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Hello all you cool hep cats in "The Land of Blog," tis I Darth Bill with some extra cool goodies to share with all!!!!!

First I want to talk about the very exciting and intensive Jedi/Sith Lightsaber Construction Workshop we had here at ImaginOn on 6/25/09. Well about 19 guys showed up and some made (sigh) Jedi Lightsabers while other made (YES!!!!) Sith Lightsabers. We then proceeded to learn some basic fencing moves and held a competition to see who was the best Lightsaber User!!!!! I have included some pictures below:


Young Jedi and Sith gathering to
obtain the materials needed to
construct a proper Lightsaber.

Our Victorious Lightsaber Fencing Champion Darth ????? (We did not get your name young Sith. Comment on this Blog and we will set that right.)




















The Graduating Class
of Darth Bill's Lightsaber
Construction and Training
Class 2009!!!!!!








And now for something completly different, reviews of READS:


Ninja Baseball Kyuma by Shunshin Maeda - Okay, what happens when you mix baseball and a young ninja named Kyuma Hattori? Well I can tell you one thing for sure; a very funny manga. The story starts with a lovable but somewhat odd assortment of baseball players whose team name is "The Moonstar City Youth Baseball Club." They are decent, but lacking in something that prevents them from being great. That all changes one day when the captain of the baseball team, Kaoru, is wondering through the forest and comes across Kyuma, the last of his ninja clan, and Inui his pet dog. Kaoru observes some of Kyuma's abilities and begins to think that they would be well applied in the game of baseball. Kyuma is very anxious to give baseball a try, but has much to learn as he knows nothing about how it is played (many funny parts of the story occur from Kyuma's misunderstandings). So if you like baseball and ninjas along with good laughs, this is definitely a manga you should take a look at!!!!!!!!!



Wolverine: Worst Day Ever by Barry Lyga - Wow!!!! I have to tell you guys, this book rocked in a serious way!!!! Imagine you are 12 years old and all of a sudden your mutant ability kicks in. Pretty cool huh? Well not so much for Eric Mattias. You see his mutant power turns out to be that everyone forgets he is around. Say he is sitting watching T.V., people don't notice him and change the channel and/or they might even sit on him because they don't notice he is there. Worst he finds it very hard to have friends because every time he is hanging out with people his own age, they forget all about him. Anyway he is a newbie at the Xavier School for the Gifted and that is his situation. He is miserable because of his condition and always getting into trouble with Professor X because he gets bored and does things that he is not supposed to do (hey I would probably to if no one payed me any attention hardly ever). The Professor is about the only mutant who can see and focus on Eric or at least Eric thinks so. I know I have not said much about Wolverine up to this point, but he plays a major role in Eric's life in this book along with the very unsavory Sabertooth. This book is written in a blog style format, as Eric is basically blogging about his day to day life at the school. Also as a bonus, 3 comic book stories starring Wolverine and Power Pack are included. Two Thumbs Up!!!!!

Until next time all, Peace,

Bill

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I try not to be jealous of other writers, and especially writers who are friends of mine, but HOW COOL IS THIS??? It would be like someone coming to me to ask me to write an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. The cover is so awesome! And because I am friends with the writer, I’ve already [...]

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So, I was really, really, really looking forward to coming home from class tonight and reading Sons of Empire. But it wasn't waiting for me on my doorstep. Publication is getting pushed back to August. UGH. Don't the good people at Vertigo know that I was counting on that to hold me over until Love Is a Many Trousered Thing comes out in early July? Which was in turn holding me over until THE BIG ONE?

sigh

Well, to commemorate my misery, here's a post of graphic novels and similar...

Jack of Fables Vol. 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape by Bill Willingham

Jack is a new Fables spin-off series. Jack was too big for Fable Town and was living the high life in LA, but now he's been kidnapped and forced into retirement by Mr. Revise-- the head librarian. Mr. Revise doesn't like Fables that are too big for their britches and holds them in his compound until the Mundies forget them, thereby stripping them of their power. This is where Mother Goose now lives. But, we know Jack, and nothing can hold him.

If you like Fables, you'll like Jack. It's along the same lines with the same new spin and smart humor.

I also want to add that I spent the entire book trying to place Sam the maintenance main. It wasn't until the end, when he did his thing with the tigers, that it clicked.

Miki Falls: Spring Mike Crilley

I don't read a lot of manga. It tends to not be my thing, but there was a question about this at work, so I picked it up. Now I can't wait until Miki Falls: Summer

So, it's Miki's first day of her senior year in high school when she meets the new boy in town, Hiro. Hiro pushes everyone away and doesn't want to make friends, or fit in. Miki knows there's something behind his tough exterior and wants in. Slowly, she starts chipping down his walls, only to find a really deep, big secret.

I was kinda blase on this until I found out what the secret was. Which I can't say, because that would totally ruin the book. But it's a really interesting concept that has me enthralled. Definitely on the girly side of things, I'm hooked.

