A Halloween Story

The Butch and Spike Halloween giveaway is history. Now it is time, girls and boys, to draw around and hear the story of how real life became part of the Halloween chapter in said book.

Okay, in the Halloween chapter, Butch and Spike, who are pretty much what you'd expect from a couple of guys with names like Butch and Spike, take over straight arrow Jasper's front yard on Halloween. They are not exactly Martha Stewart when it comes to Halloween decor, anyway, but in addition, they've been running roughshod over Jasper since the first day of school. He's had enough, and he manages to pull one over on the Cootch cousins.

Where did this idea come from? Why, real life, of course. You're working too hard if you have to make things up.

What happened was, one year one of the Gauthier boys gave up trick or treating in order to...uh...provide some holiday-themed entertainment in the front yard. (We are Cootches through my grandmother Gauthier, as I may have mentioned before.) In addition to whatever else he did, he positioned himself as some kind of zombie lumberjack or chainsaw killer in a chair right next to the front door. (That's his old toy chainsaw he's holding in the picture. Isn't he adorable?) The plan was that he would sit perfectly still, pretending to be a dummy, and then while the kiddies were receiving their treats, he would suddenly move. He envisioned people screaming, running through the night, and a good time being had by all.

I missed out on most of the fun because I was out in the street trick-or-treating with another child done up as a Star Fleet officer. However, I was told that while only one trick-or-treater became upset, her mother got quite snippy about it. That was enough to satisfy the zombie lumberjack. He was pleased with his evening's work.

And his mom got an entire chapter for her second book. She was rather pleased, too.

Some Day I Will Learn How To Read

I thought Pierre Bayard sounded very interesting when I first heard of him last winter. Now his book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, is available in this country.

Bayard had some interesting things to say in an interview in The New York Times Book Review. (Though the interviewer, Deborah Solomon, sounds as if she wouldn't agree.)

For instance:

"I think a great reader is able to read from the first line to the last line; if you want to do that with some books, it’s necessary to skim other books. If you want to fall in love with someone, it’s necessary to meet many people. You see what I mean?"

Yes, Pierre, I do. I have learned that there are books I feel I need to familiarize myself with for professional reasons even though I can't possibly bring myself to read them from first line to last. Familiarizing myself with them, having some knowledge of them, enriches my life and shapes how I think of other books in relation to them. Reading every line of them would have killed me.

And:

"You suggest in your book that schools destroy a love of literature, in part because they don’t allow skimming. Yes. Sometimes I help my son write book reports. Guillaume — he’s 14. It’s terrible. The questions are so specific about the names of characters, dates and towns where the heroes went that I am unable to answer the questions. It is the model of reading in France. A kind of scientific reading, which prevents people from inventing another kind of reading, which should be a form of wandering, as in a garden."

I wouldn't go so far as to say schools should allow skimming, but I agree that they aren't doing anything to encourage reading with those assignments that involve finding mindnumbingly pointless details in works of fiction. After going over a page of that sort of thing relating to a sixth-grader's Witch of Blackbird Pond homework, I remember thinking, Gee, I loved that book when I was a kid. I must have been out of my mind.

Not only did the boy in question hate the book, his homework assignment ruined it for me years after I'd read it. Think about it--the schools are destroying the love of reading retroactively.

I can't wait to see if Bayard's book gets taken up by the press and what reviewers have to say about it. Reading the reviews would be sort of like reading the book, right? Another kind of reading?

Nobody's Breaking New Ground Here

As I get older...and older and older...I am often struck by how little collective memory the reading public has.

For instance, have you been hearing the murmurs about whether or not Jessica Seinfeld committed vegetable plagiarism, snitching from Missy Chase Lapine's book on the same subject? The rumor was simmering for a few weeks before Seinfeld's husband came to her defense on Letterman, thus insuring both authors more sales. Bless him.

The thing is, this is not exactly cutting edge material here, folks. I was reading books and magazine articles on ninja nutrition back in the day when I was sneaking wheat germ and grated carrots into unsuspecting children's muffins and cookies at the end of the last century. It's not as if either one of these women holds a copyright on the concept. Can you call it plagiarism when the idea has been out there for years, anyway?

Back in the '90s, two books came out at the same time on Amelia Earhart. That wasn't brand spanking new material, either. Unfortunately, it happens.

Some New Press

A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat was reviewed in the October issue of the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. I say October because that's four months after publication. It was one of those mixed reviews that I keep saying writers should be grateful for, so I'm putting my money where my mouth is and mentioning it here. Plus a review in a professional journal four months after publication is fantastic.

