What I Did This Morning

I am obsessed with the blog this week, as I sort of suggested in yesterday's post. This morning I did an Internet search of children's literature blogs. I didn't find a whole lot, which doesn't mean there aren't more out there, just that I didn't find them.

I found Kids Lit Books and More for Kids and Teens, Mrs. Rabbitt's Bookbag, and Books and Reading: Reading Motivation, Book Lists, Collection Development. All three sites appear to be maintained by librarians. I also found Children's Booklog. Sorry, I just can't make the link work. However, it's connected to a big site called About that I can connect to. I don't totally understand what it's about, but there it is. And Achockablog is a site from the United Kingdom, also connected to About.

Now, there may be blogs at individual children's authors sites that didn't show up on my search. My blog didn't show up, after all. But, otherwise, that's all I could find.

Blog Universe

I've been mentioned in someone else's blog! How cool is that? Karin (pronounced "car in") Gillespie also has a website and a book, Bet Your Bottom Dollar, coming out through Simon and Schuster this summer. She's not a kidlit person, but I'm mentioning her in Original Content, anyway, because Karin has a good book-and-author-type blog, and I'm in a blog mindset the last few days.

Totally Believable To Me

I finally finished reading M. T. Anderson's satire Feed, which I thought was fantastic. Anderson has created a well-defined world and populated it with some believable, complex characters. And there's lots of other clever stuff, too.

Can you believe that Gail, who hardly ever likes anything, is raving like this? Or, at least, raving in the good sense of the word?

Of course, I personally believe that the commercial world we live in now is already trying to control our minds so the basic premise of Anderson's story, to me, is just a logical extension of what is already going on. I thought that having the characters lose their flesh and hair was a little over the top, though. I agree that the environment is adversely affected by our mass consumerism and that will affect our health. But for the book's sake I think sticking to just the consumer stuff would have been plenty.

And, finally, I imagine some readers will be disappointed with how Titus, our narrator, treats Violet when she is sick. (Someone I know who has read the book referred to him as "a puke," though believably so.)His behavior isn't pretty. However, I think it is realistic about how hard it is for a young person to deal with this kind of situation. The things he says to her are all things that must go through the minds of many young people. Plus, he is part of a group of kids who aren't noteworthy for their depth and strength of character.

In spite of the sickness and skin disappearing from peoples' bodies, there is a lot of clever, sophisticated humor in this book. I liked it so much, I'm going to give one of Anderson's earlier books, Burger Wuss, a try.

I'm Cleaning My Desk Again!

On Feb. 14, 2003 I did a blog on Reading Rants, which is a site of book lists for teens on various subjects. I had stumbled upon the site, which is how I find most places on the Web, made a copy of one of the lists, and left it floating around my desk for who knows how long. Then, when I stumbled upon that, I wrote a blog about it.

Well, folks, I've done it again. I made a hard copy of a Reading Rants' list called Reality Bytes: Non-fiction about teens, for teens, which I thought looked interesting, and left it floating around my desk. Now, I'm only a week or two behind on life--well, probably a month to be honest--and can take a few minutes to clean my desk and I found the hard copy. So now you're hearing about. Really, I would read some of these books if I had the time. How's that for a recommendation!

Here is something interesting and timely I found at the Reading Rants site today: Joss Whedon of Buffy and Angel fame has written a graphic novel called Fray, which is about a futuristic slayer, of course.

I would have loved to have linked to something about Joss Whedon, but I couldn't find an official site for either him or his production company. I found masses of fan stuff for him, but what to choose? what to choose? I think it's great that a writer is getting so much attention and is so loved but in my experience this kind of stuff just doesn't happen to writers. Which leads me to wonder if Whedon doesn't have some connection to that circle of evil dudes Angel and his team took out on the series finale Wednesday night.

And What Did You Get For Mother's Day?

Okay, here I go talking about one of my kids again. I'd just like to point out that I've been keeping this blog for a couple of years, and I've only mentioned the little dears twice. Maybe three times.

The day before Mother's Day, Little Dear II, went to a used book sale, something he's very fond of doing. (In fact, this afternoon he's off to a going-out-of-business sale for a used bookstore.) Anyway, the day before Mother's Day, he buys me my Mother's Day present at this booksale. I should have been kicking his backside for waiting until the last minute, but he did buy me something cool.

What he got me was The Children's First Reader by Ellen M. Cyr. I've found very little on Cyr on-line, though she is supposed to be one of the first women involved with writing an instructional book for children, and eventually she had a line of them known as Cyr Readers. My particular book is dated 1893 and has one torn page.

