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Enter to win your choice of one of fifteen designs from a series of colorful journals known as The Friendsbook! Giveaway begins May 23, 2016, at 12:01 A.M. PST and ends June 22, 2016, at 11:59 P.M. PST.

House Arrest Written by K.A. Holt Chronicle Books     10/06/2015 978-1-4521-3477-2 298 pages      Ages 9—14 “Stealing is bad. Yeah. I know. But my brother Levi is always so sick, and his medicine is always so expensive. “I didn’t think anyone would notice, if I took that credit card, if, in one stolen …

Time and time again I hear authors say that when you sit down to work on a book not to worry about what other people are going to think, forget the trends, silence your inner editor and just write what you love.

Write what you love. What a freeing way to think.

So that’s exactly what I did when I wrote my debut MG novel Operation Pucker Up. I wrote what I loved. Or more specifically, I wrote a book the middle school version of me would have loved.

But middle school was a long time ago, so in order to reminisce about those wonderful years of cringe-worthy moments, I went straight to the source.

My middle school diary. (Click on each of these images to see a larger version.)

So sophisticated and chic. The teddy bears with the red hearts just scream maturity. And while I thought the lock was sure to protect all my secrets, it was no match for the pair of scissors my sister used and then so sneakily stapled and taped back together thinking I’d never suspect a thing. No, seriously. She didn’t think I’d notice. She put it right back in the hiding spot I used and acted all innocent when I found it. Newsflash…I noticed!

After my sister discovered the diary, I was very careful about when I’d let another set of eyes look at it. I wrote a note to myself inside the cover with instructions as to when I could share this diary:

It’s kind of sweet to think about how the younger version of myself wanted to share these words and experiences with my future kids. I just hope the middle school version of myself wouldn’t have minded that instead of sharing my diary with only my kids, I shared some of my experiences with potentially thousands of kids who will pick up Operation Pucker up and read it. Whoops!

I found a lot of good material when revisiting these pages. My diary reminded me of all those mixed up feelings that I was going through when I hit middle school, and I drew from those when developing the main character, Grace, in my book. Grace is cast as Snow White in her school’s play, only to remember that Snow White is kissed by Prince Charming. She’s never kissed anyone before, and is terrified at the thought of having her first kiss on stage. Her friends launch Operation Pucker Up, a plan to get her her first kiss before she has to have it on stage. Sure enough, the plan gets out of hand and Grace feels like everything is moving too fast and her friends are trying to make her into someone she isn’t. My middle school self could definitely relate to Grace’s feelings, as I worried about the friendships around me and how everything was changing.

In the book, Grace goes to her first boy/girl party, and I pretty much struck oil with all the information I provided for myself in my diary when my own experience going to my first boy/girl party. I had created a list of questions/worries before I went to the party and afterwards, I filled it all out. Talk about the perfect glimpse into the head of a middle schooler!

Throughout the book, Grace is trying to figure out the confusing world of boys and first kisses. The road to love is often rocky and traumatic in middle school, as evidenced from my love of a “younger” man. Yes, it is true, I was in sixth grade in love with a boy in fifth grade. Gasp! Just call me a cougar! Looking back now I can laugh, but it does remind me of how major things could seem when you were young.

I love the fact that the awkward, confused, sensitive middle school version of myself provided inspiration and information for books I would write in the future. In fact, I’m pretty sure I have material for the next few decades with everything that I so honestly and openly chronicled while growing up. As I work on my next MG novel, I plan to continue to dig through all of my diaries and see what I can find. I’ll draw from those moments, remember them, use them, and then thank God that I don’t have to live through them again!

—

Rachele Alpine is a lover of gummy candy, bad reality TV, and coffee…so much coffee. She’s the author of the MG novels Operation Pucker Up (Simon & Schuster) and You Throw Like a Girl (Simon & Schuster, 2017), and the YA novel Canary (Medallion). You can visit her website, check out her pictures on Instagram, like her on Facebook, or send her a tweet on Twitter @ralpine.

Reading Roger Deakin’s book Notes from Walnut Tree Farm was a great joy. The book is composed of excerpts from notebooks he kept during the last six years of his life. He wrote in them almost daily his observations, impressions, thoughts, feelings and doings. So while the book is strung across the course of a year from January to December, the entires are pulled from six years of writing. They are not dated with a year and on any given day there might be multiple entries from various years. It sounds complicated and disjointed but it really isn’t. I had intended to read the book a month at a time, to move through the year along with the entries. But I couldn’t stop reading, I was enjoying myself far too much to be able to dribble the goodness out over an entire year.

