December Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar

I thought December was going to be a slow month for author appearances, but not so. A number of big names are visiting the state, and a Connecticut children's author and bookstore will be featured on Booktalk Nation, which is like a public appearance, but different.

Weekdays in Dec., Janet Lawler, broadcast of reading of Tyrannoclaus and interview, WPAA-TV, Wallingford,  7 AM

Sunday, Dec. 2, Michael Northrup, Greg Fishbone, and Ann Haywood Leal,  Bank Square Books, Mystic, 3:00 to 5:00 PM

Sunday, Dec. 2, Janet Lawler, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, 1:30 to 3:30 PM

Sunday, December 2, Sarah Ferguson, New Canaan Library, 3:00 PM

Tuesday, Dec. 4, Ann Haywood Leal, Booktalk Nation, 7:00 PM You can sign up and listen to Haywood Leal being interviewed by Annie Philbrick of Bank Square Books in Mystic.

Friday, Dec. 7, Barbara McClintock, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 4:00 PM

Saturday, Dec. 8, Susan Hood and Barbara McClintock, The Hickory Stick Bookshop, Washington Depot, 2:00 PM

Friday, Dec. 14, Jane O'Connor, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 4:00 PM

Sunday, Dec. 16, Rosemary Wells, The Hickory Stick Bookshop, 2:00 PM 

Sunday, Dec. 16, Jane Yolen, New Canaan Library, 1:30 PM   Jane Yolen will appear again at the New Canaan Library at 4:00 PM for a poetry reading for adults

Interview With Tanita Davis

CBC Diversity has posted an Industry Q&A with author Tanita S. Davis. Yay, Tanita! There are some interesting questions here and one that looks as if it belongs on some kind of exam. "Please write an example of a paragraphthat is tone deaf when it comes to cultural diversity, then write the correct version. Explain the differences in the third paragraph."

Two Different Views Of The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

At the end of August, The Millions published Michael Bourne's essay, Keeping the Faith: Ten Days at Bread Loaf, about his experience at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. In August, 2011, The Millions published my essay on the same subject, My Bread Loaf. Compare and contrast, people.

I would just like to point out that while I didn't do any professional networking while I was at Bread Loaf and it pretty much ruined writers' conferences for me, I was paid to be there.

A Children's Lit Blog Hop

I only recently learned about blog hops. There's one underway now through the GEO Librarian blog.

Time Management Tuesday: Maybe Routine Was What Got Me Off The Mat

At this time last week, I was wondering if the unit system would keep me working, at some level, through the holidays. It definitely didn't get me through this past one. By Saturday evening, the whole idea of giving up the good times I'd been having and going back to work was...hmm? Is repugnant too strong a word? I felt a little better after writing this line in Saturday's blog post, "Will our intrepid writer get back on task with cleaning her files, laying out her website overhaul, and developing lists of marketing contacts for the launch of the Saving the Planet e-book, just for starters." But for the most part, a life committed to going for walks and baking sounded rather inviting at that point.

What does Gail's failure of will have to do with time management, you may wonder. Remember, there is a self-discipline aspect to time management. Yes, there is. Last weekend, mine went down in flames.

However, Sunday morning I got up, went over a step sparring tape, did a mile on the treadmill, and, because I'm in training for January's retreat week when I will take five or six one-hour yoga classes in six days, I upped my daily 10/15 minute yoga practice by working with a 30-minute DVD that I rarely use because I find it difficult. The 30-minutes of yoga went incredibly well, and when I was finished I felt very close to being back to normal.

Eureka! I thought, or something similar. Yoga truly is a cure all! I was aware that meditation assists concentration for some people, thus helping them use time more effectively. But I hadn't heard anything specifically about yoga. So I spent some time that afternoon hunting on-line for material on some kind of connection between yoga and self-discipline or control.

Yesterday morning I was working out again when I started wondering whether it was really the yoga that brought my mind back to where I wanted it to be. Maybe it was the fact that I was working out at all, as I almost always do in the morning. Maybe it was the repetition of my regular life routines that brought me back to regular life.

