not without controversy, by the way.  Some folks objected to the fact that it was a whole bunch o’ white girls, which was a legitimate point to make.  That was my mistake.  At the time we had almost zero bloggers to choose amongst but we were not without options

The much greater objection, however, was to the fact that we were holding alcoholic drinks.  Imagine!  Librarians and teachers and editors who drink!  What kind of message is that sending?  WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?  Looking back on it (one librarian wrote that she could easily have left this face up on her desk where some poor unsuspecting child would have seen it – apparently dooming said child to a lifetime of alcoholism, one assumes) this may have been the incident that inspired the creation of Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature.  After all, that book is all about combating this fluffy bunny mentality surrounding folks who work with kids in some capacity.  Never mind that we were all adults well over the drinking age.  Never mind that what we were actually holding were fake drinks that tasted like nothing so much as used pink bathwater.  We work with or for children and therefore must be fine upstanding citizens at all times.  There is no room for adulthood when you work with kids, it would seem.

All this happened five years ago.  In that time span a lot has occurred not least of which is the state of children’s literary blogs themselves.  If you read the piece you’ll see that I include in it a sampler set of kidlit blogs from which to choose and to read called “Ten Blogs You Can’t Live Without”.  Most of them remain, to this day, go-to pieces.  Others have passed on (Collecting Children’s Books and Editorial Anonymous most notably).  I’ve already done a post on children’s literary blogs that have passed on, so today I’d like to consider where the children’s literature blog of the future is going.

Take, for example, The Kidlitosphere.  Started as a group to organize and celebrate the bloggers out there, it continues to have annual conferences (the next one is in Sacramento on October 10th and 11th) that are well worth the time and energy taken to attend.  The Kidlitosphere has not yet incorporated, but one can hope that it’ll head that way someday.  That group has legs and The Cybils, its annual book award, is only more and more popular every year.  Since 2009 we’ve seen Book Expo express an interest in book bloggers as well with their own little conference.  It is broader than the children’s literary field (and their first conference was exceedingly annoying since they kept repeating over and over that it was the “first” book blogger conference ever in the history of the world, which it most certainly was not) but is well attended.

Then there are the new blogs.  In my prime I was able to keep track of new blogs with shocking alacrity.  These days a blog essentially has to walk over and bop me over the top of my head with a large heavy object for me to notice it.  Still and all, I’ve managed to locate some pretty outstanding blogs over the last five years.  Here are the ones I would let you know about if I were to write another article for SLJ about the state of blogging in 2014.

Great Children’s Literary Blogs : A New Sampler Set

32 Pages – Canadian to the core!  There aren’t as many Canadian bloggers out there as I would like.  It’s absolutely lovely.  For those of you already fans of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, this makes for a nice supplement.

The Book Smugglers – Actually they’ve been blogging since 2007 so technically they don’t belong here.  They were around when I wrote the SLJ article.  That said, I didn’t know about them until relatively recently.  They exhaust me, actually.  Full of spitfire and verve and personality, these folks give blogging a good name.

Bookie Woogie – Created by Aaron Zenz this is without a doubt the smartest, wittiest father & kids blog out there.  Zenz captures the words of his kiddos brilliantly.  Once you’re hooked you just can’t stop reading (and those kids make some EXCELLENT points about the books out there).

Books Around the Table – Author blogs come and go.  They all seem so fleeting (except Blue Rose Girls, which may be the longest running author/illustrator blog since it started in 2006).  This blog has had some serious legs.  As it describes itself, “Books Around The Table is the blog of Margaret Chodos-Irvine, Laura Kvasnosky, Julie Larios, Julie Paschkis and Bonny Becker. We are a critique group of children’s book authors and illustrators who have been meeting monthly since 1994 to talk about books we are working on, books we have read, our art and our lives.”  Read it.  Love it.

Disability in Kidlit - Three YA authors make for most excellent guides into the world of children’s and YA literature where disability is a feature.  Definitely check out their most recent post The Mystical Disability Trope.

The History Girls – Another author blog, this time with a concentration on historical fiction.  It’s a great topic and this blog has been blowing and going since 2011.  No mean feat!  Check out the topic cloud on the side if you’re looking for historical fiction of a particular era or time period.

How To, How Hard, and How Much – Or, put another way, nepotism nepotism nepotism.  Yeah, this is my sister’s blog, but when it comes to crazy original crafts you can’t do much better.  For example, her recent piece on Origami Monster Bookmarks that you can make yourself . . . well some enterprising picture book author with a book about monsters would be WISE to check this out (to say nothing of the children’s librarians out there).  Plus it uses the phrase, “8 minutes per monster” which is just awesome.

Latin@s in Kid Lit – This group blog has five authors and one shared purpose.  They came to prominence in the wake of #WeNeedDiverseBooks and have produced consistently compelling and interesting posts ever since.  If can add only one of these blogs to your blogroll, it should probably be this one.

Lolly’s Classroom – This is the Horn Book blog specifically made with educators in mind.  Lots of great posts.  My current favorite is Using picture books to teach satire.