Deakin has a keen eye and a great knowledge of the history of the land. He is a fan of the commons and the wild, an advocate for stewardship. He loves cats and birds and holds a great respect for all living things including the insects that make their way into his study since it seems his window screens are either non-existent or of such a large mesh he is guaranteed to be visited by something while sitting at his desk:

I think, yes, it really is another world, this microscopic insect world, a world apart. But almost at once I realize that to put insects into ‘another world’ or ‘a world apart’ is dangerous. In fact it is the rationale for exterminating them with pesticides. If theirs is ‘another world’, it has nothing to do with us. It is unconnected, and, whatever we choose to do to it, we ourselves are unaffected. The very reverse is the truth of course. Unless we realize we share a single world with the insects, and that if we harm them we harm ourselves and the rest of nature, we will end up destroying ourselves — committing suicide, in fact.

I think we are beginning to discover this with the bees and people are starting to speak out about it. But it has taken far too long to get to this place and we have a long way to go. It is easy to feel sorry for a dead honeybee, not so easy for people to be sorry about ants or flies.

If I can be enchanted by my cat, rolling in joy on the brick terrace before me, why can’t I be enchanted by a green shield bug in my vegetable garden, or two ants meeting and exchanging information with a flourish of their antennae? Or the billowing fizz of cow-parsley in full flower?

But Deakin isn’t all nature yes and civilization no, bugs good, people bad. It is possible to have a balance.

I blame the Romantics for all this self-consciousness about landscape and inspiration. Wandering lonely as a cloud may be the last thing you need sometimes. Going round the corner for breakfast in a steamy cafe may be much more like it.

Deakin has much to say about trees. I learned quite a lot about pollarding and coppicing, two things that seem to be a dying art, as is creating and properly maintaining hedgerows. He is also a person who enjoys working with wood and has considerable skill at turning felled trees into bookshelves or even sculptures. He is the kind of person who respects the tree and the wood, which I believe must infuse his work with respect, passion and love.

How wonderful it must have been to be Deakin’s friend and walk with him around his farm in Suffolk and the surrounding area. Deakin died in 2006, but he has left us his notebooks curated into the beautiful Notes from Walnut Tree Farm through which we may walk with him anytime no matter the weather.

Edith Holden was an artist and naturalist. She lived most of her life in the West Midlands of England where she spent her time teaching art to students at Solihull School for Girls and working as an illustrator of children’s books. Holden’s paintings were often exhibited by the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and in 1907 and 1917, by the royal Academy of Arts. But as these things go, women were not at that time taken seriously as artists and by the mid-twentieth century she was nearly forgotten.

In 1906 Holden created a diary notebook of watercolor paintings. The text that went along with them included excerpts of poems related to the month and time of year and short notes about nature walks she took. She did not create the book as a diary but as a text for teaching in order to model nature observation for her students.

In the mid-1970s, Holden’s great-niece showed the notebook to a publisher. It was published in facsimile in 1977 as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. Through the years over six million copies have been sold. There is a second book, Nature Notes of an Edwardian Lady, that was published in facsimile in 1989.

I read the first book, The Country Diary, and what a delight it is. At first I thought it was meant to be a diary and was disappointed that the text was not more detailed. I do love her neat hand though and the sepia color of her ink makes me want to find a bottle for my own pen.

The beauty and detail of the book is in the paintings. They are a real delight. She had a keen eye for color and composition. While I rushed through the text, I spent time just looking at and enjoying each drawing.

Sadly, Holden died in 1920 when she was only 49. While reaching out over a backwater of the Thames to break off a branch of chestnut buds she fell in and drowned.

I borrowed my copy from the library because of Grad. I am glad I spent time with this book. It was a pleasure to look at the paintings when the snow was deep, the temperatures arctic, and spring seeming so far away. For a little bit more about Holden and some more photos of her art, visit Morning Earth.

By Jad Adams

Tony Benn has left as an enduring monument: one of the great diaries of the twentieth century, lasting from 1940, when he was fifteen, to 2009 when illness forced him to stop.

