Wonderboy, inquiring about my evening plans: What will you do at twelve o’clock?
(We’ve already covered nine, ten, and eleven o’clock.)
Me: I’ll go to bed, probably.
Rilla (gasps): Twelve o’clock at night?
Me: Yup.
Rilla, incredulous: You mean there are minutes in the night??
• Home of Baggott & Asher & Bode: Glenda Baggott Tries to be a Tiger Grandma.
Her advice going off to grad school was this, “Don’t fall in love with a poet.” (I did so immediately.)
• McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: An Open Letter to Madeleine L’Engle.
Please let me sit at your table in writer heaven, if I make it in. I’ll bring tea—we’ll read Henry Vaughan together, and I’ll catch you up on all the scientific discoveries you missed. I’ll show you where my novel gives a big shout-out to you, Ms. L’Engle.
• Betty Boop decision: Copyright trumps trademark | The Beat.
“This is actually pretty major. In recent years, Warner has used the active trademarks on Looney Tunes characters to quash third parties’ reissues of PD 1930s/40s Looney Tunes content (of which there is a lot). If the Betty decision is not reversed on appeal, then Warner is stripped of its strongest weapon against the public domain. ”
• Swati Avasthi on Getting the Male Voice Right
The power of imagination has been losing value on the stock market of ideas in this post-modern, post James-Frey, reality TV, search-for-credible-information age, where we focus on the writer’s background. We ask, “What standing does the writer have to write their fiction?”
An actor once told me that when he used his imagination to get into his character, he would think of a piano: We all have the same 88 keys. The variations are infinite, but the notes are all the same. You just have to think about what notes this person plays loudest in their lives.
We use our imaginations, our ability to empathize, in order to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown. We find the notes in ourselves that we don’t use and explore them.
• Another Princess Story — Knitting the Wind
She moved into the magician’s castle, and they grew a beautiful garden, and used magic and courage and fiestiness to heal the ills of the kingdom as much as they could, and the princess would say later, in all honesty, that the magician was not handsome, and he had a terrible singing voice, and she’d had to do a lot of work on his communication skills – talk to me, don’t just loom a black cloud over me, for heaven’s sake – but all in all he was thank goodness interesting.
Terrible news.
Gratuitous morning walk photo:
Bet I’m the eleven thousandth person to make that (very weak) joke. Ah well, it’s Friday night after Shakespeare Club and my brain is off duty.
Anyhoo (<–further evidence my thinky parts have packed it in for the night), I’m popping in to say I’ve added a FAQ to my website, replacing the one that used to be part of my Books page. The new one is aimed more at kids, answering the most common questions I get in the mail (both kinds, e and snail), including “Are you related to Laura Ingalls Wilder?” and “Is Loch Caraid a real place?”
The Books page will be changing, too, in the months to come. I have three new books in the works: a beginning reader, a middle-grade novel, and a YA. The first two are written and with their editors now. The YA is in my head still, mostly, but is beginning to fall out onto the page. It’s a stage of writing I enjoy very much (there are stages I don’t like a bit, but they’re usually where the best writing happens), the breathing-in part, that fraught moment just before you begin the long exhale.
Back to the FAQ (just the faq, Lissa, you promised!), if you have any Qs you would like me to A, fire away in the combox.
Just arrived from the library: Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concert series, which aired on CBS from 1958 to 1973. Backed by the New York Philharmonic, playing to a packed house of children in Carnegie Hall, Bernstein conducts and chats his way through the marvels and mysteries of music.
Scott watched this series, bit by bit, years ago in our New York days. He recently discovered our library owns it, so we’ve got plans to immerse ourselves in these DVDs for the next few weeks.
The fun Mr. Bernstein has with the music and the audience reminds me of this wonderful Bobby McFerrin moment, which I think I’ve linked to before.
Moment :43 and the swell of laughter that follows is pure, real, unexpected joy. I’m thinking about it and it’s hard to find examples of a crowd of adults reacting with such spontaneous and childlike delight. It’s like the first time a baby takes up a crayon and makes a streak of color upon the paper or the wall. Magic just happened!
I asked Rilla which book she wanted me to read to her: Interrupting Chicken or A Sick Day for Amos McGee.
She studied them for a moment, then jabbed one with her finger.
“I want An Interrupting Day for Chicken!”
(We read ’em both. Twice. They’re both wonderful books—selected because of the Cybils Shortlist Reading Challenge—both were finalists; Interrupting Chicken took the prize—and also because Amos won the Caldecott medal and Chicken won an Honor. Don’t miss them, even if you must do them one at a time.)
• How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? by Jane Yolen & Mark Teague. From our Rillabooks list. Technically it was Jane who read this one—11 times in a row—to her insistent little sister. That Jane, she’s a keeper.
• How to write a sentence « Farm School. Becky’s back, therefore I bookmark. And my TBR pile grows.
• A Year of Reading: Be Careful What Behaviors You Extinguish.
I let her keep doodling while I read, as a “consolation prize” for all the “incomprehensible English that was washing over her.”
NOT.
From a delightful letter by two sixth-grade girls in Ohio:
“We are collecting autographed pictures of our favorite book people. Mrs. E[.] says people who make books are more fabulous than movie stars. We would go crazy if you sent us one for our author/illustrator ‘Wall of Fame’ we are creating, if it is not too much trouble.”
It most certainly is not too much trouble. I’ll be honored to share space on that wall with other fabulous folks! (And please tell Mrs. E. I really like her outlook.) 😉
• On deck « Farm School. For the TBR pile: The Semi-Attached Couple & The Semi-Detached House. Becky writes: “As the late great Noel Perrin wrote in his blurb on the back, ‘The Semi-Attached Couple is the answer to a good many prayers. It is the book you go on to when you have run out of Jane Austen’s novels.’ ”
• The right way to cook bacon in a pan – Boing Boing.
• Winners of the 2010 Cybils Awards. At School Library Journal: short summaries of all of this year’s winners.
• Stacked: Why the Cybils Matter by Kelly Jensen, with whom it was a pleasure to serve on the 2010 YA fiction first-round panel.
• Mo Willems Doodles: WE ARE IN A BOOK! recieves 2011 CYBIL AWARD! Elephant and Piggie react to the news. 🙂
• Gratuitous morning walk photo:
“It was sure nice to meet that lion.”