I also have a reproduction set of McGuffy Readers that I received for Christmas years ago. I thought I was going to read them, but, guess what? I didn't. I'm hoping for a better fate for my new book from my son. I'm leaving it floating around the living room and sunroom hoping I'll read it.

A True Story

I make a big point of not talking about my family in this blog, but I have a story I think is so neat that I'm going to make an exception. Here it is:

I was talking to my son on the phone a few weeks ago. Sometimes we can talk on the phone for forty minutes or so. This was not one of those times. I was almost ready to sign off when I asked, "What are you reading in your lit class?" (Aside: Though I have a college age son, I, myself, am really young and cool. You will have to trust me on this one.) He says, "We just read "Feed." I say, "You mean Feed F E E D? Does it have a picture of a bald guy from the back on the cover." He said, "Yes. I have a signed copy." I said, "I can't believe it! I've wanted to read that for a couple of years, but our library doesn't have it and I'm too cheap to buy it. Did you like it?" He said, "I liked it the best of the books we've read." And I said, "You know it's YA?" And he said, "Yes." Then I said, "How did you end up with a signed copy?" And he said, "The author came to our class." And I'm screaming into the phone.

My son was home last weekend, and now I'm reading his book. I'll have more to say about this later.

Strange New World

It has been so long since I've posted that my host has totally changed its format. I have only the vaguest idea what I'm doing here folks.

The draft I was revising since the beginning of February went out in the mail last Friday. I won't go into what happens to me during the last few weeks I'm working on a revision except to say it ain't pretty. Among other things I have to finally become so focused to get it done that I just have to ignore most everything else in my life. Now I'm so far behind with my living I don't know where to begin. Plus there's all these new work projects I want to get started on.

Perhaps I should begin by cleaning my desk.

This morning I did do something new and positive. I registered this weblog with a site called Globe of Blogs, which should bring it to the attention of more readers. I am confident that something will come of it since, to my knowledge, only one person has ever read Original Content. Only one more person has to see it, and I'll have a one hundred percent increase in readership.

Another Neil Gaiman Book

I've been sick this weekend, which is why 1. I couldn't see Hellboy last night; 2. I couldn't go bicycling today; and 3. I'm back here so soon.

However, it was the kind of sickness that leaves you feeling that it's acceptable to read instead of cleaning, doing yardwork, and other weekend slave activities. So I finished reading Stardust. I thought the first two chapters were really ho-hum fantasy (little village near the land of Fairy, sometime in the past, lad of mysterious birth) and the ending was sort of flat. I prefer a big climactic scene like the ones in some other Gaiman books such as American Gods and Good Omens. However, the central material had lots of unique stuff that made me want to keep reading.

It was, though, one of those mythic journey stories about a guy finding his birth right and his beautiful maiden. While I know those have a long and honorable tradition in our culture, I do feel I've read it before.

I am still a Gaiman fan and will continue to make my way through his works as I stumble upon them here and there, now and again.

A Busy April

No more whining! I have nearly finished my scheduled school and bookstore visits. All things considered, everything went very well. I only had trouble getting to one place, a bookstore appearance, and the manager was just lovely about it. The school presentations have gone well so far, even though I had to do four different presentations in one day. By four different I do not mean that I had to do the same presentation four times. I do that all the time. No sweat. I mean that I was speaking to kids in such a wide range of grades that I had to come up with new material for some of them. Then I did an evening talk on the history behind The Hero of Ticonderoga. I've done that before, but not often so I did have to do some planning.

What I have learned this spring: A. from talking to a bookstore owner and a young woman who joined her PTA rep mom and me for dinner, it appears that teenagers do read YA. Conventional wisdom suggests that they don't, that twelve and thirteen year olds read YA and older teenagers read adult fiction or nothing at all. Which just goes to show you can't believe everything you hear. B. After reading the first few pages of Prince Whiskers (have I mentioned that here?) to two kindergarten classes I now know I need to make some changes. What's more, I know what some of those changes should be. and C. Grade school kids really aren't terribly interested in the Puritans and Enlightenment philosophy. Which is so sad, because it's fascinating!

Alex Awards

Here is something I found out about a while back and have been holding on to so I could post it here. (What an elegant lead in, huh?)

The Alex Awards are given for the 10 best adult books for young adults. That doesn't mean they were written for young adults. They are adult books that either the award committee members think young adults would like or would be suitable for them or improving in some way or something. I can't tell from the description.

I like the idea, though. And I like going through the list to see what I've read.

I have this fear that I've written about this award before, but I couldn't find a reference to it when I did a search. And, let's face it, who's going to look?