Spring

Why blog when I could be in the woods enjoying the spring bounty? Check out these ramps.

And these morels.

And this tree, nearly four feet in diameter. The beavers got ambitious! Seriously, that was beavers that did that.

Another One Bites the Dust

J.G. Ballard, one of my early and most profound influences, has died in London at the age of 78. I read most of his books. His first novel, and still one of my favorites, is The Drowned World.

Instruction Manual

I finally got the cover art for How to Steal a Car. I like it! Little toy cars. The publication date is set for September, so be sure to get your LoJack installed before then.

Voles

As he enters his late middle age, our toy poodle Jacques fancies himself a mighty hunter.

This past winter, Jacques spent many hours in the backyard plowing through eight-inch snow with his four-inch legs, listening to things we could not hear, pouncing on things we could not see, coming up with nothing but a face full of

snow. But a few weeks ago one his pounces netted him a small, dark gray creature with a short tail. Crunch.

At first I thought it was a short-tailed shrew, but upon closer examination it turned out to be a vole, which looks like a field mouse, but slightly larger, with shorter snout and a furry tail.

Jacques has since refined his stalk/listen/pounce routine, and he has caught at least one more that I know of which probably means he has caught

several I never saw. Apparently, we have a lot of voles here. That's fine with me, as long as they stay outside.

We are having a nice, gentle thaw here, with each day stripping away another layer of snow. I went out this morning and noticed the the melt had revealed the vole highways all over our property. The patterns are quite beautiful, don't you think? It looks to me like a language. The language of the voles.

I am looking at...

...a very nice blue-and-white handmade bowl I received from Granville Middle School, along with what I believe to be an OSU card protector. 

I mean, if it's not a card protector I don't know what it is. Those are just two mementos of my recent trip to Granville, Ohio, home of my new BFF Dana Gilligan, who can make a foam hot dog costume look very stylish.  I am not kidding.

The students at GMS were great--they had a lot of questions, most of which I did my best to answer. Unfortunately, the most common questions had to do with the ending of Invisible, and I couldn't answer them because about half the students had not yet read the book!
As you can see from the second picture, the students and faculty put in a lot of work in anticipation of my visit. Jana Von Dach, a professional poker player masquerading as school librarian, brought in her own poker paraphernalia to make me feel comfortable on stage. It felt just like home, Jana. Thanks!

Godless Brouhaha

"After numerous parent complaints, administrators at Oxford High School are asking teachers to consider removing the book Godless by Pete Hautman from their summer reading lists."

That's a quote from a February 3 article in the Oxford Eagle, an Oxford, Mississippi newspaper. Here's a link to the article. 

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that Godless has been challenged in a public (or any other) school.  I wrote a respectful and polite letter to the principal of the school early last week, but I have received no response from him.

What I find sad and disturbing about this sort of thing is the message it sends to teachers, parents, and students.  When a school administration kowtows to small group of parents (I'm guessing it is only two or three), they are telling the teachers that they do not trust their judgement, and that a few strident voices can control what books are appropriate to assign to their students.  The parents of all the other students, who rely upon the school administration to moderate those fringe voices, get the message that a few extremists are calling the shots in their child's education.  The students get the same message, with the added embarrassment of being "protected" from a book that hundreds of thousands of middle school students have read.

The other thing that bothers me is this: I strongly suspect that the parents who objected to Godless have not read the book.  Because if they had read it, I do not think they would find it objectionable.  We see this over and over again in cases of book banning.  One activist finds reason to object to a book and they inflame a bunch of other parents who read, at most, a few selected, out-of-context passages.  

Oxford High School, I should mention is a large, progressive public school with no history of book banning that I can find.  I hope that this problem with Godless is an isolated incident, and that it does not spread to other books in the school district.

This is one of those posts where I have nothing to say...

...but feel the need to say something because it has been one month since my last post. This may indicate that my life has been largely uneventful otherwise unworthy of celebration, or it may mean that I have been deliriously happy, or occupied with projects so fascinating that I’ve been unable to tear myself away.

All of the above are somewhat true. I’m getting a lot of writing done. No funerals or weddings or births in the past month. No salmonella or septicemia or bubonic plague. The dogs have been obsessed with moving from one sunny spot to another. No travel. No flat tires or furnace failures during our subzero January. No emergency room visits. No meteorites crashing through the house. I’m midway through a Lost marathon, watching seasons two through four on hulu.com (four or five episodes a day) and enjoying it tremendously. Life is good.

I even got a laugh out of the latest one star review of my novel Sweetblood on Amazon.com. Here is the review in its entirety:

Now that is an effective review.  You know exactly where the reviewer is coming from and what she thinks about the book, all in 25 words.  If only I could express myself so succinctly.

