Interesting Book News:

1. Percy Jackson Series by Rick Riordan is awesome. Go out and read it NOW! Oh! and the first book is going to be a movie, Percy Jackson: Lightning Thief, released on February 12th, 2010.

2. A teen author’s Angel trilogy was just bought by Feiwel and Friends. It sounds promising.

3. Warner Bros. bought the movie rights for Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. Just received this book in the mail, so looking forward to reading it.

4. Lies by Michael Grant cover was revealed. Very Similar to the first book’s cover, but still great.

5. Hunger Games 3 release date was announced. (It’s August 24, 2010 for all of you who don’t know.)

6. Lord Sunday by Garth Nix cover was revealed. LOVE IT.

7. The Eagle of the Ninth Movie Adaption includes the cast of Channing Tatum, star of GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra and Fighting and also Jamie Bell star of Jumper and Defiance. Intended to be released in 2010. One word, AWESOME!

8. The Maze Runner was a grim and morbid masterpiece. Two more books will be in this trilogy, with the second titled The Scorch Trials. Looking forward to that.

9. Oh and if you enjoyed the Percy Jackson series (which you will!), Riordan has already begun a new series, The Kane Chronicles. Book one is titled The Red Pyramid,  and its centered around Carter Kane, 14, and his sister, Sadie, 12, descendants of Egyptian magicians who battle gods accidentally released in the present. Sure to be a Bestseller, if you want my opinion.

10. The 2009 Kirkus Reviews Book Video Awards began a few months ago. I’ll have to look up the winners, but the voting came down to three videos, The Maze Runner, Fallen, and Very LeFreak. Exciting stuff.

And all sorts of other thrilling topics.

You got any juicy book gossip you want to share? Or just read an awesome book that you believe everyone should pick it up? Just leave a comment with your Books News, that way everyone can see it.

If you’d like proof, I will be at the BARNES and NOBLE at 86th and Lexington in New York City, October 15th, 7:00 PM.

I’ll be wearing black.

Also there:  the great and powerful Scott Westerfeld!  The lovely and vivacious (I assume) Carrie Ryan!  And the, oh, let’s say the talented and translucent (look, I’m tired and I’m out of adjectives, okay?) James Dashner!

Never in the history of young adult literature has such a panel of luminaries assembled in one place.  The sheer brilliance will astound you!  It’s entirely possible that we will combine to form a singularity and suck not only you but the entire bookstore into a black hole.  That’s right:  we are just that deep.

But wait:  there’s more!  The first 20 people who show up and buy a book (one of mine, duh) for signing get a flash drive containing the first chapters of LIES and the first chapters of an entirely separate series, THE MAGNIFICENT 12.

Sweet Lord, can you imagine a more astounding offer?  You can? Well, too bad because this is all the offer I have right now.

Come one, come all, and hear four YA authors bloviate, pontificate, and try to top each other in pandering to you, our devoted audience.  Should be fun.

Anyway, having a book translated into a language I don’t understand has led me to discover Google’s translation program. I’m hoping the program is seriously buggy, because this is what I find when I translate my author bio on the publisher’s site. Enjoy.

“Carol Snow grew up in New Jersey, studied psychology, but got an aversion to rats, began to write, became a teacher, married, had two children, wrote, moved to Utah to Arizona to California and wrote and wrote. In 2006 her first novel, “Been there, done that” was published, the Publishers Weekly as “humorous, wise debut” marked.”

I love going to this web page and browsing the different quotes. Historical figures can sometimes be funny… in a dry, kinda overly confident way.

Here are a few of my faves:

“Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep,
for your habits and character will be as much
influenced by the former as the latter.”
— ~ Paxton Hood~

The printing press is either the greatest blessing
or the greatest curse of modern times,
sometimes one forgets which it is.
~ Sir James M. Barrie ~

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book;
a good head cannot read amiss:
in every book he finds passages which seem confidences
or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear. ”
— ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

“Books give not wisdom where none was before.
But where some is, there reading makes it more.
”
— ~ John Harington ~

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people,
is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents.
This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland
and other favorites of the nursery.
~ A. S. W. Rosenbach ~

What are some of your favorite Quotes about Reading?

check out the entire post here (there’s a very funny, okay, sorta funny, video):

http://onourmindsatscholastic.blogspot.com/2009/06/were-giving-away-catching-fire-arc.html

How to enter: Create a video no longer than one minute in length, of yourself, and only yourself, reciting the following pledge: “I hearby swear, if I am lucky enough to receive an advanced copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, I, [your name], promise not to spoil the story for those not as fortunate as I am.” Post that video to your favorite video hosting site (such as YouTube), and post a link to it in the comments of this blog post.
Deadline: 11:59 PM EST on 7/5/09
Prizes: Advance Reader Copy of Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Void where prohibited
For complete rules click here.

Yeah, and it ends soon, so all ye who have not gotten yourselves ARCs of Catching Fire, do yourself a favor and make this very easy video. Not many people are entered so far, so your chances are pretty darn good.

“What the ____ is a video Tweet?” you ask.  To which I answer, “Hey, watch your ______ language.  Do you even know what ____ means?  It’s a very rude word.  You little ____!”

Well, it seems if you have Tweetie which is a Twitter Client (no, I don’t know what that means, but my 12 year-old does) you can post videos to Twitter.

It’s really easy.  You go up to the Tweetie tool bar, punch “New video Tweet” and then just talk to the camera.  Assuming you use a Mac.  If you’re on a Windows machine I assume there are nine more steps and at least three crashes involved.

So I’m now using this video tweet thing to read HUNGER, a few paragraphs a day.  As you know, HUNGER is longer than the Bible, (but not as violent and the language is cleaner,) so it may take me a while.  The three I’ve put up so far are from my back yard which is my office.  But I’m thinking of doing some from different locations. Maybe from a B&N or a Starbucks or a Borders.  Anywhere that has WiFi.

I’m also thinking of answering fan questions that way.  And that makes sense.

Here’s what doesn’t make sense:  I’m thinking of reviewing books by video tweet.  In fact, I’m thinking of reviewing books I sometimes have to read to my kids.  For example a book series that rhymes with Wearing Stained Pears.  Kind of rhymes with it, anyway.

But I’m thinking it could be a bad idea.  Because I don’t have anything good to say about Wearing Stained Pears.  I kind of hate Wearing Stained Pears.

As you may know, the books are the story of how Mama Be. . . um . . . Mama Pear sucks the joy out of life. Here’s every Wearing Stained Pears story:  Mama tromps around wearing a white polka-dotted blue mumu and a tragic little Martha Washington matching cap, and destroys pleasure wherever she finds it.  You know about antimatter?  Mama Pear is anitjoy.  She’s the Predator drone of fun:  when she sees it, by God she kills it.  Boom!  Were you relaxing?  Boom, Mama Pear will put an end to it.  Were you just blitzing out, chilling, having a pleasant day?  Look out, it’s Mama Pear, Queen Buzzkill.

Junk food?  TV?  Making messes?  Skipping church?   Brother Pear’s heroin habit?  Whatever small measure of joy the Pear family might squeeze out of their tree-bound, rustic existence, there’s Mama Pear in her frumpy fat-dress scolding and nagging.

Her two children, the imaginatively-named Brother Pear and Sister Pear — that’s right, she named her kids for their relationship to each other as though neither of them is entitled to a distinct identity outside the suffocating confines of their grim, repressed family — have to be constantly on watch against any display of enjoyment or they’ll draw their harpie mother like bees to honey.

She’s the shrew of bears.  I mean pears.  She’s the black hole of happiness.  I mean, good lord, woman, climb down off it from time to time.  Shut up and go buy yourself a dress from this century.  Maybe something not shaped like a bag of mulch, you tedious, genderless, sanctimonious, hypocritical, soul-sucking prig.

But see, that would be wrong to do as a video tweet.  Because no one should say those things about the Wearing Stained Pears books.  Because, you know, they teach all kinds of good lessons.

I understand that in the final book Papa Bear . . . I mean Pear . . .  finally gets his axe and comes into the treehouse yelling, “That’s the last time you. . . ”

But I have to stop myself.  I don’t want to spoil it for you!

Which is why, I was so darn excited when I opened a nondescript white package from Scholastic to find my very own ARC of…dun dun dun…Catching Fire.

Be jealous. Be very jealous.

And after about a half of hour of jumping up and down excitedly and squealing to my family (who aren’t big YA readers by the way, so they had no idea why I was so happy), I holed myself up in my room to start reading. About four hours later, I was done (okay, technically, I went to sleep before I finished the last 15 or so pages, but if I stayed up for like ten more minutes…)

And all I can say right now to those who have been as lucky as me to get a Catching Fire ARC and have not read it, READ IT NOW! And for those who just aren’t that lucky, I’m very sorry, but you’ll have to wait until September to read this *very awesome* sequel to The Hunger Games.

What brought on this poll? This post.

Who doesn’t love a book full of emotionally unstable teens with destructive powers and evil villains squashing all good and hope? Doesn’t that just sound thrilling!

A few of these awesome books:

The Awakening (Book One in the Quantum Prophecy Series) by Michael Carroll

The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp (Book One in the Alfred Kropp Series) by Rick Yancey

Gone (Book One in the Gone Series) by Michael Grant

Heir Trilogy (The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir) by Cinda Williams Chima

Hidden Talents (followed by sequel, True Talents) by David Lubar

Jack: Secret Histories (Book One in the Jack Series) by F. Paul Wilson

Jimmy Coates: Assassin? (Book One in the Jimmy Coates Series) by Joe Craig

Keys to the Kingdom Series by Garth Nix

The Magician (Book Two in the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel Series) by Michael Scott

The Named (Book One in the Guardians of Time Trilogy) by Marianne Curley

Raven’s Gate (Book One in the Gatekeepers Series) by Anthony Horowitz

Strange Angels (Book One in the Strange Angels Series) by Lili St. Crow

Did your wish list just grow, or what?

Click here to read what I thought of the Twilight Movie.

1- I finished LIES: a GONE Novel.  I’m working on the rewrites right now.  Stage one:  Editorial Whack-a-Mole.  They send me the manuscript marked up with little red notes in the right margin.  Most of these notes say things like, “Deleted: and.”  Or “Deleted: ,”  I get a lot of those.  Apparently I, don’t exactly know where, to use, commas.  Anyway, there’s a little check mark inside the little comment box so I have to go through the not-quite-600 pages and hit the little check mark accepting all those “comma deleted” boxes.

2- Yep, writing’s kind of boring isn’t it?

3- Went to England.  Attempted to sign 1,000 books in one hour, like Meg Cabot.  Instead signed 1,300 books in four hours.  I have run the numbers:  I actually kicked Meg’s butt.  Shut up:  I did too.

4- Talked to various Hollywood weasels re: ANIMORPHS and GONE.  Results:  blah blah blah, we respect your work, blah blah blah.  

5- Hung out in Hollywood with “the boys.”  The boys are changing the entire face of web media.  And yet I end up picking up the tab.  Hmmm.  (By the way, the link takes a while to load.  Click on the arrow on the lower right of the screen.)

6- The boys want me to rewrite a TV script I came up with a  long time ago.   Are they paying?  Not yet.  So . . .

7- . . . I started work on The MAGNIFICENT 12.  Having so much fun.  I get to write funny.  I get to write silly.  So not GONE.

8- Editor Teresa asked me for cover suggestions for LIES, easy enough, and PLAGUE, the 4th book.  This is tougher because I have to commit to a couple of lead characters when I haven’t spent eight seconds thinking about that book.  I sent her some pix I grabbed from Google and Flickr.

9- The great and powerful K.A. Applegate is flossing, pauses to ask, “What are you writing?”  I answer, “Stupid Blog Name.”  She asks, “What’s the topic?”  I answer, “Topic?”

10- Much Purell being used around here.  No one wants the flu which I think should be called the “Carnitas Flu.”  See, it’s swine flu originating in Mexico.  Ah hah.  Okay, it’s not actually funny, but it’s mildly witty, right?  Right?

11- I totally missed the LA Book Fair.  Instead I mopped the floor.  Also wrote.  And cleaned the front of the refrigerator.  And bought shoes for the kids.  And ate chile relleno at Z Tejas.

12- My editors asked me to take down my old Facebook picture because it gave the erroneous impression that I was some grizzled, mean-looking old man who smokes cigars and drinks whiskey.  Not exactly the image we’re going for apparently.  So I replaced it with a picture of Katherine and me.  Awwww.  Sweet.

13- While I was in the UK I did a brief shoot for Wordia.  

14-GONE is sold out on Amazon UK.  Kinda cool, huh?  Unless they only bought two copies.  In which case it’s pathetic.

15- These kids?  Cool.  Demonstrating one of the themes of GONE: that kids can step up, be so mature, so capable, so good.  On the other hand, this story also demonstrates one of the themes in GONE: that kids can be every bit as rotten as adults.

16- I’m loving Southern California.  I bought actual shorts.  I won’t wear them in public, I’m not a sadist, but I will wear them in my yard when I write.

17-The thing I buy when I shop for food that I don’t actually eat:  cheese.  I love cheese.  But I kind of love it more when I’m at a nice restaurant and it’s a cheese course.  For some reason I don’t eat it at home.  

18- Next week we’re all going to Minneapolis so Katherine can do some big HOME OF THE BRAVE thing with the library there.  Also some school visits.  I’ll maybe sign some books at the International Reading Association.   Then I’ll take the kids to the Mall of America and eat junk food and hate myself for it.

19-End of May I go to Chicago, to Anderson’s Bookstore min Naperville for the launch of HUNGER: a GONE Novel.  Don’t miss it if you’re in the Chicago area.  

20- Speaking of Chicago, I wrote about the city for the London Telegraph.

21- In the battle of the XLT black t-shirts, I give it to Land’s End over Eddie Bauer.  If it’s XLT black polo shirts I take Eddie.  

22- Kind of sad:  my relatively cool Audi A6 isn’t as much fun to drive as my totally uncool Toyota RAV 4 (6).

23-Can you have a list that’s 23 items?  I mean, it’s a prime number, doesn’t it have to be a multiple of ten?

For the first time ever, I have been quoted in a published book. Eek! Trés exciting for moi (pardon my franglais). It’s the UK version of Gone by our very own Michael Grant. This has seriously been like my dream for a while. I’d always see this or that person in the acknowledgements or quoted and be like, well, that would be cool if that was me. And now it is. Squee!

Now, all I need to do is buy myself a copy of this UK version…

Some pics so you can share in my happiness if you so choose.

THe pictures are a little small, but you can click to enlarge them.

But today I had to give an actual speech. A dozen people in a small room. No podium. Nothing to separate me from those piercing, judgmental, critical eyes. The eyes! The . . . eyes!

Okay, actually there were no eyes. It was a dozen eyeless people. And that was creepy, quite frankly.

Anyway, I give this speech. And there’s a kind of appalled silence. Questions anyone? Yes, I have a question: what the hell is the matter with you? What in God’s name does Ulysses S. Grant have to do with your book?

Here’s what was cool tonight. I walked from my hotel at London Bridge all the way to Selfridge’s department store on Vegemite Street. (That’s right: I am sticking with the Vegemite.) A long walk. Maybe an hour or so. Over the bridge, through the City of London with banker types spilling out of pubs, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Along the river. Run-down old ships anchored along the way, turned into banquet halls. A drunk, skinny punk and his mate hoot and challenge, looking for trouble. I’m wearing a topcoat. Hands come out of pockets, we exchange glares, they decide that I may be a little larger than they’d like.

I walked through Trafalgar, said “Dude!” to Nelson way the hell up on his column. Through Picadilly Circus. (Turns out it’s not actually a circus. Huh. Not so much as an elephant.) Think Times Square minus 90% of the neon. The Brits still can’t touch us for jaw-dropping over-the-top excess. Seriously: their bankers are still stealing millions, apparently unaware that we’ve all moved on to stealing billions.

Up Regent Street which is unfortunately all the same damned stores we have in the States. But there were all these tiny side streets I didn’t have time to wander down. A trio played what was probably Mozart, the cello drowned out by passing cop cars.

At each street I pause, check the “Look Left,” or “Look Right” signs painted on the street. It’s bad enough these people insist on driving on the wrong side of the road, but every other street is one-way so there’s no way to make any sense of it.

I finally reached Selfridge’s which is a world-class department store. Dutifully bought crap for my kids. Spent a small fortune on four cigars from a certain Caribbean nation which shall remain nameless because we don’t want to poke US customes in the eye, now do we?

Cab back to London Bridge. London cabs are flat out the best in the world. No! Don’t bother to argue. They find their way around a city that was, as we know from history, laid out not by an architect but by drunken sailors on leave from Her Majesty’s Navy. What they would do is tie a string to a sailor before he was given his freedom and a guinea (no, not an Italian, Jesus, keep up,) and told to go wherever he wanted. The sailor promptly took a large quantity of rum on board, set off in pursuit of hookers and wherever he went, that became a London street.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s true. I checked Wikipedia.

Picked up a sandwich and cheese at Marks and Spencer in the train station. Insipid bottled bitters. Good cheese. Peaches. A puzzling sandwich.

I’m back in my room, sated, scanning British TV. Sweet lord: they’ll put a gardening show on in prime time! People are planting flowers at 9:00 pm. Seriously? We’re mulching in prime time? American TV executives must come over here and think they’re anthroppologists studying aboriginies. Do these people know nothing of The Demo?

Yesterday I was watching Robin Hood, and Friar Tuck was a black dude. No explanation. None of the Merry Men saying, “Jesus, it’s the 12th freaking century, it’s freaking England, none of us has ever traveled further than Ye Olde Swine Faire over in Twaddle, and yet, here’s a black dude and we don’t even notice!”

English Guys: as the more experienced member of the Special Relationship when it comes to racial balance in TV, allow me to gently suggest: it’s okay to mention that a black guy might stand out in Sherwood Forest. That’s not racially insensitive. You know, as it turns out, black people know they didn’t play much of a part in fighting the Sherrif of Nottingham. I’m sure they would have been happy to help out, but your typical Masai was not terribly well-informed on the whole John vs. Richard the Lion Heart thing.

Anyway, Moll Flanders is on now, and it’s an American movie with a bunch of American actors pretending to be English. And Morgan Freeman. So much for laughing at British racial idiocy. But on the other hand you can’t argue with Morgan Freeman. There’s never a bad time to have Morgan Freeman around. He could be here, right now, narrating and I’d be cool with that.

Morgan Freeman: “Michael takes another swig from the bottle of Bowmore 12 year.” How great would your life be if Morgan Freeman was doing the voice over?

The point is — and you thought I had no point, hah! — is that London is like the woman you deliberately don’t get to know because you’re happily married. (WTF? Seriously? That’s your analogy?) I think I could totally fall for this city. And I can’t. Kids, schools, sunshine . . . all that is great in California.

But I almost have to avert my gaze, not look at London too much, not think about it too much. Because it may be the greatest city on earth. It seduces without trying. And I can’t live here.

Apparently demonstrators will be converging on the Bank of England, which is just across London Bridge from my hotel.  I’m supposed to be running around from bookstore to bookstore while all this converging is going on, glad-handing and signing books and generally being charming.   Yes, that last one is a stretch.

Meanwhile the demonstrators will be shouting whatever it is one shouts at central bankers.  I’m going to guess:  No more bailouts! But it could be:  Longer weekend hours! Or:  Shorter lines at the drive-thru! Or:  Hotter tellers!

I’m not sure.  Because like every single member of the human species, I have no idea how to solve the economic and financial crises.  Oh, there are plenty of people who think they know how to solve it all.  But they don’t.  When you have ten experts and you hear two opinions from them, that’s standard partisanship.  When you have ten experts and you hear ten opinions, you have “experts” in quotes and none of them knows a damn thing for sure.

Nevertheless, people enjoy a good rage, so a lot of people will pour into the streets of London, surround the B of E, and furiously demand conflicting or even nonsensical solutions to a problem the guys inside the Bank of England will have no clue how to solve.

Good times, good times.

Here’s my defense in case the rioters turn on me as I’m passing by:  I only ever took out 30 year fixed mortgages! Or possibly:  I’m just a stockholder and I never even bought on margin!

Or I could run away, but really, at my age what are the odds that I can outrun a wild-eyed anarchist?  I could maybe beat one up, because it’s not like they can organize and come after me in a group, but really, I’m hoping that if beating is required I can be matched against some mildly irate Unitarians rather than, say, drunken punks.

Here’s my defense in case I am chased by drunken punks:  I love Rancid and even the solo projects Lars Frederiksen and Tim Armstrong do!

And if it’s Unitarians?  I appreciate your lack of dogma!

Or maybe I’ll just skip the whole thing, stay in the hotel bar and get drunk.

As it turns out, if you take money out of the equation (and with most writing jobs you have to), a woman named Jeanne Hoffa has the best job in the world. She writes the daily crime log for my local paper. Being from New Jersey, I love that someone named Hoffa writes the crime log. (Confused? Google “Hoffa” and “Meadowlands” and all will become clear.) Beyond that, I am in awe of her ability to encapsulate entire lives in a few short lines. Example:

Transient – white man in his 50’s wearing a baseball cap, a black trench coat and carrying a camouflage bag is blocking the driveway at the Kinder Care Learning
Center stating the governor owes him money.

Bear in mind that the paper is published in California – which means the governor in question is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hasta la vista, baby.

More from the same issue:

Suspicious – Caller states there is a bloody knife in the dirt to the rear of the House of Bibles on Harbor Blvd. Final Case: Halloween knife. No blood.