They are published as nine volumes but these are perhaps ten percent of the 15 million words in the original dairy. I am one of the few people to have had access to the manuscript diary, in the course of writing my biography of Benn. For this I received every assistance from him and his staff in the jumbled, chaotic office in the basement of his Holland Park Avenue home.

The diaries of course are of historic interest because they reveal the work of a cabinet minister and member of parliament for more than fifty years. Over time the Benn charts post-war hope, the rise of the Labour militants, the battle of Orgreave, and the decline of the Left. The books also have descriptions of constituents’ experiences in his weekly surgery, an opportunity to meet the people and sample their woes, which is hated by some MPs but was embraced by Benn.

They also show the development of Benn’s family of four children, twelve grandchildren, and the suffering of the death of parents and partner. One would be hard put to it to find anywhere in literature a more poignant description of death and continuing loss than Benn’s of Caroline, his partner of more than fifty years whose illness and death was described in remorseless detail in manuscript, some of which was published in More Time for Politics (2007).

Benn had always felt he ought to be writing a diary, as a part of the non-conformist urge to account for every moment of life as a gift from God. He explained at one of our last formal conversations: ‘It’s very self obsessed. I must admit it worries me that I should spend so much time on myself, I saw it as an account, accountability to the Almighty, when I die give him 15 million words and say: there, you decide. I think there is a moral element in it, of righteousness.’

This need to see time as a precious resource to be accounted for went back to his father, William Wedgwood Benn (Later Lord Stansgate) who expected the boy Benn to fill in a time chart showing how he had made use of his days. Benn senior had read an early self-help book by Arnold Bennett called How to Live 24 Hours a Day on making the best use of time. ‘Father became obsessed with it,’ Benn said.

Tony Benn had been keeping a diary sporadically since childhood. It had always been his ambition to keep one, and early fragments of diary exist, including one during his time in the services, where diary-keeping was forbidden for security reasons so he put key words relating to places or equipment in code. In the 1950s he began keeping a political diary and wrote at least some parts of a diary for every year from 1953. The emotional shock of his father’s death in 1960 and subsequent political upsets stopped his diary writing in 1961 and 1962 but, with a return to the House of Commons in sight, he resumed it in 1963.

He started dictating the diary to a tape recorder in 1966 when he joined the cabinet because he could not dictate accounts of cabinet meetings to a secretary who was not covered by the Official Secrets Act. Benn would store the tapes, not knowing when he would transcribe them, or indeed if they would be transcribed in his lifetime. His daughter, Melissa spoke of arriving at their home late at night when she was a teenager, and hearing her father’s voice dictating the diary, followed by snoring as he fell asleep at the microphone.

Benn stopped writing the diary after he fell ill in 2009 in what was probably the first stroke he was to suffer. He explained to me:

‘You can’t not be a diarist some of the time. One day is much the same as the other and it is a lot of effort. You really do have to be very conscientious and keep it up in detail and keep up the recordings and so on and it took over my life, also I’m not sure now that I’m not in a position on the inside on anything where my reflections would be interesting. I think my reflections might be as interesting as anybody else’s but whether it constitutes a diary when I’m not at the heart of anything…

‘I never thought of it as an achievement, just something I did, it’s been a bit of a burden to have to write it all down every night. It began as a journal where I put down things that interested me during the war, I drew a little bit on that for Years of Hope (1994). You can say you’ve achieved a reasonably accurate daily account of what has happened to you and since people are always shaped by what has happened to them so if you have a diary you get three bites at your own experience: when it happens, when you write it down and when you read it later and realise you were wrong.’

Benn did not think he would publish it in his lifetime, but in about 1983 he decided to type up six months and have a look at it. He invited Ruth Winstone to help with the diary in 1985 and found they worked so well together that she stayed and edited all the diaries.

His final thought on the long labour of the Benn Diaries was: ‘I couldn’t recommend anyone to keep a diary without warning them that it does take over your life.’

Jad Adams’ Tony Benn: A Biography is published by Biteback.  His next book is Women and the Vote: A World History to be published by OUP in the autumn.

