Holiday gift giving is upon us!

Don’t know about you, but I tend to ignore most of the marketing in my inbox, most of the time.

So here’s a blog post for intrepid souls who have ventured this far into my lair.

This week is marketing week, to get the word out before the supply chain for printing books is overwhelmed. Here’s your reminder (for anyone new to my site or my newsletter) that I have 3 kid-appropriate books available that would make great gifts.

The Crow Magic series follows the adventures of a young girl who discovers that not only does she have magical powers she must learn to control, she inherited the ability to shape shift as well. During her second adventure, she is joined by a young girl who has abilities Suli has never heard of, but which are key to restoring the magic to their world.

The third book, The Wharf Rat Guild,is appropriate for slightly older teens and adults, with a fifteen-year-old protagonist who also has unusual abilities. It’s based on the true history of the Restoration period in England, a time when “surplus labor” and radical ideas of liberty, freedom, and democracy were the cargo exported to the new world.

Russian readers?

Cover of The Third Kind of Magic with Russian title

I am thrilled to announce that The Third Kind of Magic is now available from the largest Russian publisher of children’s books, EKSMO. The second Crow Magic book, The Cursed Amulet will be published in Russian soon! It was a long process, and I learned a lot about publishing (and auto-translation of emails) along the way.

If you read Russian, or know someone who does, visit the link below.

Book 24 website

“Oh, just one more thing…”

Lately my life has been a Columbo episode. Just one d### thing after the other.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back the water, just when you thought that pesky morphing alien was dead, just when you were sure that the vampire had a stake through its heart, just when you thought Gojira had sunk to the bottom of the ocean…something gruesome lifts its slimy head and…the to-do list gets longer. Again.

I am talking about getting a book out the door, and the pesky tasks that happen in its wake. I think I’ve swept all the broken glass from the floor, but be careful where you step.

I need to say a big sparkly heroic THANK YOU to all the folks who’ve helped me on the way. Here’s the list:

For services above and beyond the call of duty, my beta reader extraordinaire, Bryan-Kirk Reinhardt. Not only did he read more than one draft, he cheerfully said he’d do it again.
Laura Blackwell, the copy-editor on The Third Kind of Magic, who didn’t work on this last book but whose suggestions I absolutely took to heart for the second. (All extra commas and British spellings are my own.)
Julie Dillon, the cover illustrator, who brought older Suli and her gang of friends to life and accepted my passion for purple without a murmur.
Mary Auxier, the copy-editor who turned around the copy edit on The Cursed Amulet well before the promised date, and pointed out where logic was missing or stuff just didn’t work. Painful, but much appreciated.
Robin J. Samuels, who did the final proofread and made my revisions so much better.
David Blatner, who doesn’t know me from Adam, but whose lynda.com tutorial on book covers in InDesign has saved my life a couple of times. Thank you for making life-saving videos free, David!
I have to thank my Russian publisher, EKSMO, because if they hadn’t insisted I provide them with a sequel,”and when can we have it?”, I probably wouldn’t have prioritized the half-finished ms.
The crows in the local park who have advised me on questions of Crow protocol and laws.
And last but never least, all the fans and reviewers of the first book who posted reviews and emailed me to tell me they liked the first book and why. Words can’t express how much it meant to me to receive that encouragement.

Thank you all. Deep bow.

The proof is in the pudding

I am in the middle of trying to pull together all the editions needed to publish the next Suli book, The Cursed Amulet.

The ARC version is ready to go, but naturally that means PGE will shut off my power for a couple of days (again), so if I want to actually send out newsletters and emails, I have to figure out some other place to be.

This is a better option than death by wildfire, but so far it seems wildfires start just as easily in the areas where the power is off as it does anywhere else. The last outage here (two weeks ago) we had a grass fire on the hills not that far from where I live (see photo above), but because the power was out, no one got a phone notification from the FD or PD or from Calfire.

Including me and I signed up my landline for precisely this reason — so if the cell towers were down I thought I’d still get a phone call. Nuh uh.

Luckily someone in that neighborhood noticed, and folks started knocking on doors in the dark, and blowing car horns.

But there’s not much point in my grumbling when most of the state is in the same fix, and people are losing their homes in Sonoma and SoCal. It’s eerie here because so many folks have left. The smoke is getting pretty oppressive, too, and that may be what forces me to leave if the power isn’t back on within 24 hours. No power = no HVAC filters (and no hot water for coffee. Must acquire camping equipment.)

The final final version of the book attends the proofreader’s leisure, but if you’d like a fairly well edited advanced reader copy in exchange for a review, let me know.

I’ll be excited about it again when I’ve survived natural disasters and software I use so rarely I’ve forgotten how.

Thank you, mystery librarian

I discovered recently that my book, which is available to libraries as an ebook through Overdrive, is now part of the collection at Oakland (CA) public library. This makes me so happy. I have been a patron of the OPL libraries for most of my adult life. Also, for reasons I don’t fully understand, it seems to be having a positive effect on sales.