Patrol Check – Caller request patrol car due to her husband having an affair. The husband of the woman her husband is cheating with is threatening to pummel him.

Suspicious – Man is standing in the middle of the street attempting to pull his pants down. The pants are jeans. Also wearing a baseball jersey. Possibly drunk.

Possibly drunk? You think?

And, finally, file this one under “I believe the children are our future”:

Suspicious – Authorities at Fullerton High School have student in principal’s office who asked what smoking methamphetamine does after taking ADD meds.

All of this goes to show that the best material does not lie between my ears but outside my front door. However, having also read the less-amusing entries (Disturbance – Caller’s grandson was standing outside on 600 block of e. Imperial Highway when an unknown subject pulled up in a red Volvo and pointed a black handgun at him), I’m thinking I should keep my front door locked.

You see, I have a lot of books. So far I have packed up about ten boxes to keep, given away two boxes, and set aside what looks to be another two to four boxes to give away.

I’ve even thrown away — recycled — a few that had fallen into the bathtub one time too many.

But it’s hard to choose what to keep and what to part with. As a reviewer, I get tons of books. Tons. Some are completely inappropriate for YA New York — picture books for small children, adult romance novels for some reason — and others are books I didn’t find worthy of review.

Then there are the books I did like, and did review. Do I keep them? If I do, I will soon collect so many books that no apartment is big enough to hold them all.

So I use a system. Will this book have a sequel? If yes, keep. Is this book or book series iconic? If yes, keep. What if I don’t like this series? Keep it anyway. What if I feel I’ve gotten all I need from this series? Keep the first book. (Examples:Lemony Snicket, which is tween lit and not really my area of expertise, Gossip Girl: the original series, which I’ve committed to memory though I can’t say I loved every one of the books. My YA LA correspondent should, of course, own every Gossip Girl book, because one of these days she’s going to have to write some TV pieces about the whole thing.)

But what else determines whether I’ll keep something? It feels like a sin to throw away a book … and not just that second copy of the The Book of Mormon, a duplicate gift from the boyfriend’s parents. No, anything that someone has put time and effort into feels like a living being to me.

Still, the idea that I’ll give this book away, and maybe it will circulate, and a few new people will pick it up from the library or the Salvation Army or wherever else books end up, is something that makes me feel better. My galleys of Alma Alexander’s books will live on, and I get to keep the nice hardcover copies for myself. Those books I never reviewed and never will? They too may find an audience. (And some of those books, by the by, are books I meant to review and never got around to. Which is why I’ll be restarting some sort of catchup review thing over at my site, when things get going again.)

But I want to ask all of you, especially Mr. Michael Grant, what you do with your books when you move? Other reviewers, how do you deal with all the books you receive?

In spite of it all, there are always too many books I can never part with — I’m looking at you, Ms. Cabot, with a little bit of resentment because I absolutely must keep every one of your books, always. Books by people I care about, or books about things I care about, or books that are one of a kind, or books I want to study and compare to other books, or books I just want to hug and love forever because they’re so good.

My boyfriend, by the way? Is totally annoyed by how many books I insist on lugging along with me to our new apartment. We’ve been keeping books in a closet for the last year or so, and now we’ve got to buy yet another bookcase.

Oh yeah:  we are on!

Some time ago Meg Cabot issued the Crack and  Stack challenge.  Confident of her superhuman book-signing abilities, the Queen of Chicklit issued a challenge to authors: sign a thousand books.  In one hour. I’m not sure why she insists we smoke crack, but what the heck.

Wait.  Okay, I re-read the part in Meg’s post about the crack.  So never mind that.

On Tuesday, March 31st, I will present myself at the offices of Egmont Publishing, #3 Vegemite Street in the quaint English village of North  Eelpie on Gorge, Nossex, UK and whatever random string of numbers those foreigners use in lieu of a decent, God-fearing zip code.  (Maybe I should double-check that address.) There I will be presented with (up to) 1,000 books to sign.

I will proceed to school the arrogant Ms. Cabot.

However.  I would like to make note of two facts.  One: I’m 100 years old and afflicted by most of the illnesses diagnosed on House during that show’s first three seasons.  (That’s right:  leprosy. I’m down to a thumb, a finger and a nub.)  Two: there are online rumors that Meg Cabot has a prosthetic robot arm.   I don’t have any proof of that.  I’m just putting it out there, you be the judge.  So it’s possible that a fair-minded person would want me to benefit from a small handicap.  Let’s say 300 books.

The winner will be chosen by this blog’s Alistair Spalding (or his representative,) who can be relied upon to set aside the fact that his employer publishes me while some (possibly Communist) competitor publishes Meg Cabot.

Today Stephen King — yeah, that Stephen King — wrote this to my editor, Katherine Tegen:

I’ve been corresponding with your “Michael Grant” about his Gone books. More important, I’ve been reading the Gone books–the first and Hunger, the follow-up. These are exciting, high-tension stories told in a driving, torrential narrative that never lets up. There are monsters, there are kids with mad-crazy super powers, there’s the mystery of where all the adults went. Most of all, there are children I can believe in and root for. This is great fiction.

If you want to quote any or all of that, be my guest. I love these books.

Stephen King

I don’t want to go all sincere on you people, but if you showed me starred reviews from everyone with a star to give, it wouldn’t mean as much to me as this does.  Reviews are really great.  But this is Stephen King.

If you get past my affinity for German cars, tasting menus, molecular cuisine and single malt whiskeys (ahem) I’m a blue collar guy.  My father was Army.  I had a decidedly lower middle class childhood.  High School drop-out.  College drop-out.  I was a stock clerk, a house painter, an office cleaner, a resident manager of crappy apartment buildings.  But mostly I was a waiter.  For a decade.  

When I waited tables I carried a bigger station than anyone else in a given restaurant and I worked more shifts.  I worked every shift they’d let me have.  I would carry eight tables — two regular stations — and do it 7 nights a week.  I love work.  Work gave meaning and structure to my life and even at my lowest, when I was a hopeless screw-up, when I was broke and (deservedly) friendless I still worked my ass off.  At one point in my life I was sleeping under an overpass in Austin, Texas, with my busboy black-and-whites in a locker at the Trailways station and I still worked every shift.    

There are a lot of good writers out there.  (Some of them blog here.)  There are other people who can write (almost) as well as Stephen King.  But no one else is as good as he is and also as hard working.  He doesn’t stop.  He doesn’t let up.  He doesn’t whine about writer’s block.  He gets it done, and when he gets it done it kicks ass.  He’s seven years older than I am, he’s been through addiction, and he got run over and almost killed for God’s sake, and he still outworks me. He carries that eight table station on a Saturday and he’s got everyone loving him at the end of the night.

If there’s one guy I want to be when I grow up (an event delayed by, oh, about 30 years so far,) it’s Stephen King.  I’ve had some high points in writing:  big checks, bestseller lists, fans, nice reviews.  But this?  This is really cool.

Below are snippets of my reviews of a few books that could be looked upon as books of pain, but more accurately books of healing.

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley
Publication Date: February 2009
5 out of 5 stars

“Author Justina Chen Headley has a real, hard-to-find skill in modern day authors. She entwined intuitive philosophies generated by a simple object, a map. She wove a beautiful novel with substance… North of Beautiful was a profound, thought provoking novel that was crafted with an intelligent, insightful hand.” For my whole review, click here.

Evermore
By Alyson Noel
Pub. Date: February 2009
4 out of 5 stars

“Evermore wasn’t mind-blowing, but its slight suspense, eerie mystery, and strange magic were interestingly entertaining… Evermore was clearly a first book in the series because many profound outlooks were hardly explored. I’m curious to find out how Ever is going to deal with her new life and I also hope to see more illustration of Damen’s supposed compassion in the second book, Blue Moon.” For my whole review, click here.

Privilege
By Kate Brian
Pub. Date: December 2008
4.5 out of 5 stars

“Privilege far surpassed my expectations. The writing and characters of this book stands out from other YA literature currently available… Ariana was a mentally unstable murderer. Yet I really liked her. She had many great qualities that all centered around her morals and guilt ridden conscience. She was a mind-boggling naughty main character who was trying her best to do what’s right.” For my whole review, click here.

Willow
By Julia Hoban
Pub. Date: April 2009
5 out of 5 stars

“Willow was a powerful book that was entirely phenomenal at expressing the perspective of a teenage cutter… The main character, Willow, was a chaotically layered mess of colors. Her naked canvas of pain was hidden under many layers of conflicted feelings… Willow was an extraordinarily real person…” For my whole review, click here.

I like the format, the 140 character limit and the instantaneous nature of the updates. So I just have one question. What should I twitter about?

Anybody with followers on Twitter are either famous (I’ve chosen a famous Brit that I hope you recognise) or are offering some kind of service. What do I do if I can offer neither of these things?

Okay, so I’m kind of happy to follow a few other people that I find interesting, but I’m not a follower, I’m a leader! I just point me in the direction of a topic to lead on!

I’ve put a few tweets on there about my ride to work (time, attire and instances of near death) so I could run with that.

I’ve put a few tweets on that are surreal in nature, but grounded in my flawed understanding of Physics, so that could be the way forward.

A friend of mine already stole my other idea. He’s twittering about his life as a zombie/living amongst zombies.

So what should I do, use one of these ideas, or twitter on another topic of your bidding? I await your ideas with baited breath.

There are a large number of book publishers on twitter and it’s quite revealing to follow them, so if I’m not interesting enough I’ll just have to do it on behalf of Egmont.

If you read enough behind-the-scenes writing by famous authors, you’re probably over-familiar with the “Why I Write” essay. Sometimes these are pretty damn inspirational (I’m thinking of Paul Auster’s pieces collected in The Red Notebook), and other times a wee bit indulgent and hateful (probably best not to name names, sorry). But it is all too rare to come across an essay about why we read.

For me, it has always been about What Happens Next, about storytelling at its most fundamental, that breathless and then, and then, and then. It can be easy to forget that, sometimes—I become enamored with a writer’s wit or pyrotechnics or form-bending exercises, and I spend ages hacking through wildernesses of metafiction, giving my brain a workout on playgrounds devised by genius loons. (I’m thinking, of course, of the usual suspects: Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson, Paul Auster—really, this shelf is endless, and endlessly fascinating.)

And so I forget about plain old story. Until I stumble upon it again and recall, Oh yeah! This is what it’s all about.

Which brings me to The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I began reading this the other day, and it’s a struggle to pull myself away from it. Yes, it is wordy and long and taxes my vocabulary, but good God! It moves like it’s on speed. Things happen, pretty much from the first few pages. Our naif hero d’Artagnan takes offense and challenges a stranger to a duel; the stranger can’t be bothered because of a mysterious plot he’s involved in with the beautiful Milady; d’Artagnan suffers a theft of the thing he most prizes in the world. And that’s all in the first chapter. I don’t know where it’s going, but I can’t wait to get there.

Dumas keeps the reader on a need-to-know-basis, telling us no less than but no more than we need at any particular point in the story, filling us in as things develop. He perfectly illustrates the tried-and-true reliable story mnemonic  ABDCE—Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending. That formula is usually used to discuss the short story, but it applies just as much to the novel, and to sections within novels: engage readers with action, parcel out just enough background to pique our interest, escalate to some sort of breaking point, get out.

We can all learn a thing or two from that kind of story. Speaking of which, I’m going to get back to it.

Oslo is an amazing city. How amazing is it? From the city centre we grabbed some ski’s, hopped on the Metro system, and half an hour later we were cross-country skiing through the countryside to another metro stop. We got back on and were home in time for dinner. It’s that amazing.

I fell over about 15 times and wiped out a three year old child. A Norwegian three year old child already has three years of skiing experience and was doing great until I slammed into them at full pace, completely out of control. The childs Norwegian parents were quite upset until they realised I was British. Then they just kind of rolled their eyes in a patronsing way.

I went to the offices of my Norwegian colleagues to find out how things run in Norway with book sales and marketing and was reassured by the similarities of the UK and NOR systems. They also set me straight on an issue that I had previously maligned Norwegians for:

Actually the biggest tragedy is that reading isn’t big in Norway, despite the fact that it’s dark and cold most of the time. They’d rather watch blu-ray DVDs on big screen TVs instead. Oh - and occasionally they go skiing.

Actually they said that Norwegians read a massive amount of books per/capita and I did see an awful lot of bookstores in the capital. So apologies Norway - you do read - there is no tragedy.

My holiday reading was The Phoenix Files: arrival by Chris Morphew who I spotted commenting on my own insightful posts here. His publishers Egmont Hardie Grant were kind enough to send me a copy.

I have to say that it’s terrible holiday reading. It’s much too interesting, much too fast-paced and much too unputdownable. I finished it on the plane on the way to Oslo leaving me without a book for the rest of the weekend. I’m thinking of writing to complain.

Chris lists one of his interests as Animorphs (Michael Grant take note) and the book is a really engaging story about a creepy corporate-run town that seems to be bent on the destruction of the rest of the world. Luke Hunter, the new (and final) arrival to the community, uncovers the beginings of the truth behind the town. It’s a perfect YA read, great characters, a really engaging story and leaves you desperate to know more at the end. Well done Chris and good luck with the rest of the series. The faster you write them the better!

His favorite was a green one. Trevin’s Green Ranger was missing a leg, so my son named him “Lucky.” He explained, in perfect two-year-old oral arguments, that the Power Ranger had to be “Lucky” because he wasn’t missing the other leg, too. Trevin took Lucky everywhere with him, even several times to Hawaii, when we’d go there to visit my wife’s side of the family.

We live on a farm. I brought home some baby chickens a few years ago, but they were too small to put out in the henhouse, so we kept them in the bathroom. One day, our Aussie dog came into the house to herd and play with our little chickens. The dog played with one of them a little too enthusiastically, and ended up removing all the bird’s feathers. But the chicken didn’t die (yet), so, of course, we named her “Lucky.”

When the chickens got big enough to move out to the henhouse, they thrived there (except for the ones who got eaten by a mountain lion). They lay so many eggs that we have to give them away. And they pretty much have their run of the place, going anywhere they want to (they’re fast enough to keep clear of the dogs).

One day, one of our horses stepped on Lucky’s leg and broke it. So I guess there was some kind of weird prophesy in naming her Lucky. Anyway, she still didn’t die (yet). But her leg was permanently bent backwards, and she didn’t so much walk as hop. But she still got around okay.

When we go out to the henhouse in the mornings, all the chickens follow us inside for food. Sometimes, when we stir around the straw and nests, we’ll uncover mice. The chickens love to chase the mice. They’ll even fight over them and eat them.

I have no doubt that if chickens were big enough, they’d eat people.

And chickens can live a long time, but not Lucky. When she died (finally), I found her outside the henhouse. She had choked to death on a really big mouse. The mouse was dead, too, hanging half-way out of Lucky’s unlucky beak, a weird kind of barnyard murder-suicide.

We still have lots of chickens, but none of them have names (yet).

It seems a foregone conclusion that Slumdog Millionaire will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards tonight. Well, okay. I haven’t even bothered to see all of the competition, but Boyle’s movie was certainly the liveliest, most consistently entertaining of the nominated films I have seen. Not as moving, complex, and real as Milk, no, but …it is fun here and there. It does have that going for it. And yet I hope it doesn’t win much of anything.

Don’t get me wrong. I like overheated melodrama. I love dancing on train platforms. I am even fond of completely outlandish story structures like the Q&A one at the heart of this movie. I like me my crazy storylines in service of a good time. But there is so much that is deeply wrong with Slumdog Millionaire that I can’t let go and enjoy the frippery of the story. That it has been embraced so feverishly by so many westerners I find deeply suspect, because no way no how not in a million years would this story fly with US audiences if it had been set in, say, New York.

But others have said this more sharply. Here’s a long quote from a blog review a friend linked to:

…the problem is when you show every hellish thing possible all happening to the same person. Then it stretches reason and believability and just looks like you are packing in every negative thing that Westerners perceive about India. . . .

Let’s say I made a movie about the US where an African-American boy born in the hood, has his mother sell him to a pedophile pop icon, after which he gets molested by a priest from his church, following which he gets tied up to the back of a truck and dragged on the road by KKK clansmen. Then he is arrested and sodomized by a policeman with a rod, after which he is attacked by a gang of illegal immigrants, and then uses these life experiences to win “Beauty and Geek”.

Even though each of these incidents have actually happened in the United States of America, I would be accused of spinning a fantastic yarn that has no grounding in reality, that has no connection to the “American experience” and my motivations would be questioned, no matter how cinematically spectacular I made my movie. At the very least, I wouldn’t be on 94% on Tomatometer and a strong Oscar favorite.

But I can forgive Boyle and his screenwriter for the ridiculous structure. Because why not? There is a larger, more offensive storytelling sin to focus on.

The big one? Boyle’s cynical exploitation of other people’s pain as “local color.” That is to say, going for the easy emotional push-button of observed pain as a shortcut to connecting viewers to the main character. If a story is actually concerned with a character overcoming real suffering, then by all means, the viewer needs to see it and understand it. (Any number of films come to mind, but think of, say, Christy Brown in My Left Foot.) But is Slumdog Millionaire that kind of story? No, not at all. It’s a shameless melodrama about, . . . whatever—true love against all odds, featuring gangsters and gunplay and the usual cheapjack stew of genre elements. That is, it’s storytelling as frivolous entertainment, which I typically love.

Except the horrors depicted in the movie are still very real for millions of people. And so the whole movie feels morally lopsided as a result. It’s too inconsequential to do justice to the uglinesses evoked. Raiders of the Lost Ark, one notes, does feature Nazis as cartoon villains, but no mention of the incomprehensible crimes they committed. Kasdan and Spielberg knew—as Boyle does not—that too much reality will swamp a fun, fluffy tale. Once that story mentions the Holocaust, we could give a damn about Indiana Jones and his bullwhip.

Because storytelling can’t have it both ways: You don’t get to pull the curtain aside to reveal genuine pain and suffering, then drop it and milk the audience’s reaction for your diverting sideshow. That’s crass, that’s cynical, and Boyle shouldn’t be rewarded for it.

The free — or freeish — market is the best way we’ve found so far to ensure that more people are eating than are starving. It works. But it doesn’t work pretty. It’s crude. It’s messy. It works like a 20 year-old Compaq with a frayed power cord. It gets the job done, but magic? No. So don’t make a religion out of it. Don’t pray to it. It’s not Jesus. It’s not Jehovah. It’s not the Buddha. It’s not even Dumbledore.

The marketplace is devoid of morality. It doesn’t reward the good and punish the bad. It doesn’t even necessarily reward the hard working. Or the smart. Or the capable. It shoves a bunch of money into the pockets of people who may, taken as a group, be somewhat more capable than those who aren’t making the cash, but that in no way suggests that any blessed individual is deserving or any screwed individual is undeserving.

It’s hit or miss. It’s not a precision-guided smart bomb, it’s a World War 2 era 1000-pounder falling from a meandering prop plane: it means to hit a target, but mostly it misses, and when it does hit a target it tends to blow up a few houses next door. And a church. Maybe an orphanage. Crudely effective, not magic.

A drunk usually manages to drive himself home without hitting anyone, but that doesn’t make the drunk a wizard.

But talk about the marketplace this way, as the leeches and enemas of economic systems, and people get very pissy. See, people need magic. They need faith in something perfect. So they need to believe that the economic system is somehow akin to God. They need the system to be benign and rational and moral.

The winners need to believe they deserve what they get, and the losers need to believe that all they really need to do is try again and they, too, will be winners. It’s about 75% bullshit. Because as much as people hate to hear it, success or failure is, like all of life, affected by more than free will and positive thinking. DNA, environment and pure luck all have a role in life. And the magic of the marketplace doesn’t somehow exert its magical magitude and reshuffle that deck.

It looks right now as if 2009 will be a good year for me, marketplace-wise. You know why? Because some wad of gray goo in a corner of my brain was formed by DNA and environment into a tiny, slimy little plot machine. And luck led me to my wife, and put me in an English-speaking country at a time when those facts can be translated into income. If bad luck blows a hole in an artery tomorrow, guess what? Suddenly that wad of gray goo dies and I’m bagging groceries for minimum wage.

That’s scary. It’s scary to think that all you have, all you are, is a consequence of some kind of alchemy between DNA, environment, random chance and free will — four factors that are each part of the other — but that’s the reality. And given what we’ve seen of the billionaire masters of the universe lately, isn’t it time, finally, to admit the truth? There’s no magic here. No morality. Assholes win, good people lose. Idiots win and geniuses lose. And other times the reverse. And the system we have isn’t wonderful, it stinks. It’s just the best we’ve come up with so far.

I have a terror of ever having to face my kids and tell them I can’t get them what they need, let alone what they want.  I think it’s one of the reasons I hate Christmas, it seems so cruel to people who are struggling.  So, to any kids reading this, we could be in for a tough year or so in this country.  Cut your folks some slack for a while.  Hold off asking.  It’s tough for your parents when you ask and they can’t give.  Hit them up in 2010, might be a better year.

My office. Where I write.

By way of introduction, my name is Andrew Smith and I am happily honored to have been asked by Michael to be a part of this blog. I am the author of Ghost Medicine (2008, Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan) and have a second YA novel called in the path of falling objects (yes… it’s all lower case) coming out in September.

The other day, I read every Stupid Blog Name post. It made me really tired. But afterwards, I felt smarter.

Well, not really. I’m just making that up. It’s what I do.

Being a novelist is really cool because it’s a job where you actually get paid to make things up. I mean, sure, there are lots of other jobs where people make a living by telling lies – just read a newspaper… the front page of any major is like “The Ladders” for lying sons of bitches. But with writers, our fabrications don’t routinely inflict harm on our clients.