Chicken with Plums Marjane Satrapi

I fell in love with Marjane Satrapi's work this spring. Chicken with Plums is a short book looking at an Iranian musician's final days. After his wife breaks his tar during an arguement, Nasser Ali Khan can not find a new one he likes the sound of. Eventually, being unable to find a new instrument to play, he loses the will to live, and decides to die. In the eight days until his death, Satrapi (his great-niece) chronicles his dreams and hallucinations, illuminating his past and the future of his family.

The same elements that make Satrapi's previous works great are at play here, with the element of mystical realism, and heartbreak. Her art tends to be stark, which adds to the bleakness that Nasser Ali, and the reader, feels as he waits for Death to come to him.

You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons - The World on One Cartoon a Day Mo Willems

Those of us who are hep to kidlit best know Mr. Willems from such fantastic titles as Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, and Leonardo, the Terrible Monster. That last one is one of my favorites for storytime-- especially that temper tantrum bit in the middle. I really get into that one.

Anyway, back in the day, before he started writing hilarious children's books that adults enjoy almost as much as children, but on a whole different level, back when Willems was just a recent college grad not entirely sure what to do with this life... he took a trip around the world. Instead of keeping a traditional travel journal, at the end of each day, Willems drew one cartoon. His cartoons tend not to cover the big tourist things, or the splendor of a country, but rather those little moments that make travel so awesome and perfect. Most cartoons had a caption and Willems has added modern day captions and commentary as well.

Some of my favorites were from December 9th, "While ordering lunch, make a mental note to learn the Thai word for 'chicken'" or July 3, "Old enough to smoke, young enough to play hide and seek."

Dave Barry's introduction is also hilarious and sets the book up perfectly.

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl Barry Lyga

Donnie's the geeky scrawny kid who's always getting picked on in dodgeball with the gym teacher never noticing, or caring. His best friend is a super-cool jock, so they can't hang out together at school (even though I got the feeling this is mor Donnie's imagining of an unspoken rule that his friend really didn't care about). His mother is pregnant and won't let anyone come over to the house, and he hates his stepdad. The only real comfort he gets is from reading comic books and drawing his own. Then, one day, the goth girl, Kyra enters his life and everything changes.

Boy meets amazing/weird girl who changes everything has been a trend I've noticed a lot in YA books recently. Maybe this is the boy equivelent of the girl story of girl cruches after hott popular guy and never realizes until the end that her best guy friend is her prince charming after all...

I liked this book. Donnie's voice is sharp and authentic. And Lyga's love of comic books shows through, which is why I'm including it in this post, even though it's not a graphic novel.

Also, I have 17 books checked out from the library and another 6 borrowed from other people. So, the first part of my "read what you own, doofus" challenge is to, well, read those 23 titles. I'm halfway through the biggest, slowest going one, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France.

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Barry Lyga on Barry Lyga: "Born on 9/11/71--you can imagine how I spent my thirtieth birthday! Lived for most of my life just about an hour below the Mason-Dixon Line, but never felt like a Southerner except when I visited family in New England, where I was told I talked like a rebel. Then, back in Maryland, friends said I sounded like a Yankee. So I guess I've felt like an outsider from the beginning!

"I learned how to read and write thanks to comic books--I absorbed the damn things as a kid, internalizing lessons in plot, characterization, and pacing. Some of those lessons were good, some of them were bad, but all of them led me to figure out more and more writing issues for myself. Plus, comics invigorated my imagination (anything could happen!) and also did wonders for my vocabulary (show of hands--who knew the words 'impervious,' 'invulnerable,' and 'continuum' in first grade?).

"My first book is The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). It's about what happens when a young comic book geek meets the girl of his nightmares and oh, yes, it was quite cathartic to write it."

What about the writing life first called to you? Did you shout "yes!" or run the other way?

I definitely shouted "yes!" but I also ran the other way at the same time! My earliest memory of "the writing life" is being very young--probably seven or eight. My grandmother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told her, very seriously, that I wanted to be a writer. And she did Jewish grandmothers everywhere proud by saying, "Oh, so you want to starve!"

She was kidding, of course, but I was young and I didn't understand that she was kidding. And while I liked the idea of writing, I also liked the idea of eating! So for much of my life, I figured I would be something else and then be a writer as well--lawyer/writer, teacher/writer, etc. But that just didn't work for me. It wasn't until I fully embraced the writing life that things started to happen for me.

What made you decide to write for young adults?

I had always resisted it because I had this lingering prejudice--from the young adult books of my childhood, which were awful--that YA literature wasn't "real" literature. But people in my writers group, editors, my ex-wife, were all telling me I should try it. So I did, and I found it tremendously liberating and fun.

Could you tell us about your path to publication, any sprints or stumbles along the way?

Well, I wrote the first draft of the book in a sprint--a five-week sprint! Stumbles along the way. You know, once I decided to write YA, everything pretty much fell into place. I would say the major stumbles came in the years prior to that, when I was writing stuff for adults and taking myself way too seriously and just spinning my wheels.

I think when we forget that writing should be fun, we lose our way--we become so serious and heavy that we bleed any joy out of what we're writing. I mean, even in my second book, which is about a very serious topic, there's room for humor. And a necessity for it.

We need humor as a way of contrasting the more downbeat moments. That's not just in the work itself, but also in the process of writing--you need to have fun doing it. Otherwise, what's the point?