So thank you, anonymous librarian who added me to the collection! Maybe I met you at a conference and don’t remember. Drop me a note if you see this so I can aim my gratitude to the right person.

I also love bringing my used books to the Bookmark Bookstore, run by Friends of the Oakland Public Library, because I know they will find good homes, AND that those sorting through them will recognize good stuff to add to the collection (not always a sure thing.) You can contact the Bookmark Bookstore at 510-444-0473 or visit them at www.fopl.org. Donations support library collections!

I first moved to Oakland when I was an UG at Bezerkeley, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I’ve lived there off and on, but always seem to return. I love Lake Merritt, and the amazing wildlife, human and animal, that hangs out there.

Did you know Lake Merritt is the oldest wildlife refuge in California (1869)? Amazing birds. And bonsai garden. And a sensory garden, And a Japanese garden. And a palm garden. And gondolas. And…geese.

So yes, I am familiar with the less savory attributes of geese, dear readers.

Artists at work

NYRB is publishing translations of Tove Jansson’s writing that haven’t been available before in English, and we’re so lucky.

I loved the first memoir I read, The Summer Book, reflecting the memories of a child. Now I’ve read her adult memoir entitled Fair Play. The books are very different, written in differing styles, but they form parts of a while.

The first is a wonderful retelling of the feelings, images, and myths of childhood. The second is a matter-of-fact recounting of how two artists live and work together — and the give and take required to make that work.

“Fair Play” here means balancing needs, creating companionship without getting in each other’s way – and not using weaknesses against each other.

The stories illuminate the understanding, civility, silence, distance and patience between these two women, and the quirks that must be allowed for.

My favorite passage was the story of the chaos her partner creates when rearranging artwork on the walls and then the amazing change it makes when she’s finally completed her work and the juxtaposition of pieces changes their impact and meaning. The scenes set in a hotel in the USA while they traveled cross-country on a Greyhound bus were funny and interesting too, rather like one’s own travel journals, strange and interesting things happen, but is it a story? Does it round itself off? Perhaps it’s simply an anecdote to retell years later.

The tension of trying to be there for your partner, while focusing on your art wholeheartedly, touched and inspired me.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson – Review

This is a book to read slowly and savor, to fully taste the sense of being on an island in the sea with long days of sleeping, swimming, gardening and fishing ahead of you.

The interactions between the grandmother and grandchild are idiosyncratic and never sentimental. I felt I was a guest in someone’s tiny cottage over the summer, observing a way of life different from mine.

Although clearly founded in memories of the author’s past, I couldn’t tell whether the author was the grandmother or the grandchild. Isn’t that marvelous? They were equally emotionally present throughout the book, neither voice dominating.

A marvelous summer book, to help you remember the long days of daydreaming and exploration we associate with childhood.

Is education a waste of time?

I was idly listing out all the supposed “children’s books” that deal with fascism or totalitarianism in one form or another, and as the list grew longer I wondered why this lesson is never learned. Maybe my post-war generation was just especially saturated with it, like war movies.

Then I remembered how little I can recall of the vast swathes of education and reading I’ve been exposed to. In fact, my title is probably the start of a Socratic dialogue in Plato somewhere. As in, is there any point in paying these peripatetic teachers for their supposed knowledge and subsidizing their drinking at banquets? Maybe I do remember something about it.

Here’s a beginning list:

1. Animal Farm, Orwell. “Some animals are more equal than others.”
2. The Harry Potter books. Hello, I loved the Weasley brothers creating a swamp in Hogwarts as part of their Resistance to Umbrage. Resistance theatre.
3. A Wrinkle in Time. L’Engle. I don’t have to spell this out, do I?
4. The Tripod books by John Christopher, a dystopian’s dystopian.
5. Yes, yes, Fahrenheit 451 one of my least favorite of Bradbury’s books. A fine writer reduced to agitprop. Not really a kids’ book, but a godsend for teachers since it has a “message.”
6. I’d add Lord of the Flies if it had a coherent point, but I think it was simply an excellent example of misanthropy, appealing to those who find children nasty, brutish and short.
7. Hunger Games, of course, although that might be a bit reductionist.

I’ll leave you to guess why I’ve been thinking about totalitarianism, but I will say I’ve been having ongoing conversations in my head with my WWII and Korean veteran father (no longer with us) who was a keen reader of Western world vs. Soviets espionage and thriller books, especially those set during WW II. In fact you could argue that one proximate cause for my existence was McCarthyism and the hysterical fear of communists during the 50s which prevented the State Department from hiring anyone while my father was waiting to hear back about his Foreign Service application. Instead of doing sneaky things at embassies, he ended up marrying my mother and embarking on a completely different career. But he never lost his interest in that east/west conflict and the realization that we had enemies that could annihilate our country. I wonder if he would find our current situation more comprehensible than I do, having been schooled in the genre that deals with KGB-generated disinformation campaigns and tactics. Yeah, Dad, you were right, I should’ve paid more attention.