And, of course, a lot of the things we write about have some base in our own personal experiences…or at least they do in my case. The brothers in in the path of falling objects, for example, ride around the Southwest in the backseat of a car alongside a life-size tin statue of Don Quixote.

I have actually done that. Not with a psycho killer, though.

You can see a little book trailer for in the path of falling objects by clicking on the title, which, I believe, is linked.

And that reminds me of something else.

Not only did I read every archived blogpost on SBN, I also clicked on every link.

Now I want Jake to marry my daughter.

She’s 25, Jake.

Just kidding. My daughter is the same age as you are. I will be a good father-in-law, too. My wife… I’m not so sure about. She can get pretty cranky around boys, which explains the nervous twitch my son and I have developed.

I’ll give you until the end of the week to come back with a definite answer. The caterer needs a headcount. That and a response to “beef or chicken?”

Oh yeah… we use Macs, too. I understand that’s a plus.

I’ve been thinking of creating these posts for months now but never felt confident enough in the idea to actually do it. Until now.

More and more lately I’ll be working on something or going somewhere and a book will pop up into my head. I’m working outside with my parents on fixing up some out buildings with a hammer and drill in both hands and all of a sudden “Dark Water Rising” pops into my head. Dark Water Rising is about a family who deals with the aftermath of a horrible hurricane and the only thing the main kid wants to be is a carpenter.

We can see connections between reality and fiction everywhere. But the one thing we have to always remember is that fiction is not reality. We can enjoy fiction and its benefits, but not live in a fictional world.

That is one thing I myself have been accused of. “my skewed version of reality” has been attacked but the truth of the matter is, many people prefer fiction to reality. When people are living in fiction, what happens then?

(This may seem like a depressing post, but it really isn’t. It’s just a thought I have been harboring for a few months now and felt like sharing.)

Meanwhile, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe in a t-shirt. Gazing up at a palm tree. I could have been drinking a Frappuccino. I wasn’t because I’m not a girl, but I could have been.

I’m looking to meet more people I can talk to in places like Minneapolis, Bangor and Denver.

So, the California weather? Lovely. The California landscape and landscaping? Terrific. The California pedestrians? Cattle. But dumber.

In Italy the rule is if you didn’t actually hit a pedestrian head-on, you’re cool with the law. (Law in Italy being a series of suggestions.) A smack with a side mirror? That’s only to be expected. You want to walk? You’re going to need to toughen up.

The Italians are particularly sensible when it comes to this matter, but even in the rest of the United States it’s understood that pedestrians are a barely-tolerated nuisance. It’s clear that you should not actually hit a pedestrian, or even (sigh) come close to hitting a pedestrian, but it’s fine to scare the pee out of a pedestrian. Not okay to hit, but okay to make them think you might.

But here in California not only can’t you hit a pedestrian, not only can’t you cause a pedestrian to leap in pants-wetting panic toward the curb, you are not even allowed to imply that you just might be thinking about gunning the engine and mowing them down.

This is taking things too far. There is a natural order to the universe, a Darwinian order. At the very bottom of the food chain are skateboarders and bicyclists. Slightly above them, pedestrians. Atop the food chain, the drivers. The masters of the wheel. The men on horseback. We drivers have a sort of 21st century droit du seigneur. We cannot deflower your bride (like a pedestrian would have a bride, hah!) but we are, or at least should be, entitled to demonstrate our superiority by daring you to step out into the sidewalk, refusing your impudent attempt at eye contact, and racing toward you in an effort to make you drop your bag of loser goods from the loser store.

But here, in California, all is topsy-turvy. It’s madness. Here, the pedestrian rules. It’s bizzar-o world! Here, a pedestrian, a frail, watery, flesh-made creature, a sack of goo hung from a toothpick frame, has the legal right to step out in front of even a fine German autobahn monster.

It’s koyaniqatsi. (Really? Spell-check recognizes koyaniqatsi and not Frappuccino?) World out of joint. (That’s the Rastapocalypse, by the way: world out of joint.) 

Pedestrians here need only indicate an intention to enter a crosswalk and the entire street comes to halt. A pedestrian need only cast a sidelong look in the general direction of the street and we all have to hit the brakes. My God! They want drivers to be psychic!

And there will be no slipping the transmission into neutral and gunning the engine. Nor will there be the sudden forward jerk. Nor will you adopt the crazy-ass smile of the psycho killer and grip the wheel as though you are merely waiting for the fools to step in front of you.

It sucks. It takes forever to get through the parking lot of a strip mall. I mean, damn, I have chicken to buy. Get the hell out of my way.

In October 2009 Egmont UK is releasing a sequel to The House at Pooh Corner, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by David Benedictus and Mark Burgess.

In case you were wondering, I think the book and decision to publish it has been done with a great deal of integrity, and I’m hopeful that it will be well received.

I point this out becuase a few people are unimpressed whenever anybody attempts to re-issue something that was once a classic. The level that people are unimpressed is almost directly proportional to how much they loved the original, so in the case of Winnie-the-Pooh you’d think that might be a lot.

However despite a few critical pieces, the news of the sequel was well received. Of course this was mainly down to the consummate skill of the publicity person responsible for how the news was released but I was thinking that there must be a few other reasons as well.

Firstly I think that so many sequel projects have happened in the last few years (Another new James Bond book, Peter Pan in Scarlet and so on . . .) and so many of them have been good, that the public are less likely to be immediately outraged when they hear about a new one - happily they’re more inclined to wait and judge the book on its merits.

But I also think that people’s love for Winnie-the-Pooh is so great that they are prepared to overlook all cynicism in the hope that the book might just give them some of the pleasure they had when they first read them.

So in the end all we can do here is be grateful for the immense coverage the announcement had, and hope that the book will indeed live up to the standards of the originals.

Anyone here have an opinion on this new sequel project, or any other recent ones?

So I have this new book out.  It’s called Here Today, Gone to Maui.  As far as my books go – this is my fourth – it was the most fun I ever had thinking up an idea.  I mean, I was in Maui!  And I got this idea!  And everything kind of fell into place!  And I was in Maui! 

Here’s what happened.  My husband in son were snorkeling far out in the water.  I was on the beach and lost sight of them.  So I thought:  Ohmigod, are they okay?  And then, like any good wife and mother, I followed that thought with:  Hey!  What if a woman was on vacation with her boyfriend, and she saw him go snorkeling — or maybe scuba diving — and he just never came back?  The synapses started firing, and the plot began to build in my mind.  And, oh, yeah — my husband and son were fine.  (Do not judge.  I am doing this for my art, people!  My art!)

On the writing end, it was by far the least fun I’ve ever had writing a book.  A month and a half before my deadline, I did a read-through, thinking I was ready to launch into revisions, and I realized that the last 200 pages … what is the word I’m looking for?  Oh, yeah: sucked.  An extension was out of the question; I had two books scheduled right after it.  So, after walking around in a panic and whining to my husband for a couple of days, I just did it: I rewrote the entire second half of the book.  I worked days, nights, weekends.  I even worked while cooking dinner, zipping back and forth between the stove and my laptop whenever I came up with a good line.  I emailed the completed manuscript to my editor four hours before the deadline.  She loved it and was thrilled to see how few revisions it required.

I’ve read a lot of author interviews, and I’m amazed at how many authors talk about writing as this kind of feverish dream.  They have THIS IDEA and then THEY CAN’T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE and so they START WRITING AND KEEP GOING UNTIL THEY’RE DONE.  A few months go by, and they’ve got a finished manuscript.

I’ve never worked that way.  When I’m lucky, I come up with a great idea that occupies me for a few heady, day-dreamy days.  I’ll walk around in a fog and stuff just comes to me from some usually inaccessible recesses of my brain, and it’s not like work at all.  It’s more like being in love or taking super-powered prescription narcotics (I’m prone to bronchitis).   I put as much of my thoughts down on paper as possible: characters, scenes, dialogues, plot arc – whatever comes to mind.  Eventually, though, the inspiration fog lifts and I have to do something that can only be called work.  I am pure tortoise, assigning myself weekly minimums (typically fifteen to twenty pages) and just pushing through to the end.

But now I know what it’s like to be a hare.  There’s something astonishing to it, I must admit.  When I re-read the manuscript a few months later, the words felt surprisingly fresh — almost like someone else had written them.  And the book has some of the funniest scenes I’ve ever written.  How can something that was so torturous make anyone laugh?

Right now I’m working on my sixth book.  I’m a bit behind schedule, which means I need to get tougher on myself: four pages a day until I’ve hit the twenty-page per week minimum.  Maybe even five pages a day.  I am glad to know that I’ve got an inner hare for emergencies, but I’m putting my inner tortoise back in charge.   It’s the only way I can sustain any kind of career — not to mention my sanity.

Sometimes, when I’m reading, I wonder why. Why I am reading, that is. I mean, if my life were a YA novel, (confusing, isn’t it?) there would be some sort of meaning to all this reading I do. Reading, for me, is more than just a hobby or pastime. I read for entertainment, escape, personal therapy, and information, among other things. But despite the vast amount of books I practically inhale, I don’t think I’ve ever found a true and perfect masterpiece—the Holy Grail of YA.

Yes, there are definitely some novels that come pretty darn close to perfect, and I may have even declared a couple of them to be “masterpieces” in my reviews, but I’ll be honest, if I keep thinking about said masterpieces, the more I realize that I was incorrect to label these books so. Yes, some books are amazing, spectacular, and nearly unforgettable, but all books have flaws, no matter how big or small. I’m not sure if it’s even possible for a story to be perfect.

Perfection is an unattainable standard, yet we (or some of us at least) struggle to achieve it anyhow. Sometimes, I wonder if I read to search for the perfect story. But at the same time, if I know the perfect story doesn’t exist, then why do I keep looking?

I once heard from a very smart person that fiction is often truer than non-fiction, and even though I wholeheartedly agree, isn’t fiction just an imitation of life itself? Readers are able to relate to fictional characters and situations generally because of their realistic qualities. And going by my definition of perfection being unreachable, especially in real life, are stories and novels just a reflection of that imperfection?

So, why do we write? Why do we read? Why is it human nature to always strive for the epitome of betterment? And is it all related, or do stories and perfection, or lack thereof, have nothing to do with each other?

I can hardly even answer my own questions. I think that for me personally, I read for truth like I live to experience, or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe I’m looking for something I can’t find, this perfection. But then again, since perfection has never been reached, how will I know what it is if/when I find it?

Enlightening thoughts, anyone?

The big game everyone was playing awhile back was Runescape. I never got the hang of it. To many options and people all at once. Very confusing. I then tried Adventure Quest. Then was no interaction with fellow players and it was quite dated.

Now I’m a member of Dragonfable. A nice in between of Runescape and Adventure Quest. I have enough options and quests to not get stuck on a level, yet not to many to cause a sensory overload. And the only time I can interact with other players is on the battle field.

I am currently a level 15 Rogue named IsabellaTheStrong, though I have finished enough quests to be either a Pirate or Ninja also. I have my faithful Dragon by my side along with my many poisonous daggers and swords. I have numerous successful quests under my belt and I’m currently working on another one.

In a way RPGs (roleplaying games) are like books. Yes, RPGs are mostly pictures and Books are mostly words, but we use them both for the same reasons.

• to experience looking at the world in different perspectives
• for escape
• for shear enjoyment

I don’t feel geeky or nerdy for playing roleplaying games online (for free!). I use both books and RPGs for many of the same reasons.

SO CAN YOU! Have a bad day at work? Stressed out by the kids and coworkers? Why not relax with a little goblin butt kicking? With the right game, relaxation is only a click away.

(Or not, I guess for those people who get headaches while looking at the computer. Oh well, I tried.)

Update:  Oh my God, I just did it again!  Could I be a bigger idiot?

- A moral question.  I want to use some lyrics from Hollywood Undead in LIES: a Gone Novel.  The lyrics I’d use are G-rated.  But the song has some R-rated language.  And the album and band are definitely kind of dark.  So.  Can I use the lyrics in good conscience?  Or not?

- So here’s what I did today:  got my Toyota out of a box.  Before we went to Italy we had two rather large and thus inappropriate-for-Italy cars.  We sold them both and bought a RAV4, because Italian roads could handle it.  So when we returned to the US of OC we shipped the RAV back in a container.  There ensued a bureaucratic runaround courtesy of the US customs service that made Italian customs look like a model of efficiency.  Customs fee to get the RAV into Italy?  1 Euro.  Customs fee to bring it back? $3,000.  Yeah, God bless America.  Plus they didn’t even notice the suitcase nuke I’d stashed under the passenger seat.  

- Conscience?  Yeah, good one, Michael.

- Want proof that Microsoft is pitiful?  Here you go.  They have Songsmith.  Apple has Sting giving guitar lessons. 

- So, I did a phone interview with The Bookseller which is the UK counterpart to Publishers Weekly.  I come off sounding mentally impaired.  But it’s cool, because a lot of readers will think “Wow, it’s so cool that a high-functioning idiot can write a whole book.”  I’ll get pity readers.  Fine by me, as long as they spend their $17.99 (or in UK currency, three pounds, sixpence, a piece of eight, four shillings, two quatloos and a Cool Ranch Dorito.)  

- Is “The Giving Tree” the most obnoxious kid’s book ever written?  Guilt much?  If I tried that crap on my kids Julia would punch me and Jake would delete all my emails.  I give and I give and I give to you kids and this is the thanks I get?  Waaah.  Shut up, your kids don’t owe you anything:  it was your choice to conceive or adopt them. 

- The sad, secret pain of the speculative fiction writer:  I came up with an idea that some friends ran with.  I was just mouthing off, inventing, wargaming, writing.  They’re going to make nine figures.  Maybe they’ll toss me a bone.  You know, Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea for the communications satellite.  I doubt COMSAT pays him a royalty.

- I have no time to read right now, and anyway I have books piled up, but I bought Dennis Lehane’s latest because he’s Lehane.  The guy can write.  He’s one of the guys who makes me wonder: could I do that?  

- My weakness is food.  I hate it when I put on weight, but I do it anyway.  Like a drunk with booze.  At one point many years ago, I hit 270.  I went on Atkins and dropped to 235.  Since then it’s been a back-and-forth war between 240 and 250.  I haven’t gone all the way back up, but I can’t hold onto the low number.  Two people I know well are recovered alcoholics.  Their ability to stay sober leaves me awestruck.

- I live just a few miles from Hollywood and I have all sorts of story ideas I don’t have time to write.  Some would make pretty good movies.  So what’s my hesitation?  I can get in to see a Hollywood agent.  Why don’t I?

- Apropos of Southern California, I’m not sure I’ll ever move away from the area.  I’ve lived in, like, a hundred places.  I was born here, in LA, but spent very little time here.  And yet, now that I’m here I have that creepy (for me) feeling that I don’t really want to relocate any time soon.  This is disturbing to me.  The OC?  Really?

- The Deal.  Still not done.  Always takes longer than I think it should.  The Deal hangs in the air over my head.  As long as The Deal isn’t done I can’t organize my life.  I hate deals.  I like writing.  Deal or No Deal, I mostly don’t care, except that I need to know what to think about.  Thinking is all I have to offer.  (Well, plus some two-fingered typing.)  Projects line up in my brain like planes waiting to take off at JFK.  Am I taking off, or should I pull back to the gate?  I hate sitting here on the runway because I have plenty of other planes ready to take off and life is short, kids, so I hate having my time wasted, I hate not knowing what I should be thinking about as I fall asleep.

- Which is what I’m about to do.

(My neighbor Jeff)

For the first time in years, my husband, two kids and I went east for Christmas.  We all stayed healthy (for once), and our flights were on time (despite warnings of snow delays).  Only one problem:  my nine-year-old son, Philip, who stubbornly clings to his belief in Santa Claus, insisted that the big guy should leave our gifts at our home in California, not at his grandparents’ house on Cape Cod.  To keep the magic alive, I asked my friend Tracey to stuff the our Christmas stockings while we were away. What I didn’t realize was that Philip had left a note:

Santa if you come

if I get coal tell why here please ->    if I don’t write (no coal) here ->

Put a gift I would like most on my bed     Or if I get coal no coal on bed please

Sign here please ____________________ PS big writing please

Quiz on back for you please do it       tern over

Is your sleigh tricked out? yes/no

Is there really a Rudolph?  yes/no

Do raindeer really pole your sleigh?  yes/no

How many Cristmases have you diliverd presants?   _____ wright number please

Mary Christmas Santa     writen by Philip

Fortunately, Tracey saw the note and left a typed response:

Dear Philip,

I just love getting letters from the good children!  In fact, I receive so many letters that I bring my laptop with me everywhere I go.  No coal for you this year.  I have just enough to go around for all the naughty little boys and girls.  Now, I will answer your quiz, but you must promise to be kind to your sister and behave for your parents this year.

1. My sleigh is not “tricked out.”  A few years ago, some of the elves tried to “trick my ride,” but we discovered that all the flashy stuff made it too heavy for the reindeer to pull.  I did put in a high end GPS last year for some of the more remote locations.

2. There really is a Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, but he isn’t on the payroll.  Donner leads most of my flights.  Sometimes Blitzen.

3. Yes, the reindeer really pull the sleigh.  They are quite strong and agile.

4. This year will be 2007

I missed the cookies and milk this year.  Could Cookie and Cecil* have eaten them?

Love, Santa

*my cats

Philip was thrilled to find the note, of course, but a little peeved that Santa had neglected to leave a present on his bed, as instructed.

Happy new year, everyone & best wishes for keeping the magic — any magic, no matter how farfetched — alive.

 . . . calling me to ask me how your customer service was.  Your customer service was a whole lot better before you forced me to take off my headphones, pause my playlist, close my laptop and set my coffee down to pick up the phone and deal with your pathetic neediness.  Before you called me I didn’t really care about you or your company. Now I kind of hate you.  

. . . looking like a cop car but being a sheriff.  It’s not fair.  I see your light rack on top of your car and waste a good two minutes driving the speed limit before I realize you’re a sheriff and not highway patrol.  I resent obeying the law for the benefit of peace officers who don’t even issue traffic tickets.  

. . . telling me you’re doing anything for my protection or my convenience.  No.  You’re not.  You’re actively annoying me.  How is that for my convenience?  In fact, let’s be blunt here, shall we?  You and I are natural enemies.  First off, you’re a robot while I am arguably human.  You’re a soulless, brainless automaton programmed to serve the needs of your corporate masters.  While I am only two of those things.

. . . pretending one vodka is any better than the next.  Scotch, bourbon, even gin can be clearly differentiated but vodka is all the same.  It’s all about the bottle with you people.  (Side note:  Moscow Marriott, room service sends up $50 worth of beluga.  It’s a ball the size of my fist. (And I have a big fist.) (Which is a perentheses inside a parentheses.) The point being that I don’t even remember the vodka.  (Which is often the problem. (He says, parenthetically.))  What do you think, one more “close parentheses?”)

. . . Oh, and if you are a cop no fair driving anything other than a Crown Vic.  Am I supposed to memorize every car silhouette?  How am I going to know you’re clocking me if you’re in a Pontiac?  So uncool.  

. . . answering online questions with, “I don’t know.”  See, here’s the thing:  if a guy goes to some message board and asks, “Does anyone here know how I can get cheese out of my camcorder?” answering “I don’t know,” isn’t really moving the ball forward, now is it?  Doesn’t matter what the question is, if you post it online the first answer is always, “I don’t know, but . . .”  (And the second answer is a spam link.)  Look, people, I know you don’t know.  I was hoping that other guy did. 

. . . with the “awesome.”

. . . pretending you read books when what you really read was just the New York Times Book Review’s review of the book.  Be honest, like me, and admit you didn’t even read the review but did watch How I Met Your Mother because you wished you could be Barney.

. . . dissing suburbia.  You know why so many people live in the suburbs?  Because they can have a garage three times the size of a Manhattan apartment.  And they throw the garage in free if you buy the house.

. . . saying “no worries.”  Guess what:  plenty of worries.  You have no worries?  None?  Do you qualify as sentient?  Have you turned on your TV lately?  Has someone been rooting around in your cerebrum with a red hot knitting needle?  If not, if your brain is functioning, then I’m going to guess you have some worries.  And if you don’t then by God I’ll give you some, starting with the fact that your tip is still in my pocket.  Now do you have worries?  Great.  Then bring me that iced tea.  And a vodka.

One doesn’t have to be Christian to be moved by the plight of a young couple, the wife heavily pregnant, homeless and wandering, forced to bed down in a barn for the evening. Even by the standards of the time, a manger can’t have been considered an appropriate or safe place to give birth, and yet that very birth gave rise to the current spectacle of excess we all enjoy/ endure every December. A homeless, ill-treated, poverty-stricken couple and a child they were not equipped to care for: this unwanted trio have done much to change the course of history.

That story at least has the benefit of a happy ending, give or take a few hours from Gethsemane to Golgotha. Hans Christian Andersen’s morbid Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne, or The Little Match Girl, offers us the horrifying tale of a young girl, barefoot in the cold of a Danish New Year’s Eve, huddled in an alley, exhausted and afraid to go home: she hasn’t sold any matches and her father will surely beat her. So she lights three matches, one by one, to enjoy their brightness and warmth. As she slowly freezes to death, she sees visions of happier things: Christmas trees and roast goose dinners and finally her dead grandmother calling to her. She dies surrounded by homes full of prosperous Danes enjoying all the comforts of the season.

