Coming Late To The Carnival
As usual, I didn't get to the most recent Carnival of Children's Literature at A Year of Reading until after it had been up for a few weeks. My favorite articles:

Fair Weather and The Devil in the White City: Book Review at the imponderabilia of actual life. Sandy D. discusses The Devil in the White City, a piece of adult nonfiction by Eric Larson about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and Fair Weather a children's novel by Richard Peck also about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.

I haven't read either book, though I did give The Devil in the White City to a family member for Christmas a few years back. But I love the idea of approaching the same material in different ways. I will be much more likely to pick up these books as a result of reading this post.

Through imponderabilia I discovered The Newbery Project, a blog in which a group of people are reading all the Newbery winning books. It's a fascinating idea, and I'll be visiting the site.

These carnivals are well worth a look.

It's Almost Like Traveling Myself

Having made a road trip into the south a number of years back, I particularly enjoyed catching up on Mark Peter Hughes' Lemonade Mouth Across America as he made his way as far as Atlanta and then headed west. The mere mention of South of the Border made me crave a pecan log, which, of course, comes from Stuckey's but those southern roadside stops are all glorious to me.

Blogger is refusing to let me make titles this evening, so I had to rig up a fakie.

And Some Of Those Canadians Have A Way With Words, Too

Blow off all your blog reading for today, and maybe tomorrow, so you can read Adventures in the Reviewing Trade: A Cultural Primer by Alex Good. This is a very, very long piece, but Good has lots and lots of interesting (note I didn't say "good," though I thought of it) things to say about book reviewing. And I'm not just saying that because he agrees with me that a bad review is better than no review. Though he does come right out and say it: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bad review is better than no review at all."

Among the things he discusses:

How books get selected for review at newspapers

The promotional aspect of reviews vs. the critical aspect

How easy it is for reviewers to fall behind with their reviewing given the limited number of reviews they can publish, they huge number of books to review and the short shelf-life for new books

"Positive" reviews or "Making Nice"

Why readers prefer to read reviews of nonfiction to reviews of fiction

And, of course, the Internet

Something I found particularly interesting: "None of the print reviews that I’m aware of runs more reviews, or longer reviews, on their websites than they do in print. They have all the free space in the world – indeed an almost infinite amount –but we’re not seeing any explosion in reviewing. The Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail could double their number of book reviews online just for the cost of paying someone to write them. But they’re not. And there’s nothing stopping the CBC from running book reviews on their web-page. But it’s not very often they do."

I don't know if space on websites is free. Mine isn't. But it is interesting to consider whether or not the print reviews that are cutting back or shutting down couldn't move their operations to the Internet more economically and thus preserve review space.

Those Brits Don't Mince Words

From a Telegraph review of the new Harry Potter movie:

"The fifth volume of the Harry Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was by common consent the worst book to emerge from the pen of J K Rowling.

There were too many sub-plots, it was relentlessly miserable and the first character who really mattered both to the reader and to the hero was killed off."

The Potter books tend to all blur together in my mind. I do believe, though, that The Order of the Phoenix also included long episodes of magical housecleaning at the beginning of the book, which were pointless, though I rather liked them. And there was a page that introduced at least three new characters who weren't used very much, which an editor probably would have done something about if s/he'd been working with anyone other than J.K. Rowling. And then there was a final, very powerful image, of Dumbledore carrying a character out of the woods. Except that the book isn't called Dumbledore and the Order of the Phoenix, you may recall.

I agree that the only character who mattered to me in the whole series was killed off in The Order of the Phoenix, pretty much just to make me miserable. I mean, I don't even care about Harry. You won't see me shedding any tears if Rowling sends him to wizard heaven.

I'll be p.o.ed if she offs Ron or one of his siblings, but only because of what it will do to his parents. Though, here is my prediction--that brother of his who is a priggish bureaucrat and some kind of baddish guy (though I can't recall exactly how) will buy the farm redeeming himself. I've been saying that for years, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself.

Anyway, I wasn't planning to go to the new movie, and recalling the book hasn't done anything to change my mind.

What's Happening Down Under

Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld will both be the writer in residence at Inside a Dog for the month of July. They'll be starting later this week.

4th Of July Holiday Post--Working All The Time

I think it was Terry Pratchett who said in some interview that a big chunk his work is done when he isn't actually writing. I understand exactly what he means. When immersed properly in a project, you could find yourself "working" at odd times, off and on all the time.

