June Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar

June is the beginning of summer and that means the Avon Free Public Library is starting its Local Author Festival. See this month's panel below.

Sat., June 2, Michele Cusolito, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 10:30 AM

Wed., June 6, Morgan Matson, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 7:00 PM

Wed., June 6, Rosemary Wells, Wesleyan R.J. Julia Bookstore, Middletown  Educators' and Parents' Night 7:00 PM

Sat., June 9, Michael Ian Black and Debbie Ridpath Ohi, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 3:00 PM


Sat., June 9, Leslie Bulion, Wesleyan R.J. Julia Bookstore, Middletown  10:30 AM


Sat., June 9, Michael Belanger, Barnes & Noble, Stamford 1:00 PM

Thur., June 14, Chandra Prasad, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 7:00 PM

Sat., June 23, Dave Roman, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 11:30 AM

Sat., June 23, Dave Roman, Wesleyan R.J. Julia Bookstore, Middletown 2:00 PM

Thurs., June 28 Steven Parlato, Juliana Spink Mills, Mark and Sheri Dursin, Geoffrey Craig, Natasha Friend, Teen Author Panel, Local Author Festival, Avon Free Public Library 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM

Sat., June 30, Mimi Stevens, The Storyteller's Cottage, Simsbury 2:00 PM

Time Management Tuesday: Use Multipliers For Both Work And Play

On Saturday we did our first bike ride of the season, taking a spur on a rail trail that ended a half mile from the snf where one of our elders lives. So we biked up the road to see her, went out to lunch afterwards, and got back on the trail.

Remember Multipliers?

Multipliers, you may recall, are "activities that meet more than one goal." Don't confuse multipliers with multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is the attempt to do more than one thing at a time, which has fallen out of favor, since researchers say all multi-taskers are doing is switching back and forth between tasks, not doing more than one thing at a time.

With multipliers, on the other hand, you are doing only one thing. This one task, though, serves more than one goal. So while you're not trying to do more than one thing, you're trying to do one thing that will serve you in multiple ways.

It might help to think of multipliers as killing two or more birds with one stone.

My biking multiplier hit three goals:

• The weekend elder visit
• Increasing my walk/bike mileage for the week.
• Training for a fall biking vacation

 

Why Should You Care About My Biking?

 

My bike riding multiplier is an example of how we need to be managing all our time, work time and free time, in order to find or make hours for things we want to do. Like writing. Addressing those three goals separately last Saturday could have taken me all day. I took care of all of them in half a day. If I hadn't stopped for lunch, I could have done it in less. That left me with another half day for other things.

As a general rule, when this happens for me it's accidental. It's rarely a result of real planning. Trying to spend some time at the beginning of each week planning for one multiplier would be an interesting exercise.  

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? May 21st Edition

Less than one week left of May Days. In the meantime, I'm still all about Good Women.

Goal 3. Generate New Work With "Good Women." I spent some time revising last week's chapter and then today I wrote all this material I was happy with but it just went on and on and there was so much more that had to happen and wasn't that going to be a drag? Then I came up with a way to make everything different and faster, though it means reworking today's work. So things are good, but not great.

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding.

• Started the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar
• Spent a lot of time today corresponding with a family member with quite an elaborate website and blog about GDPR.
• Did four blog posts and promoted them, which I'm not going into tonight because I have that CCLC to work on. Also, vacation. Also, I have to back up some work.

General Data Protection Regulation And Me

Well, I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't been paying much (or any) attention to what is going on with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation until today, the day it goes into effect. I'm going to be researching how it affects writers, this writer in particular, and will be putting up some kind of notice for the very few European Union people who come by here.

As it turns out, I haven't stored information from visitors at my website and have had a privacy statement there saying so for years. That came about when concerns arose in the children's writers' community over e-mail from child readers.

Richard Peck

Author Richard Peck's death hit Facebook early this morning, long before the obituaries started turning up on the Internet. He was an accomplished and prolific author who continued to write well into his later years, publishing the well-received The Best Man in 2016. He was also very active and well-known in the children's literature community. How active and well-known? Even I've heard him speak.

Original Content On Richard Peck

A search of Original Content indicated that I've written about Richard Peck many times here, sometimes just mentions, sometimes more. The best ones:

•  Another Day Another Conference, 2002
•  Let's Talk Horn Book, 2006
• 48-Hour Book Challenge, 2008

What I Didn't Say

I can't find a post on Peck's award winning book A Long Way To Chicago, which I read and liked.