I bring these two tales to your attention tonight, on Christmas Eve, because I would like those of you who do have enough, even in these uncertain financial times, to remember those who don’t: not enough food, not enough clothing, shelter, medical care, one might even say not enough love. We are bombarded with appeals for money for causes and I’d like to think most of us do what we can, but there’s one segment of the population that I’d like you to focus your attention on this evening: the homeless Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) population. While several among us have created and edited wonderful books, among them Nancy Garden’s transcendent Annie On My Mind, David Levithan’s blissful Boy Meets Boy, and The Rainbow Timeline (as yet unpublished, attention all editors), Karen Romano Young’s brilliant nonfiction work about LGBT life from 3000 B.C. to the present. But while these books feed the minds of our children, they aren’t putting food in their bellies or clothes on their backs.

One of the by-products of the increasing acceptance of the LGBT community by the mainstream is that kids are becoming more comfortable with the idea of coming out and are doing so at an earlier age. (I myself waited until the last college tuition check was paid, the last rent check sent before coming out: I wasn’t brave enough to risk the hardship that might have come from revealing my sexual orientation to my parents.) Today kids as young as 12 are coming out, and not all parents react with even begrudging acceptance. More young children are forced from their homes—by their parents, by mistreatment at school, by emotional and physical neglect—and taking to the streets.

New York City is a tough place and there are a lot of unpleasant lessons to be learned by an unprotected pre-teen or teen, and most of them, some irreversible (HIV, for example) come within a few days of street life. The rate of HIV infection among homeless teens is very high. The medical care available to a homeless person is inadequate and not designed to foster ongoing good health, especiallly for a still-growing youth. Homeless LGBT youth suffer from inordinate rates of mental illness, trauma, HIV infection and substance abuse. And the basics—food, clothing, shelter, education—all things many of us take for granted, are often unavailable to these children.

There are organizations in NYC that aid these children, and I would like to bring your attention to one of the most amazing of them: The Ali Forney Center. Ali Forney was a homeless gay teen who was forced to live on the streets of New York during the 1990s. Ali was dedicated to the safety of other homeless gay youth. He was a tireless HIV prevention worker and an inspiration to all who met him. In December of 1997, Ali was murdered on the streets; his murderer has never been identified. Violence is a very real part of life on the streets.

Since 2000, Executive Director Carl Sicilano, along with staff, volunteers (and the help of a small board and generous donors) have run The Ali Forney Center, an organization to house, clothe, educate, and offer medical care to homeless LGBT youth. But it’s an ongoing struggle. City, state and federal funding help, but we really depend on the generosity of people like us—people who care about children. On a daily basis, everyone who reads this blog works to nourish the minds of our children—and they are ALL our children, regardless of color, religion, political leanings, or sexual orientation. How about taking a moment to fulfill some more basic needs, like food and shelter?

I am asking, in the spirit of the holidays to do at least one of two things. First, please click on the link just above this paragraph in the left-hand column for The Ali Forney Center and learn more about us. If you can make a donation, no matter how large or how small, PLEASE DO: every bit helps. Second, I would ask that if you have a blog or don’t mind sending e-mail blasts to your friends, please link to this post, so we can get the word out to even more people. Donations are appreciated, but even if someone can’t give money, I’d like them to consider the parallels between the too-often-forgotten status of the principal characters in the Christmas story and the children of the Ali Forney Center. Joseph and Mary, pregnant with Jesus, were homeless because the stood up for what they believed in and did what they felt to be right, not what those around them or their communities told them was right–just like our children.  In our now idyllic recreation of the nativity scene, the manger is warm and clean and hushed with the reverence of the moment–but in reality it must have been filthy and noisy and every bit as frightening and uncertain as it is right now, on the streets for LGBT children thrown out of their homes.

I’m proud to be on the board of this organization that does so much for those who need it so badly and I hope that you will consider helping us in a large or small way. These children lost so much simply for being who they are and being brave enough to tell the world. Won’t you honor their bravery in this harsh world with a helping hand? The aid you give now could help a youth move on to great things. In its brief life span, we’ve seen many of our graduates move on to amazing things: one has studied with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, while another appeared for a season on a national television show. Still others are leading productive lives outside of the spotlight. Think back to the inn-keeper who gave that homeless couple a barn to sleep in overnight: how different would the world be if he had simply said, “I can’t help you,” and closed the door?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all. I hope 2009 brings you and yours all the happiness—and comforts—you hope for, and I wish the same for the children of The Ali Forney Center. If anyone would like to know more about the Center, take a tour, or find out other ways to help, feel free to e-mail me at markwmcveigh@gmail.com.

Thanks again, and good night to all.

Day man.  Ah ah ah.  Fighter of the night man.  Ah ah ah.  Champion of the sun.

Na na na na na na na, I want to start a fight.

I don’t go anywhere without my switchblade.

He’s a cat (meow) flushing a toilet.

I want to rock and roll all night.

You’re a master of karate and friendship for everyone.

Matty told Hatty, about a thing she saw.

He’s a cat (meow) flushing a toilet.

And party every day.

I don’t go anywhere without my crew.

Let’s not be L 7, come and learn to dance.

She left me for Jesus, and that just ain’t fair.

And while I hope I’m not like them, I’m not so sure.

Woolly bully.

Said I can take you home, where we can be alone.

He’s a cat flushing a toilet.

I think my dad’s gone crazy.

So what, I’m still a rock star.

The characters.  They’re people that I like that I hope make it to a happy ending.

Book Series told through many different narrators.  Well… I still read them, but don’t enjoy them as much. 

Why?  From book one the story is told through a character that I grow to know and understand (well, it does if its a good book).  I read the whole book wondering what will happen to my narrator and hoping its a good ending.  Usually they grow to be my favorite character in the book.

And?  Imagine if the narrator isn’t your favorite character.  I’m trying to enjoy this interesting book, but the character is annoying and dulling my joy.

Your being picky.  When does that happen that you can’t just put the book down?  Imagine a series where the first book is told through a person that you come to admire and like, and all of the sudden the second book is told through a different person.  I can still enjoy it and come to like this new character, but when this new character is shallow, jerky, or unlikable that ruins the book.

I just don’t understand why a lot of series now in days has to be told through a different narrator for each book.  The book’s world is shown through a certain character that allows us to view it from their own perspective.  This character because a person and you want to keep reading to find out their fate about just as much as the person themselves.  Most series continue the characters story/life book by book.  But some series “wrap up” a characters problems and moves on to the next person.  I don’t believe there is anything wrong with that. I do still read and enjoy series like this (example, All About Us Novels, Miracle Girls series, etc.). 

What bugs me is when the first book likable narrator is kicked to the curb in the second book and is only allowed a couple lines of dialogue or placement in the rest of the series! 

Example: The Heir Trilogy by Cinda Williams Chima (I do recommend this trilogy, especially the second book, The Wizard Heir).  I enjoyed the first book and the main character.  But in the second book he was gone!  Only to be infrequently heard from towards the middle and end.  He was no longer my favorite character and he felt cut off.   I wasn’t able to understand his reasoning, thoughts, or actions when they were brought up.  And somehow that made me sad.

Series told through different narrators opens up so many different perspectives to enjoy and experience.  But though readers, like me, enjoy these new views, we don’t want to see our much loved characters from former books pushed out of the picture.

That last part is a shadow over the day.  A stain that kind of sinks into your soul.  Adam Walsh.  Old story, old horror.  I don’t believe in souls, but this stuff hurts something and it isn’t my body or my brain so it must be something, and I don’t have another convenient name for whatever the hell it is that this offends so deeply that it warps the direction of my life, at least for a while.  Until I forget about it.

Except that like most parents I never entirely forget about it.  

There are lots of things kids don’t know about their parents but the craziest thing is the violence their parents hide inside nagging and fretting and disciplining.  Kids don’t have any idea that their parents would die for them.  And kill for them.  I don’t think kids look at their fat tired fathers and their dishwater mothers and understand that here is a person who would not only die, not only kill, but burn down the world for their them.  Crazy, isn’t it?  Disproportionate.  Irrational and probably immoral.  I don’t care.  

When one of us, one of us parent types, sees a story like this, we lose, at least for a time, any pretense of charity, forgiveness, religion, understanding.  Civilization is a pretty thin coat of paint when we see this kind of story.  Because we, the race of parents, want to kill people who do things like this.  We want to kill them.  With the law if that works, but with our own hands if necessary.  Nothing sadistic about it, it’s not really a question of vengeance, it’s just that people like this need to cease to exist.  They need to be erased. On this the race of parents is unanimous.  

Would I take a life to save my kids?  Yes.  Two lives?  Yes.  A hundred?  Ratchet the number up all you like, the answer will always be yes.  Until there’s no one left alive but my kids.  That’s the crazy that kids don’t see in their parents.  Probably a good thing.

John Walsh, Adam’s father, said today that it had been torture not knowing for sure who had murdered his six year-old son.  Reporters used the “closure” word.  John Walsh didn’t say this, but I will:  he’d spent 27 years looking for the monster, needing to kill the monster.  Now he can relax a little.  Turns out the monster died in 1996.

It’s hard sometimes not believing in hell.  Hell is most definitely an appropriate location for those who kill a child.  It’s good that the monster is dead.  But an eternity in hell would be even better.

1- The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) - Mel Tormé, Robert Wells

2- Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - Fred Coots, Haven Gillespie

3- Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin

4- Winter Wonderland - Felix Bernard, Richard B. Smith

5- White Christmas - Irving Berlin

6- Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! - Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne

7- Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer - Johnny Marks

8- Jingle Bell Rock - Joseph Carleton Beal, James Ross Boothe

9- I’ll Be Home For Christmas - Walter Kent, Kim Gannon, Buck Ram

10- Little Drummer Boy - Katherine K. Davis, Henry V. Onorati, Harry Simeone

What’s that list?  The most popular Christmas carols, according to this site which is probably just making it up.  

I hate Christmas.  I don’t mean that I hate it in a cute Grinch-Scrooge-Christmas Special kind of way where I just need to learn the true meaning of Christmas.  I will not be redeemed at the end of this tale. I will not be reformed by spectral visitations.  There’s no reassuring moral at the end of this tale.  So if you’re looking forward to saying, “Awww. . .” you’re reading the wrong blog post.

Christmas is dominated by two very problematic characters: Baby Jesus and Santa Claus.  

The story of the baby Jesus, as most of you know, is essentially a tale of horror.  First, He’s chased around by a megalomaniac ruler who’s decided to kill Him.  Herod misses Jesus but manages to kill all the other baby boys in the vicinity, which casts something of a pall over the  Baby Jesus’ holiday season.  

Then the baby Jesus’ Christmas takes an even worse turn when the only gifts he gets are gold, frankinscense and myrrh.  The baby Jesus can’t play with myrrh.  He doesn’t even know what myrrh is.  Baby Jesus wanted a rattle and a teething ring, was that so much to ask for?  But no: it’s krugerrands and two different types of tree resin.

The Baby Jesus was like, “What, I wasn’t a good little boy?  You calling Me naughty?  You know who I am?  Do you not notice the way all My pronouns are capitalized?  Take your myrrh on out of here and bring Me one of those toy lawnmowers that goes pop! pop! pop! when I push it around the stable.”

And 33 years after that first disastrous Christmas, the Baby Jesus ends up having an even worse Easter.

As for Santa Claus, he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good.  At best Santa has serious boundaries issues.  At worst we’re looking at a monstrous villain who uses illegal means to invade the privacy of children all over the world.  God only knows what he does with the data he compiles.  

All of which explains why Christmas music is so grim and joyless.  When you base a holiday on the lives of a deprived, doomed baby and a sneaky blackmailer, you’re not going to get a lot of cheerful tune-age.  The average Nine Inch Nails album is happier than any collection of Christmas carols.  

Christmas carols, with their incessant demands for weather phenomena that each year lead to dozens of traffic deaths, with their tales of brutal hazing endured by malformed reindeer, their disturbed hallucinatory rants (I’ll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams,) and their barely-disguised drug culture anthems (I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, sniff, sniff.  Merry and bright?  Uh huh, we get it, Irving,) are the inevitable result of a culture debased by this forced celebration of hay-bound babies and overweight peeping toms.

But no Christmas Carol so exemplifies the underlying horror of Christmas as The Little Drummer Boy.  

I’ll play my drum for Him, parumpah pum pum.  

Hey, about you play the drum later, champ?  The Baby Jesus is trying to sleep.  He’s got a headache from the Myrrh.  And He’s finally asleep.  So be a good kid and . . . 

I’ll play my drum for Him, parumpah pum pum, rumpah pum pum, rumpah pum pum.

Look kid, the Virgin Mary and I have had a long couple of days.  The Baby Jesus is finally asleep and we’d really like to curl up on some nice cow-crap-saturated hay and catch a couple Z’s ourselves, so . . .

Come they told me, parumpah pum pum!

Who told you?  Was it those shepherds?  I am going to kick . . .

Rumpah pum pum . . .

Great!  Now He’s awake.  You rotten little brat with your stupid drum, you woke Him up!  He’ll probably turn my wine into water again.

Pum . . . Pum . . . Rumpah pum pum . . .

You never hear about what happened next to the “little” drummer boy, do you?  No, they leave out that verse.  

Run, they told me parumpah pum pum

Joe’s got a baseball bat parumpah pum pum

He says he’s had it up to rumpah pum pum

And if I want to live I’ll run papum run

Run papum run

Run papum run.

Kid got away, but it was a close call.  And he never played the drum again, I can tell you that.

Firstly, my computer likes to attract viruses. It’s had a few this year along, causing it to crash no less than several times. I don’t even know how my computer gets all these viruses anymore. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t entirely my fault. Now, my computer does this weird thing that, while I’m using it, it will spontaneously shut off. Sucks, right? Especially when I’m typing homework. Luckily, my comp has a pretty good recovery program, but still, not everything is saved. When my computer was cooperating one day, I ran several virus scans, which turned up nothing. My uncle, a computer expert, thinks there’s a virus or a corruption in the software. So, now he has it and is trying to fix it.

My dad’s computer is okay. It’s the newest one in the house. Only problem: its internet connection is SLOW. The sad thing is that it’s located like right next to the wireless box thingy (my pro technical term). My computer, which used to be separated from the wireless connection by an entire floor, never had this problem. As I type this, I am waiting for hotmail to load an email I want to read. Plus, my dad’s computer doesn’t have many of the great computer programs (aka iTunes, I can’t sync my iPod anymore!).

My sister’s older laptop doesn’t have Microsoft Office 07 (actually, none of the computers in my house except mine have it). So, when I tried to open a Word file on it, it came up with a bunch of symbols and gibberish. Fun fun. It made me angry.

The other laptop is pretty good. Except for the fact that when I was trying to make a DVD of my project for English, it messed it up. It made me so freakin frustrated, I was nearly in tears. I kid you not.

One day I will get a super computer that is immune to viruses and technical problems and my life will be complete. Heck yes.

Random hotel room thoughts, in no particular order, and bearing in mind that I’ve had a Knob Creek Manhattan, a Sam Adams, a room service Reuben sandwich and pineapple upside down cake with white chocolate mousse.

1) I love Jet Blue.

2) White chocolate?  No. Missing the whole point of chocolate.  It’s chocolate for people who don’t like chocolate. It’s the chocolate equivalent of near beer.  Dark chocolate is chocolate.  White chocolate is lard.

3) In the near future advertising will be participatory, peer-to-peer, not top down.  Here’s the evolution:  hard sell, soft sell, product placement, peer-to-peer then lifestyle placement.

4) See, white chocolate is one of those aged-out foodie fads. (It was the big thing what, 15 years ago?)   Foodies love anything that’s new.  They don’t always have much judgment, much taste, so they chase after whatever’s new equating “New” with “Good.”  This explains the great goat cheese obsession of a decade ago.  Goat cheese here, goat cheese there.  90% of it tasted like feet, but it was new on the scene, so suddenly you weren’t supposed to like Stilton or Camembert or Reblochon because we’d already done those while chevre was new and hard to pronounce.

5) I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.  An example of why writers shouldn’t read books:  there’s always somebody better than you are.  And then you get bummed.

6) I forget what #6 was.

7) There’s never a magic bullet but people waste their lives looking for one.  Magic diet, magic therapy, magic plan for getting rich, magic revelation that will destroy Barack Obama.  People want to believe in magic.  Magic is for stories.  In real life you actually have to work at things, there’s no sudden cathartic moment that turns everything around on a dime.  Says the man who just succumbed to pineapple upside-down cake.

8- Yes, I’m aware that I hyphenated “upside-down” in one case and didn’t in the other.

9) My great fear in meetings is that I will not recognize someone I’ve met like six times.  It goes without saying that I won’t remember names.  If you have a two syllable name I’ve already forgotten the first syllable before you say the second.  I don’t think this makes me a jerk.  I think it’s just quirky.

10) In April I’m going on a book tour in England.  Take that, Meg Cabot, you and your big deal Asian book tour.  

11) It bothers me that I know I’m probably going to like living in SoCal.  There’s something wrong with people who actually like Southern California.

12) I thought of a scene that’s too gross to actually use in LIES.  Not just too gross for Scandinavians, too gross for Americans.  Sin City gross.  And it’s something I could only use in one of the GONE books.  Which means it will be lost forever.

13) When I told my wife about #12 she said, “Sometimes it bothers me that I’m married to you.”  Not the first time she’s said that.

14) I asked a guy who really knows whether it made any sense that My Space, Facebook and Twitter are worth billions of dollars.  He said, “Nope.”  I think he’s right.

15) Okay, my wife and kids just called and now I’m sleepy.

Paperbackswap is great.  I just received to books in the mail from them last week.  (Its a site where you swap books.  For every book you send of to a member (who requests the book) you earn a point.  One book=One point.  So then you can spend your point to get a book from another member.

I am currently using their recommendations feature and I love it!  Every time I log in, theres a scroller that briefly runs through the books available in genres that I have marked as favorites.  This feature is how I found the two books I received last week.

The one con: The Out-Of-Print Curse.  When I finally find a book that sounds AMAZING, they don’t have a copy available.  Okay, then.  Next step: Check my library.  Sadly, they clean their shelves of books that haven’t been checked out in months, the book isn’t there.  I’ll finally look it up on BarnesandNoble to consider buying it and… ITS OUT-OF-PRINT!!!

How frustrating!  All I want to do is read this amazing book from this great author, but I can’t even get a copy!

My last hope is Amazon to buy a used copy.  But I am just so darn picky that I’m scared to get a used book (on paperbackswap you can fill out a sheet with your preferences to book condition, so the sender has to have the book in near perfect condition before sending).

I noticed many places on the web and my library don’t hold on to their out-of-print copies.  Everyone is jumping for the books that come out the next month, but very few are looking for books that happen to be published in the early ’90s.  I have to admit that I love it when publishers reprint older editions with new covers (the ’80s didn’t do so well on book covers) and modernize them a bit.  They are currently doing this to the Sweet Valley High Series and Hardy Boys Series.  Why can’t they do that to all books and not just bestselling series?

The answer to this unfortunate curse: None so far besides the searching at garage sales, flea markets, other libraries in the same state, and the occasional buy off Amazon or Paperbackswap. 

Doesn’t it make sense to have a company, kind of like Barnes and Noble, that would just sell out-of-print books?

I spend most of my time when I’m there moaning about such things, I’m telling you: the radio stations’ play-lists haven’t been updated for 20 years - seriously 20 years. It’s the same every time I go. I like Alphaville’s Forever Young as much as the next person, but it doesn’t belong on a modern radio station - Move on Norway!

In a recent advertising campaign offering Norwegians the chance to vote for a new kind of pizza (beef and onion or ham and pepper) more people voted for the eventual winner (beef and onion) than voted for the party that won the Norwegian national elections. Enough said.

However every time I go there I also have a look around the bookstores. The first thing you notice is that they don’t do offers in Norwegian bookstore’s. There’s no 3 for 2, there’s no discounting, no money off, no Buy One Get One Free or Half price.  Everything is full whack, asking price, RRP.

This leads you notice the second thing about Norwegian bookstores which is the price of the books. To pick an unrelated example at random I picked up Gone by Michael Grant in hardback.

Guess how much it was? Go on guess?

Nope.

Nope.

You are way off.

Gone was on sale for 339 Norwegian Kroner.

That’s £32!! or $48!!

£32!! or $48!!

It’s supposed to be a kids book! What kid can afford that on a weeks allowance?! Well - Norwegian kids apparently because there was only 1 left on the shelf.

So as a publisher I’m jealous of Norwegian bookstore’s enormously high profit margins, but not their attitude towards politics and pizzas.

Actually the biggest tragedy is that reading isn’t big in Norway, despite the fact that it’s dark and cold most of the time. They’d rather watch blu-ray DVDs on big screen TVs instead. Oh - and occasionally they go skiing.

Recently, I came across an interesting program called Delicious Library. Delicious Library is a program that can catalog and sort pretty much anything you own, including books, movies, software, video games, toys, gadgets, tools, and apparel. Delicious Library will also add all of the movies and music that you have in iTunes. Beautifully designed and easy to use, it is Mac-only (as all well-designed programs are) and costs $40.

Adding to your library is as simple as holding up the barcode to the built-in iSight camera. DL will then download the cover art, reviews from Amazon, recommendations, and all of the details, including retail price, current value, release date, ISBN, and much much more. If the data you need is not there, you can add it manually by selecting the Edit icon. If you want to add a product that you do not have the barcode for, you can either search it using the built-in search tool, or enter the ISBN.

Once all of your items are in Delicious Library, you can create shelves for them. There are two kinds of shelves: smart shelves, like smart playlists in iTunes (which will automatically add items if they meet specified criteria), and normal shelves (which you manually add items to). For example, if you wanted to create a smart shelve that would automatically house all Green Day albums, you would specify that the creator field must be equal to “Green Day”.

