Archive for June, 2011
When you comment on a post (here or elsewhere), do you come back later to see if anyone has replied to you?
Do you subscribe to the comment feed? Here, you can sub to the comment thread of each individual post, or to all the comments in general.
Some blogs—I see it most often on Blogger—offer email notification of comments. I seldom subscribe to those, though: it can mean too much mail. I’m more likely to subscribe to the post’s comment feed, if that option exists.
I love this series of posts by comic-book writer and artist Ty Templeton. In the 90s, Scott was Ty’s editor on The Batman Adventures. Ty has been sharing a look at rejected cover sketches for various issues, with commentary about the changes that led to the final, approved covers.
Unseen Batman Gotham Adventures Artwork…Two-Face edition | Ty Templeton’s Art Land.
This particular issue was published after Scott had left to go freelance and the awesome Darren Vincenzo took over as editor of the book. I think it’s very helpful (especially for kids) to see how even a highly skilled professional like Ty goes through many drafts on the way to a final piece.
Incidentally, here’s what Ty had to say about Scott’s contribution to The Batman Adventures and its successor comic, The Gotham Adventures:
I’d argue that Scott is the single most important creator who worked on the book. Besides launching it as editor, and hiring most of the well known talent that participated, Scott’s editorial hand was very present in many of the best issues of the book ( He certainly helped me to be a better writer)…and let’s never forget that Scott scripted more issues of the assembled series than anyone other than your humble blogger. By my count, I wrote (or drew) about fifty-five issues, and Scott wrote about forty-five, including one of the best Catwoman stories ever published by DC. When you add up his two runs (editorial and scripting) he put his hand in about two thirds of the complete run, and is integral to the series’ success.
(Scott’s going to be ticked at me for posting that, but sometimes a wife’s gotta brag on her man.)
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Published by Candlewick.
I think the best way to tell you about I Want My Hat Back is to describe my family’s reaction to it. I was sent a review copy by the publisher (the official pub date is Sept. 27), and I began reading it right out of the package, standing in the living room. A bear has lost his hat, and he wants it back. He asks a fox; the fox hasn’t seen it. He asks a frog; no luck there either. He asks a rabbit—a rabbit who happens to be wearing a pointy red hat.
“No. Why are you asking me,” replies the rabbit. “I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen any hats anywhere. I would not steal a hat. Don’t ask me any more questions.”
By this point I’m laughing out loud and I have to go right away and show the book to the rest of my family. This book is begging to be read aloud by a daddy like Scott.
They’re in the kitchen, Scott and my three older girls, ages ten, twelve, and sixteen. I thrust the book before their faces, you’ve got to read this, and we stand there turning the pages together. At the rabbit’s remarks, the girls burst out laughing. The animals’ deadpan expressions and terse, uninflected dialogue make this exchange viciously funny.
We’re huddled around the book, reading on silently. The bear asks many more animals, with no success, and finally flops down in the grass and stares at the sky. My poor hat. I miss it so much.
And then the bear remembers where he’s seen it. I’m not going to say what happens after that, but it made my daughters shriek with laughter and shock, even the teenager. My husband gasped. I howled. Rilla, when we read it to her later, chortled wickedly.
I don’t think everyone will approve of the ending. I’ve had three-year-olds who would be very upset by the turn of events. Most six-year-olds I’ve known would, I think, embrace it with glee.
Today I tweeted, “I really want to write about a certain book but various children keep spiriting it away from my stack.”
And my husband replied: “I have not seen that book. I would not take that book. I don’t know what a book is. Stop asking me questions about a book.”
Better watch out, rabbit.
Updated: How Rilla was inspired by the art.
June 7, 2011 @ 7:50 am | Filed under:
Books I’m remembering this, with a smile.
And this, with a full heart.
And this:
Jane was five years old and we were at a conference where I had a speaking engagement. At one point, a friend’s teenaged daughter took Jane to the drinking fountain. The teen later related this story to her mother, who passed it on to me.
Apparently young Jane was delighted by the arc of the water as it came out of the spout. “Look, I’m drinking a rainbow!” she cried.
Then she took a drink, paused, and added thoughtfully, “That’s funny, I always thought rainbows would be crunchy.”