The reviewer said Monster Cat is "conceptually inspiring." When my computer guy heard that, he said, "What does that mean?" I said, "I don't know, but I love it." No, really, I do know what it means, and I still love it. Actually the whole sentence was quite good. "More than anything, Gauthier's novel is conceptually inspiring, and it may motivate more than one reader to click off that remote and head into the endless possibilities of imaginative play."

Another good line is "Be prepared to laugh." That's what a writer for The International Falls Daily Journal had to say about Monster Cat. If you follow the link and go all the way down to the fourth from the last paragraph, you'll see it. I only got two sentences in that particular piece, but when one of them is "Be prepared to laugh," you don't need any more.

I was particularly pleased to get a mention in The International Falls Daily Journal because it's published in International Falls, Minnesota, the inspiration for Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, the home of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Rocky and Bullwinkle were cool.

Gail Leaves The Office, Part II

Lunch!: On Saturday while at the Rabbit Hill Festival, I met Susan Thomsen of Chicken Spaghetti. Susan had to cut out after the morning panel discussion but she knows a large portion of the Connecticut population, and before she left, she introduced me to Sari Bodi who then invited me to have lunch with her and her writing group who were attending the festival.

These women blew me away. They are so much more sophisticated about their work than I was at the same point in my career. (Quite honestly, they are more sophisticated than I am now.) These women study writing with a published author, their writing group meets every week (I've been a writing group member a couple of times--every week seems like a big chunk of time to me), and some of them take writing classes in New York City. One woman sitting at our table goes into New York City every week to meet with her writing group.

In my part of Connecticut, it's generally believed that getting into New York City requires a passport. When I was living in Vermont, we knew it couldn't be done without a spaceship.

Oh, and one of those writers has met Fuse in the flesh, not in that pretend, alternative world way that I've sort of met her. I feel very cool now, because I ate lunch with someone who has met Fuse.

What did we talk about at that lunch? Why, we talked about bloggers! For a few minutes there I was the center of attention because I could name names of blogs.

One person at the table asked what I thought was a good question. She wanted to know if there were any kidlit blogs that dealt with writing process. That interested me because for the last four or five months I've been trying to test out writers' blogs looking for that kind of information. Because I'm so haphazard about nearly everything I do, I don't have a good list of writing process blogs, but it seems as if it would be a good idea for someone to pull one together.

Butch and Spike Reminder

Just a reminder that you're halfway through the period in which you can take a shot at winning a copy of A Year with Butch and Spike. Hurry. Halloween is almost here.

Gail Leaves The Office, Part I

I would have said "Gail Leaves The Cellar," because that's where my office is but office sounds less creepy.

So I made it to the Rabbit Hill Festival of Literature even though my GPS tried to get me to leave the highway 10 exits early. I was too wily for it.

An over all impression: The last time I went to the Rabbit Hill Festival was probably five years ago. At that time, the audience was made up primarily of women of a certain age. This time I saw younger women, men, younger men, and kids. According to one of the speakers for the event, they had entire families sign up to attend.

I was impressed.

The lack of graphics for this post: I wussed out and didn't take pictures. I mean, photographs of well-known authors standing at a podium wouldn't be anything you hadn't seen before, and candids of them drinking coffee (I almost took one of Jeanne DuPrau doing that) fall into that creepy sphere I'm trying so hard to avoid. So use your imagination.

Speaking of Jeanne DuPrau: I actually went up and spoke to her during the break because I had something fannish to say that made a good excuse to bother her. I told her about a family member who was a big fan of The City of Ember on CD because he's a civil engineer and loved the breakdown of the underground infrastructure. I was trying to think of a way to tell her that he'd really like her to do a book about how the city was built, when she told me that she gets a lot of e-mails and letters asking her to do a book about how the city got there. She appears to have a techie fan following.

Then she looked at my nametag and said, "Do I know you?" I thought, Uh-oh. She found out I wasn't crazy for The Prophet of Yonwood. So I'm standing there going, "Aaaaaah...." Then she said, "Are you on the child_lit listserv?" "Yes! Yes! That's it!"

Andrea Davis Pinkney: Andrea Davis Pinkney started her talk with an exercise she says she uses before she starts writing. You have to place your feet on the floor, straighten your back, close your eyes, and search for the light that is within each person. (Search for your own, not someone else's.) Then after you find the light, let it transport you to your imagined world (meaning the imagined world you're writing about.)

