Greg Heffley: Role Model

I like the Wimpy Kid books. I don’t jump on every bandwagon, but I’m on this one. The first book cracked me up (Zowee Mama!)  and I’ve read every one since, usually the week it’s released. I got a nice email from the author once. Anyway, the sixth book has an interesting subplot about Greg getting a doll (told as a flashback) that he becomes attached to. It is sweet in a William’s Doll way, without obviously having a moral, but isn’t played for laughs the way you expect — nobody mocks Greg for his doll. It’s shown as completely normal for a boy to simply want to take care of something, a theme that’s emphasized rather humorously when Greg becomes obsessed with a virtual chihuahua. And of course the book will be read by millions of boys. I think this alone makes Jeff Kinney a true American hero.

Fly Me to the Moon

As a kid I was a big fan of a series of books about a kid who lived on the moon. I had trouble tracking them down without the author’s name or the titles — googling wasn’t much help. I finally realized that Worldcat.org is a great tool to find out of print titles with specific topics, since you can search for books matching LLC subject terms and they don’t have to be current as long as they are in a library somewhere.

And so, after thirty-odd years, was I reunited with the Moonster space traveler, Matthew Looney. The books are much as I remember them, with breezy and fast-moving prose and whimsical illustrations by Gahan Wilson (Does anybody do the pencil sketch/cartoon style of illustration anymore? I’ve always liked it.) Today I read the first two. Both involve voyages to earth as the Moonsters try to find life on Earth. The world is cleverly imagined and, written in the 1960s, they are representative of an era where interest in the moon was high.

What I liked best in these books is a serious respect for science while making scientific discussion fun and novel. Even though some of the actual scenario is a stretch (a people who have mastered space travel but are mystified by water, and the pert explanation that people of the Moon simply can understand every language in the universe for no reason), it’s a great way to get kids thinking critically about things — what life would be like on the moon, how a person from the moon would see things — and I particularly like the message that science isn’t about knowledge, but inquiry. Matthew is the hero of the first book not because he learns anything, but because he asks the right questions. In the second book we see the exhausting stubbornness of scientists who insist on making facts fit their paradigm, but they do eventually face the facts. So Jerome Beatty must have had a background in science, enough to be both respectful of the tenants but able to lampoon (warmly, I think) the culture.

Why haven’t these books stood the test of time? Why are they out of print? I see few books as nicely imagined and as accessible as these.  They are quick reads but have great discussion fodder. I just don’t see many kids books like these any more, that are both scientific and whimsical. It’s true the books have a 1950s mentality about family life and women (the mothers cook and complain, the men have all the fun). It’s also true that having mastered the moon (which happened mid-series and is the subject of the third book), perhaps readers lost fanciful interest in the subject.

But for a few hours, I was a kid again. I miss books like these. I wish I could write them.

Hurricane Season

There’s a transition between babyhood and childhood where you find yourself with a two-foot-tall hurricane crashing around in your living room, sending everything flying. This is where I am right now in life, and this is much of the reason my blog has fallen silent. Plenty of experience, but no time for solitary reflection, so necessary to poetry and blogs. I haven’t wandered lonely as a cloud in a very long while. Here are a few hurried updates before the kid wakes up from his nap and we head off for a reading.

* My chapter book series for Topps is now visible in various places on the web. Writing a series vs. stand-alone books and writing for younger readers was a real learning experience, but I discovered I like both and I can’t wait to see these books in their final form, with great illustrations by Eric Wight and collectible cards in each book.

* My robot book is waiting in the wings for my attention, and I’m excited to get back to it. I’ve discovered that robots are suddenly a minor trend in middle grade, with lots of new or forthcoming books involving robots, even robots made by kids. I insist upon verisimilitude in all my books– I won’t just have the robots do anything because I say so; I need to believe they could be made by bright children with the tools and materials at their disposable. I hope that makes my robot book stand out.

* I learned a lot about middle grade fiction by teaching it. It made me think through what makes children’s novels memorable or important to me, and more planful about what I’m doing as I write. I learned a lot from my students, too — they brought a lot of creativity and savvy to our class discussions. I’m flattered that such a talented group felt they could learn from me, and hope they did.

* I’ve been reading more picture books because of Byron. I toyed with the idea of  writing them, but realized after trying and failing that this is really an alien genre for me. I don’t know why picture books are lumped in casually with books for older kids. Thinking I could write picture books as a branch off of middle grade is like a professional baseball player thinking he can take up golf at the same level. Yes, they both involve swinging at little white balls with sticks, but they have nothing else in common. What I’ve learned about a well-done picture book — Phyllis Root has become our favorite PB author, and I love one I saw Stephen Shaskan read yesterday, A Dog is a Dog — is that they are less about the “story” and more about the reading experience between the reader and the listener. They seem to have more to do with theater or music than the kinds of books I’ve studied and written. They’re meant to be a performance. The book is a script. I have zero ideas for that kind of thing. When I’ve tried picture books I find myself trying to write a novel in a few hundred words. But I admire Root and Shaskan and other picture book authors for their vision for how a book will bring a parent and a child together in this great experience of reading a book aloud.