I didn't even look for a post on his London Holiday, because it's an adult book, and, yes, I've read  it. I don't recall a lot, except it involves some American women visiting England. I can say that that's a set-up I like.

I'm going to close with a few words for some Peck books I don't hear a lot about. He wrote several books about a character named Blossom Culp. My recollection is that the one I read was historical and amusing and had some fantasy elements. I'm thinking I should make an effort to find one of those for a reread.

Time Management Tuesday: Pick Your Companions Carefully

Salon has a new article, Identifying With Others Who Control Themselves Could Strengthen Your Own Self-Control that revisits the famous experiment in which children were tormented to see how long they could control themselves without wolfing down some marshmallows. The kids who could do without the longest  ended up doing better later in life. Were they born with good control? Could it be taught?

The Salon article describes a new study tormenting children who had been assigned to groups. Kids who thought their group members had waited before scarfing down marshmallows were better able to wait before doing so, themselves. The research is "the first to show that group behavior motivates young children's actions that involve self-control."

Haven't We Heard Something Like This Before?

Why, yes, we have. According to Kelly McGonigal (Hmm. I have her new book on my Kindle. When am I going to read that?), self-control is contagious. We are influenced by others in the groups we are part of, just like those kids.

"What does this have to do with managing time," I asked a few years back, "particularly managing time for writers? The May Days, people! National Novel Writing Month! Your writers' groups. All these group initiatives involve setting aside time (a month, a meeting every week or two) and pulling people together with the hope that we will "catch" initiative, work ethic, etc., from each other."

Right Now

Right now I'm taking part in  May Days, binge-writing with others. Looking for some self-control from other writers.  On the other hand, I didn't go to writers' group last week. No hope of getting self-control help from them this month. Yikes.

And, finally, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this here, but I really don't care for marshmallows. They would have had to pay me to eat those things.

Worth The Wait

I liked what I heard about Nimona by Noelle Stevenson when it was published in 2015. I finally got hold of a copy a couple of weeks ago, and this National Book Award Finalist did not disappoint.

Nimona is a graphic novel about a joyful young female shape shifter who is game for, and good at, any kind of violence. She throws her lot in with a supervillain, one with a backstory that involves injury and disappointment. Morally, he's a little horrified by Nimona, though he definitely becomes attached to her.

There's what was for me a surprising and subtle love interest. I'm not going to say much about it and ruin anyone else's reading experience.

The world these people live in is an interesting one. It's your traditional high fantasy setting with knights and medieval-looking people, but one to which science and modernish weapons have been added.

Great-looking art. Also, this is my favorite kind of graphic novel, one in which the story is showed totally through the images and dialogue, no narrative boxes telling us things.

Lots to enjoy here and not much to complain about.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? May 18th Edition

Weren't we just doing this? Like, a week ago?

Well, I took care of a nine-month-old for half a day, which was a better time than you might think, and a half a day of unexpected errands, which wasn't. Then I'm painting my living room tomorrow, which seemed like a good idea when I came up with it, but then I had to spend some time today putting up tape and taking drapes to the dry cleaners and...well...nothing revolutionary happened here this week.

Goal 3. Generate New Work With "Good Women." So, I finished the chapter I was working on last week, and started another. That wasn't as well planned as the two earlier chapters I've done this month. It's not done, but some more planning has been done for it. And I'm painting that living room tomorrow. Breakout experience potential!

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding.

I must admit, I blew off writers' group this month. I can live with my decision.

Blog work:

• Little Woman in Blue Post, promoted to Google+, Twitter, and Goodreads
• Time Management Tuesday Post promoted to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter
• Flying Deep Post, promoted to Google+ 

Sent out the request for Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar events.

Started following National Novel Promotion Month, though I am way, way behind. 

Terrific Interview With Michelle Cusolito

Michelle Cusolito's first book, Flying Deep: Climb Inside Deep-sea Submersible Alvin, will be published next week. Today Kathy Halsey interviews Michelle at the GROG blog.

This is a terrific post that includes great material describing how Flying Deep can be used as a mentor text. The interview itself stays focused on book launches. Both interviewer and interviewee did good work with this.
 

Time Management Tuesday: "Minimalism Is Really About Time"

I'm a believer in our personal environment having an impact on how we use our time. Disorder, for instance, undermines impulse control. Not Into Industrial Lofts And Capsule Wardrobes? This Is Minimalism For The Rest Of Us  by Lindsey M. Roberts in The Washington Post describes a new book called New Minimalism by organizing experts Cary Telander Fortin and Kyle Louise Quilici. In the article, Quilici is quoted as saying, "Minimalism is a tool that you use to uncover what it is you want most in life." The article concludes with a section that begins with "Minimalism Is Really About Time." "Think about what you would rather spend your time on than hunting for something in a drawer or organizing on the weekends."