Another useful feature of Delicious Library is that you can loan items to specific people. For example, if I wanted to loan the item GONE to Michael Grant, I would just drag the book to his name. I can also set a due date for this item, which will cause the item to appear with an “out” banner next to it. The book now shows up in gray, which allows me to know which of my items have been loaned.

If I ever want to show people my library, Delicious Library makes it easy by allowing you to publish your library as a website. Just click the publish button in the lower left corner, and you can publish your website to your MobileMe account (if you haven’t given up on MobileMe yet), iWeb, your own website (if you have one), or to a folder.

You have a choice of publishing everything, or just selected shelves. You can also choose between two themes: Paper Stencil, or Library Shelves. Whichever theme you choose is also optimized for iPhone viewing.

Overall, Delicious Library is a wonderful buy at $40 that is Leopard-only (though there is a version for Macs running Tiger that has less features) and has a beautiful interface. DL is an especially useful program for writers, editors and reviewers, as you can easily browse reviews, recommendations, synopses, details and more. You can buy Delicious Library or download a demo at www.delicious-monster.com.

I can’t just read a book for PURE FUN. I’ll unintentionally begin evaluting a book. Every sentence of every page can’t just be enjoyed. It will digest and sit in my head all day and I’ll start noticing little blemishes or faults. The great amazing parts begin to numb a little with every crack in the books facade. Books that I absolutely loved and bought a few months ago, no longer seem completely over the top amazing. I begin to pick out little things (like dialogue clarification, plot speed, realistic/relatible characters, etc) that I never noticed before.

Is this a pro or con to book reviewing? I hope its a pro, but I have yet to make a final decision.

Unsettling premise:  everyone over the age of 14 disappears.  Complication: some of those kids are mutating.  From there all I had to do was follow the premise forward to get to creepy.  

I didn’t want to do the whole, “Boo!” thing.  I wanted the creepy to be as real as I could make it within the context of fantasy.  Real but not.  Realistic within a story that’s completely unreal.  Following the premise forward I had no choice, really, but to write about kids at their best and at their worst.  Neither good nor evil could be banished, I wanted both.  Because that’s reality. 

In a world where every institution has disappeared, where every authority is suddenly gone and kids — kids without experience, without education, without much in the way of moral sense — are suddenly on their own and in some cases given great power, well, bad things are going to happen.  

So anyway, I follow the premise through. And I get feedback from kids that they like the book and find it nicely creepy. I promptly put up a banner that read “MIssion Accomplished” and then I landed a jet on an aircraft carrier.  (Oh, my God, that allusion is already old enough that lots of kids won’t get it.)  

But at the same time I started getting feedback from various adults, some of whome didn’t find GONE nicely creepy.  They found it really disturbing.  And some wondered what the hell is the matter with me.

Seriously:  adult readers have generally been much more bothered than the kids.  Grown-ups, especially parents it seems, (based on my highly unscientific sampling,) are twice as creeped out as kids.  

Why would this be?  How is it that I aimed at one target and caused the flesh wound I was after, but also hit a second target and inflicted a much more serious wound?  And is the previous sentence proof that there really is just something wrong with me?

I’m formulating a theory here.  I have no real basis in fact, just wondering, thinking on the fly, guessing, pulling things out of thin air.  (Which, as I understand it, is how the Supreme Court makes decisions.)  But I wonder if there isn’t a mathematical formula for fear that goes something like this:  

Um . . .

Okay, I can’t get Wordpress to do mathematical notation.  Which is a shame because I totally had an equation.  And it included cube roots.  (A disease afflicting malformed potatoes?) But basically my thinking is that fear is intensified by responsibility.  Kids reading GONE get the creepy stuff.  But they get the creepy without the sense of responsibility, the terrible feeling that they might, themselves, be the cause of the creepy.

Adults, however, especially parents, feel responsible for everything.  So when you write a scene about kids with their hands encased in cement forced to eat their food from dog dishes, kids get that it’s creepy.  But adults feel that it’s not only creepy, it’s a personal failure of preparedness and vigilance.  Responsibility heightens fear.  And then they blame me.

Or maybe it’s just that old people are wimps.

This weekend my family and I celebrated an early Thanksgiving with relatives who live pretty far from us.  Family get-togethers can usually go one of two ways.  First, everyone could be having a lot of fun and nobody is crabby (this is the rarest).  And second,  everyone is in need of a nap and little arguments break out about who gets the last roll.

Thankfully, the get-together leaned more to the first possible outcome!

There was a little argument about who should get the last candy cane (It should be me!) but overall the night went well. We played a fun game of cards called Nuts (I scored 3rd place!). We watched a movie while I was beating my cousin at chess. The younger kids were running around and jumping on all the different tractors (I have to admit, I seated myself on a tractor or two also

But my favorite part of all was the food! You got your stuffing, your gravy, your mashed potatoes, ham, turkey, buns, and desserts. After my second plate I had to lossen my belt a bit, but a little tummy ache was worth it!

On the way home I was reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and I just couldn’t relate to Katniss, the main character. She was use to feeling hungry and had about starved to death a couple times in her earlier childhood. Here I am with my stomach practically bulging out of my jeans, and 16-year-old Katniss was completely excited over finding an edible plant.

Wow… I have never gone hungry before (well, maybe had lunch at 3:00PM instead of at noon, but still). I guess every Thanksgiving is a little blessing, no matter who you spend it with or the dinner’s atmosphere.

Oh, great.  Now my mouths watering, luckily I can smell dinner starting to cook!

Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone, no matter where you are!

To check out my The Hunger Games review, click here.

There are certain things that people, for whatever reason, want to know about authors.  Like:  How long does it take you to write a book?  Do you write longhand or on a computer?  Where do you get your ideas? (David Mamet offers the best response to that one: “I think of them.”) 

I understand the curiosity behind those questions.  Here’s what I don’t get:  “Do you write in Starbucks?”  It’s always Starbucks.  It’s never, “Do you write in The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf,” or, “Do you write in your favorite local café?”  (I actually took my laptop into a local café recently only to discover that they’d covered up all of their plugs – presumably to discourage loitering writer types.)  For me, one of the perks of being a writer is being able to stay home with my cats and my teapot and my hidden box of Cheez-Its.  Why would I want to leave?

But yesterday, I did it.  I wrote in Starbucks.  My house is being renovated, and there are workers everywhere, all the time, and I can’t concentrate.  (I can’t shower, either, but that’s another issue.)  So I said goodbye to my cats (who were hiding under the bed), packed up my laptop, and headed to my favorite Starbucks.  (Fun fact for anyone thinking of moving to Orange County:  According to their website, there are 20 Starbucks within five miles of my house!)

Here’s the thing I never noticed about Starbucks until I tried to work there:  It’s seriously loud.  There are those monster espresso machines going WHOOOSH, and ceramic dishes going CLINK-CLINK-CLINK, and barista girls in green Starbucks aprons saying stuff like, “Pineapples are way high in fiber,” keeping their vocal volume up to be heard over the machines.  Above it all there’s some Bob Dylan-ish music, clearly intended to make Starbucks seem, you know — coffeeshop-ish.  Like, maybe if you were just a little bit artier, you’d freakin’ appreciate it.

The customers at my local Starbucks don’t talk.  They’re almost all on laptops.  Which made me wonder: Are they writers, too?  Or are they just surfing the net?  Or are they reading their email or looking for jobs or …

Stop!  Concentrate! You’ve got to work on your book!

I’d just about managed to finish my tall cup of supposedly low acidic (but disappointingly bitter) coffee and focus my attention on my latest book when I heard the magic words across the room.  “Would you like a sample?”  A heavyset barista girl was delivering … something … to a guy with a shaved head and a middle-aged lady in a flowered shirt.  

Hey!  What about me?  Back here by the bathrooms!  I tried to catch the barista’s eye, but she just trotted back to her friends at the counter – there were more workers than customers – and they all made embarrassing food groans as they gorged on the pastry.  One of them said, “It’s so good.  It’s something I would buy on my day off.”  I smelled cinnamon.

Defeated, I re-read my last couple of paragraphs, only to have the sample-bearing barista, who was talking on her cell phone, finally spot me.  She pranced over with a nice little slice of something centered on a chunky white plate.  She paused in her phone conversation to smile and ask, “Blueberry oat bar?”

And I said, “Yes!  Yes!  Yes!”  Okay, actually I just nodded politely, took the plate from her, inhaled the warm, sweet aroma, and finally … I tasted it!

It was … okay.  You know:  one of those healthy-sounding goodies that’s supposed to make you feel all virtuous because you can actually see the oat flakes on top but that you can just tell is laden with fat.  Plus, it was so sweet it made my tongue sting.  In the end, I managed to finish the oat bar, push away the plate, and knock out a couple of pages on my manuscript, but it wasn’t easy. 

Today I got my hair cut, and the shampoo girl, Brittany, asked if I was writing any more books.  I’ve got one due in February, I told her, but the chaos of my house renovation has made it hard to concentrate.

“You can always go to Starbucks,” she said, adding wistfully,  “I always wished I had the kind of cool job where I could take my laptop there.”

“Starbucks,” I said.  “Good idea.”

On Tuesday evening last week, I went to the most fantastic US Election night party I could have hoped for in London. I went to a friend’s place and as soon as we walked through the doors I knew it was going to be a special event. They had pictures of all the US presidents in the hallway (including Martin Sheen, what number president was he again?). They had tapes of famous speaches playing in the bathrooms, they had cookies, they had popcorn - they even had some actual Americans there!

The front room was decked out in US flags and banners, we had the trusty old BBC on the television as well as a projector screen showing streaming images from CNN and NBC. We watched the states turn blue with growing wonder and when Ohio was called and when the electoral votes were counted we all went crazy!

People were screaming and shouting, tears were shed, we hugged, we toasted, we cheered. It was the best election night ever.

This wasn’t even our election night, it was yours. We care what you think. Thanks for voting!

PS. Sorry if this seems out of date now, I’ve just been really really ill (sniff.)

For those of you who are non-Californians, Prop 8 goes as follows, short and (not so) sweet:

“Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

It basically eliminates the right for homosexuals to get married.

This to me is just ridiculous for several reasons. I’m not sure what good could be accomplished by enacting this law. All it does is discriminate, and what does that show about the people of California? That we are homophobic and prejudiced against people outside the norm? I definitely would not like to be seen that way. Think about it: the United States used to have laws preventing interracial marriage, between whites and blacks, and between whites and Asians. Those laws were repealed because they aren’t constitutional. Those laws eliminated marriage rights; so does Prop 8. Why is it okay now to prevent certain people from getting married when you can’t do so to others?

I know some religious groups, particularly the Catholic Church I attend and especially the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), were in support of Prop 8. I believe they refer to the Bible to declare that homosexuality is a sin. Being a more scientific person, I believe that sexual orientation is something you’re born with as a result of chemicals in your brain. I didn’t know until a little while ago that some religious people view homosexuality as a choice. To me, that is just ridiculous. I mean, I did a quick search on Google and found loads of sites confirming my theory. I mean, I just don’t understand, if everyone is “created in God’s image,” then aren’t the gays also? But then again, religion and science don’t mix too well, do they?

I’ve also heard some people say, well, so what if the gays can’t marry? They can get a civil union. Unfortunately, they are not the same thing. If a couple is married, then they are married in every state and have the same rights as every married couple. If a couple is in a civil union, then their rights aren’t uniformly defined across the US. So if perhaps someone in a civil union had a health care plan that included his/her partner in one state, they might not get the same benefits in the next state.

Some people want to protect the “sanctity of marriage.” Well, I hate to let this come to light, but people can get married in Las Vegas one night and then divorced the next. If that doesn’t violate marriage’s sanctity, then I don’t know what does. Some people think marriage is solely defined as the “union between a man and a woman.” Well, words change over time, as do their definitions. People will change language as it suits them. Why doesn’t that seem to apply to the word “marriage?”

Also, don’t even get me started on the ridiculousness of some of the propaganda supporting Prop 8. I’ve seen so many commercials and so many signs that my eyes have nearly bled (seriously). One of my favorites goes as follows: a young girl (maybe in second grade?) comes home from school and tells her mom something along the lines of “Today I learned that princes can marry princes and that if I want to, I can marry a princess!” And then her mom looks all shocked and probably proceeds to instruct her daughter in the “correct way of marriage” or something like that. Seriously, that commercial is so wrong it’s funny. Firstly, public schools aren’t required to teach anything about marriage, which is why I highly doubt a second grader would ever come home from school to talk about “princes marrying princes.” Besides, if there was a school program about marriage, parents can request to have their child excused from it, and the schools are then required to follow this request. On top of that, if parents don’t like the way public schools are teaching their children, they always have the option to home school their child or put them in a private school. And I don’t want to hear anything about well, maybe they don’t have time to home school their kids or maybe they can’t afford private school. Well, if they cared enough, they would find a way to make it happen.

I’ve also seen some of the most ridiculous handmade signs in support of Prop 8. One of them, I believe, said something like “protect religious freedom.” Uh, hello?!? Americans already have religious freedom. However, what we do not have is a mixture of government and religion. I don’t think eliminating rights for homosexuals to get married has anything to do with religion. It has to do with discrimination.

Oh, and my oh my, should you have seen all the signs in support of Prop 8 around where I live (I live in a rather conservative part of SoCal). One time when I walked home from school, I counted at least twenty something “Yes on 8” signs. The day before the election, I saw one house with at least 10 signs. I’m pretty sure I saw a man who lived in that house jaywalk across the street to plant some “Yes on 8” signs on public property. I’m glad they were gone the next day.

This weekend, I turned on the news and saw that there were anti-Prop 8 protests occurring in LA and one other southern California locale I forget. There were a lot of people holding signs that said “H8” because, well, that’s what Prop 8 is. I really hope Prop 8 will be tried in court and found unconstitutional (against the United States’ Constitution, not the California constitution considering it is now a part of it) because I believe in tolerance for people who aren’t like me. I am an open-minded thinker, and I hate it when people tell me what to think. I especially hate it when people lie to me. And this is why I am so against Prop 8. It serves no purpose other than to eliminate rights and promote intolerance and discrimination.

Of course, this is not solely a Californian issue. It was put up to vote in several other states, I believe Arizona and Florida (I may not be right, and there may be others as well). I hope in those states, their new prevention of same-sex marriage will be overthrown.

Muses?  Um, I think they’re on aisle 13.

Non-writers like the word “inspiration.”  My guess is that most writers don’t so much.  I know I don’t.  ”What’s your inspiration?”  ”What inspired you?”  ”Ooooh, you live in Italy, that must really be great for inspiration.”

Well, actually Katherine (Applegate) and I are leaving Italy.  We are dragging the two kids, the two dogs and the cat away from stunningly beautiful Tuscany to stunningly dull Orange County, California.  Why?  Are we expecting to find a muse to inspire us in Southern California?  No.  (The last muse in Southern California was killed during the wildfire season of 1997.  Her siblings had died earlier from mudslides, smog and earthquakes.)  What we’re expecting to find is high-speed internet, book stores, an Apple store and a Target.  Each of those mundane things is more important to me as a writer than my lovely view out over the rolling vineyards.

Writing — at least for the two of us — is a job.  We get up every day and do it.  Emphasis on the active verb “do.”  There’s not a lot of waiting for inspiration.  Mostly there’s a lot of typing. I don’t really know where ideas come from, but I know that once I have an idea I have to do a lot of planning and researching and emailing and negotiating and always lots of typing.  

I have to know what’s on the shelves at my nearest chain bookstore and what they’re selling at the indies.  Those shelves are real estate I’m hoping to claim.   I need my computer and phones to work so that I can both email and talk on the phone.  Not some of the time, all of the time — an impossible dream in rural Tuscany.  I need to be able to pick up a bottle of Advil, a ream of paper, a carton of milk and a t-shirt in fifteen minutes and all in one place.  Living the rural Italian life that’s four different stops at four different stores, all with different opening and closing times, and with nowhere to park.  The process can take literally five times longer than it does in the States.  Yeah, it sounds charming, but not when you have pages due.  Then it’s just a huge waste of precious time.  Tick tock, people, I have work to do.  

I know all this sounds trivial.  Shouldn’t the romance of Italy trump the convenience of the States?  Yeah, for about seven months, which is how long we’ve been here.  After that I really, really, really just need things to be easy.  

I need an Office Depot.  A Target.  A Wendy’s.  A Walgreens.  I need straight roads that go directly from where I am to where I want to be.  I want a DVR so I can time-shift.  I want my iPhone to work.  I want to pay my bills online or with a phone call, not after a fifteen minute wait in some overheated post office.  I want to drive with a cup of coffee, not pull over at a bar for an espresso.  I want to pick up a phone or send an email and get actual answers to my questions.  I want all the data, all the access, all the convenience, all the time.  

I will have a lot more time for inspiration if I can waste less time being charmed.

I’ve been preoccupied.  I am ashamed to admit that I am a hopeless political junkie.  Politics is my sport.  I’m checking polls literally hundreds of times a day.  Yes, I know the meaning of “literally.  I literally mean “literally.”  Again and again and again, starting with the DailyKos poll first thing in the morning and proceeding around and around like a crazy person until I pass out at night with my laptop open to FiveThirtyEight.com.

I could draw you a color-coded map right now, showing every state as red, pink, yellow (toss-up) light blue or dark blue.  It’s really kind of sad.  But it explains why I’m not pushing people for posts or writing my own.  I’ll be better in a couple of days.  And since this is a YA lit blog and not a political blog I’m not even going to tell you who I support.

Unless you click on the “More” button.

Sorry.  You need to understand:  I can’t help myself.

I love anagrams. And I love Rosemary’s Baby, both the brilliant and underrated Ira Levin novel and the unbelievable Polanski film adaptation. So I am killing two birds with one stone—make that three—to convince you to buy Rosemary’s Baby and read it soon (Levin started as a screenwriter and he’s a master at both understatement and making totally implausible situations seems real), rand ent the DVD of the film, even if you’ve seen it before. There’s so much to love, from Ruth Gordon’s nutty Satanist, Mia Farrow’s gorgeous Sassoon haircut, and John Cassavetes generally oozy ickiness, which, if you’ve ever dated an actor you will recognize immediately.

But really I just want to throw in an anagram I came up with while playing with paper and scissors—I’ve recently given up the act of cutting but still like to play with sharp objects.

So, here’s a nice use of “anagram” from Rosemary’s Baby, just to get us started.

“With no false moves she made [the scrabble pieces] into Roman Castavet.

And again into Adrian Marcato.

And then again into Roman Castavet.

. . .

“’He’s Adrian Marcato’s son,’ she said. ‘The man who said he conjured up Satan and was attacked downstairs by a mob. Roman is his son Steven. Roman Castevet is Steven Marcato rearranged—an anagram.’

Guy said ‘Who told you?’

‘Hutch,’ Rosemary Said. She told Guy about All of them Witches and Hutch’s message.

. . .

Rosemary looked at Guy uncormfortably and said, ‘You don’t think he’s –the same as his father?’

And here’s my anagram of the day:

SARAH PALIN = A PLAIN RASH

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I consider myself lucky to be relatively politically aware and to have my friends the same. I think it’s a pity that most kids and teens aren’t interested in politics because they don’t think it affects them. WRONG. The leaders of this country are creating the world of the future. And we all belong to the future, especially the younger generation. If people don’t care about electing future leaders, then they shouldn’t lament how horrible their situation has become in the future, because they didn’t try to change that outcome when they had the chance.

Now, I’m going to remain neutral in this post, because my point is not to persuade people to vote a certain way but to try show the benefits of being more politically aware. I don’t know, if the knowledge that electing certain people could mess with the future you want doesn’t make you want to be politically active or at least aware, then I don’t know what will.

Part of the problem with politics is the stickiness, evasiveness, lying, and just general politician qualities that make it so difficult for people, especially young people who are trying to figure out their political philosophy, to understand what each candidate stands for. And this only discourages people from trying to become politically aware, because, trust me, it is a LOT of hard work to find out who’s right and who’s wrong and what’s really going on. And then there’s the whole internal debate of if you agree with this or that issue. Just ignoring this whole mess would be the easy way out. Unfortunately, making a country run smoothly has never been easy, and in order to make it do so, people have to work hard from the bottom up.

So, I encourage everyone, especially young people, to watch the debates online, if you haven’t already. Visit Obama’s and McCain’s websites. Some other great sites to check out are Ya for Obama, YA for McCain, and MyDebates.org.

Don’t let your future be decided for you.

Greetings readers of Stupid Blog Name! While on my latest book tour (England, Sweden, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand) something truly exciting occurred. I came up with the idea for the official Crack and Stack Challenge.

Editors, publicists, and booksellers who are reading this, please let your authors know:

It’s on.

The Crack and Stack Challenge has been informal up until now, but that’s over. I want official numbers. I want to know—who is the fastest stock signer on earth. That’s right. ON THE PLANET.

Because, I’ll be frank—I think it’s me. (Robert B Parker, who only signs using his initials, doesn’t count. To participate in the Crack and Stack Challenge, you must sign with at least one full name. Do you hear me? One. Full. Name).

In case you’ve never heard of the Crack and Stack Challenge, allow me explain: I made it up. I made it up on my past book tour due to my being sick of authors who take forever at their stock signings (for those of you who don’t know, a stock signing is when authors are sent to a warehouse or book outlet and asked to sign thousands of copies of their book, which are then sent on to random customers or shops to be sold as “autographed copies”).