* I’ve been listening to Game of Thrones on my daily drive. It’s been fun, and I think there are good writerly takeaways from George R.R. Martin. Every character wants something, like some conventional wisdom dictates. A sense of injustice courses through the book, motivating the reader to keep turning the pages, hoping justice will come to those believably bad characters who deserve comeuppance (perhaps it never will). I think this sense of justice drives a lot of children’s books, too. Children like to see stories affirm the basic values of fairness and see evil-doers get what’s coming to them. Yet, I’ve never really had a “bad guy,” in a book, as my characters face other challenges. Perhaps one day I shall.

* Perhaps the most important realization this hurricane season is that I can’t write in the evenings, and shouldn’t. I need to enjoy my little hurricane while I can. I’ve become a morning writer, up around five and putting in a hundred words or so before I go to work. Maybe that’s why coffee is a major plot element in one of my chapter books.

Helicopter Authoring

News broke this week that soon three major publishers — including mine — will have an authors portal so we can view up-to-date sales information for our books. This just rounds out the recent move by Amazon to make sales data visible to authors, and not just sales data from Amazon.

As an author, it’s a kick in my stomach every time I see numbers that are measurable by man. Nothing but “Sorry, that book is selling so well we can’t process it…” would satisfy me. The truth can be… er, grounding, to say the least.

I wonder how any author can survive the magnitude of information available to us. Amazon and GoodReads reviews allow us to hover around actual readers while they read — many post updates as they plow through it. If they’re reading your book on a Kindle and highlighting, you can find out what they highlighted. The distance between author and reader isn’t just getting smaller, it’s disappearing. In a seemingly disconnected trend, authors invite readers to send pictures of new books “in the wild”, as they appear on bookshelves. So we can see our books before they’re bought, and we can monitor the readers afterwards…. I guess using Google Earth we could even follow the reader home from the bookstore…  OK, not really. But I’ll bet if we could, we would.

WHY ARE YOU STOPPING FOR COFFEE?? OK, FINE BUT… NO! DON’T PICK UP THE ONION! YOU HAVE A BOOK RIGHT THERE YOU CAN READ WHILE YOU’RE WAITING! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?

Some of my writer friends say they don’t check sales data or read the customer reviews, but I can’t stop myself. I want to know how the book is doing. I wrote the books so people would buy and read them, after all. But I understand that you have to let go of the book, like a child heading off to college. There’s nothing more  I can do, I have to tell myself. If I raised that book right, it’ll make its way and be all right. I’m struggling with that, and my publisher doesn’t want to help by setting up a web-cam in the college dorm of my books’ success. NOTE: They mean well.

On the flip side, you don’t need to worry about Byron. He’ll head off to college in the battered hand-me-down jet car, unpack by himself, and tell his new roomie: My dad? Nah, he didn’t come to help. He couldn’t tear himself away from that new app that lets him watch the readers’ eyes while they read his ebook.

Hat!

Byron’s favorite word is “hat.” He uses it for a hello, goodbye, give me my bottle, let go, and many things in between. The meaning is usually clear from context. He will sometimes put his hand on his head to show you what he means, and he’ll say it when he has a hat, or when you have one, so he clearly knows its primary meaning. His favorite game is called hat, and involves bringing you a hat (or a bowl, or a napkin, or a shoe) and saying “hat hat hat” and then watching you in eagerness and awe as you put it on your head. He then reaches for it, saying “hat hat hat” and carries it to someone else. He enjoys hats, too, sometimes taking two or three with him when we go out. He doesn’t wear them for long, unless they are strapped on, but he likes to carry them around.

I’m sure it has developmental significance, this love for head wear, the constant donning and doffing of hats, the repetition of the word.

I wonder what the next thing will be that he pulls out of his hat.

Audiobook winner(s)

I forgot to put a deadline on the audiobook giveaway post, but I decided to pick a winner. That winner is BECKY. But SAM will also get a copy just for the heck of it.

The rest of you will need to buy it, download it, or head to the library. Believe me, it’s worth it.

The Breading

I don’t like to bake a big deal out of my friends’ books, but both of these are such great books I couldn’t resist. I hereby declare, with the power nobody has vested in me, that today is INTERNATIONAL BOOKS ABOUT BREAD DAY to celebrate the release of two magical, lovely, books by people I like a lot.

Since yeast is a kind of fungi, I even feel a bit like I’m in the same wave of bready goodness… OK, maybe not.