Things I promise not to say in 2009

Jaw-dropping

It was clever once, but that was many, many years in the past. I confess to having used this term. Recently. In print. Possibly more than once. Now, it is lazy, cliché, and ineffective. I am giving myself a dope slap…right…now! Ouch. It hurts so good.

Laugh-out-loud funny
See comments under “jaw-dropping,” above.

Yeah-yeah-yeah (or, yah-yah-yah)
You’ve heard this one, and probably used it yourself. It can mean “I agree with you,” or “Now I remember!” or “I know, I know!” It bugs the s%@! out of me, especially when I hear it sputtering from my own lips. Nevermore, I swear. 

Got
Okay, “got” is an extraordinarily useful and omnipresent word. It’s not going away anytime soon, and I will doubtless use it myself both in conversation and in writing.
But I will use it less often.

Tween
A young woman of, perhaps, eleven years once called me to account for using this word to describe the readers for whom Mary Logue and I intended the Bloodwater Mysteries series. She perceived it as derogatory; I cannot blame her. Anyway, she scared me off using the word ever again in any context whatsoever.
I am now without a word to describe persons aged eleven and twelve, or thereabouts, who have realized their full intelligence, but lack the knowledge that comes with adulthood, and the insanity that comes with teenagerness.*

Then
See comments under “got,” above.

*Yet another word I promise not to use—ever again.

New Website

For the past five days, while attempting to master Dreamweaver CS4 (Adobe's web design program), I have been employing every profane, obscene, vulgar expression I know--which is a lot of expressions.  The dogs slink past my door giving me these mournful, accusatory looks. Mary has been keeping her office door closed.  The cursing and stomping and shrieking amused her at first, but after a few hours she'd had enough.  Can't say I blame her.

CS4 is way too fussy and complex for my impatient self.  I may as well have used a John Deere combine to mow my lawn.  

Anyway, it's over.  I just uploaded my new website to Earthlink's server.  It's sort of simple and crude, and I'm sure there are lots of bad links and pages that won't load and so forth.  If you find a problem, please let me know and I'll try to fix it.

Scarsdale, and the National Book Awards

I met another Super Librarian, this time in New York, at Scarsdale Middle School. Liz Waltzman (check out her website) is one of those people who gets more done before lunch than I get done in a week. Make that two weeks. Oh, and she does this while suffering from a cold and wearing Uggs. Uggs are HUGE in Scarsdale. I asked one auditorium group how many of them owned a pair of Uggs, and about 60% of the hands went up.

I didn’t spend quite as much time with non-Uggs-wearing Scarsdale Super Librarian #2, Sharon Waskow, but she managed to explain the terrifying New York City Subway system so well that I rode the trains all over Manhattan without once ending up in Flatbush or Brighton Beach. Thanks, Sharon!

I also met three or four hundred Super Eighth Graders over a two day period, and I am KICKING myself because I did not take my camera out, not even once. So I have no visual evidence that I was actually there.

But it was a great visit. I had never before had the chance to do two days running with the same group of students. For once, I almost had time to talk about all the things I wanted to talk about, and the students had time to ask their questions both in an auditorium format, and in smaller workshop-size groups. Their questions were really good. Nobody asked me how much money I make, if I’m friends with Stephanie Meyer, or whether I prefer boxers or briefs.

Wednesday, after a full day of workshops in Scarsdale, I went down to Manhattan and put on my tuxedo (a forty-five minute project due to suspender and cufflink problems) to attend the National Book Awards Banquet at Cipriani on Wall Street (go here for lots of pictures). It was a fabulous event, even better than last year. The room was stunning, the people watching was bookalicious, and the food was remarkably good for a banquet of that size (I think there were about 700 people there).

I’m going to drop some names now, so if you find such things irritating it’s time to tune out. And yes, I know I’m a lousy photographer.

Here is Laurie Halse Anderson with her editor Kevin Lewis, at the pre-ceremony reception. Laurie’s book Chains was a finalist in the Young People’s Literature category. This was Laurie’s second appearance at the NBA.


Judy Blundell, whose book What I Saw and How I Lied, was the winner, is standing here with her editor (and mine!), David Levithan. Congratulations, Judy! (BTW, David was not drunk, I must have caught him in mid-blink.)

The winner in the YPL category was announced by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, a very funny guy who, apparently, loves to be on stage, as he spent a long seven minutes entertaining the crowd while the five finalists suffered through an eternity of churning stomachs and heart palpitations while waiting for the verdict.



Other celebrity sightings include Peter Matthiessen, whose novel Shadow Country won for best novel...

...and Jonathan Franzen, who won best novel for The Corrections back in, um, I think it was 1999. (Nope, it was 2001.)  I like this picture. It was even better before I took the red out of his eyes.

And when I got home…