Uncategorized – Page 12

I’ll be at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual convention in Philadelphia later in the week. I’m looking forward to catching up with old writer friends, and even to making some new ones. Will YOU be there? Here’s my schedule for the trip …

Friday, November 20
4:15pm-5pm
Convention Center, Room 107B, Street Level
Stories and Standards: Pairing Fiction and Nonfiction for Interdisciplinary Connections
Moderator: Teri Lesense
Author Panel: Kate Messner, Tanya Lee Stone, Jenny Moss and Loree Griffin Burns

Saturday, November 21
10am-11am
Convention Center, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Booth (#500)
I’ll be signing copies of TRACKING TRASH*

12:00pm-2:30pm
Books for Children Luncheon
Marriott Grand Ballroom, Salon A
I’m told I am hosting a table at this event. From what I can tell, this means that a dozen of the teachers who come to hear a keynote by the amazing Brian Selznick are going to be stuck with, er, me. But I plan to be very nice to them as we sit together and admire Mr. Selznick, and each will leave my table with a signed copy of TRACKING TRASH, compliments of Houghton Mifflin.

Hope to see you there!

*I’m not sure that F&Gs of THE HIVE DETECTIVES will be ready, but my amazingly talented photographer/partner-in-bookmaking, Ellen Harasimowicz, turned final color proofs of the book into a gorgeous preview, and I’ll be bringing that along. Do stop by and have a look if you are in the vicinity!

November 17, 2009April 25, 2015

Happy News

THE CITIZEN SCIENCE MANUSCRIPT IS DONE!

It is done and I am happy with it and it will soon be off my desk and onto the desk of my editor at Henry Holt. This means I am free to blog again … to read and write on other topics again … to traipse in the woods with my camera (see above) … to sleep in the middle of the day!

Okay, maybe not that.

But I am feeling lighter than I have in months. And not a moment too soon: I am leaving shortly for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual conference in Philadelphia. Details first thing tomorrow. In the meantime, anyone recognize the image above? I’m pretty sure it’s a vireo nest. My son spotted it after the leaves fell from the trees along our driveway. Isn’t it lovely? The shiny, silvery material woven along the outside may very well have been stolen from a paper wasp nest. Can you imagine? Here’s an inside shot:

November 4, 2009April 25, 2015

Mean Girls

Today at Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor and the ‘What A Girl Wants’ panelists discuss mean girls in youth literature and in the world. Why are they so damned popular, anyway? The WAGW women, as usual, provide much to ponder in their thoughtful responses. Please check it out!

(Notice I did not participate in the discussion this month. See? It is not just my own blog that I am neglecting. It is everything outside the citizen science book. Seriously. But the deadline is creeping closer, the manuscript is nearly finished, and I hope to be back here more regularly soon.)

October 21, 2009April 25, 2015

Polka-dotted Inspiration

These windows peek into my office, where I worked all day yesterday on the ladybug chapter of my citizen science book:

Can you see what I saw? (You may have to click on the image to enlarge it.)

Ladybugs! Hundreds and hundreds of ladybugs. One of the scientists I interviewed for the book told me that this particular species, Asian Multi-colored ladybug (Harmonia axyridris), spends the winter tucked into tiny crevices in the face of enormous cliffs that are common where they evolved. Here in North America, they fly instead to the biggest vertical structures they can find, usually houses, and crawl around looking for a place to tuck in. That’s why so many of them end up in my bathroom every winter. And that’s why the back of my house was covered with them yesterday afternoon.

Judging by the clip on my local news station last night, this behavior annoys people. Obviously these people are not writing about ladybugs! Here’s a bonus photo, and here’s to inspiration arriving on your doorstep (or office window) today, too.

