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A Rude Awakening
Several weeks ago, I woke up to the sound of gunshots outside my bedroom window. I jumped out of bed and peered out the window to see what was going on. Police vehicles surrounded the house next door, including one of those black SWAT vans, and police in body armor prowled the yard, converging on…
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A Conversation in Spam
My blog’s spam filter blocks all kinds of interesting comments, which are typically listed as being authored by an apparently verbal and sometimes intelligent pharmaceutical. Usually, the comments are along the unintelligible lines of, “qkweyfpewlku…@#$%!34.” But lately, I’ve had some rather coherent comments that actually started to make my spam queue sound like an […]
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LeVar Burton
Neal Conan recently interviewed the actor and former host of Reading Rainbow for Talk of the Nation on NPR. I really enjoyed their conversation, and loved what Mr. Burton had to say about the role of reading in the lives of children, and the mission of the show. This quote summed it up nicely: “Sesame…
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Writing for Charity
A little while ago, I posted about the Writing for Charity Event at the Treehouse Children’s Museum in Ogden, Utah. I was invited to take part in the workshop as a debut author, and I think I was the “newest” writer at the event. It also happened to be my first time participating in something…
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No more butterflies in the sky…
Reading Rainbow is ending its 26-year run on public television. What could be greater than a show whose purpose it was to promote reading and make it fun for kids? I loved watching it when I was growing up, and I looked for those books I’d seen LeVar Burton introduce. And it meant something to…
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You laugh now, but wait till the zombie apocalypse!
A team at the University of Ottawa has contributed a groundbreaking paper to the study of infectious disease: When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection. Yes, zombie infection. From the abstract: “We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions.…
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What's in a name?
After much brainstorming, emailing, considering, and discarding, my book officially has a title. All the necessary people have signed off on it, so I can tell you here. My debut novel is called: The Clockwork Three I really like it. The challenge was coming up with something that worked for the whole book. I came…
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SCBWI 2009
Over the weekend, I was in LA for the annual summer conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and can I just say that I had an absolute blast! Seriously, I love writers. And I believe that as solitary an activity as writing is, writers need other writers. We learn from each…
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"The Wilderness of Childhood"
I really enjoyed this essay by Michael Chabon. I mean, I love his fiction (and you may remember that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was one of my favorite books that I read last year) but he’s a great essayist as well. I plan to read the collection from which this essay comes when it’s released…
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"Zubbles"
At long last, we can all blow colored bubbles. When I read this I thought to myself, “You mean we couldn’t before?” But then I thought about it and I realized I’d never actually seen a colored bubble. It turns out that it’s very difficult to manage without staining whatever the bubbles happen to pop…