Nerdy Book Club – The rise of The Nerdy Book Club is probably the most significant change since that 2009 article.  In 2012 (as far as I can tell) a band of bloggers with an educational bent came together to create their own site.  If you want to see your jaw do a drop to the floor, check out their blogroll on the side of the site.  They have big events where they gather together in a kind of un-conference called Nerd Camp (and its kid-spinoff Nerd Camp Junior) and even their own book awards.  Little wonder publishers have picked up on them as a force to be reckoned with.

Nine Kinds of Pie – This is Phil Nel’s blog.  A professor at Kansas State, Phil is amazing.  An academic and a contributing member to the online conversation about children’s books, his site never fails to make me happy every single time I look at it.

Pop Goes the Page – I love my sister’s craft blog but if you want a pure library program focus then this blog from Cotsen Collection librarian Dana Sheridan is awe-inspiring.  Of course there are interviews as well as crafts to be found too.  One of my favorite new blogs out there.

The Show Me Librarian – Sure, I’m a librarian but how often do I do posts that another children’s librarian could really use?  Posts about storytimes and flannel boards and all that good stuff?  If nothing else her recent post on art bots and family forts should convince you to check her out with great regularity.

The Uncommon Core – Though it took a hiatus for a while, the best blog out there to discuss the larger ramification of the Common Core is back in business, baby!  It seems strange to me that in the wake of all this CCSS talk there haven’t been more blogs of this sort.  At least we have this one.

Views from the Tesseract – Without a doubt this would be the #1 science fiction and fantasy middle grade blog out there (though, to be perfectly honest, I work with Stephanie so I might be prone to a bit of bias).  Anytime I want to know how a middle grad work is I hand it to Stephanie and she vets them for me.  Her taste is impeccable.  Without her there are whole swaths of books I might otherwise miss.

Watch. Connect. Read. – Mr. Schu is the arbitrator of this video blog.  Want to see a trailer or filmed conversation about books?  Now you know the place to go.

Looks like it’s time to update the old blogroll, eh?  All of these are extraordinary.  They give me great hope for the future.  Blogging, far from the trend some predicted it to be, continues unabated.  Of course, this is just a small sampling.  If you know of any blogs that cropped up post 11/09 that I should know about, comment here!

By the way, in 2009 when Peter Sieruta caught wind of our controversy he created a faux alternative cover for those disturbed by the presence of lady liquor.  Seen here:

God, I miss that man.

So I was listening to an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour the other day.  If you happen to unfamiliar with the show it’s just your basic pop culture based podcast where they dissect the trends and news of the day so you don’t have to.  In a recent episode called ‘Captain America’ And The Pitiless March Of Time a discussion was made of websites that have simply disappeared over the years.  The folks over at NPR were concerned about the fact that Television Without Pity is now defunct.  They mentioned how we live in this odd world where things we love and sites that once contained just loads of content can disappear in a day.  It got me to thinking.

I started A Fuse #8 Production as a blog on Blogger back in February of 2006.  At that time I had no idea what I was doing, stringing one word next to another, plucking weirdo news items from the ether, and generally reviewing anything I could get my hot little hands on.  I did a book review a day in my prime.  Now I’m lucky if I can get two out in a week!  That was when I caught some attention for starting a series called The Hot Men of Children’s Literature.  All in good fun, it got attention which was my ultimate goal.  Then SLJ picked me up and the rest is history.

So I took a trip back to my little old blog site and checked out the blogroll on the side.  The blogroll was something I maintained meticulously for a while.  There was even a moment when every day I would systematically check each and every blog there for news I could use.  Looking at it now, I see a lot of familiar faces who are still going strong, but they’re alongside folks I wish were still around.  If we pick a random number and say that the Kidlitosphere has been in existence for a decade, then maybe now is the time to tip our hats to those folks we miss.  In no particular order . . .

Collecting Children’s Books

Well. . . maybe a certain kind of order.  Here’s the thing about that old blogroll of mine.  If you look at it today you’ll see it’s organized in a kind of haphazard method.  That’s because it’s in order of blogs I checked the most to the least (7 years ago . . don’t flog me if you’re low!).  And coming in at #5 was Peter Sieruta and his jaw-dropping Collecting Children’s Books.  I kid you not when I say that for a time Peter was the hardest working man in show business.  His sheer output put me to shame.  I’d mince about with a tiny post here and there and then he’d swoop in with his Sunday Brunch posts and just blow us all away with these insightful, clever, interesting looks into the history of children’s literature.  He was beloved of certain authors like M.E. Kerr, childhood heroes he connected with thanks to the age of the internet.  Peter was so amazing, in fact, that it seemed a bloody frickin’ shame that no one was paying him to do what he did so well.  So I reached out to him and Julie Danielson of Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast and proposed we all write a book together.  Turns out, I couldn’t have picked two better authors in all my livelong days.  Though our writing styles were diverse we were able to synthesize them into a single unified voice.  That book, Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature comes out in August (we had to push back the pub date, which is why you’re not seeing it on your shelves this month) and is dedicated to Peter.  You see, after we had turned in our text, Peter passed away unexpectedly leaving a massive gaping hole in the children’s book blogosphere.  He was a kind and witty friend and from time to time I turn back to his old site just to see if there are any updates.  There never will be, but it does the heart good to check.