We Original Content folks would rather spend our time writing.

Minimalizing The Office

Fortin and Quilici maintain a blog at their decluttering and design services website. Last year they did a post on five core principles they used in a workshop. All five are thought-provoking and should be useful. But the one I'm going to address is Focus Your Space. "If your space feel(s) chaotic, asking too much of your space is commonly the culprit... for each room in your home, designate the #1 activity that takes place there. Then assess, is that room optimized to support that designated activity? Additional activities can be added to the space as long as they do not detract from the stated #1 activity."

As it turns out, I'm planning to purge my office in the next few months. I'm not talking about just the desk, which I've worked on cleaning many times before. I'm talking about the shelves full of books I can't reach. Take a look to your right.

Quite honestly, I haven't been writing in there for months. I've either been working next to the wood stove in another room, in the living room, or, now that the weather has improved, a sun room.

Take a look at that picture to your right. Does that room look like the #1 activity that's supposed to take place in there is writing? Or any other kind of work? It looks like a storeroom. A lot of stuff is just stored in there.

As always, I'm looking for ways to impose order, order which should support self-discipline. Because there are things I'd rather do with my time than hunt through that office looking for things or organizing that mess over and over.

I may have more to say about minimalism in the months to come.

For Alcott Fans, Women's History Fans, Women's Lit Fans, Art Fans...You Name It

My faithful readers are aware that I can be a bit obsessive about Louisa May Alcott. I've gone on and on here about Little Men, which I reread last year. I went on and on about An Old Fashioned Girl back in 2010. Honest to God, I've read Little Women and Werewolves. I've been to Alcott's house. I've been to her grave. I've been to Fruitlands. In truth, all this activity was spread over many years. We're not talking an Alcott scholar here.

But I'm going on and on like this to explain why I was attracted to the adult book Little Woman in Blue: A Novel of May Alcott by Jeannine Atkins.

 May Alcott was Louisa May's youngest sister, the inspiration for Amy in Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys. This novel about her adult life is impressive in the way it uses what I, at least, know of the Alcotts' lives. There are lots of small details, like the reference to Louisa's childhood birthday party at which she had to give away all the little cakes to her guests and didn't get one herself, that I'd heard of. Or recognized from Louisa's books, which, remember, had some connection to her life. There's also playing off the books. May in Little Woman in Blue is unhappy with how she is portrayed in Little Women. And, when you think about it, who wouldn't be?

This book is a marvelous mind game for readers who have knowledge of the source material.

But it's more than that. In Little Woman in Blue May Alcott is a single woman who is overwhelmed by her family. I will hazard a guess that this is a classic theme in women's literature. In this case, the needy parents and the needy married sister and her family don't seem to even realize what they're doing or that there's anything unusual in draining their family members. I say "members" because it's not just May they're doing this to. Louisa bears the financial burden for all the Alcotts, as she did in real life. Louisa and May could be described as draining each other, too.

This book also shows the life of "single working women" in the 1860s and '70s. It sounds very much like a section in Louisa Alcott's An Old Fashioned Girl. And then there's all the talk of art and specifically art in nineteenth century Paris at the beginning of the Impressionist movement. (Read Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore, covering the same period? I have.)

So there's something here for several different types of historical fiction readers. And good somethings.

UPDATE: Reading this book motivated me to record Little Women on PBS last night, which I would probably have passed on.


FTD Stuff: Jeannine Atkins is a Facebook friend, one I actually interact with. I purchased an eBook edition of this book during a sale period.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? May 11 Edition

Did pretty well, people.

Goal 1. Submissions. I had an essay accepted for submission! Needed to do a little administrative type stuff on Monday for that. And I did some research for more submissions.

Goal 3. Generate New Work With Good Women. Knocked off one short chapter and fourteen pages of another. Little disappointed that I didn't finish that second chapter, but I didn't have as good an outline as I did for last week's work. I'll try to get a few minutes in this weekend.

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding.

• Maurice Sendak Post. Promoted to Google+, a Facebook community, and Twitter.
• Time Management Tuesday Post. Promoted to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Environmental Book Club Post. Promoted to Google+, a Google+ community, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
• Worked on getting some books I've read onto Goodreads.
• Started reading some marketing posts that I'll probably be writing about at some point. 

