Here are a couple of early morning shots of one my favorites trees, just down the road from my house. I walk or run past it every day.
Happy Autumn.
Getting antsy
Click on the video below and push the time bar to the 50 second mark.
Ready? Push play and sing along with me as loud as you can:
“AN-TI-CI-PAAA-TION!!!”
That’s my life right now. CHAINS will be released officially on October 21st, the day my book tour begins, two days before my birthday. The nice people at S&S have posted a CHAINS excerpt for you to read while you are waiting for the book.
The details of the book tour are in the last stages of being firmed up, but it looks like I’ll be visiting:
36 schools (these presentations are not open to the public)
19 bookstores (this includes 2 stores in December after the official tour is over)
3 presentations to groups of librarians and teachers. Maybe 4.
At the end of the tour, I head for San Antonio, TX for the NCTE/ALAN Conference. And then I go home, turn off the phone, and take a nap.
Right now I feel like a basketball player after the warm-ups are over and before the National Anthem has been sung. My stomach is a little jumpy, my hands are sweaty, and I can’t wait until the referee blows her whistle and throws up the ball to start the game.
I am doing something new on this tour. I am bringing a portable digital projector so I can show a visual presentation to everyone. The “show” gives a little background about me and my writing, then focuses on my research and writing of CHAINS. If you live in Central NY, you can see a sneak preview of this show next Tuesday at 7pm at the Barnes & Noble in Dewitt, NY, where I’ll be speaking at their Educators’ Appreciation Night.
While we were running this morning, BH and I saw a gorgeous red-tailed hawk sweeping over a meadow. When we got home (he cooked an awesome ham and egg breakfast), a second hawk about twice the size of the first one perched on the edge of our forest and allowed us to admire him.
It’s been quite a day.
betwixt with tweens
Bookavore has a wonderful post about a recent bookseller panel that discussed the challenges facing everyone when choosing books for kids in that very nebulous 11-13-year-old age bracket. You should click over and read the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight one bit. Bookavore and many booksellers are pondering the need to further segment the children’s/YA section of their stores to separate books that appeal to teens that have mature content and those that don’t.
She writes: “My store, and many others, have two sections: middle-grade fiction, and YA/teen fiction (and as I sit near the receiving desk, I can tell you that where we shelve a book when it could go either way, at this point, usually is determined by the level of mature content). What we need is a section in between for all these books.
This is where you come in. Just what do we call this section? The best suggestion I’ve heard so far is “young teen.” It appeals to tweens because they want to think of themselves as teens, but also connotes that content is conservative. We could also do the opposite, and follow the lead of some manga publishers, who have “teen” and “older teen.”
What do you think? What do we call this section? Should we make a new section? Do we need to worry about dividing books up too much? As a side note, too, Politics & Prose in DC has recently moved their YA to be with the adult books, rather than with the children’s books. Is this helpful?”
What do you think about this? I would love to hear your opinions about this – as readers, authors, editors, librarians, teachers, parents, booksellers – speak up!
It’s monday so I have to be organized, right?
First – I am blushing and squirming profusely as I do this, but Betsy Bird posted an incredibly detailed and generous review of CHAINS. Thank you, Betsy!
The weekend sort of didn’t exist for me because I spent most of it rushing hither and yon. Saturday morning I flew to Detroit and then took a cab to Dearborn for the Great Lakes Bookseller’s Association annual tradeshow. I hung out with Sarah Miller and ran into Jaime Adoff, who has produced both a new book and (with considerable help from his wife) a new baby this year.
Two weeks from today I leave on the CHAINS book tour! Yikes! I need to write many, many pages before then. I also need to find the appropriate tour sneakers. Anyone know where I can find a pair of sizzling, baby-blue high-tops, women’s size 10 or men’s 8? Oh, and I need a couple of shirts that won’t wrinkle. But mostly I have to write oodles of pages.
The right to read, the right to think, the right to express opinions
Worth fighting for.