Archive for March, 2013
Can you see this post? I’m hearing that some folks can’t get my site to load. Has been a problem all day; we’re looking into it. I’m bumping the Ballet Shoes post yet another day until I’m sure the problem (whatever it is) has been resolved.
Meanwhile, noooooo! Google informs us Reader’s days are numbered. Those of us who rely on a good RSS aggregator to make the web manageable are crushed—there’s no better feed reader than Google Reader.
Some alternatives, none of them quite perfect (but I’m confident someone will rise to fill the void):
Feedly—this is probably what I’ll wind up using. Not quite as streamlined as Reader, but it offers many options for customizing the look and function. In “Full Articles” mode, it’s a decent Reader substitute:
(I subscribe to way more book blogs than are visible in that list. I think it only shows the top twelve.)
If you click on the gear icon, you can toggle to different layouts: mosaic, list, magazine-style, etc.
You can export your subscriptions at Google Reader and import them to Feedly, or simply connect Feedly to your Reader account, which is what I did. For now Feedly runs off Reader’s API but it is going to “seamlessly transition” to another source before Reader bites the dust in July.
A Feedly plus is that it has mobile apps as well, with syncing between your desktop, iOS, and Android devices. And if you connect it to your gReader account, it’ll sync with that, too, as long as gReader lasts.
You can share posts from Feedly directly to Facebook, Twitter, G+, Delicious, and other platforms. Diigo isn’t one of the preset share options and I really hope you can add it manually—haven’t figured out how yet but it’s early days—because Diigo is how I share links in my sidebar here. I suppose I could switch back to Delicious if I have to.
Here’s Feedly in “magazine” view:
Other options: Bloglines (what I used before Google Reader came along). NewsBlur (after a certain number of subscriptions, there’s a fee). NetNewsWire for Mac. The Old Reader. Pulp (a paid app for Mac). Flipboard for iOS devices (no good for me, as I need a desktop interface).
What’s your poison?
Related post: Sending Web Content to a Kindle for Reading Later
Got this question in the comments yesterday, and since it’s an inquiry I get often, I thought I’d pull it up into a post here:
“Why have the Martha, Charlotte, Caroline and Rose books gone out of print? As a huge fan of Laura’s books I read all the books and the books about her family. Now being older I want to purchase them all for my own collection as the libraries are getting rid of them. It does not help that I am Canadian and have a hell of a time of even finding them! Do you know of any places that still carries them?”
When a publisher allows a book to go out of print, it pretty much always means one thing: the book isn’t selling very well anymore. Warehouse space is extremely expensive, and there’s a certain point when it becomes more costly for a publisher to store books that are selling slowly than to just remainder them.
The decision to shutter the Little House prequels and sequels happened before social media took off, so if HarperCollins ever decides to bring them back (particularly as ebooks, which has been discussed but doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon), we’d be able to give them a nice big push and I think they’d do very well.
You can sometimes find used copies on eBay or Amazon Marketplace, but they tend to be extremely expensive in those outlets. (I don’t get royalties on used book sales, so please know those crazy prices don’t have anything to do with me!)
A doozy! You guys! The Betsy-Tacy Treasury (that’s the first four books in the series) is $2.99 on Kindle right now!
Here’s an older post of mine about the books.
Sorry so brief today. Busy busy day! We took the kids to the mountains to see snow. Was Huck and Rilla’s first encounter with it. Oh my little Southern California children.
But I finished re-reading Ballet Shoes for the Streatfeild read-along and I should be able to get a post up about it tomorrow afternoon. Are you reading? Are you ready?
March 10, 2013 @ 10:25 am | Filed under:
Kindle The Narnia books are $1.99 each on Kindle today.
Don’t forget to cast your vote in this year’s SCBWI Crystal Kite Member Choice Awards! Voting ends March 15.
Here are the finalists for the California/Hawaii division:
• Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan ( HarperCollins Children’s Books)
• Tina Nichols Coury, Hanging Off Jefferson’s Nose: Growing Up On Mount Rushmore (Dial Books For Young Readers, Penguin Young Readers Group)
• Katherine Longshore, Gilt (Viking Children’s Books, Penguin Young Readers Group)
• Ginger Wadsworth, First Girl Scout, the Life of Juliette Gordon Low (Clarion)
• Melissa Wiley, The Prairie Thief (Margaret K. McElderry Books, Simon & Schuster)
You can see the other division finalists here. One Crystal Kite winner will be chosen for each division.