Just One More Book

On Saturday, April 19th at 2:00 p.m. I’m so pleased to announce that I’ll be hosting the Children’s Literary Salon Podcasting Children’s Books: Ins and Outs, Ups and Downs.  In it, podcasters Katie Davis (Brain Burps About Books), John Sellers (PW KidsCast), and Matthew Winner (Let’s Get Busy) will engage me in conversation about the world of children’s literary podcasting and their experiences with the form.  It’s bound to be a real thrill but it’s also important to remember that before any of these folks started in on the form there was one site that was your automatic go-to kidlit podcast.  Just One More Book was a Canadian creation, the brainchild of Andrea Ross and Mark Blevis.  For a time, it was really the only place to get good podcasting (unless, of course, you were a Harry Potter fan who subscribed to Pottercast).  Then personal problems arose.  Andrea was diagnosed with breast cancer and the site bravely chronicled her fight and recovery.  That was in 2009 and since that time there is the occasional podcast or video but for all intents and purposes the site is no longer updated.  Yet even in its defunct state I was happy to note that the Twitter feed of @JustOneMoreBook rakes in a whopping 6,549 followers.  You can bet I’ll be giving them a shout out at my next Lit Salon.

Big A little a

In an age of countless children’s literary blogs, with more and more cropping up every day, people forget that in the early days there just weren’t a lot of us hanging around.  You had your Tea Cozy and your MotherReader.  Your Educating Alice and your bookshelves of doom.  And then there was Big A little a run by Kelly Herold.  It wasn’t one of those big flashy blogs.  Instead, Kelly just provided really good, steady content for folks who were curious.  She had no problem interviewing Judy Blume one day and Mary Pope Osborne the next.  Sadly the site shuttered in 2009 and though she did try to do an alternate blog for a time it didn’t last.  Fortunately you can follow Kelly on Pinterest if you like, where she maintains four different boards.

The Edge of the Forest

Now my memory is a bit foggy on this one so folks who remember and worked on this will have to correct me when I get my facts wrong.  You see, in the early children’s literature days we had no idea what we were doing.  We knew we had to get organized in some way, so the Kidlitosphere Central was created, a wiki of reviews born, and the yearly Children’s Book Blogger Conference Kidlitcon established (not to mention the Cybils!).  On top of that, there was an idea of maintaining an online magazine with contributions from our community.  Called “The Edge of the Forest” it featured reviews of its own as well as articles and interviews.  Sadly it didn’t last and the site itself disappeared completely from the internet.  This is one of the rare cases of something children’s book blog related completely disappearing, reminding us that no matter how much content we may produce, it could all cease and desist tomorrow.  A blogger momento mori, if you will.

Editorial Anonymous

Ah.  One of the great mysteries of the children’s book blog age.  Created in 2007 and continuing until its demise in 2011, no one ever knew who EA, as she/he was affectionately known, really was.  Many theories raged, and undoubtedly a number of editors of children’s books probably had to field questions from folks wondering if they were “the one”.  EA’s disappearance isn’t hard to explain though.  She (it’s probably a pretty safe bet to call EA a she) was snarky in the good sense of the word.  Suffering no fools she had a whip smart tongue and a great style to boot.  Undoubtedly someone somewhere figured out her secret and so she stopped posting entirely one day.  I harbor two fantasies about EA.  One is that someday she’ll write a book of her own (though she may easily have already done so) and that I’ll see it and recognize her style.  The other is that I’ll be in my gray later years, oh say 85 or so, and one day someone will call me up and say to me and me alone: “Editorial Anonymous was [enter name here]“.  It could happen.  A girl just has to have faith.

Uncommon Corps

Sometimes a blog goes away and you feel sad.  And sometimes they stop posting and you get a bit miffed.  When The Uncommon Corps was created in the wake of the early Common Core State Standards rollout I was thrilled.  With an illustrious group of authors at the helm this was slated to be THE #1 most important blog to talk about CCSS out there.  But as time passed it just couldn’t quite post regularly.  It was started in 2012 and continued through 2013 then died on the vine.  I do maintain a hope somewhere that someday it will be revived, but until then we’ll just have to be content with the archives, such as they are.

Of course there are other blogs that have been pertinent to our business over the years that I miss just as much as well.  Children’s Music That Rocks used to be my one and only source of great new children’s album reviews.  Golden Age Comic Book Stories showed as much classic children’s book illustration as it did comic book panels.  There are others too that just slowed down their postings to one or two a year.

So now that I’ve steeped you in my own unique brand of nostalgia, return the favor.  What are some of the sites you find yourself missing from time to time?

At Hogs Back Books we love the Olympics and we love bookshops so we decided to combine the two! To tie in with the launch of our new Olympics book and website, O is for Olympics, (www.oisforolympics.com), over the next few weeks we will be following the route of the Olympic Torch Relay and chatting to the best bookshops along the route - from Land's End to Innerleithen, from Guernsey to Norfolk to Aberystwyth, finishing in the Olympic Park on 27 July - a total of 2,624.6 miles.