Authors are asked literally to sit there and sign their name over and over several thousand times, and some will take forever to get through their books.

This is, of course, excusable for elderly or infirm authors. For those authors, it is reasonable to expect their books to have to be handed to them individually for signing.

But that is not okay for perfectly healthy young authors. Perfectly healthy young authors should, in my opinion, be required to participate in the Crack and Stack Challenge.

Why is Crack and Stack so important?

Because due to perfectly healthy young authors who take forever to sign their books, my publicist insisted I get up at six in the morning to make the two hour drive to the book outlet where the thousands of copies of my books were waiting for me, so that she could hand feed me each book one at a time.

I did not WANT to get up at six in the morning to do in four hours what should take one. There was no reason for it.

But do you know how hard I had to argue with my publicist that it would not take me four hours to sign a thousand books just because it took some other perfectly healthy young author four hours to sign a thousand books? I had to prove that I could do it!

Which is why I came up with the Crack and Stack Challenge.

How do I Crack and Stack?

Crack and Stack is simple. That’s where you open the books and pile them on top of each other at the page on which you’re going to sign. Then you sign, starting at the top of the pile, while your publicist whips each book out from under your hand as soon as the signature is complete and hands the book off to a bookseller, who then sticks an Autographed sticker on it, then boxes it.

That’s crack and stack. That’s how you sign a thousand books (or over) in an hour. Done. Also, done.

Then you go eat something delicious. Or sleep.

I’m left-handed. Can I still Crack and Stack?

Lefties? You can do it. I’m left-handed. Righties? Even easier for you.

Doesn’t Crack and Stack hurt the books?

No, Crack and Stack doesn’t hurt the books.

But I like having a nice long gossip with the booksellers while I sign.


You still can! Just do it faster.

But I’m thirsty, and the bookseller is offering me some cookies.

I know. But remember, this is a competition. Speed is important. Eating and drinking will only slow you down. Do you want to get back to the hotel so you can watch TV, or
do you want to win?

The choice is up to you.

What are the current standings in Crack and Stack?

Because Crack and Stack only just started, times are mostly unknown and at best only rumored. It has been said that author Robert Harris signed 3,000 copies of his latest book in 3 hours, a more than decent time. Remember, Crack and Stack ALWAYS works, but it works best if someone is timing you and also timed the last author who was there so you can try to break his or her record. Mine is 24 books per minute. See if you can beat that (I’m guessing you can, and handily).

What is the prize in Crack and Stack?

As of right now, there are no prizes in Crack and Stack, although I’m working on that. Currently, the reward is Honor. The Honor of knowing you are the fastest, best, most brilliant Crack and Stacker on the PLANET.

What are the Rules of the Crack and Stack Challenge?

There is only one rule in Crack and Stack:

Initializing instead of signing (you know who you are) doesn’t count. You have to sign your full name or at the very least write out one full name. It’s easy to do a thousand books in under an hour if you’re just initializing, right, RBP? Signing Dave when your real name is Lord Attenborough doesn’t count.

How to make Crack and Stack more fun and earn Easy Bonus Points:

To make Crack and Stack even more challenging, try to see if you can get them to stack twenty books in a tower, or more. Then stand to reach the top of the tower if you can (not recommended, I’ve tried it. The tower falls down unless held by a publicist, which can be entertaining, only not to the publicist as it turns out).

What have we learned from Crack and Stack?

In conclusion, the Crack and Stack method of book signings is way more effective than having the publicist stand there and hand you each book one at a time.

Call ahead and have the book outlet people crack and stack before you get there (if they’ll be so kind).

Restorative snacks recommended but not while signing.

Medium to Fine point Sharpies are the best pens for Crack and Stack.

Look, authors. You have a great life. You get to write books. For a living. Signing them isn’t that hard. Just Crack and Stack.

Participants, report all numbers to Stupid Blog Name. Independent observers appreciated as authors have a tendency to exaggerate.

Let the games begin.

Sincerely,

Meg Cabot

My husband and I throw a big Halloween party every year.  And it’s funny: when it comes to dressing up, no one is neutral.  Year after year, some people find excuses not to come because they hate the whole costume thing.  (Surely it’s not because they don’t like me?)  Far more start talking about the party in January and haunting eBay for the perfect costume by June.  Maybe writers don’t have a monopoly on identity issues?

Enough text.  Heeeeeere’s Britney ….

It was a revelation when my girlfriend patiently and kindly explained to me that I was a geek.

I was obviously surprised: my love of sci-fi, spending time in libraries, getting excited about physics, weren’t these things cool? I wanted clarification because I’m a bit self obsessed, “Okay, fine.” I allowed, “But I’m King of the geeks right?!”

We live in Hackney, which is in East London. We have this regular walk we do from our house, through London Fields park, down Borough Market, through a flower market and into Spitalfields (another market).

It’s a nice walk. Give me a shout if you’re in the neighbourhood and we’ll do it together.

For those of you who don’t know or haven’t been to London this area is a vibrant, young and fashionable place to be (or at least, it is since we moved there).

I call the route we walk the ‘Catwalk Mile’. Everybody attempts to outdo each other in clothing craziness. Jeans pulled up around their chests, odd shoes (or no shoes), hats of all shapes and sizes, pins and badges - anything goes.

Interestingly more and more of these charity shop fashionista’s are dressing as bookish librarian types. The increase in people wearing cord trousers with a high waistline, thick rimmed plastic glasses and cardigans means that the Catwalk Mile is starting to feel like a trip to the local library. (Apologies if I’ve just offended every librarian on the planet).

The good news from all of this is that being a Geek really is cool again - look at Napoleon Dynamite. If you’ve been sitting in a dark room reading by a dim light, open the curtains and go outside! Times have changed! As you sit proudly with a well-thumbed copy of your favourite paperback, you’ll be recognised for the style icon and trend setter you really are.

The gold standard is someone like Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler.)  He would play the accordion and tell jokes and basically put on everything just short of a Broadway show.  I only met Mr. Snicket while getting a book signed for my kids.  So I didn’t have a chance to talk to him and say what I would like to say.  Which would be, “Thanks a lot, jerk, you’ve really raised the bar for the rest of us.”

I don’t play a musical instrument.  I don’t tell jokes.  I’m a big, fat, baldheaded, cranky old man.  The things I care deeply about are politics and food.  If I had to sit down and talk to a group of YA readers the topics of conversation that would come naturally to me would be, 1) My preference for the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, 2) Why food ideologies are ridiculous and beside the point.  I can do a good extemporaneous half hour on either.  Or on any number of other topics that would cause a 14 year-old (and most other sensible people,) to fall into a coma.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy talking.  It’s hard to shut me up unless you have a baseball bat handy and are prepared to use it.  But, man, what do I talk to “the kids” about?  The things I’m interested in are things that will either cause students to consider jumping out of the window, or, things that will make their teachers want to throw me out of that same window.

This is not a new problem for me.  I’ve always sucked at small talk.  I’ve never been very good at relating to, um, humans.  When I was in school myself I was clique-less.  I had no friends.  But please, no “Awww.”  People occasionally wanted to be my friends (something was obviously wrong with those kids) but I would always come up with an excuse for why I couldn’t join, or sleep over, or play, or hang out.  I think that was my earliest fiction writing.  ”Sorry, I can’t come to the party tonight because I’ve broken my leg. But I expect I’ll be all better by tomorrow.  Nope:  no cast.  I’m a quick healer.”

Bullies didn’t beat me up because they couldn’t quite figure out which category of victim I was.    (Hmmm, he’s not smart enough to be a geek, not interesting enough to be a freak, doesn’t skateboard, too uncool to be a punk.  Gentlemen, we must find an acceptable grounds for giving Michael the beat-down he deserves!)

The cliche advice is, “Be yourself.”   Well, that’s no good.

So, I guess it will come down to talking about writing.  Unfortunately my approach on that runs pretty much counter to what kids are taught in school.  I don’t know the first thing about literary theory.  My son would come back from his fifth grade class and show me some writing assignment he’d have to work on and my usual response would be, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

I can show someone how to create a character, or how to work through a plot, or build a backstory.  I can talk fairly authoritatively about self-discipline and work habits.  I’m very good at creating “series bibles.” I’m good at reading markets.  But anything I have to contribute assumes that people are looking to get published, not just write.  And I can never use the words “muse” or “inspiration” without smirking.

Anyway, I could honestly use some advice.  I can’t be the only cranky, introverted loner in the writing business.  So if anyone has some, please . . .

Personally, I dislike game shows. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of Jeopardy every now and then (the nerdy side of my shows through), but every day? Most definitely not!

I’ve never understood why certain people (*cough*cough*my mom*cough*) are obsessed with these game shows. It’s not like the watchers are winning thousands of dollars and extravagant prizes. I don’t see why people get excited over other people who they most likely do not know winning large sums of cash. I don’t understand it (being the kind of selfish person I am). I would rather not waste my precious time watching other people win money.

But on the other side of the coin, what if I got on a game show and won a bunch of money? Wouldn’t I then want a whole bunch of people to watch me on TV, my friends, my family, and even people I do not know?

Not being a huge fan of game shows, you probably wouldn’t think I’d ever consider even trying out to be a contestant on a game show. Yet, one Thursday a couple months ago, that’s exactly what I was doing. And what d’ya know, I got on. Whoop de freakin’ do.

Actually, it is kind of a big deal for me. I am a rather selfish person (see above), and I like money. Can you blame me? I like books and new clothes. To get those, I have to have money. To get money…I have to win a bunch on a game show. (Okay, I could get a job, but this is much simpler). So, even if I don’t particularly like a certain game show, I wouldn’t say no to winning a bunch of money on that show.

…Which brings me to the purpose of my post. I’d like to invite/ask/beg all of you to watch me and my BFF on Wheel of Fortune this coming Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. PST. Pretty please? It would make my day! You might even discover my real name (if you do not know it already) if you pay extra special attention.

Short answer:  nah.  

I’d be the last person to want to go “age and experience” on you, but I’ve lived through ten of the last zero apocalypses.  The end has been nigh since I was born.  Always nigh.  Nigher.  Nighest.  But no, the end will not come soon enough to keep you from having to write that history paper.  I had to pay my taxes today, so once again the end is running late.

There’s a really great song called Eve of Destruction.  I was playing it today as I went fishtailing around the gravel road that leads to my home.  The tune is portentous, the lyrics grim.  The chorus goes like this:

But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

Yeah, well, it’s true, I do tell you over and over and over again, my friend.  You know why?  Because that song was written in 1965.   The big thing the songwriter was worried about?  Red China.  Kind of thought they were going to blow up the world.  Turned out they were just going to send us toys decorated with lead-based paint.  

I was 11 in 1965.  In 1970 I was in 10th grade.  I was one of two kids to put together my school’s first ever Earth Day assembly.  Our big concern at that point?  Overpopulation that would lead to wordwide famine within a couple of years.

Yeah, that kind of didn’t happen.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do your best to figure out what’s happening in the world and decide how you can help things work out for the best.  Not saying there aren’t very real problems and threats.  I’m just saying stay cool, don’t lose too much sleep over things and keep a clear head.   People who panic end up looking like idiots down the road.

Me, I have to settle for stuff like this:

Subject:  My book report

Dear Carol Snow,

I have recently read your book “Getting Warmer.” It was a very good book, and I am looking foward to more books by you. I have a book report that is due very soon, and needed some help on it. The teacher wants to know the setting, and is expecting a description that paints a picture for the audiance. In your book, i couldn’t find the setting that well. if you could help me it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

(A book set in Scottsdale, Arizona)

Would the money you earned feel dirty? Would you spend it frivolously? Would you donate it to a charitable organization? Would you double your efforts at doing good things in your personal life? Or would you just assume it’s all part of the game of publishing (writing AND editing) and do it as well as possible, as objectively as possible—giving the kids the facts without left- or right-wing editorializing and letting them make their own decisions? Isn’t that what we want them to do when they grow up anyway? Read what’s out there, as much of it as possible, and make their own decisions? 

All of these questions are weighing on my mind because I have been hired to write a book—for money, needless to say—about a public figure who represents many thing that I think are wrong with our society: a seeming low regard for the importance of words and putting them into meaningful sentences, for one thing; a distaste for answering questions that might put the responder in a bad light; and it must be said, the revival of a hairdo that only looked good once, and that was on Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Oh yeah, and there’s that shooting animals with high-powered rifles from helicopters thing she does. (I myself prefer to kill things with my bare hands while I look them straight in the eye, and that’s only if they have an IQ high enough to have crossed me in some way, which bars out wolves, rabid hamsters, and scheming bunny rabbits, all standard shoot-‘em-up fare for the subject of my book. Ugh, I wrote those words. My book.)

Since I work freelance in this industry for at least one part of my career, I rarely turn down a project, including this one. But unlike many projects, this one has been really hard to get off the ground. I was only given two weeks to write 25,000 words, and although we all know editors don’t ever give you the drop dead due date, I’ve now let four days go by having done nothing but research. 

And it’s because I feel dirty doing it. I tell myself its better that I’m writing this book than some junior Anne Coulter who would get it all wrong and make this person sound like a saint in stilettos. But still, I feel uneasy. Is this dirty money? I have bills to pay, and I only make money in legal ways—call me foolish, but it’s a rule with me—so a lot of the easy ways to make dough are out. 

So this weekend, I’ll do what I usually do when on a deadline crunch—get up around 4 AM Saturday morning, research already organized, chapter outlines ready, and drink Red Bull and write until I have to take a nap for an hour or two. I’ll repeat this six or seven times until I need to actually go to sleep for the night in order to wake up Monday morning for work. I find it helps not to eat much, since digesting food makes you tired, but a fig newton every hour or so will keep me going. (The upside to this is that the new male ideal is VERY lean and trim, even the staid New York Times noticed, and I’ll lose a few pounds over the weekend.) 

And my honor? Will I have lost any of that? I don’t know yet. I’m going to try to be objective and remember that there are hundreds of reporters out there right now covering this person, filing piece after piece in which they state as much of the facts as they have access to and they presumably aren’t losing sleep. (Or losing weight. One of my neighbors has been covering the campaign for a national publication and he’s gotten downright tubby. Hotel food will do it every time.)

I realize it sounds like I’m weighing the loss of my soul against gaining some money and those little muscle lines that travel south on either side of your belly button, and that’s all true. But well-paying writing jobs don’t come along every day, do they? And perhaps I will be able to inform without editorializing for the left (which would surely be cut by the publisher) or butt-kissing to the right (which might just be left in, simply because the only people who will buy this book are fans of this person who want to give it to their kid.) There’s no easy answer to the questions in my head, but since I gave my word to my editor that I would write it, I’m going to. And I’ll make my deadline. I’ll be hallucinating on Red Bull and lack of sleep, I’ll smell bad, and probably have organized at least one closet in my apartment before I’m done, but I can only assume there’s a lesson to be learned from this, and not just the details of this person’s life. 

One thing I’ve learned already. It’s a lot harder to write about something—or someone– you don’t believe in and respect than in something or someone you do.  And that one’s own self-respect can be a slippery thing to hold on to

And then I started writing.  I began my first novel years ago, but I just couldn’t seem to finish it.  A hundred and twenty-five pages in, I thought I’d identified the problem:  I had quirky characters, snappy dialogue, vivid description … but no plot.  Oops.  I stopped writing fiction – forever, I thought — because I had a problem even bigger than the plot challenge:   I found it really difficult to focus for the long stretches of time that novel writing requires.

And then I discovered the importance of salty snacks to the creative process.  Plain tortilla chips, stale Doritos, multigrain Wheat Thins:  none of these would have the slightest appeal under normal circumstances.  But plant me in front of a laptop and saddle me with a deadline, and wham!  Some part of my brain – which I envision as an obese man watching TV in his underwear, cradling a bag of Lays — starts craving sodium and trans-fats and all of those other things that are really, really bad for you.

But the funny thing is?  After a handful of tortilla chips (which I don’t even like), I can do the work!  There’s only one downside.  Now need something else in order to work effectively:  elastic-waist pants.

(In case anyone cares:  This blog entry was previously posted on HarperTeen’s MySpace page.)

Toldja so.  Well, not you, exactly.  But other people I know and work with.

How did I know?  Because the first fan to read the first draft of HUNGER: a Gone Novel, all 700 manuscript pages of it, was my son Jake.  On his iPhone.  And this was before there were any book-reading apps for the phone.

Kids are early adapters.  They are devoid of loyalty to the past.  No loyalty to paper.  So all that effort by Amazon and others to create book readers that duplicate the paper experience are beside the point when it comes to kids.  And not just beside the point, but actually impediments.  Kids like the new.  Old people like old.   Kids like to experiment and investigate.  They like to take possession and redefine.  

Also, they aren’t all that excited by spending hundreds of dollars on a book reader, they’d much rather have an iPhone.  Seriously, do a survey of the kids you know:  Sony book reader or iPhone?

Real books — you know, with pages and all — will continue to be important, even in kidlit, but publishers who ignore e-books are making a big mistake.  This is doubly, trebly true for YA lit where we should already be deep into this new paradigm.  

But how to monetize the free, paperless book?  Advertising.  Specifically product placement.

Excuse me?  Was that a howl of outrage?  

Sorry, I didn’t invent the internet.  (That was Al Gore.)  But the internets exist, and the internet has defeated DRM and other protective measures for music, and it will continue to defeat similar efforts to control the flow of data.  We are going to be giving books away free online.  It’s already happening, it’s going to keep happening, and now the only question is:  how do we all go on making a living as writers and editors and agents?  

A few points:

1) The internet has decided it will be an ad-supported medium.  We didn’t decide, it decided.  See Google?  Ad-supported.  See the subscriber-only New York Times online?  No, you don’t.  Not anymore.

2) Technology is making it easier to subtract non-integral advertising from TV and from web pages.  You can already use your DVR to skip TV ads.  And you can use your browser to kill banner ads, Flash ads and so on.

3) Technology is making it easier and, this is crucial, more attractive to consumers, to build advertising into a movie, DVD, TV show or book; to make it integral.  Ads won’t be something before or after:  advertising will be part and parcel of the entertainment.

4) Audiences won’t just tolerate this, they will prefer it.  They will demand it.  Because the net result will be an enhanced experience, a value-added piece of media.

How does this relate specifically to books?  The “enhanced book.”  Online and free, this book would include multiple outlinks from the text — enhancements.  You can link from a character description to artwork of that character.  You can link from a difficult word to its definition.  Link to an online discussion group.  Link to backstory you don’t want to have cluttering up the text.  Link to author commentary.  Link to the Old Navy shirt the character is wearing, on-sale for just $17.95, a special rate for readers.

Say what?  You were kind of almost with me until that last part, right?  Definitions, backstory, author commentary, sure.  Why not?  But a commercial link?  Product placement?  Oh, horrors.

And yet, do you think Meg Cabot’s readers, or Carol Snow’s, or mine might kind of enjoy knowing exactly what the character is wearing?  Yeah, I think they would.  And I think if they like the look they might like to buy it themselves.  Why not?  

Why would it be so terrible?  Why is it a good thing for a reader to pay $17.95 for a hardcover book, but a bad thing for them to pay  $17.95 for a t-shirt they learned about while reading a book they got for free?  From where I sit it looks like they got a book and a t-shirt for just $17.95.

Readers could have access to an unlimited supply of absolutely free books.  Free.  As many as they wanted.  No need to budget, hey, read all the books you want.  Anywhere, anytime. Until your battery runs out.  And if you want to buy that t-shirt? 

Let’s try a slightly different example.  A book’s lead character is listening to music.  Why shouldn’t the reader enjoy a free soundtrack?  Click the hyperlink and there the reader is on MySpace music hearing the song the character is listening to.  And if the reader chooses to download that song . . .

Finally, there’s this:  Summer.  (Or whatever they’ve renamed it.  Something involving bikinis.)  It’s a series Katherine and I wrote back at the dawn of time that has been re-released.  The packager updated some of the cultural and commercial references before re-releasing.  A free, online e-book version could have been updated effortlessly.  And those already-inserted references could have been linked to purchasing opportunities.  

In other words, many backlist titles that are just sitting on publishers hard drives could be reissued at almost no cost online, and made at least marginally profitable by enhancing the text with all the aforementioned types of links — art, backstory, commentary, definitions — as well as some sponsored links.  Cost to publisher?  Far less than printing, shipping and etc…

Books will be digitized, they will end up being free online, and I believe those online books will end up being monetized by integral advertising.  The results, if it becomes the enhanced book, will be larger numbers of books available to larger numbers of readers for far lower printing, shipping (and environmental) cost.  And readers will very quickly come to prefer, and finally to demand, the enhanced book experience.

I’m 54 years old.  Not exactly a youth.  My whole life I read paper newspapers.  In the last two years I’ve gone completely online, no physical newspapers.  Why?  Because although paper newspapers are great to fold and hold and stick under your arm, a free, an up-to-the-minute, hyperlinked, “enhanced” newspaper is better.  Publishers would do well not to count on kids being set in their ways.

(10/3 Update: An email to Ron Hogan at galleycat discussing my experiences speaking to this subject in Turkey has resulted in a posting there.)

As most have read elsewhere (galleycat’s coverage has been pretty entertaining), Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary for the Nobel prizes for literature, has slammed American literature as too insular, whining that we “don’t translate enough” and “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”

This complaint that the American market doesn’t translate enough world literature is an old one, but the numbers that are usually cited by Europeans aren’t quite as clear-cut as they might at first seem. Thing is, the lion’s share of books translated into other languages are translated from English—American and British authors—and are big bestsellers. John Grisham. Stephen King. Sue Grafton. Maeve Binchy. Frank McCourt. J.K. Rowling. Lemony Snicket. Etc.