From the SCBWI website:
To cast a vote, go to your Member Home page, click on “See what’s going on in your region,” then on the Crystal Kites tab. The list of the finalists listed below will be there and all you have to do to vote is click the button next to the desired title for your region. [Note: To get to the voting buttons, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the finalist list.]
Please remember there is no campaigning of any kind for individual titles but you are encouraged to promote the awards in general using all social media! This includes but is not limited to blogging, tweeting or social networking of any kind.
Anyone participating in an individual voting campaign (promoting a specific title) will be disqualified. This is to ensure the votes are based purely on personal opinion.
* The year’s first poppy. Stunning as they are when fully open, this is how I love them best: just peeking out from under their green elf caps.
* Rilla’s first serious horse. She worked for ages, following the instructions in the Usborne Book of Drawing. What I love most here is seeing her several erased attempts to get the legs and tail just so.
* The tulips Krissy brought me back from Amsterdam, that time I couldn’t go. I adore tulips. Growing them this way, all mystery, three mute brown bulbs with no hint of the vivid hues encoded in their DNA, is the best possible fun. Now I want to grow mystery tulips always.
* Shazzzzzzam.
March 6, 2013 @ 10:27 am | Filed under:
Books 
What are you reading aloud today, and to whom?
This morning I had the fun of visiting a 2nd-grade class in West Salem, Wisconsin (via Skype), to read Fox and Crow Are Not Friends and answer lots of great questions. In a little while, I’ll be zipping down to Gainesville, Texas (virtually, of course), to share Inch and Roly with a pre-K/kindergarten class.
After that? I have an Elephant and Piggie date with Huck, and Rilla’s been asking for Brambly Hedge again. I’ve been wondering if Freddy the Pig would be up Wonderboy’s alley…
Ready for the next Skype visit
Special thanks to author Kate Messner for her efforts in connecting authors and classrooms.
P.S. Have you rustled up a copy of Ballet Shoes for our Noel Streatfeild read-along? We’ll start gabbing about it later this week. (But you can join in anytime, if it takes you longer than that to find a copy. That’s the beauty of a blog discussion. No expiration date!)
March 3, 2013 @ 8:46 pm | Filed under:
Books 
The other day I asked Jane to hunt up our copy of Noel Streatfeild’s Dancing Shoes for Beanie in relation to something we were discussing. At the time I couldn’t remember whether the event I was recalling happened in Dancing Shoes or Ballet Shoes, or possibly even Theater Shoes. It didn’t matter which, because it turned out what I was really wanting was to reread all the novels myself.
I haven’t started yet, but I’m so in the mood. Streatfeild’s writing is delicious and occupies a unique niche in children’s literature: the behind-the-scenes lives of children in the performing arts, in London, in the mid-20th century. (An extremely prolific author, she wrote a great many books about other subjects, but the only Streatfeild works I’ve read are her “Shoes” books—and not even all of those. Party Shoes, for example, is still on my TBR list.)
The cover at left is from the mid-90s reissue, which is when I was introduced to Streatfeild’s work. I missed them, somehow, growing up. During the year I spent at Random House after grad school, my boss, the brilliant Stephanie Spinner, was in charge of bringing the three Shoes books mentioned above back into print. These were the editions with the Diane Goode covers like the one pictured above.
All we had to work with were out-of-print editions from the archives. I was offered the job—freelance, during my off-hours—of typing two of the manuscripts into Microsoft Word. I was either saving up for my wedding or freshly returned from my wedding (I left Random House for HarperCollins in the summer of 1994, just a few months after Scott and I got married), and the eight bucks an hour I was offered for the typing gig felt like a windfall. I remembered reading that Hunter S. Thompson honed his writing skills by typing out novels by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. There was something thrilling about continuing this practice of literary apprenticeship, and I enjoyed the hours I sat up late at night, typing onto my Mac Classic, wrapped up in these charming stories I’d never read before.
Streatfeild is a good writer to study under. Her prose is rich, wry, vivid, never treacly, laced with humor. She conjures up wonderful old London houses and populates them with memorable personalities, including adults who treat children with great respect. (Some of governesses and tutors seem straight out of Charlotte Mason’s teacher’s college at Ambleside, and I smile, sometimes, at the influence this trio of novels must have had on my ideas about education.)
Anyway, I’m in the mood for a nice Streatfeild binge and I wondered if any of you would like to join me? Which of her books is your favorite—Shoes or otherwise?