And, well, sixteen wonderful years of moments like those.
And feeling very, very lucky indeed.
June 6, 2011 @ 7:59 pm | Filed under:
Audio 
Last night Scott and I stood in the hall, listening to the belly laughs coming from inside the bedroom shared by Rose, Beanie, and Rilla. They were listening to our Jay O’Callahan story CD, evidently for the first time in a long while, because it seemed the tales were all new to Rilla. Her peals of laughter enchanted us; we couldn’t tear ourselves away. Later, I tweeted about it and I was going to include a link to my O’Callahan post—I knew I’d written one years ago—as a frame of reference.
That post is actually as much about the wonderful Jim Weiss, whom we adore, as it is about Jay O’Callahan. Here’s the O’Callahan part:
I first encountered his work the summer before my sophomore year in college, when I was a camp counselor at a theater camp in Missoula, Montana. One of the girls brought a story tape with her and I remember the girls—this was the high-school bunk, not the younger set I was in charge of—laughing their heads off over a story about two children who encounter the King of the Raisins in a strange underworld. Half-remembered phrases from the story were still haunting me almost twenty years later when I began this blog. I posted a plea with a vague description of the story—
The raisins are amiable enough despite their aversion to the strange wiggling things at the end of the children’s arms—
“What you got there, worms?”
“No, they’re fingers! See?”
(Sound of raisins screaming.) “Ahhhh! Horrible, horrible! But I like you anyway.”
And a short while later, the marvelous Lesley Austin of Small Meadow Press chimed in with the answer I’d been seeking so many years: the storyteller we were looking for was named Jay O’Callahan. I Googled accordingly, and there he was. The Raisins story is on his Little Heroes CD. To this day it remains a family favorite. Sing it with me: Raisins, raisins, all we are is raisins; big one, small ones, short ones, tall ones…
And now the wheel’s gone round again and it’s Rilla’s turn to be swept away by O’Callahan whimsy. (She’s already a big Jim Weiss fan.) As for me, the story tape I want to listen to is a recording of those belly laughs from last night.
June 6, 2011 @ 7:27 pm | Filed under:
Bloggity Our combox discussion turned to blogrolls, the appeal and difficulty of. I enjoy exploring other people’s blogrolls but long ago gave up any attempt to maintain one here. My worry, of course, was that someone would feel left out.
But I do love to share. So here are a very few of the blogs I read on a regular basis. I am going to include some of my favorites, and leave out some of my favorites, so that you’ll see it really is just a small sampling of the folks who edify and inspire me every day. (I should say every week. I tend to save blog-reading up for a few days and then attack it with zest.)
Mental Multivitamin. One of the first, one of the best. She reads, she thinks, I learn. And she just recently enabled commenting, which made my week.
As Cozy as Spring. Jenn’s lovely photos, piercing observations, and quiet musings bring a sparkle to my mornings.
Fiction, Instead of Lies. Smart, thoughtful commentary on books and the world by author Tanita S. Davis (who is extremely high on my people-I-hope-to-meet-in-person-someday list).
Girl Detective. For all I love to read about books, I’m often gunshy of reviews: I have a crushing case of spoiler-phobia, you know. Girl Detective’s very sharp notes on her reading are the sort of book reviews I read with relish, not fear. But she’s murder on the book budget.
Original Content. Gail Gauthier is a children’s book author who writes with refreshing candor about what she reads and about publishing in general.
Handmade Homeschool. Sarah’s someone I’d love to live near; I think we would get along famously. Plus, I bet she’d knit me some socks.
The Poem Farm. Amy’s daily original poems are a delight.
Knitting the Wind. Here’s how much I love Sarah’s writing: I have learned the time difference between here and New Zealand in order to speculate as to whether she’s likely to be awake and possibly blogging soon.
Baggott Asher Bode. I went to grad school with Julianna Baggott and her husband Dave Scott. I love them, the inimitable pair of them, enormously. Julianna doesn’t so much write about a topic as skewer, slice, and julienne it, using words like a Japanese steakhouse chef uses knives. The result is equally delicious.
Dura Mater. She is one tough mother indeed. Honest, tired, brave. I have been a quietly admiring lurker at her blog for at least five years.