These books aren’t translated because the publishers in France and Turkey and Poland are keen to engage in an international dialogue with American literature. These books are translated because there is a market for these books, and because these books sell, and sell well.

The real test is to ignore translations from English, and for someone to examine how many books each market translates from a more obscure source. South Korea, say. Or, heck, let’s say Japan. Big country, big body of literature. I’d wager that the numbers will be awfully similar.

The number of pages I have to get done in order to feel that I “got my pages done,” changes. It’s not a fixed number.  Today I decided 7 1/2 was enough. Yesterday I was in a lousy mood because I crapped out after 3 1/2. Two previous days were 9 pages each, so I was feeling pretty good about that. When I lose a day of work I am impossible to be around.

My name is Michael, and I am a workaholic.

I dropped out of school after completing 10th grade. Long story short, I spent that summer hitchiking across country and by the time that was done felt a just a bit emancipated.  Then, at a new school for 11th grade, a teacher saw I had entered the lunchroom by the wrong door and demanded I go back out and come in through the right door. So I dropped out.

Really, under the circumstances what choice did I have?

(Aside to younger readers:  no, this is not a rationale for you dropping out.  About one out of every 50 people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge actually survives but this does not mean jumping off a bridge is a good idea.  Also:  do not hitchhike. Again, just because one idiot gets away with it that doesn’t mean the next one will. )

In any case, I dropped out.  Later I went on to drop out of junior college, and then university.  So it’s not like being a high school drop-out limited my dropping out career.  Before I went on to bail on San Francisco State University, I got my first job.  I wanted to run off to Europe and I needed money so I got a job at age 16. Toys “R” Us.  Stock clerk.  I worked the doll aisle.  Barbie, Cabbage Patch and Baby Go Bye-Bye.  $1.60 an hour but I worked basically every shift, so it added up.

I liked working because working made sense.  School and home always felt irrational to me, while the workplace made sense.  I showed up, put on my red and white Toys “R” Us uniform and worked.  Then, they would give me money.  I liked that formula.  Still do. I show up, I work as hard as I can, and someone pays me.  (I did eventually earn enough to take myself and a cashier named Connie off to Europe for three months.  I was 17 by then.  Connie dumped me, I ran out of money, my stuff was all stolen, I spent a week sleeping under a bridge in Germany and I came back to the US with nothing but a jar of peanut butter and a copy of Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke.  Best trip ever.)

I’ve worked pretty much full-time since I was 16.  That’s not a complaint, it’s a brag.

My work has changed over the years — stock clerk, painter, library clerk, law librarian, restaurant manager, antiques shopper, temp, waiter, apartment manager, editorial cartoonist (say what?) hotel night manager, janitor, restaurant reviewer, political media consultant, documentary film maker, writer — still today, some thirty-eight years after I got my first job, happiness is a day where I get my work done.  

7 1/2 pages.  I can live with that.  Decent day.

I did something kind of cool with my Dutch publisher Unieboek a couple weeks go.  We did a Skype interview.

For those who don’t know what Skype is, (Don’t pretend, okay: I can see that Sarah Palin look in your eyes,) it is a service or software . . . okay a service and a software . . . that allow you to communicate by picture phone.

Fine, clearly I don’t really know what it is, either, but I know this: I can use it to hook up by two-way video link with anyone similarly equipped. (Yes, that last is really an unfortunate sentence, isn’t it? Editors? A little help.?) Through my computer.

I get the account name of another Skype person. (Or, Skypester.) I click on their name. A window opens on my computer. They answer, and lo! Their picture appears to me, as mine does to them. And we see each other. In real time. Plus or minus three seconds.

This is almost always a better deal for me than it is for them.

They ask questions, and I answer. Cost? About $1.50 for an hour-long link from here in Tuscany to Amsterdam. It’s the closest thing to free.

My question is this: why aren’t authors using this technology to do school visits? An author could “appear” at any reasonably tech-savvy school in the world. No travel time or expense. Instead of school getting nailed with a per diem and travel expenses they could shell out a fraction of the cost, while the author would still make a nice shiny dime and not lose a day flying or driving.

Granted, a video appearance isn’t as cool as an actual physical manifestation, but from the author’s or publicist’s point of view it could yield ten times the number of appearances.

Minuses: 1) Not as cool for the kids as watching an actual, world-famous author fidgeting and surreptitiously adjusting his uncomfortable underwear onstage. 2) Makes it harder for teachers to sneak out and grab a smoke while the author drones on. 3) The tech can always go wrong — internet down or too slow, or computer malfunctions. 4) Kind of hard to sign books.

Pluses: 1) No hotel bill, no air fare, no mini-bar bill. (Wait a minute: don’t get ideas, here, Alistair, this is all purely theoretical.) 2) Far greater potential coverage. 3) The author can use the webcam to show kids around his office or home. “Here’s where I work, kids! And here’s my favorite place to break down sobbing over my Amazon number!”

Maybe people are already doing this in large numbers. If not, why not?

It’s not always on the list of requirements for submissions to publishers, more often they want to see the first three chapters and synopsis, but if you want a tool that will support your story long term- then a summary has to be it.

For each chapter, write a two sentence main event, it’s not always true but if you can’t write a two sentence main event for the chapter then it might have too much going on (or worse – too little). The first sentence should be a set up, “The main character arrives in a new town but as night falls she realises she is alone.” The second sentence should be a climactic note, “The character is attacked by bandits and escapes into the desert.”

That done, write a 500 word description of the entire chapter. You can also summarise number of pages and word count per chapter.

It’s such a revealing process! You might immediately notice that three of your chapters are twice the size of the others and need to be split up or edited down.

You’ll see potential edits and redrafts easier than you would by just reading and rereading the same chapter. If you find yourself summarising as follows; “There are two pages of description of their journey.” or “For three paragraphs the main character talks in detail about an irrelevant hobby.” then you might want to change them.

Be strict with yourself, and keep to a 500 word limit per chapter. This process of carefully editing your summary down to the absolute minimum is, of course, a scaled down process of what you should try to do with the full size chapter, but it’s much easier to manage on a small scale. Once you’ve nailed the 500 words, go back to your original chapter and see what you think of it.

In addition, should you get feedback on your manuscript, or if an editor suggests changes you’ll be more able to make them quickly. Rather than having to sort through the story as a whole you can look at your chapter summaries and make concise changes there, which you’ll then find easier to write back into the main text.

The magical beauty of summaries doesn’t stop there- no! If you’re writing series fiction you can have 500 word book summaries. If you apply this process to someone else’s work you get a review, and If you want a fantastic example of this you should look at John Crace’s Digested Read in the Guardian newspaper. Here he is on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Two sentence summary of this post:

“Writing a summary of your work will quickly reveal important changes you hadn’t seen before.”

Oh- just one sentence. Perhaps the post wasn’t interesting enough?

For a prize, who can summarise it in the least words?

Total words (not including post heading): 500

I work in marketing and publicity for Egmont UK (there’s an Egmont US now too). We’re the UK publishers of Gone, and were invited to blog by Michael- Thanks!

I’ve just come back from the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature where we had a number of authors. Basically I’m the person that has to tell people like Meg Cabot (see her post below) to get off their couch and go and promote their work!

I understand what she’s saying, one of the authors we dragged along kept complaining that she could have been at home finishing her next book instead of promoting her last one. But I was unrepentant and kept her chained to the signing desk for 2 long hours, without water. I’m hoping to get some electrodes together for my next tour  - that’ll keep them in line.

Actually the real benefit of touring is that the kids get really excited about seeing authors talk. One child who was listening to Andy Stanton talk laughed so much he threw up and had to be removed – awesome. Another group watched enthralled as Jackie Morris painted an alternative book cover live in front of them.

Moments like that make festivals and tours really special places to be.

For those of you who are out of the know, Sept. 27-Oct. 4, 2008 is Banned Books Week. A few interesting factoids: it’s been observed since 1982, and “is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, American Library Association, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of American Publishers, National Association of College Stores, and is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.” (Whew, that’s a mouthful, I had to copy and paste that!)

I think it’s just outrageous that people could ban books in the first place. I mean, isn’t that in a way a restriction of free speech? (sort of?) If people can publish anything they want than shouldn’t they be able to read whatever they want? Doesn’t it work both ways? I think it should.

Books get challenged for all sorts of things these days: sexual content, drugs, offensive language, homosexuality, religion, racism, and for being “unsuited to age group” whatever that means. Do adults really think that teens aren’t aware of all of these? Because, believe me, we most definitely are. Reading about racism or gay people isn’t going to spontaneously prompt a teen to become a racist gay. In fact, all reading about these topics does is expose us to these matters, something that is extremely important. And, most of the time, these books promote tolerance. The other things like sex, drugs, religion are just parts of everyday life whether prudish and extremely strict adults want to believe it or not.

In a way, banning books is kind of a sad tradition. Just because you don’t agree with something doesn’t mean you have to stop other people from being exposed to it.

____________________________________________________

Other exciting news (on a happier topic!!)

My review of The Midnight Twins has been published in Reuters!!! You can see it here:

http://www.reuters.com/article/blogBurst/entertainment?bbPostId=CzAIQvvUp5TemBAbNOHE7N2nRCz7EdlIXZH4EJCzDZe7hWWWAhX

Greetings readers of Stupid Blog Name! I was so excited when Michael and Katherine asked me to be part of this blog because of course I’m a HUGE fan of the Making Out series, and I was always hugely jealous of Animorphs because it was such a genius idea.

I haven’t read Gone yet but I’m insanely jealous of it too because I had an idea I thought was sort of like it and I was worried if I wrote it Michael would think I was copying him, until Michael assured me (when I explained my idea to him) that it was differentish enough (from what Michael told me about the Gone sequels, we’re headed in very different directions—his sound outrageously good, whereas mine are just…well, insane).

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying reading the blog but haven’t been able to contribute much because right now I’m on a book tour to promote the UK releases of some titles of mine (Airhead and Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls).

Book tours sound super fun to people who’ve never been on one but of course when you’re actually on one they’re almost the most hideous things on earth, possibly not as bad as having your fingers pulled out of their sockets by Jack Bauer on 24, but depending on the time of day when you’re asked, then they’re about even. I think it’s because you spend so much time as a writer just sitting around writing…or staring into space. Or watching Judge Judy.

And then suddenly someone says, “You can’t do any of these things anymore. You have to get up by this certain time and look nice and be here by this time and speak in front of 500 people and then go on television and then go on the radio and then be at this party with all these people you don’t know until midnight and then wake up at six the next morning and then get on a plane and do it all over again in a new city and you can’t go back to your normal life until this date,” and it’s really…well, startling is one word for it.

I went to the State Department website once to see what to do if I’m ever kidnapped in a foreign nation and what it described was a LOT like being on book tour. Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.

When I was first starting out as an author I longed to be sent out on book tours. I longed to be put up in fancy hotels and be waited on hand and foot, to have intellectual chats with reporters about my books.

And yet somehow this never transpired. The fancy hotels do, occasionally, but I rarely get to spend more than a few hours in them, always sleeping, and the reporters and I almost never have time for tea. They’re too busy running off to get their next scoop and I’m too busy running out to get to the airport.

I used to be disappointed when I’d have a book out and there’d be no tour set up to promote it. Now when I have a book out and I find out there’s no tour I’m super relieved.

I realize it’s fantastic when you’re publisher even gives you a book tour. Most authors don’t get one , unless they pay for it themselves. I’ll admit, without a book tour it’s very difficult to crack the bestseller lists these days unless you’re a Big Name Author.

But there must be an easier way to sell books!

Anyway, I have to go to bed now. Not that I have any pajamas to wear or a toothbrush because my suitcase didn’t make it here to South Africa from Sweden. Maybe it will catch up to me tomorrow, before I leave for Hong Kong.

Who knows?

More later.

Meg

This is a video I made at the request of my British publisher, Egmont.

So far we’ve had eight contributing bloggers.  Thanks to all.  More bloggers are on the way.  (Think cavalry, but wearing bathrobes.)  We hope soon to have several new posts per day, every day.  

The tweaking of the site will continue until we have it running just the way we like it.  We’re starting to put ads up on the right side-bar for our contributors.  We’re playing around with the blogroll.  And soon we’ll start actually promoting the site with Google ads, and by reaching out to other blogs, and by sending out bulletins on Facebook and MySpace.  Readers can already subscribe to Stupid Blog Name on Twitter and RSS.

Our goal is total world domination.  We don’t know why.  We just think it might be fun.

The label “science fiction” on a teen book usually translates as “soon-to-be failure.” Not always, no. For every dozen science fiction novels that bomb in the teen section, there are a few that by dint of smart packaging or awards attention succeed fantastically. (Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, which is packaged in such a way that it is about our own fascination with looks over brains; M.T. Anderson’s Feed, which is deservedly acclaimed and did well thanks to prizes and review attention; Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which simply kicks mighty ass—exceptions are easy to call to mind. But beside the point.) The biggest teen science fiction novel ever, Ender’s Game, was published as an adult book and then republished as a children’s novel (with a risible cover that makes it look dorky as all get-out).

But for the most part, those teen readers who cotton to science fiction? They’ve abandoned the teen section. They’ll never find, say, the Mortal Engines quartet by Philip Reeve, which they would love. They’ll never stumble across Westerfeld’s excellent dystopias, because they wouldn’t recognize it as science fiction, anyway. That’s because publishers, recognizing that that boy audience no longer browses the teen shelves, target their science fiction to girls. Those teen novels about not-so brave new worlds these days look like the strongest sellers in the genre: chick lit.

My read of the market comes from a hopelessly biased place: my own memory of how I grew as a reader. When I was a kid, I made the shift from books for middle graders to books for “adults” via the shelves of the science fiction and fantasy section. Teen wasn’t much of a category yet back then, and aside from S. E. Hinton and crap like Go Ask Alice, there weren’t clear books for teenage readers.

But science fiction and fantasy? Seeing as this genre (in general) avoids the messiness of sex and psychological complexities; seeing as it privileges idea over emotion, plot over character, specificity over ambiguity; seeing how it is typically focused on figuring out what it means to be a person—the core dilemma for any teen—these books were perfect for the eleven-year-old I was. The novels and stories of Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison—they demanded more of me as a reader, without demanding too much. There was still a story that moved like a runaway train, yes, still lots of action and event; I hadn’t yet developed the patience to deal with, say, Philip Roth. Before I got there, though, I’d read Le Guin and Ellison and Disch and Russ and, in the process, become a stronger reader.

I believe a certain readership still matures the same way. Seems natural, especially for boys. Which means most teen science fiction is doomed, unless it’s disguised as something else that appeals to the remaining readers, who tend to be teen girls. Hence the treatment of the Westerfeld series, hence the treatment of Michael Grant’s Gone. When the target readership goes elsewhere, you’ve got to package your book as the thing that is selling.

But what this does is to make it still more difficult to publish science fiction for teen readers. It has become a self-reinforcing feedback loop that has left it near impossible to get a publisher behind a science fiction novel in the teen section. Never mind that this age group loves this genre. Those kids are not going to recognize the books that are published for them. And they’ll keep going to the genre section, where they’re sure to find those books that look like exactly what they want.

So, my name is Sabrina, I’m a Leo, and I like long walks on the beach. Actually, I really do like long walks on the beach, especially early in the morning.

But mostly I like reading (and attempting to write) teen lit. Here’s the problem I’ve encountered, though: In one day, I can go through three books. Seriously. Three. And then, by the time the pub date rolls around, I’ve read about sixty billion other books, and I can’t remember what happened in, for example, Losers by Matthue Roth. (Which is a really great read, and I got to do an interview with Matthue, and it’ll be posted on the site on Oct. 1 if I can remember what the book was about. Zombies? Werewolves? A Russian kid in Philadelphia? I think it’s probably the last one.)

Now, a smart, organized person would write up reviews immediately after reading each book. And then she’d put them all in a queue, to be automagically posted on the release date. But such a person would also probably do her laundry on a semi-regular basis, before the only thing left in her closet is the fancy dress she bought for black tie weddings. Alas, I am not such a person.

Which means that I need Justine Larbalestier to give me an organization fairy. Or an intern slave who will do all the organizing for me. How does one get intern slaves, anyway? Suggestions, anyone?

First off I think I’ll address my tardiness. Needless to say I’m a little…. intimidated, but at the same time so ecstatic to be included in the ranks of the Stupid Blog Name! I’m not a writer, nor do I pretend to be one. So it’s taken some me some time to build up the courage I needed to initiate my first post.

As far as introductions, I’m The Story Siren. I started a book review blog of the same name in November of 2007. So that in essence is why I’m here. I review books, well I read books and then I try to review them. Although I’m technically an adult, as The Book Muncher mentioned in her post she is the *only* teen contributor, I continue to love and read the YA genre that I should have grown out of. I have a feeling I will continue to love it and will most likely become the creepy old lady at Barnes and Noble that heads straight to the YA section.

On a more personal note: I’m a graduate of Indiana University, I’m newly married, I enjoy long walks on the beach and drinks with little umbrellas. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Let’s talk a little bit more about my reading habits. I’m a fantasy junkie, but I’ll read just about anything. My favorites so far for 2008:

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

Lament: A Faerie Queen’s Deceptionby Maggie Stiefvater

Gone by Michael Grant

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Faefever by Karen Marie Moning

Sisters of Misery by Megan Kelley Hall

City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare

Queen of Babble Gets Hitched by Meg Cabot

Of course this list will continue to grow with the few remaining months of 2008.

You now know a little bit about me and some of the books I like, and that’s all you’re going to get for today.

Until next time, happy reading.

Hi, I’m Jake Mates, web designer and Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate’s 11 year old son. After trying out so many note-taking and text editing applications for my iPhone 3G, I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison of them.  Text editors are incredibly important to writers. (Note: Article contains 6 MB of images)

I chose six apps:

WritingPad (Free, ShapeWriter)

WriteRoom ($4.99, Hog Bay Software)

TextGuru ($4.99, Brancipater Software)

Notes (comes pre-installed with iPhone)

noteskinery ($4.99, iridianSTUDIO)

MagicPad ($3.99, Proximi)

Let’s start with WritingPad.

WritingPad

When you open WritingPad up it displays all of your saved notes.

Pressing the plus icon creates a new note. The UI looks horrible compared to what iPhone apps “should” look like, and the badly redesigned keyboard interface looks bad next to Apple’s design.

(Left Apple’s keyboard. Right: WritingPad’s keyboard.)

What sets WritingPad apart from all other note-taking apps is how you enter text. You swipe your finger across the letters that make up the word you want, and WritingPad guess what word it is. You can also type normally if you want to.

Just in case it guesses incorrectly, WritingPad shows you other possible words that you can choose from.

If you type in a word WritingPad doesn’t know, it will ask you if you want to add the word to WritingPad’s built-in dictionary.

Once you’re done with your note, you can email it or delete it. Unlike some of the other apps, WritingPad has no way to transfer files from your computer.

WriteRoom

Next is WriteRoom.

Upon launching WriteRoom, you are greeted with a simple, clean, no distractions interface.

WriteRoom allows you to type in landscape mode, giving you a larger keyboard that is easier to type on.

WriteRoom has no real exciting features besides the simple interface and file sharing.

File sharing is incredibly useful. Pressing the button in the upper left will share your files using Bonjour. Do not turn this on if you have any sensitive files in WriteRoom, as this will allow anyone on your network to acsess them.

In Safari, click on the boomarks icon and select Bonjour. Then double-click on “WriteRoom Documents on (name)’s iPhone”.

This will open up a screen like this.

Selecting a document will bring you to a screen like this where you can edit your document or just copy and paste the text into your favorite text editor.

TextGuru

TextGuru is next.

Opening TextGuru will display all of your documents.

Pressing the “New” button will give you three options: to create a new file, download from Pastie, or to recover AutoSaved text.

Choosing to create a new file gives you a simple text editing window.

TextGuru also works in landscape mode.

One very useful feature is TextGuru’s advanced searching options, including he very useful search and replace.

You can also view a web preview - very useful for web designers like myself.

When you are ready to save, TextGuru offers tons of file types: plain text file (.txt), HTML (.html), PHP file (.php), JavaScript file (.js), C source file (.c), C header file (.h), Objective-C class (.m), binary file (.bin), or any other custom file type you know.

TextGuru also warns you if a file with the same name already exists.

You can also view the file size, submit it to various sites, email it, and more.

TextGuru has extensive documentation and help that you can view buy pressing the help button in the upper left.

One of TextGuru’s best features is the file sharing application. You can download it here for Mac and Windows.

When you open the application, a T will appear in your menu bar.

Clicking on the T will reveal a drop down menu.

Click on “Browse File Share…” to open a window. Drop any files you want to transfer to TextGuru in this window.

Now switch to your iPhone and go to File Shares.

Select “TextGuru FileServer”. You can now select any document to download it you your iPhone for editing.

If you want to transfer files from TextGuru to your computer, go into preferences and turn on file sharing.

Typing this address in on your computer will display this screen.

You can now download any document in the format you chose on the iPhone.

Notes

I am including the built-in Notes app just to see how it stands up to the rest.

When you launch Notes it shows you all of your notes with a “New” button in the upper left corner.

Once you compose your note, all Notes can do is email or delete it, making Notes the obvious worst choice of the six.

noteskinery

Second to last is noteskinery (previously called moleskinery).

In moleskinery, everything is organized in folders. When you launch moleskinery, you have to press edit to create a new folder.

You then type in the name and an optional description for the folder.