Recall that I first began to feel some stirring of my normal self Saturday night when I wrote a blog post, something I do nearly every day, often in the evening, but hadn't done over the holiday. Then things really began to fall back into place Sunday after working out, something I do nearly day, also, but hadn't been able to do regularly over the holiday. I hadn't gone back to work, but I had gone back to routines I associate with work--working out before the work day and blogging at the end of it. That appears to have been enough to get me transitioning back to my work life.

Though I will keep my eye open for any yoga/discipline connections.
 

May Have Revived My Interest In Sherlock Holmes

I've written about Sherlock Holmes quite a bit  here over the years. As I've often said, I read the Holmes books when I was a youngish teenager, but as an adult, I don't know why kids are fascinated with him. The publishing world certainly is, but child readers? I don't get it.

I put off reading the Enola Holmes books by Nancy Springer because, without recognizing a child/Holmes connection, I didn't feel any compelling need to read a Holmes story about his younger sister. I wasn't very hopeful.

Well, I stumbled upon the last book in the series, The Case of the Gypsy Good-bye, and, since the author and I are Facebook friends for some reason, gave it a try. Wow. A marvelous book.

This series appears to have had an arc involving Enola's (and Sherlock's and Mycroft's) mother disappearing. Enola has been on the hunt for her and while doing so has taken on her own cases. She's also been on the run from Sherlock and Mycroft because, since she's only a female in her early teens and they are the men of the family and this is the Victorian Era...Well, you get where I'm going with this.

It was incredibly easy to come up to speed with that back story. Additionally, this volume includes a mystery that really is well done with a marvelous solution, especially for those of us interested in women's history.

The writing is just incredible. Enola's first-person narration makes her sound like a young woman from another time, which is exactly what she's supposed to be. The historical world-building is fascinating without becoming a tedious lesson in what it must have been like to live in nineteenth century England. The detail...Well, I've already said incredible, haven't I?

And Springer uses the world Suffragist. SuffragIST and not SuffragETTE, which would have been considered derogatory. I would have forgiven a lot, just for that one point. But I didn't have to forgive anything.

The publisher lists this book as being for ages 8 and up. I found it in the YA section of my local library, where I believe it belongs, if only for the sophistication of the historical world and voice.

I'm Oozing Back Into A Practice

I'm coming down from my Thanksgiving-induced mania and moving back toward work mode. I'm finishing   my weekend with a little professional reading, a habit I've been trying to create these last few months.

First off, here's a Bookslut interview with Dinty W. Moore. He's an essayist, and in this interview he talks specifically about flash nonfiction. That's a subject that interests me, because I often think of blog posts as flash nonfiction. Moore says something about the difference between an artist and "someone who probably never will be" that reminded me of John Cleese's point about creativity taking time. Moore says, "...it is very hard for certain students to ever imagine entirely scrapping a beginning or ending. There is too often that insidious voice telling them that if they just clarify a word here or add a clever descriptor there, perhaps it "will be good enough," and they can move on to something else. There's the dividing line between a true artist and someone who probably never will be, if you ask me. A writer wants it not to be "good enough," not even to make it very good, but to nail it, to make it as nearly perfect as she can."

Mitali Perkins did an interesting post on working with an editor at the Fire Escape.

Do YA authors, editors, and librarians promote the idea that YA books have the power to do good, but reject the idea that they can do harm? at CBC Diversity. Link from Finding Wonderland. Naomi Wolf raised questions way back in 2006 about whether or not YA girls-gone-bad books were damaging. She took some heat for it. (Though she takes heat for a lot of things, and I'm saying nothing more about that.) I think the CBC blogger raised good questions that many people don't want to address. Personally, I made the decision years ago that if I ever found out how to make a nuclear bomb, I would not use that information in a novel. Seriously, I actually thought those words. More recently I made the decision to never create a character like Bella Swan.

Chronicle Books sends me catalogs.  Fiction Notes offers a tour of its offices.

Talk About Breaking Discipline

I have had a fantastic few days, but good times appear to have destroyed my discipline. All I've done for work since Tuesday morning is write an e-mail. An e-mail, as in one. I've spent the last couple of hours researching self-discipline fixes and coming up dry.

Well, at least we're experiencing a little drama here at the OC. Will our intrepid writer get back on task with cleaning her files, laying out her website overhaul, and developing lists of marketing contacts for the launch of the Saving the Planet e-book, just for starters? Or will she throw everything over to hunt for multiple cookie pie recipes?