If your blog is not one of these I’ve mentioned, please don’t feel left out. I really did omit some of my favorites on purpose. This was actually quite a fun endeavor, compiling this list; perhaps I’ll do it again upon occasion.
June 5, 2011 @ 3:32 pm | Filed under:
Photos 
…despite its being, you know, Facebook.
Scott thought a remark I made in the comments ought to be pulled onto the main page and elaborated on a bit, so here it is. In response to a nice thing Melanie had said, I replied:
I do like thinking aloud about the new media…I tend to be an early adopter, and I’ve tried out loads of things that I didn’t stick with for one reason or another. The way I know something works for me is if I’m still using it a year later. 
There are many platforms I’ve enjoyed briefly but didn’t find expedient over time (for example, I love the look & functionality of Listography but forget about it for long stretches of time, which tells me it wasn’t quite the right platform for my daily needs).
There are things about Facebook that drive me batty (the privacy issues) but there’s nothing quite like it for staying in touch, is there? I mean, I’ve been on the internet since 1995, active on bulletin boards and email groups from 1995-2008, blogging daily since Jan 2005, on Twitter since 2007—but not until Facebook was I in daily internet contact with my relatives, high school friends, college friends, grad school friends, old work friends, etc. PLUS the interaction with online friends (with whom I became friendly first via boards, lists, blogs, etc), kidlitosphere colleagues, and so forth. And I find I really count on FB to let me know quickly who is safe when, say, a freak tornado touches down in Massachusetts!!
And actually, I think my main point got a bit lost in that paragraph. It’s this: not until Facebook was I in daily internet contact with my relatives. My closest cousins, some of my aunts and uncles, one of my sisters and her husband, my other sister’s daughter, three of my four sisters-in-law, many of my nieces and nephews on Scott’s side. That’s a big deal.
My father is also quite active on FB, to my delight—I seem to Like just about everything he posts 😉 —and he shows my mom all the photos and kid-quips Jane and I post there. But my affection for Facebook isn’t because it lets me share glimpses of daily life with others—as I said, I’ve been doing that via a variety of platforms (including, for a long while, a private family blog) since 1995. What I love about FB is that it, for whatever reason, seems to be the first platform that has compelled a large number of my loved ones to share glimpses of their daily lives online. And I really, really love that. Scott and I have never lived close to our families, and the telephone is not the easiest way for this mom-of-small-children to keep up with loved ones. Appropriate phone-call hours overlap too completely with attending-to-younguns hours.
In my first twelve years on the internet, the people I talked to were almost entirely new acquaintances. Some of them have become very real and dear friends—Huck’s godmother, for example. I’ve met dozens of internet-first friends in person, several of them repeatedly. They’re real friends, and I’m glad to have them in my life. But it wasn’t until Facebook, these past couple of years, that I had the pleasure of seeing, on a daily basis, what my cousins are up to, and my high-school friends, my college friends, my grad school friends…all of them, friends I’ve not lived near since the pertinent graduations, and so many of us busy these past two decades raising our families, attending to our jobs. It would take me hours and hours of telephone time each week to find out what Facebook can tell me in ten minutes.
(Occurs to me I can sum up this entire post with that one sentence.)
Don’t get me wrong—I love those long, gossipy phone conversations. I’m simply unable to manage them very often during this season of my life. And this season has been sixteen years long!
Keeping a blog doesn’t appeal to everyone. Commenting on blogs doesn’t appeal to everyone. For whatever reason— convenience, layers of (hypothetical) privacy, the visual format— Facebook seems to appeal to a much wider swath of people. I love being able to see, with one click, my niece’s prom pictures, a birth announcement from my high-school friend, a link to an article written by a grad-school classmate, and the beautiful wedding photo of one of my very first internet acquaintances—now a real-life friendship spanning sixteen years. I love the reminder that today is my Uncle Eddie’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Uncle Eddie!
Via The Daily What. (Some content and comments there may not be appropriate for younger readers.) I can’t tell from the original source whether this photo is real or a beautiful fake, but in the course of my search for verification, I’ve learned a few interesting things about the Argentine ant, the ghost ant, and the honeypot ant. Plus, you know, it’s pretty.