Pressing a folder will show you an overview of its contents; right now nothing.

Tapping the folder allows you to change the folder icon.

Each folder can contain folders or notes.

Notes are represented by Moleskine icons.

To edit a note, tap the edit button.

After you are done, tapping the “i” will show you the word and character count.

At the main screen, tapping the first icon at the bottom will allow you to backup your documents to Google Spreadsheet.

Tapping the second icon at the bottom will allow you to restore from any backup you have made.

MagicPad

Finally is MagicPad.

When you open MagicPad it shows you all of your saved notes.

The editing screen has a bar above the keyboard that allows you to change four options: font, size, color, and to add italicizing, bolding, underlining, and striking through. The last button allows you to copy and paste text.

There are six fonts available: Marker Felt, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Courier New, Zapfino, and American Typewriter.

There are five font sizes available: 14 pt, 16 pt, 24 pt, 30 pt, and 36 pt.

There are eight colors available: orange, blue, purple, gray, green, pink, red, and black.

Four text styles are available: italics (oblique), bold, underline, and strikethrough.

One of the best features of MagicPad is the ability to cut, copy, and paste text not just within the same note, but all notes within MagicPad.

The fact that to email a document you need to answer a CAPTCHA is really annoying.

Your documents arrive on your computer with all formatting intact.

Recommendation

In my opinion, I find TextGuru and MagicPad to be the best. TextGuru is the better choice for programmers and web designers, with it’s many file types and web preview feature. MagicPad is best for the average user, with it’s extensive formatting options. However, WriteRoom is better for anyone who needs to transport files back and forth between computer and iPhone. Noteskinery is best for anyone using the GTD methodology. WritingPad is best for anyone who needs to type in documents very quickly. But I strongly recommend TextGuru and MagicPad. I think that WriteRoom and TextGuru are the two best apps for writers, as you can easily transfer documents from your computer to your iPhone and vice versa.

Here in Italy the kind of advanced technology that allows Americans to seal their garbage bags by pulling on a space-age device called a “drawstring” is unknown.  Trash bags here come with a sort of filament.  A long and exceedingly fragile plastic thread that is in no way capable of actually sealing the bag against the sorts of super-pressures built up by American waste production habits.

There’s a five stage process involved in properly sealing the Italian garbage bag:

1) Stall until garbage is spilling over the top.

2) Lift garbage bag up while producing old man grunts.

3) Attempt to use the filament despite the failure of the previous 912 attempts.

4) Find the duct tape, curse Italians for their refusal to do the hard work necessary to produce state-of-the-art bag-sealing technology, the children for creating trash, the wife for creating children, the numbness in my left thumb caused by stabbing myself with a knife opening a Nerf pistol two years ago resulting in a degree of clumsiness in tearing off duct tape, and George W. Bush because why not?

5) Drop the stupid string on the floor where it will be eaten by the cat.

So we go on vacation for a week — if by vacation you mean driving around France screaming “goshdarn it, if you two scamps don’t pipe down I could have a serious accident and then I will be very disappointed in you.*”

And we come home to Florence.  Okay, Pelago.  Which yes, does sound like a skin disaease.  We drive over to see the Cat Lady.  She’s British, lives up the side of a mountain that would daunt Granny Clampett, and we pick up Lightning the kitty.  Take Lightning home and it seems Lightning isn’t acting like her usual self.  In this case, howling much of the night causing me to cry out, “Oh, please, kitty, won’t you cease disturbing my well-earned repose?**”

This morning we discover that Lightning has a garbage bag string hanging out of her butt.  Which quite frankly took some of the steam out of my irritation.  Under similar circumstances I doubt I’d curl up in a  ball and go to sleep, either.

There’s a vet right at the bottom of our hill but Katherine made an appointment with her regular vet who is much better.  He’s more expensive, further away, slow and inconvenient.  But purely by coincidence he is the handsomest vet ever.  If you like young, swarthy, five o’clock shadowed with great hair, dreamy eyes and the cutest accent.  

Katherine and The Girl spend two hours discussing butt string with Dottore McSogno.  The Boy and I sit in the car playing Quordy on our iPhones.  

Lightning is home and doing better.  If by “better” you mean producing vast piles of diarrhea so toxic that I’m thinking of sleeping in the office.  Katherine and The Girl are digging through the piles of poo looking for string.  They’re going to measure the string, add it up.  

It’s a kind of home school math project.   

*translation:  ”G—– it you little —–, if you don’t —- —- —- — I’ll —– —- and ——-on a —– killing spree!”

**translation:  ”G—– it you —— cat I am going to —– —— and ——- —- cat cassoulet!”

A couple of years ago my book club read Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen’s tale of an old-time traveling circus.  At the club meeting, people kept gushing about the big plot twist at the end. I enjoyed the book but had found the story arc rather predictable.  I had no idea what big twist everyone was talking about. 

They said, “You know — how so-and-so killed such-and-such.” 

I replied, “That wasn’t a twist.  It said it in the first chapter.”    

We all flipped through our copies, and sure enough, Gruen did not reveal the killer’s identity until the end.  Unless you’re a writer — in which case the suspense was over by page six.

It wasn’t always this way.  I was one of those kids whose parents urge her to stop reading so much:  Go outside!  Call someone!  Do something!  Just get off the couch!  They were wasting their breath.  Reality couldn’t compete with literature.  When I read, time stopped and the world around me disappeared.

Studies show that when musicians listen to music, they use a different part of their brains than “regular people.”  I’m starting to wonder if the same thing is true for writers and literature.  I find it much harder to get lost in a book than before I started writing novels.  The more I write (I’m on my sixth book), the worse it gets.  I see the structure under the story; I mentally edit awkward prose; I monitor transitions.  It’s like I’ve seen the man behind the curtain, and I can no longer believe in Oz.  Or – I can no longer see the forest for the trees.  Or – [insert your own hackneyed metaphor here].

I still love to read.  I still come across books that suck me in, but I am more apt to admire the craftsmanship than be truly drawn into an alternate universe.

The gunman came out of the bushes as I rounded the corner and pressed the muzzle of a silver-plated .38 automatic against my forehead. “Give me your money,” he said, “and we won’t have a problem.”

“Dude,” I said, “here’s my wallet.”

As he thumbed it open with his left hand I said, “But there’s no money in it” at the same time as he said, “There’s no money in here!”

“Right,” I said.

“You’ve got an ATM card,” he said. “So we’re going for a ride.” I offered to tell him the code, but he said, “That ain’t gonna work. Come on. You’re driving.”

Later, my girlfriend would ask why I didn’t run away, why I didn’t scream, “Yaaah!” get people’s attention. I mentioned the whole gun-to-the-head thing, and she told me that I should have just let him shoot me, that I had a better chance of survival that way. She’d been a police dispatcher and knew all sorts of frightening statistics about what happened to people who got into cars with strangers and guns. But I was tired—I’d been teaching all day and night—so what I said was, “Sure. I can do that.”

He politely waited while I manhandled my bookbag into the back seat and unlocked the door, and then we were off.

Now, it was a short drive to the bank, but there were lots of stop signs, so he and I, we had some quality time together. “You know,” I said, “I don’t really have any money in the bank, either.”

“You gotta have some money.”

“I’ve got, like, sixteen bucks,” I said. “I’m a graduate student, man. I only get paid once a month. Next week, I’d be flush. This week, I’m eating spaghetti.”

“No way,” he said, “you’re lying.”

We drove in silence for a moment, but typically for me, I just couldn’t shut up. “It isn’t like I don’t want to give you my money,” I said. “If you need the cash that badly, I’m happy to give it to you—I’ve got a couple of brothers in prison, and man, if I could have given them money when they needed it, I would have.”

“You’ve got brothers in prison?” He didn’t believe me, I could tell, but when I glanced over at him, he was turned toward me, listening. I had him.

“My oldest brother, Jack—he robbed a few banks. Something like a half-dozen before they caught him. But you know, he was homeless, and, like, a junkie at the time, and it was something he could do. So he wrote notes and gave him to bank tellers and looked all menacing, and they gave him money. He’s done five years already.”

My mugger shook his head, whistled.

“And my other brother, Robert, is this con man guy who’s been on Hard Copy like four or five times.”

“Bullshit,” he said. And laughed. “For what?”

“They call him the Rock-and-Roll Heartbreaker,” I said, and quickly sketched out one of his favorite scams involving him pretending to be a member of Metallica, and limousines, and test-driving motorcycles for three days.

By the time I finished, we were turning into the bank parking lot, and my mugger was laughing and saying, “No shit!” again and again and slapping his legs with the side of his pistol. “Oh, man, that’s awesome,” he said, and then he was all business again. “So, yeah, okay, go get the money.”

I went to the ATM and my mugger slid up alongside, hugging the wall like Spider-man. I took out ten dollars, the most I could remove from my account. My balance was now $6.38.

“Ten bucks? That’s it?”

He reached around to punch the buttons on the ATM. No savings account. No money market. No linked accounts. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

“Aw, shit. Here.” He handed my money back.

“No, man, keep the money,” I said, and meant it. “Maybe it will get you through tonight and then something better will come along tomorrow.”

“No, seriously,” he said, shoving it at me. “I don’t want to take your money.”

“No, really. Go ahead. It’s not a big deal.”

“Look, I’m not going to rob you over ten fucking dollars! You need it more than I do!”

“All right,” I said, and I pocketed the ten.

He gestured at the car. “How about you just . . . give me a ride back to where we started?”

At this point, someone began crossing the parking lot toward the ATM. He was an African-American man in his forties, in a suit, his tie loose, probably married with kids, stopping to grab some cash before morning. Probably had more in his account than I did, but my mugger wasn’t thinking that way. He turned to the man, held up the pistol, and yelled, “There is nothing here that concerns you! Get the fuck away!”
The guy paused mid-step, nodded a few times and, raising his hands up palm out, walked backwards out of the parking lot.

Well, that kind of freaked me out a bit, but all I said was, “A ride? Sure. I can do that.”

On the drive back, I told him more about my brothers, about how one was getting out in three months with training in heating, ventilation, and—

“Air conditioning!” he spat out. “Everyone gets that crappy training. But no one on the outside wants to trust a felon.” He started in on all the ways people mistreated him, judged him for being a bad guy just because he’d been to prison. He told me he’d been unable to find a job, that his grandma thought he was a slacker and so had kicked him out.

To all of this, I just made nice little listening sounds. You know, appreciative crap like, “Man, that sucks.” And, “That’s just totally unfair.” And whatever else came to mind. I don’t know what I was talking about.
About halfway back, he said, “You know, you’re okay people.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s James,” he said.

So I told him my name and we shook, and by the time we got back to my apartment, he’d become my new best friend.

“Sorry about all this,” he said, “But I didn’t rob you.”

“I know,” I said. “And I appreciate that.”

“I’m just kind of having a hard time right now.”

“Man,” I said, “so is everyone. No harm done. I’ve got my money. All we did was go for a ride.”

“That’s right,” he said. “So there’s no reason to call the cops.”

“More trouble than it’s worth,” I reassured him.

Then he reached out to shake my hand again, and when I took his hand he did something unexpected: He pulled me forward into a hug, and wrapped his arm around my shoulders in a quick tight embrace. “Thanks, man,” he said, all husky voiced. “This means a lot to me. It’s going to be okay.”

“It is going to be okay,” I told him, and I squeezed him back, and before I knew it, habit had taken over, and I was telling him, “Thank you, thanks a lot.”

What are we doing now?  Negotiating.  More on that when we are further down the road.

Today I spoke with a guy I know who is very hooked up in online media.  I  now know the future of advertising.  But I can’t tell anyone.  Seriously:  I had to swear, and they’re sending me a non-disclosure.  Let me just say this:  I came up with this five years ago.  Of course I didn’t you know, create actual software or anything.  I was probably busy.  Probably something involving food.  I think that’s it:  I was busy making toast.

A little about myself for those of you who don’t personally know me (which I’m sure is most of you). I’m a book reviewer and a passionate reader, especially when it comes to YA. I am a teen somewhere between the ages of 14 and 18 (feel free to guess). I’m in a lot of tough classes in school (some college level) which assign a LOT of homework, so it’s a wonder I still have time to keep up my book blogging.

I am also the *only* teen contributor to Stupid Name Blog. I find this fact supremely awesome, and I probably won’t even be able to get over it (or myself for that matter).

What is “Book Squee” you ask? Well, it is my recent enthusiasm over an ah-mazing book I just read. It’s called Wherever Nina Lies and it’s by a promising debut author Lynn Weingarten. I was so psyched to get an ARC (it’s being released in February ‘09, I think) and even more thrilled when the story outlived my expectations.

In fact, you can even read my review on Amazon (it’s not up on my blog yet):

“It’s been two long years since Ellie’s older sister Nina has disappeared. Pretty much everyone has given up any hope that Nina will return, but not Ellie. Ellie can’t bear to think Nina, her sister whom she loves and idolizes, could be dead. Ellie desperately wants to find Nina, and when she stumbles upon a portrait of her, drawn by Nina, she’s certain she’s found her clue. With the help of a hot and mysterious stranger named Sean, Ellie sets off on a seemingly wild-goose chase for the whereabouts of her sister. But Ellie isn’t prepared for what she learns along the way, regarding her sister and her new love interest Sean. In this suspenseful and fast-paced debut, readers will be swept along with Ellie as she journeys and finds love, lies, and the strength of sisterhood.

Read the rest of the review here.”

Sounds good, huh? I thought it did

Anyway, that’s all for now!

 

Nice, France. Haven't been since I was 16 and staying at a youth hostel up that hill. Kind of still like it.

 

We stopped in Carcassonne, the coolest medieval walled city ever. Had to drive in and out to reach the hotel. This is driving out behind a truck. Tight? Yeah. And we drove over a drawbridge.

 

Fouras, France. I lived here when I was 9 and 10. Fort Vauban in the background. Wife in foreground. I tried my first cigarette in the moat of that fort.

Note: We seem to have developed a glitch in which I post as Carol Snow. Hmmm. Tech is working on it.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t written as many books as Michael and Katherine (has anyone?) but I don’t get to live in Italy.  I live in Orange County, California.  Oh, yeah, everyone’s heard about “The OC.”  Only, I don’t live in that part of the county – you know, near the ocean where the beautiful people live.  I live inland, where the Targets sprout like dandelions.  There are four Targets within ten minutes of my house.  Three of them are Super Targets.  I never, ever run out of paper towels.

Okay, I do sometimes. 

But the point is (hey, wait – do I have to have a point in a blog?  Oh, what the heck –) that you can write anywhere.  It’s the ultimate flexible job.  But the writing life doesn’t mean you get a free pass to live where ever you want – unless you’re married to Michael or Katherine.  And they’re already taken.

How do you say “paper towels” in Italian, anyway?

We love comments and encourage same. They will be “moderated” so there can be a delay before they appear.

Update: This has been fixed.

We sold ANIMORPHS over-the-transom, un-agented. We just wrote Jean Feiwel a letter and mailed her some books. I sold GONE over-the-transom, though I brought in my publishing lawyer to handle the negotiation. Of the 150 or so books Katherine and I have jointly or severally written, agents have made only a slight contribution. Although we’ve managed to contribute quite a bit to agents.

I’m not dissing agents as a group. No, wait, I guess I’m not dissing them as individuals. As a group I’m plotting their demise:

1) In my experience agents are less likely to know what the publishers want than the editors are.

2) Logically, therefore, the editors should be reading the slush pile. But . . .

3) . . . can’t, because we’re talking roughly nine billion submissions per week.

4) Publishers outsource the slush pile to the agents . . .

5) . . . who are paid by published authors. Thus neatly shifting the cost of the slush pile off the publisher’s balance sheet and onto mine. Well, mine and many others.

6) Unpublished authors get a free ride financially, but are reduced to groveling, weeping, sycophancy, the desperate reading of tea leaves and eventually, if they have any pride at all, a serious drinking problem.

My proposal? Publishers charge $50 to read a submission. Here’s what that does:

1) Eliminates people who don’t really want to be writers but figure “What the hell, I’ll give it a try.” These are the people who clog the system resulting in the current blockage. Am I picking on these people? No. But figure ten submissions at $50 each which, according to my always shaky grasp of mathematics, comes to $500. You want a career in writing, you want to be Stephen King, but you won’t beg, borrow or steal $500? Then don’t waste everyone’s time. You’d spend that much on job interview clothes.

2) Turns the slush pile into a profit-generator for the publisher. Why is this a good thing? Is it because I think Rupert needs still more money? No. By making the slush pile profitable it ensures a vastly-improved degree of efficiency. Response letters would fly out the door. Let’s say a hardy young editor can burn through just a dozen submissions a day. That’s $600 a day, $3000 a week, 156k a year. Real numbers would probably be quite a bit higher.

3) This new system would allow a direct feedback loop from senior editors to the editorial grunts, which would be more efficient (and involve fewer business lunches and less butt-kissing) than the current agent-editor system.

The part of the agent’s job that involves negotiating the deal can be handled by a publishing lawyer for a flat rate. 300 to 500 an hour, which seems like a lot, (because it is) but is less than 15% in perpetuity, which is what an agent takes.

The $50 proposal cuts the number of submissions, makes the process infinitely more efficient, actually placing a premium on speed, and allows serious writers to get their work in front of actual editors. It puts publishers back directly in contact with the people who, after all, provide them with the raw material from which they derive their unholy profits.

Next: I’ll solve that whole Palestinian/Israeli thing.

So, what I’m saying is, yes, you should probably hate us.

Unlike most writers who, let’s face it, live lonely lives without anyone who understands what they’re going through, we are two kid book writers living together. We have the great good fortune to be able to talk about everything. To sympathize together, to rage together, to obsess over Amazon numbers together, to demand to know who the hell gave us two stars on Goodreads together and drove down our average. To joke about how I got two starred reviews while she only got one, or how she wins prizes and I don’t.

Not that we care.

We’re living a kind of magical life. And I just want to share with all of you some of the pleasure we take from each other’s company. This was our evening, after putting our kids to bed:

“You have the Ambien?”

“It’s in the bathroom.”

“Like, where in the bathroom?”

“To the right of the bidet.”

“And by ‘right’ you of course mean ‘left?’”

“Okay, look, do you have the floss hidden somewhere, because I don’t see it.”

“What am I, the keeper of the floss?”

“I gave it to the kids, and then it disappears.”

“Oh. Here it is.”

“Where’s the Advil?”

“Where’s the bourbon?”

“My feet hurt less now that its cold and I’m wearing shoes.”

Most people can only gaze with admiration and perhaps a twinge of jealousy at this kind of literate, witty dialog. Pretty much a Joyce Carol Oates and John Gregory Dunne exchange.

Michael and I have been together for 29 years. We will always be together. (Unless of course he finds out about Paolo.) But because we’ve been married for so long, and because we’ve worked together so often, (we co-wrote ANIMORPHS and MAKING OUT and various other series,) I can say with some authority that Michael is kind of a pain.

I’d tell you where he’s a pain, but this is a YA blog.

So, let me state for the record that whatever offensive thing he writes here, I had nothing to do with it. I am not to blame. I am a good person. Unlike my husband, I do not have Satan on speed dial. I believe in fairness, decency, kindness to strangers, cuddly kittens, bouncy puppies and all things sweet and precious. Lick my hand. What do you taste? That’s right: sugar.

In other words, as I’ve been saying for almost three decades: it’s all his fault. Unless it goes well, in which case it was all my idea.

The Wife and Me: Having Consumed Wine.

Welcome to Stupid Blog Name.  This is the very first post.

There are a lot of great blogs covering YA and kidlit.  I’ll link to them all once we get this thing completely up and running.  But I see this blog going in a slightly different direction.  I want to bring together contributors from all ends of the business — writers, editors, agents, publicists — on the one hand, and some actual, living, breathing kid writers on the other.

I hope to talk about serious things in an unserious way.  But we’ll balance that off by talking about unserious things in an even less serious way.  Occasionally, when there’s simply no other option, we’ll try and have an intelligent discussion.

We’ve already assembled an amazing list of contributors, all chomping (Champing?  One of the editors will tell me.) at the bit, dying for the chance to work for free and pour their hearts and souls into this blog.   And by chomp/champing I of course mean that they’ve all reluctantly agreed to do it as long as it’s not too hard.

Stupid Blog Name is owned and operated by me, Michael Grant, and my wife and frequent co-author, Katherine (K.A.) Applegate. I’ll contribute every now and then.  Katherine will contribute whenever I cajole her into it.

We also have, in no particular order, author Carol Snow; from Firebrand Literaray, agent MIchael Stearns;  from Simon and also Schuster, editor Mark McVeigh; from Books of Wonder in NYC, bookseller Peter Glassman; from Shrinking Violet, Mary and Robin; from the Book Muncher and remaining anonymous the Book Muncher; from Egmont UK Alistair Spalding; and, if I can ever figure out what I did with her email, the Story Siren; and last but not least, Meg Cabot.

I don’t know, I guess she’s some kind of writer or whatever.

So, some housekeeping:  this isn’t an off-the-rack blog design, The Boy built it.  We may have the occasional glitch.  We’ll have links up in those big blank boxes to the right as soon as the various contributors send me some art.  We will put a blogroll up.  We’ll have a big contributors page, detailing the details of our various contributors.

We expect we’ll kind of suck at the start and get gradually better.

Hang in there with us as we work together to inform, amuse, entertain, um. . . did I already say inform?  Hmmm.  Inform, amuse, entertain . . . Oh, and use our assembled might to dominate the world of YA lit, crush our many (many) enemies and destroy all who would oppose us.  Yeah, that was it.