(For those of you who didn’t waste your impressionable youth reading Mad magazine, the above images are from Spy vs. Spy, a regular feature providing an intellectual challenge similar to that of Wiley Coyote and Road Runner.)

Tesser well

Sigh. This seems to be another time-travel book that no one calls science fiction. It is wearing to have all that barbed wire to climb over, getting in and out of the genre ghetto. Some days you just get so tired of the snags in your socks.

But the ghetto doesn’t apply to kids’ books, right? Subvert them when they’re young, mwa ha ha, although they seem to finally be calling A Wrinkle in Time a science fiction book. Perhaps it was just to justify the dayglo makeup on Oprah in the movie.

Speaking of a Wrinkle in Time, my next middle-grade adventure is a humdinger of an homage to that very novel. In When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, Miranda carries her favorite book with her everywhere, and that just happens to be Wrinkle. In fact, she refuses to read anything else. (Whoa there, Missy, there were sequels, too.) Another main character in the book figures out how to tesser in time, and that fact is central to the plot and the novel’s structure. But is that what the book is about? What a good question!

No. At its heart, it’s about friendship, at that age where friendship is everything, at least among girls. How you treat your friends, how you betray your friends, how you do or do not trust other people, whether your pride prevents you from helping a friend— that’s what it’s about. But the time-travel makes it all so much more amazing, in a 12 monkeys kind of way. (If you haven’t seen 12 monkeys, go see it now. I’ll wait.)

I am late to the party in heaping praise on When You Reach Me but it deserves another heap. Anything that can get me to spend a Saturday afternoon re-reading almost the entire book to notice the clues I missed before, and working out whether the ending would have completely changed the future or not, deserves its popularity, even if it didn’t have to spend time locked up in the scifi ghetto with the other deserving books. The deft handling of clues, and the revelation of bits and pieces of the mystery was masterful. I would dearly love to know how the author kept track of when she would reveal what. If you want to learn how to write a mystery, this book is a great model of the controlled release of information.

I love this book for so many reasons, but mostly because the author played fair with the reader and gave us all the information we needed to work out what was happening, before the narrator apparently did. If you paid attention, you even noticed when the main character’s self-centered behavior may have been partially responsible for the almost-tragedy, that was a tragedy nonetheless. See how I am trying not to create a spoiler here? Whew.

Despite this, the reader is rooting for the MC, but the complexity of motives and emotions is what’s so satisfying and plausible. I’m going to make a philosophical pronouncement and say that girls can be pretty mean at that age, especially in the throes of that “you’re not my best friend anymore” warfare.

For the record, I completely choked up at the unexpected dedication in a book Miranda receives as a gift. I admit it, okay?

This was a beautiful book that makes you both think and feel, and it’s quite clear why it won the Newbery Honor Medal.

Now please, Ms. Stead, share your plot chart with us?

For extra credit, a youtube video in which Dr. Tyson explains dimensions and tesseracts in a way which lets me (and everyone else) off the hook for having so much trouble trying to visualize this in high school geometry class. Tesseracts – Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thank you, Dr. Tyson, for helping me let go of geometry trauma.

For extra, extra credit (you nerds know who you are) if you like time travel books, I can recommend the Ijon Tichy books by Samuel Lem. Start with Memoirs of a Space Traveler and once you’ve had a taste you can move on to the rest. Not only is the science right, but the books are quite funny.

The summer of middle-grade reading

This summer, in addition to my writing projects, I will be on catching up on all the great middle-grade or early YA books that I haven’t had a chance to read yet.

One of the instigators of this was my visit to Ashland, OR, part of my quest to decide where to live during the next phase of my life.

While I was there, I stumbled across the most fabulous children’s bookstore ever, Treehouse Books! Take a look at the website to see what a magical place it is. Since it was 104 degrees outside the day I was there, it was no great hardship to spend a couple of hours raptly pulling books from the shelves.

With great effort, I kept myself in hand, selecting only what I had to have at that moment (rather than the entire store). Reviews of those books — and others—to come!

I should mention I was bowled over by the public library there, too; there’s an entire floor for YA and they have piles of current releases, unlike my local. The library in Eugene, OR also had me lusting over what was available there – they had a real poetry section. As in University presses, small presses, recent releases, not just stale anthologies of people long dead. It was wonderful to see.

I suspect the population being served by my local system is much larger and the competition more fierce (and then there’s always the question of where the budget comes from.)

In terms of bookstores and libraries, Oregon rocks. 104 degree weather? Not so much. And every time I visit I have to relearn that green and rural Oregon has much more polluted air than the urban area where I live. California’s clean air law makes a huge difference; CA gasoline doesn’t contain such high levels of benzene and other toxic hydrocarbons. Maybe OR legislators should worry less about who pumps the gas and more about what’s in it.