October 16, 2009April 25, 2015

Five Things on Friday (Ladybug Edition)

My kids and I surveyed ladybugs for the Lost Ladybug Project this summer, and what you see above is a sampling of the nine species we found. Finding and photographing them was fairly easy … figuring out which was which was not. We *think* these are, from top to bottom, the polished ladybug (Cycloneda polita), the checkerspot ladybug (Propylea quaturodecimpunctata), the three-banded ladybug (Coccinella trifasciata), the spotted pink ladybug (Coleomegilla maculata) and the Asian multi-colored ladybug (Harmonia axyridris). This last is the ladybug that so often invades homes this time of year, and it was by far the most common in our surveys (66 of our 100 specimens).

I am showing amazing restraint here … I could go on and on and on. And I could post photo after photo after photo. Ladybugs are interesting creatures and I am completely smitten. Lucky for you, I have to get myself–and our CD of ladybug data–to the post office.

Happy Friday to you and yours!

October 15, 2009April 25, 2015

Balance and Trust

Did I really announce on my blog that I would finish the frog chapter over the weekend? What was I thinking? For the record, I didn’t even come close. How could I? There were hikes to take and vistas to admire and apples to pick and books to read and, yes, even chipmunks to photograph. I fiddled with the frog chapter here and there, but couldn’t call it finished until an hour ago. It’s now in the hands of trusted readers, and I’m left asking the same old question:

Why is it so hard to balance my personal life and my work life?

Why?

Feel free to step in here, because I got nothing in the way of an answer. Nothing. Well, I do have a poem (of sorts) to share. It was sent to me by a friend, and it helped me reframe the balance question. Karen Maezen Miller’s Parent’s Little List of Trust starts like this:

Trust accidents and coincidences; trust imperfection and the unforeseen.
Trust the milk to spill.
Trust confusion as the child of clarity; trust doubt as the mother of confidence.

The piece is subtitled Not So Little, Not Just For Parents, and you can read it in its entirety here.

Anyway, as I plunge into the next chapter, I am no longer asking for balance; I’m simply trusting that my perpetual lack of it is okay. Just to be safe, I’ll not make any predictions about finishing that chapter. It’ll be done when it’s done. Trust me.

October 9, 2009April 25, 2015

Quick Unexpected Frog

I’m leaving the pages of my citizen science book briefly–just briefly!–to share some froggy delights. Here’s a photograph from earlier in the season, and a haiku from earlier in the millenium. Enjoy!

Old dark sleepy pool
Quick unexpected frog
Goes plop! Watersplash.

Basho

I’ll be finishing my work on the frog chapter, I think, over the weekend. Then it’s on to ladybugs. If I put on my glasses and squint just right, I can almost see THE END!

September 30, 2009April 25, 2015

A Snafu and a Quiz

First, the snafu. For some reason LiveJournal has stopped sending me emails to let me know when someone has posted a comment on my journal. This is very annoying. I don’t want y’all to think I am ignoring you … but I also don’t want to check my LiveJournal even more often than I do already. (I’m trying to write a book, man!) Any other LiveJournal users having this problem? Any of you know how to fix it?

Now, the pop quiz. I’m combing through butterfly images for the citizen science book this week and I came across these three members of the royal family: a Viceroy, a Queen, and a Monarch. Do you know who is who?

I’ll post the identifications in a comment later today.

Happy Wednesday!

September 28, 2009April 25, 2015

Nonfiction Monday: Some Thoughts and Some Books

Marc Aronson, who blogs about nonfiction for young people at the School Library Journal website, recently asked his readers what they love about reading nonfiction. I’ve been mulling the question for days, and my answer is this: the stories are true.

Before anyone gets outraged, let me state, for the record, that I adore fiction. I read an awful lot of it, and I react strongly and emotionally to made-up characters and situations all the time. (For a fine example, ask my three kids how I handled Dumbledore’s death.) But my reaction to fiction is always tempered, just the tiniest bit, by the knowledge that the stories and the characters and the situations are not real, but instead dreamt up in the mind of a working writer.