Environmental Book Club

Sometime in the past, I wondered here if environmental books couldn't work with environmental settings instead of environmental themes. I'm not certain what environmental themes are. "We must save the planet?" "Humanity is destroying the Earth?" "We must save the planet from us?" If so, they are themes that are often used in cliched and very preachy ways.

Books with environmental settings or, maybe, situations, can have nonenvironmental themes, giving a book more complexity and getting away from heavy-handed lessons and warnings. A good example of this is Kissing Frogs by Alisha Seviny, which is a romance set on a trip to work with endangered frogs. The theme here could be described as the rogue outsider finding love with an opposite, which does not have anything to do with the environment. The setting--the work with the endangered frogs--provides the environmental aspect to the story.

Another example is Blight by Alexandra Duncan, a traditional dystopian, post-apocalyptic story set within a world in which only a few types of food plants are viable, because of a...you guessed it...blight. Agribusiness is the bad guy here, as business often is the bad guy in post-apocalyptic worlds. There's not a lot of dwelling on what happened, what brought humanity to this state, though. AgriStar is the bad guy not because it caused the blight (Though it may have. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember.), but because of what it's done since the blight. 

We've got a plot driven adventure here, including a journey story. We've got rebels. We've got evil junkers, a group of seriously bad guys who also appear in The Girl With All the Powers and The Boy on the Bridge. There are junker-like characters in the Rot & Ruin books. They may be a staple of post-apocalyptic stories.

My point is, this is the kind of narrative that could exist in many post-apocalyptic settings...a zombie apocalypse, an alien apocalypse...or in a religious dystopia. Blight is set in an environmental situation, but because it's more interested in its plot-driven adventure, it's far less environmentally cliched and heavy-handed than many books that might be described as environmental.

Time Management Tuesday: The Dark Side Of Temporal Landmarks/Units Of Time

I try to do what I call a "story/essay idea a day" thing in my journal. My theory is that creativity begets creativity, and that the more ideas I come up with, the more I will come up with.

Sometimes this works better than others. Sometimes I have long dry periods. Sometimes I have ideas, but it's just so inconvenient to open up the journal on my laptop, or I'm not home, or there's some other perfectly logical and legitimate reason why I can't get these thoughts done. And then they are lost. Perhaps they are out there in the universe, and they will go to someone else, because I did not accept them. Oookaaay.

And then there is what happened last month. I was coming up with ideas, but in a major impulse control failure I decided that I would start writing them down at the beginning of May. No idea how much I lost that way.

A Powerful Date, A Powerful Temptation

We all remember what temporal landmarks are, right? "...special occasions and calendar events (e.g., a birthday, a holiday, the beginning of a new week/month), which demarcate the passage of time and create numerous “fresh start” opportunities at the beginning of new cycles?" And we also remember the significance of beginnings? How we "get excited about our plans for "new" blocks of time?" It's going to be so terrific when the beginning of the year, Easter, summer vacation, the beginning of the school year, or the first of the month come and we get a fresh start. As our old friend Kelly McGonigal tells us, we think of the future as a wonderful place where we'll accomplish great things. You combine that with an upcoming temporal landmark that's combined with the beginning of a time unit?

Well, clearly you'd need to be tougher than I am to deal with that.

What Was The Problem Here?

 

Temporal landmarks and the beginning of units of time can work for us if they initiate a new surge of work, create enthusiasm. May 1st was the beginning of a May Days writing project for me. In the weeks leading up to it, I prepared.

I didn't prepare to start the story/essay a day project on May 1st. Instead, I waited for the temporal landmark/beginning of a unit of time to arrive.

Preparing is doing something. Waiting isn't. And that's where I made my mistake.

Maurice Sendak Going To UConn

This isn't hot-off-the-presses, having been announced a couple of months back. But it's newish for me.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has chosen the University of Connecticut to maintain Maurice Sendak's papers. According to Arthur Yorinks in a Hartford Courant article, Sendak's materials, close to 10,000 items, will be kept in the Northeast Children's Literature Collection, which is at the Thomas Dodd Research Center. I've had some terrific experiences at the Northeast Children's Literature Collection. Ate dinner there once and Lois Lowry was sitting at the very next table. Yeah. And then there was the time I gave someone a Band-aid to give to Anita Lobel while I was there.

But this is about Maurice Sendak.

Sendak was a Connecticut resident with connections to UConn. He was a guest in Professor Francelia Butler's classes back in the '70s and '80s and received an honorary doctorate in 1990.