Image credit: Portrait of Tony Benn. By I, Isujosh. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The post In memoriam: Tony Benn appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Catherine Gilbert Murdock, author of six acclaimed novels, is an avid reader of books that aren’t for grownups. Her latest middle grade novel, Heaven Is Paved with Oreos, is written as 14-year-old Sarah's journal. Murdock shares her brilliant "how-to" musings on fictional journal writing ... or, as she likes to put it, the real stories of fake people.

When the Library of America published a two-volume selection of Emerson’s multi-volume journal in 2010 I had to have it. Had to. Not only because I could not afford to buy the complete set of something like ten volumes that Harvard published, but because I also loves me my Emerson (after all I have a cat named Waldo which is what Emerson went by among his friends). And in spite of splurging on both volumes right then, I haven’t started reading them until now.

Of course the LOA volume one begins at the beginning with Emerson’s first journal begun when he started at Harvard at the age of 17 in 1820. Emerson titled his early journals, “The Wide World.” I have read the complete first few years of his early journals before but I can’t find if I ever posted about them. No matter.

Emerson was 17, a bit of a romantic and very silly. Quite the contrast from the sober man of his famous essays. He begins his journal by invoking the aid of witches and fairies:

O ye witches assist me! enliven or horrify some midnight lucubration or dream (whichever may be found most convenient) to supply this reservoir when other resources fail. Pardon me Fairy Land! rich region of fancy & gnomery, elvery, sylphery, & Queen Mab! pardon me for presenting my petition to your enemies but there is probably one in the chamber who maliciously influenced me to what is irrevocable; pardon & favor me! – & finally Spirits of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, wherever ye glow, whatsoever you patronize, whoever you inspire, hallow, hallow, this devoted paper.

And this is only the first entry. When he has been remiss about writing in his journal he asks for the fairies to forgive him. And, in one entry a month later he spins a fancy Arthurian daydream.

I can’t help but giggle. But I can’t giggle too much. I have incriminating diaries too. Here is my very first one:

A Shooting Star is a Sign of Happiness

It begins on February 24, 1978. I was ten. I have no recollection what the occasion was since it was too far away from Christmas and my birthday was a little over a month in the future. Unfortunately I wrote it mostly in pencil that is now terribly fading. But there is this single entry in bright green marker:

I’m not subtly flipping you off, promise

It is the next to last entry in the book. The first week of the diary I wrote every day. Then a week goes by before another entry. Then a couple weeks. Then a spread of a few weeks between entries. The green marker entry in May is followed by an entry dated September. So much for diary-keeping.

It wasn’t my last diary though. I have several half-finished diaries before it managed to become a habit. At seventeen, it was a habit and so I thought I’d pull out that diary to compare to Emerson’s. I was smug, I would NEVER invoke fairies. Are you kidding me? Get real. My smugness quickly turned to chagrin when I say the cover of the diary I began the day after my seventeenth birthday in 1985:

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One of the most amazing experiences of my life was visiting the Anne Franke House in Amsterdam. Wow! What a way for all those memories to come back to me. This beautiful book of photographs in almost a scrapbook format, and summaries of her life with quotes from Anne's favorite present, her diary, was so enjoyable from start to finish. Like any good diary, Anne's family story is told from the beginning with her parents' wedding, to the end at Bergen Belsen's death camp. If you want to read Anne's diary, this would be a great introduction.

ENDERS' Rating: Awesome!!!

Ann Franke House

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"God, I was so happy, seeing them like that, hearing the laughs and screams, seeing their grins flapping in the wind as they tore around the track. I had to wipe a tear from my eye before they could get off the ride and meet me across the street. Samantha had a huge smile on her face, and her eyes were the size of saucers."

That’s a blog entry that Janice Erlbaum wrote in 2005 about her trip to Coney Island with a young runaway. Over the next few months, her troubled relationship with that teenager would change dramatically--an emotional process recorded in Erlbaum's new book, Have You Found Her.

Today Erlbaum explains how her stories move from diary to blog to final memoir shape, giving us a glimpse--just like that video--behind her pages. 

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

On page 225, you have a great scene with Sam and your domestic partner at Coney Island--it's a gorgeous, kinetic scene. Could you just walk us through the process of writing that scene? How did you build it from memory and how did you edit it into this final shape?

Janice Erlbaum:
I originally wrote the Coney Island scene the day after it happened – it’s posted on my blog as an entry called “Coneyworld,” dated August 28, 2005. Continue reading...

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