Don't Panic!

Yesterday I tried to go out to the garage. The Fed Ex guy had opened the screen door and left a package with my manuscript in it propped against the inner door. This just goes to show that no place is safe. But everything is going to be okay. I didn't have plans this weekend, anyway.

Good News at Your Local Bookstore

It seems as if I've been in a lot of Barnes & Noble and Borders' bookstores this summer where I've been seeing a lot of YA books prominently displayed, as I may have mentioned earlier. This past weekend I was in a Borders in Syracuse, New York where I saw a good sized counter with multiple shelves on each side. Near an entrance, too. The whole thing was covered in YA. And it was almost all hardcover YA. In my experience, this is almost unheard of.

Now there was a lot of those Georgia Nicolson wannabe books that I'm always complaining about--wisemouth girls who keep diaries, hang out with friends, gush over boys, and have loser parents. I am calling them Little Chick Lit. However, I also saw a copy of one of the Adrian Mole books. Before there was Georgia, before there was Bridget, there was Adrian. Read him and see how a diary-type story ought to be written.

Weird News At Your Local Bookstore

At that same Borders I saw a rack of Mensa improve your IQ with puzzles and games books. (The game has not been created that will improve my IQ and since I rarely understand puzzles, they aren't much help to me, either.) In Mensa's defense, these books didn't actually say they were for improving children's IQ's, but they were in the children's section.

Now, most people would take this opportunity to rant about how awful it is to try to manipulate kids' minds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I keep thinking, though, is just how smart does a person have to be to get through this life? Isn't there some IQ level after which you're just wasting it?