I am sure many of you are thinking, Oh, Gail's going to have a zinger for this. Not at all. I can get into exercises like this, and I got into this one. My light took me directly to the house in Vermont where I left the Durand cousins yesterday while they were dealing with the red-haired man. Here's the thing, though--it was a big, white explosive kind of light that hit me full in the body and blew me to the house. Very out of control. Not at all conducive to watching a scene.

Whoops. There I go. Getting into the creepy sphere again.

I will try this exercise again on Monday. Oh, who am I kidding. I'll have forgotten about it by then.

Neal Shusterman: Shusterman's morning presentation was a lesson in why it pays to be witty and charming and present yourself well. I, personally, had mixed feelings about his book The Schwa Was Here and haven't read anything of his since. But after being charmed by his witty presentation, I almost certainly will.

I will have to give the rest of the details of my day tomorrow. I had to be nice for many, many hours today. It was a whole lot like work, and I'm exhausted. Plus, I really want to wring a couple of posts out of this event.

I'm Getting Out Of The House This Weekend!

I'm all set to go to the Rabbit Hill Festival of Literature tomorrow. This is exciting news for you as well as for me because it means that at least once this weekend I'll be writing about something other than what goes on in my head. I will try to take pictures, too. I'm not one to have my picture taken with others, so what I may do is, say, take a picture of Rick Riordan, and then get my computer guy to photoshop me in next to him. That would be fun in a stalker kind of way.

Oh, look! Rick Riordan blogged about the first day of the festival.

Check in for tomorrow's symposium is at 8:00 AM. Yeah. That's going to happen. Since it doesn't take me any hour to check-in and look at my small group assignment, and I don't drink coffee, I'm shooting for getting there a lot closer to when things actually start to happen at 9:00. I have two different sets of written travel instructions, plus I've already programmed the car's GPS, so I'm very confident I should get there at least in time for lunch.

Mildly Anxiety Inducing For Control Freaks Like Myself

In Identity Crisis? Not Really Meg Rosoff explains that whether or not her books are classified as YA or adult is determined by her publishers' marketing departments. "The truth is, most writers simply write, and by virtue of the subject matter they choose (divorce, sexual deviance, the Peloponnesian wars), are deemed to be adult writers. The presence of puppies and pigs in a story line usually indicates a children’s book, except when it doesn’t (Marley and Me, Animal Farm)."

I don't know about the Peloponnesian wars, but divorce and, if you define the term loosely enough, sexual deviance certainly turn up in YA.

I have control issues and Rosoff evidently doesn't, which is probably why she wrote How I Live Now, and I didn't. Just writing and letting the chips fall where they may as far as an audience is concerned has worked rather well for her. But to me, knowing whether I'm writing a children's, YA, or adult book is less about audience than it is about knowing what the hell I'm doing. Decisions must be made, people! How can I make decisions about character, voice, setting, theme, and plot, if I haven't made the fundamental decision about what I'm doing first?

Really. I'm feeling quite stressed thinking about this. Rosoff didn't sound stressed in that PW article, did she?

She had a couple of quite interesting things to say toward the end of the article:

You know how traditional wisdom says that kids' read up? Rosoff addresses that. '“In America, novels cross down,” one publisher told me' (Rosoff), “but they don’t cross up,” meaning teens will read adult books, but not vice versa.' Teens continue to read up. What do adults read up to? I've wondered about that before.

Rosoff also describes her new book What I Was as "a love story set in a boy’s boarding school in 1962, narrated by the main character as a very old man." She goes on to say, "In the U.K. it will have two editions. In the U.S., just one—adult."

My understanding of adult vs. YA/kid classifications is that if the narrator of a book is an adult looking back on his youth, than it is an adult book because the story is told through an adult sensibility. That adult has knowledge of what happened past the time in which the story takes place. A YA or children's book has a narrator telling a story of something happening to him in the moment and has no knowledge beyond the time of the story. So Rosoff's new book sounds adult to me.

I think Rosoff's article was meant to try to distance herself from the whole "YA or adult?" debate as far as her own books are concerned. While doing that, though, I think she may raise some questions for readers for whom YA fiction is defined by more than the people who read it.

Link came from the Adbooks listserv.

Halloween Giveaway

Halloween is a week from today, folks. As I announced earlier, I'll be giving away another copy of A Year with Butch and Spike in honor of the holiday because the book includes a Halloween chapter.

Send an e-mail to me (gail@gailgauthier.com) any time between now and Wednesday, October 31 (Halloween) with the word "Halloween" in the subject line. We'll do the drawing that day.

On the 31st I'll also tell you all the story of the true life experience that ended up in Butch and Spike's Halloween chapter.