Conversely, the emotions stirred when I read non-fiction are boosted, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes by leaps and bounds, simply because the stories and characters and situations I have just discovered are real. The people existed in flesh and blood. Their deeds are a matter of historical or personal record. I could learn more, should I choose to, without the author’s knowledge or consent, because the story is not his or hers, but ours; it belongs to you and to me and to all of humankind.

Corny, I know, but that’s my answer.

Here are two works of nonfiction I read recently and adored. These are not reviews, mind you, but hearty recommendations.

WRITTEN IN BONE
By Sally M. Walker
Carolrhoda, 2009

Category: YA Nonfiction

Sally M. Walker’s meticulously researched and sparklingly rendered young adult standout, WRITTEN IN BONE is perfect for any person of over the age of ten with an interest in history or science or real-life mysteries. In fact, I suspect persons over the age of ten heretofore uninterested in these topics, upon reading the book, will be inspired to wonder about history and science and real-life mysteries and, perhaps, why they hadn’t wondered about these things before.

THE DAY-GLO BROTHERS
The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors
by Chris Barton
Illustrated by Tony Persiani
Charlesbridge, 2009

Category: Picture Book Nonfiction

In THE DAY-GLO BROTHERS, Cris Barton and Tony Persiani share the story of Bob and Joe Switzer and their somewhat accidental discovery of colors that glow in the dark AND in the light. The spotlight here is on serendipity, the unique strengths of two very different brothers, and how the road to our childhood dreams is often circuitous, eye-popping … and not so very hard to navigate after all.

Do YOU read nonfiction? What books have you adored lately? Do tell! And for a roundup of web-wide posts on nonfiction for children, check out today’s post at Wendy’s Wanderings.

September 25, 2009April 25, 2015

Seeing the Chrysalis, Finding the Spine

That right there is the pupal stage of a Monarch butterfly. The jade green chrysalis with golden accents is hard to spot in the wild, so blended is it with the surrounding plants and bushes. I told my daughter this during a walk last week. We were in a milkweed meadow in the late afternoon and conditions weren’t good for our butterfly tagging mission. I suggested she look for ladybugs or caterpillars instead, but she wanted to look for a chrysalis.

“They’re pretty hard to find,” I warned her. “I know adults who have searched for years and never found one.”

She was walking behind me at the time, and she gave her patented Whatever laugh.

“It’s really not that hard, Mom,” she said.

I turned to disagree, to tell her about the man I know who has been watching and raising Monarch butterflies for more than twenty years and never, not once, seen a chrysalis in the wild. And there was my daughter, nose to pupa with a chrysalis, right there in our immediate wild. She was studying the golden threads, the droplets of dew, the silken pad holding the whole thing up.

And there you go. This is the thing about kids and nature that has so captured my imagination lately. This is the very beating heart of my citizen science book, in fact: young people see the world differently than us older people do.

Why?

Well, for starters, there’s physical stature. My daughter is four feet tall and was looking up at the chrysalis; I am five feet seven inches, and it was so far under my nose I didn’t even notice it. The physical geography of place is different for her; she was quite literally closer to the meadow around us.

There’s also the sensitivity issue. At almost forty years old and I don’t perceive sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes as well as I once did. My daughter’s senses, on the other hand, are still developing. Each day she sees and hears and smells and feels and tastes a little better than the day before. She is coming into her prime just as I pass mine.

And then there is the matter of focus. As I breezed past that chrysalis, my eyes were on the place around me but my head was only partially there. I was thinking about chrysalids, but also about my daughter, how nice it was to spend time with her; and what I would make for dinner and how badly I needed to remember to stop and buy a gallon of milk on the way home; how soon we should leave the meadow in order to pick up my boys from soccer practice; how well (or not) I had rendered this magical place—the milkweed meadow—in my writing earlier that day; and so on and so on forever and a day. I live in several moments at once. My daughter lives in the one and only moment at hand. And so she finds the magic.

This little meadow incident, coupled with the timely and wise words of my friend Linda, has helped me re-focus myself and my book in progress this week. The spine is clear. I need only grip it tightly and keep writing.