This is great news for the Northeast Collection, which also has Tomi de Paolo's, Natalie Babbitt's, Richard Scarry's, and Barbara Cooney's papers. 

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? The May 4 Edition

The first week of May Days, the group binge write I'm taking part in, didn't go badly, all things considered. I didn't get started until Wednesday, didn't work most of Thursday because it's my run-around day, and still managed the following:

Goal 1. Submissions. I made two and did some research for future submissions.

Goal 3. Generate New Work With Good Women. I wrote a new twenty-three page chapter, working from a blueprint I created earlier this year and did a lot of clean-up of earlier chapters.

Goal 4. Community Building/General Marketing/Branding. I got back on task with promoting blog posts. 

• Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar Post. Promoted to Google+, Facebook, a Facebook community, 4 tweets on Twitter.
•  Sent out the CCLC newsletter.
• What I Found in the YA Department Post. Promoted to Google+, Twitter, and Goodreads.
• Time Management Tuesday Post. Promoted to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter
• Jazz Picture Books Post. Promoted to Google+, Twitter
• Environmental Book Club Post. Promoted to Google+, Twitter, and Goodreads

Environmental Book Club

Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth by Mary McKenna Siddals with illustrations by Ashley Wolff is, as the title suggests, an alphabet book. I don't read a lot of these. I know they're often on a particular subject, but this one is really informational. All the letters connect with items that can go into compost piles.

From "Organic Life"*

Now, I didn't pick up this book just because compost is an environmentalish subject. No, I have a compost pile. I was going to take a picture of it for this post, but I forgot and now it's dark. So I'll just say it's one of these three-bin systems like the one to your right. I'm not an expert or anything. I will confess that in the winter I am often too lazy to go out to the bins with my compost. And I don't know if you're supposed to use compost bins in the winter. What I don't know about compost would fill a book.

But not Compost Stew.

Filled With Surprises

The point I'm getting around to is that though I am not a composting neophyte, there were items in this book I hadn't heard of. I had heard of putting hair clippings in a compost pile, for instance, but not oatmeal. Egg shells, but not lint. So I'm sitting there reading this with a young child going, "What?" "Whoa, there."

Note about the illustrations: They are collage-like and have a recycled look that fits the theme of the book. Very neat.



*How to Build a Three-bin Compost System Because you know you want one.

Jazz Picture Books

I have only recently become interested in jazz. My knowledge is superficial. I just listen to jazz stations on TV and Pandora while I'm eating dinner. I associate jazz with food.

So you can see why I'm interested in the 10 jazz books Pragmatic Mom covered at her blog on Monday.  Guest author Matthew Gollub does a write-up on each title. Additionally, they'll be giving away a copy of Gollub's book, The Jazz Fly. It looks as if you have until the end of May to enter to win.

Time Management Tuesday: Set Aside Times

My May Days group started work today. This is a Facebook group whose members encourage each other to write during the month of May. I've been looking forward to this all year. In fact, prepping for May Days was one of my objectives for this year. I only managed to get five chapters blueprinted, so my goal for this month is to write those five chapters, which, added to what I've completed, will give me twelve completed first draft chapters.

Set Aside Time

I think of units of time like May Days and National Novel Writing Month as "set aside times." It's time we set aside for specific tasks. Back in 2012 I said of set aside times:

"What we might be talking about with this kind of set aside scheduling is binge writing, a term I hadn't heard for years until someone on Facebook linked to some interviews on it just last week. Author Sally Bosco interviewed self-described binge writers Emily Asad and Leslie Davis Guccione. Note that both authors are not binge writers in the sense that they are moved by a muse to write like crazy. They prep for their intensive writing periods."

I'm definitely binge writing this month, on one specific project that I've prepared for for months. I can't take off on any spontaneous writing tangents. Maintain some impulse control, Gail.

Reality

Forget about the actual writing. Setting aside this much time for one particular project is extremely difficult. Today is the first day of this project, and except for some reading of and tinkering with early chapters I didn't do a thing, because I had family members here for lunch. I knew this was coming up and thought, Well, I'll start working on Monday, the day before. Nope. Had another family member here yesterday. Then last week an appointment came up for tomorrow. I almost had to take an elderly family member to the dentist the week after next, but, thankfully, that fell through. Now there's talk of some of us driving to another state in a couple of weeks to pick up still another family member.

Note that I don't have young children or even older ones living here. I don't have a day job. And, yet, look what happens to my time, over and over again.

Dealing with family is a whole different management issue when you're trying to set aside big chunks of time for projects.