Congratulations on the publication of The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)! What was your initial inspiration for writing this book?

My own life! I've often said that the book is too autobiographical for my own good. When I decided to write something for teens, I went back not only to my own teen years, but also to my twenties. I think we tend to forget that those post-college years are just as nerve-wracking and transformative as the teen years in many respects.

So I looked at the whole "writer's journey," all of the insecurity and worry and fear and sudden joys. I realized that the writer's life is very analogous to being a teen--the isolation, rejection, striving to find your place in the world. Between the two of them, I found a balance that worked for me and for the story.

What was the timeline from spark to publication, and what were the major events along the way?

From spark to publication was roughly three years. That includes a year between acceptance and publication. From the time I finished the book to the time it was accepted was about a year and a half. The most significant event along the way was meeting my agent at about a year in--from the point, things happened very quickly and a few months later I had a book deal.

What were the challenges (literary, research, psychological, logistical) in bringing it to life?

Wow, I could go on for a looooooong time on this one! I'll try to keep it short, lest your readers drop into comas. :)

The biggest challenge was the psychological barrier of "Someone who knows me could read this someday." Since the book is autobiographical to a degree, I was concerned.

I wasn't worried that people would be angry about the real life events that I "adapted" for the book--rather, I was worried that they would think that the made-up stuff was a way to dig at them or bash them after the fact! But I realized that I couldn't let this concern prevent me from telling the story I wanted to tell, the way I wanted to tell it. Once I got over that, I was able to bull through.

Logistically, the toughest thing about the book was a function of the tense and POV I chose. The whole book is told in first-person present-tense from the point of view of Fanboy, a solipsistic, gifted fifteen-year-old. He's smart, yes, but anyone who was once fifteen will tell you that fifteen-year-old boys aren't the most, uh, perceptive or empathic creatures on the planet.

Since the book was present-tense, there was little room for reflection or second-guessing on Fanboy's part. We were always in his head, in the moment. And he wasn't inclined to cut people slack.

So I was very, very worried that the supporting cast would come across as cardboard because there was no way to get into them and we only had Fanboy's very biased view of them to go on. I had to find ways to get across Mom and Tony and Kyra and Cal and the others without betraying Fanboy's singularly self-absorbed point of view. Not the easiest thing in the world, but I took it as a challenge.

Also difficult (at first) was "How Geeky Do I Go?" The book has a lot of comic book geekery in it, and I was worried that I was going to overdo it and scare off the non-comics readers.

Eventually, I just had to trust my gut on that one. It was scary, but it paid off. I've had a lot of people e-mail me to say, "I don't read comics and I didn't get half the comic book references, but I loved this book." Whew!

You're obviously a serious comics/graphic novel guy. Could you tell us about your background?

Well, I grew up reading comics. Like I said before, the YA fiction of my youth was pretty lame, so I didn't read it--I read comics instead. Fortunately for me, I grew up at a time when comics were growing up, too, as books like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and Maus were changing perceptions of the medium. So I never went through a period of time where I forsook comics--I just kept reading them. I even used them as the basis for an independent study project at Yale (much to the horror of the English Department, might I add!).

When I got out of college, I went to work for the biggest comic book distributor in the country. I did a bunch of marketing stuff and learned a lot of behind-the-scenes details about the industry, which was both good and bad. I tried my hand at writing comics, with mixed results. By the time I figured out how to write for the medium, I was starting to see some success in prose, and I stopped writing comics to move into prose full-time. I feel like I never really put my best foot forward in comics, and I hope to rectify that someday.

What do you think about the heightened attention to youth graphic novels in the youth book market, and why?

It's very strange to see! Strange, but gratifying. If comics had been as accepted and as tolerated when I was a kid, my life would have been very different. It's terrific to see the medium being treated so seriously, but I do worry about the bandwagon effect, where you have people who aren't really qualified to talk about comics blabbing about them anyway, or comics that aren't worth reading being touted as great just because they're comics. I mean, there's as much crap in the comic book field as in any other--maybe more.

What advice do you have for beginning novelists?

Don't be afraid to experiment. Don't wonder "Can I do that?"--just do it. Remember that no matter how good you think your early efforts are, they probably actually suck--it's just the law of averages. Early on, put everything away for six months minimum while you work on something else. When you come back to it, you'll see the flaws and you'll wince and you'll be glad you didn't send it out right away.

Oh, and if you think something isn't working, but "it's just me--readers won't notice," you're dead wrong. Go with your gut. Almost every single change my editor ever asked me to make was something I had known was problematic from the get-go, but figured would slide by without anyone noticing. Nope! People notice.

What do you do when you're not writing?

Not much! I'm an extremely boring person. When I'm not writing, I'm either reading or glued to my crack pipe...er, I mean my Xbox. I played piano as a kid and now that I have some free time again, I plan to get back into it.

What can your fans look forward to next?

My next book, Boy Toy (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) comes out in October. It's set in the same high school as Fanboy, the same town, with some of the same "walk-on characters," but it's a very different story: sex, violence, and uncontrollable urges. It's perfect for kids!

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