For instance, I woke up late this morning because it's the 4th of July and realized that soon I'll be starting the thriller aspect of The Durand Cousins. And then, while still in bed, I realized that a book really shouldn't become a thriller at the halfway point. If there is a "thriller aspect" I need a thriller thread all the way through the thing.

We no longer spend our 4ths at parades. Today we spent two and a half hours of it biking. Perfect time for work. I came home with some thread ideas, though without a complete thread.

But, remember, last night when I went to bed I wasn't even thinking in terms of a thread. So, actually, I did quite a bit today.

Managing Misery

You often read about authors working along on a new project and suddenly realizing that everything they've done to date stinks. They are inept, the whole concept was lame to begin with, etc. Oh, yes. It happens. Regularly.

I haven't experienced too much of it with The Durand Cousins, possibly because the last couple of weeks I've been working much faster than I usually do. (Yesterday I actually did 2,700 words, which is unheard of for me, though some of it was from some freewriting I did on Sunday.) But this morning I could feel doubt seeping in like a gas that comes curling under a door in a horror movie. I am probably reacting to some anxiety over the Girl/Boy Books rather than the new project, but misery definitely has a snowball effect.

Then I did a fifty minute workout, sixty crunches of various types, and some stretching, and now I'm feeling wonderful.

Speaking of working out, did anyone else see Mitali Perkins' video of her launch party? What do you think? Could someone develop a cool workout video around this kind of dance? They had some intervals of serious lower body work going there, including one move I think Kathy Smith calls "around the world."

Laughing, are you? Aerobic videos designed around dance are hard.

Analyzing Nancy

Slate has an interesting article on up-dating Nancy Drew. One of the tidbits that popped out at me: In a new Nancy Drew series that began in 2004, Nancy Drew books have been written in the first person.

Is anyone else freaked out by the way first-person narrators monopolize kids' books, YA in particular? And I ask this having written six first-person books, myself.

Welcome To My Nightmare

I have to knock this off in a hurry because I have an evening class today. Let's see what kind of godawful editing error I can make and have to correct first thing tomorrow morning.

I finished The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, which I did like. Love them wee free men. But I did think that without the wee free men the book would be...kind of run-of-the-mill.

I'm a Reading Fool said in a comment that her reading group felt the last third of the book took a strange turn. I think what she might have meant is that at that point The Wee Free Men turns into one of those alternate world books with hidden doorways and people passing back and forth. Dreams and controlling dreams begin to figure prominently in the mix. It's sort of formula stuff.

Except for the wee free men.

I'm not a fan of the alternate world scenario. For one thing, I always get confused. For instance, in The Wee Free Men when Tiffany makes Granny turn up in a shepherdess outfit--what was that about? Granny didn't seem to do anything. And the doorways between worlds always seem a little mumbo jumboish to me.

But the wee free men saved the book for me.

I do have a question about the audience for the Tiffany Aching Adventures. In this first book, she's only nine years old. But, come on. She doesn't act nine by a long shot. Do nine-year-olds get this? Will teenagers read it when the main character is only nine years old?

I'll certainly continue reading, for the sake of those wee free men. But I do wonder how kids respond to these books.

They May Have A Point

One complaint regarding bloggers that I've heard from writers of print reviews is that bloggers don't have editors going over their work before it's tossed up on the Internet for all the world to see. Is this really such a problem?

For some of us, yes.

Yesterday morning I woke up around 6:20 (on a Saturday, mind you) and thought that while I don't usually work on weekends, I might just run downstairs and write a few paragraphs on The Durand Cousins so I could stay emerged in my work. Work goes so much better when I'm emerged in it. I'd get up to speed faster on Monday if I could do some emergion over the weekend.

I didn't get any further in my thinking than that because I was, as they say, struck by lightening. I had been awake a minute, maybe two--three tops--when I realized that one cannot be emerged in one's work. One can emerge from it, perhaps, but only awkwardly. One can only become immersed in one's work.

I got up, hurried downstairs, and changed two posts in which I'd used the word emerge for immerse.

Cindy, my favorite copy editor, would have spared me the humiliation of making such a glaring usage error. And since she already knows I'm an idiot who, among other things, uses commas randomly, no harm would have been done. It's not as if I can go down any lower in her esteem.

Lack of precision in language impairs communication. It's also careless. If you're careless with your use of language, readers have a right to suspect that you're also careless in your thinking.

Print reviewers may also be imprecise and careless with their language. But they do have the benefit of editors who, one hopes, will catch them and set them straight. There is, I'm sorry to say, a great deal to be said for that.