Cece Bell recently wrote a post about the Library of Congress page that puts your book into nifty little categories that read like a poem. I’m loving this description on The Schmutzy family: cleanliness – fiction. As opposed to, perhaps: Schmutziness — nonfiction.
I didn’t get a chance to see the final proofs for the book, so I was especially excited to get a glimpse of the cover here, in the Holiday House catalog. (See page 15 of the catalog or page 16 of the pdf.)
A quick apology to anyone who is getting some of my old posts all over again. I’m trying to redo my blog and web site. If I knew MORE about redoing my blog and website, none of these things would be showing up in your reader. (And maybe they aren’t. Maybe nobody’s seeing this and everyone who gets this blog in a reader is assuming I’m still in airplane mode…)
If you’ve made it this far: I’ve been saying for ages I needed to make things a little spiffier around here, but haven’t actually followed through. I did start looking for blogs and websites I liked, and I fell in love with Katherine Applegate’s site for The One and Only Ivan — so much so that I contacted the site’s creator, thinking maybe I could pay him to help me with mine. (With what I don’t know… Monopoly money?) But the site’s creator turned out to be her incredibly talented son, who had too much homework to take on a new project for a virtual stranger. And my own son has another few years before he can take over as webmaster.
So I continued to look around, and procrastinate a little, and think someday I’d make it better. And then I got the Albert Whitman catalog for the fall. There was my book, looking nice and pretty! And there was my website, looking like it needed a little help. I asked pretty much every mom I came across to give me a brief tutorial in WordPress, and then Shannon Sullivan kindly agreed to help me out in exchange for bagels and two pairs of hand-me-down pants.
She gave me the courage to just play around a little more, and suggested some different themes. She also suggested that 3 in the morning was the appropriate time to work on this. Which I did. And I made a really nice site on wordpress. Only when I downloaded it to my domain I found some things didn’t work quite the way they were supposed to. (On wordpress, for instance, I could do a big beautiful banner. And on the download, for some reason, I could only make the one-column picture you see here.) And there was nobody I could call at 3 in the morning to help me out. Suffice it to say, I’m still working on it. Though there are other things that need to take priority, such as my revisions for my middle-grade novel. If it’s coming out in 2013 as planned, I should be in high gear. (If you see me on the internet, tell me to get back to work.)
So this whole Daniel Pinkwater/New York State test thing had our family talking this weekend, though the conversation hasn’t been just about the test.
“What the heck,” my kids wanted to know “was Daniel Pinkwater doing writing about a hare and a pineapple? Everybody knows the story is supposed to be about an eggplant.”
Well, maybe not everybody, but we’ve listened to the audio of Borgel about a thousand times, and we’re very familiar with the story of the rabbit and the eggplant. That fable (among others) and the moral (among others) is one of our favorite parts of the book. My kids talk like Borgel (or at least like Pinkwater talking like Borgel.) So was it a rough draft? they wanted to know. Was he ripping himself off? What was going on?
Fortunately, we found a story where Pinkwater explained everything, including the fact that the state of New York changed his original prose.
You can hear Pinkwater’s side of the story here.
You can read the response to the story from Ken Jennings, the longest-reigning champion on Jeopardy, right here.
And you can find the test excerpt, with the corresponding test questions, here.
My kids weren’t in complete agreement about the answers, with each other or with me. (We also disagreed with Ken Jennings from Jeopardy. There was so an owl. Though not in Pinkwater’s original.)
In a planets-allign sort of thing, my son was completely unaware of Jennings until yesterday, when a friend took him to a live taping for Jeopardy Power Players week. He came home talking about a guy who had won 74 times, and suddenly, there was that same person talking about an author he knows and loves. (If there had been a Pinkwater category on Jeopardy, my son would have done pretty well. He wouldn’t have done as well naming all of the power players. Or the host. “I think his name was Alex somebody,” he said.)
Hope: All of this attention to the Pineapple and the Hare will get more people to read Borgel.
I thought I’d go ahead and post the cover of Happy Birthday, Tree, illustrated by the fabulous Jana Christy. I love her work, especially her springtime art and her punk rock paper dolls. And I want pretty much every outfit I’ve seen her characters wear. (Ever since she saw the illustrations for Happy Birthday, Tree, my daughter has kept an eye out in stores for Joni’s hat. If you happen to see it, let us know so we can purchase right away!)
I’m still waiting to see which book ends up being my official “first book.” The one I sold first keeps getting bumped back due to the illustrator’s schedule. But Happy Birthday, Tree and The Schmutzy Family appear to keep moving up. Both are due out in early fall. I’ve been lucky enough to be head-over-heels in love with every illustrator I’ve been assigned so far, but somehow there’s still a feeling of shock — diving-board-into-the-pool shock — when I see my words captured by someone else’s imagination.
Breaking my radio silence because today is Navin Johnson Day here: Amazon and Barnes and Noble have officially listed both Happy Birthday, Tree and The Schmutzy Family in their catalogs. In other words: I’m somebody!
No images yet, so I will have to send you to Jana Christy’s site and Paul Meisel’s site so you can imagine what the covers might look like.
My friend Anamaria actually spotted the Amazon links first, which I can’t believe because I have been engaging in vanity googles more than I care to admit.
The books are also listed on Amazon.ca, in Canada, which means they are listed in French. Hmm. Wonder if Madame Campbell would up my grade from a C for that? I have livres coming out! In août and novembre!