Time Management Tuesday: Will The Unit System Get Me Through The Holidays?

At the beginning of this year, some of us talked about the December time suck for people who work in their homes where holiday tasks want to force themselves into our work time. Well, it's Thanksgiving week and the holiday call is beginning. I have to start on a big holiday meal days in advance. In addition, I'll have some overnighters here, which means a little prep time for the "guest wing."

Losing time to the holidays, in and of itself, is a problem. What also happens, though, is that we can damage our work habits while not working and lose any carry-over flow we might have been experiencing. What to do?

I'm relying on that planning habit I've been trying to create in order to use transitional time and the unit system, which I first heard about way back at the beginning of the year. I was cooking and cleaning in the afternoon yesterday, but not until after I used transitional time to work on the filing project I've got going in my office and a couple of 45-minute units to write an important letter, to work on the layout of the Saving the Planet page we're going to do for my website, and to do some more research for marketing said book. I also did a blog post in late yesterday afternoon. I've done some work on the filing system this morning.

I'm happy to be getting anything done this week, and while I'm not experiencing anything like real flow, I do feel that I'm in some kind of work mode. The plan is to get a unit of work in tomorrow and then start doing more on Friday. (Though not a real workday, since I'll still have guests.)

Note that except for a letter and two blog posts (including this one), I didn't do any writing. I haven't been writing in the sense of generating new material since earlier this year. I wanted to put more energy into the family situation this half year and getting the Saving the Planet e-book has turned out to be hugely time consuming. I go back to a more normal work situation in December (until the next holiday), and things should be settling down with Saving the Planet by March, if not sooner. I'm looking forward to seeing how my Situational Time Management system works when I'm really writing.

No Vampires, Werewolves, Fairies, Zombies, Or Any Other Paranormal Beings. Just Real Kids In A Good Book.

Summer for teenagers is supposed to be a fantasy of dream jobs in dream places with dream people. Teenagers know that because they've read it in books. In reality, summer is frequently far more like what the four characters in The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher experience. They're stuck in town without their friends because that's the way things fell into place. They're injured, like Adrienne, The Unbearable Book Club's main character. Or they're in trouble with their parents, like CeeCee the well-to-do snotty girl. Or they're high achievers working away at their ho-hum summer jobs like Jill because they have goals they're going to meet. Or, like Wallis, they're from families in which teenagers don't get to do any of the fantasy dream stuff that shows up in YA books.

I guess I would have to say that this book is basically about four girls without much to do who are thrown together for the summer. The frame for the story is the AP English mother/daughter book club that three of the girls' yoga-loving mothers put together for them. Over the course of the book, the girls read four novels that scream AP English. ( I had an AP English student living in my house not too long ago. Yes, he had to read The Awakening, just as these girls do. ). Bits of the books relate to what's happening to the girls in The Unbearable Book Club. It could be argued that not much does happen to them, which, to me, is in large part what makes this book so believable. Lots of times, not much happens to us. Schumacher writes about not much happening very, very well.

And yet someone dies in this book. As Adrienne says in her introduction, "Book clubs can kill you."

Adrienne is a marvelous character because she's having a rough summer in which she does modestly unsavory adolescent things without a whole lot of justification for her behavior. That happens. Okay, sure, she's never known her father, but why pick this particular summer to let it get to her? Because a bottle of gin just sort of fell into her lap. And, yes, that's how things happen in real life.

I loved CeeCee because she's the stereotypical mean girl, but she isn't. Over and over in books and movies I see that same cliche. Here the cliche gets a working over. CeeCee reminded me of Dalia in Suburgatory but way smarter. She has a sophisticated wit. Don't believe she could get into AP English reading just the summary of books on-line, the first couple of chapters, and then the end? I've known people who got through college reading like that. And they did well there. It can be done.

This is a marvelous, mainstream novel that could be another crossover book. I'm surprised it didn't get nominated for a Cybil or for one of the Goodreads awards that are being voted on now.

I've just read that Unbearable Book Club's author wrote an earlier, adult novel, The Body is Water, about Adrienne's mother sixteen years earlier. I love the idea of using characters in two different books, even in two different genres.