I’m so torn on what to be for Halloween. Mainly because what I’d really like to be is some fairy tale or fantasy character, and I don’t really have any money to buy a cool costume–because of course I’d want it to look like an SCA costume, not the cheapo thing you can buy at a costume shop.
I could be Princess Leia again–that would just require me going out and finding some gauzy white material to make the white outfit again. My Boston roommate’s curtains served as the outfit last time. However, my hair isn’t long enough anymore (it was down to my waist for that Halloween, and this year it’s only a few inches past my shoulders, sadly). I just started to be able to braid it again, and I can’t imagine I’d have enough hair for cinnamon buns. Not with this wispy blonde stuff.
I’m so bad at coming up with costume ideas. I truly have always depended on roommates for this kind of thing. Last year I’d just dyed my hair red before Halloween, so I went as Lucille Ball–only because I’d been Ginger Rogers in the exact same dress for a murder mystery party a couple months before. So everyone thought I was Ginger Rogers. 😛 She wasn’t a redhead! That was my mantra the whole night. Not a successful costume.
I’d love to be able to make myself a nice flowy green velvety cloak, if it can be done easily. If I could pair that with a nice flowy dress from a thrift store (I hope), I could go as Galadriel. I can’t remember if she had straight or curly hair, but I can totally do elf hair with the two side braids (it was my favorite hairstyle in grad school, and could double as hippie hair), either straight or curly, but straight looks better and doesn’t require as much work.
Which reminds me I should actually braid my hair Thursday night, then, because there’s a Halloween party Friday, then another Monday, then the work one Tuesday, and then a party Tuesday night. Wow.
Or I do have a cute embroidered peasant shirt with bell sleeves, and I could wear jeans (I’d have to find bell bottoms, and they’ve gone out of style again) and be hippie girl. But that’s a shirt I wear regularly, and it might be just like the Lucille Ball costume–a flop. People might wonder if I’ve dressed up at all, and that wouldn’t do. Perhaps I could go on a hunt for a new peasant shirt. I like them and they look good on my body type.
So, here’s where y’all come in. Are you dressing up for Halloween? What will you be? What should I be? Any suggestions on easy patterns for any of th
ese things? Any easily assembled but authentic-looking ideas? I could use all the help I can get!
Author: Stacy
Stacy Whitman is the publisher of Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books. She specializes in fantasy, mystery, and science fiction for children and young adults.
Slush day
I try to set one day a week aside as the day to go through submissions, though usually that gets superceded by a pressing deadline. But today I set deadlines aside because the slush pile was collapsing from its own weight, and I’m glad I did.
Rarely do I find submissions that make me giggle. At least, not in a good way. But today I found one that meant to be funny and it was! And I had several others that weren’t trying to be funny, so of course I didn’t laugh, but they were still good writing, good storytelling, and I wanted to read more. Good job, slush people! And not-so-slush, as it were, because some of them were people I’d met before.
Now to get back to reading the full manuscripts I’ve already got!
Practical Guide to Dragons fun stuff
I was just browsing our newly designed website, and what do I see?
No, not popcorn popping on the apricot tree. [/Mormon joke :)]
All sorts of cool stuff for the Practical Guide. A fun sample of the book here that lets you find out all sorts of stuff about red dragons, and then from that page you can download several cool dragon wallpapers and a nesting of dragons screen saver.
All sorts of dragon fun!
Two things
One, the Class of 2k7 website is nice, new, and pretty. Don’t know what the Class of 2k7 is? It’s a group of authors whose debut novels will be coming out next year, and they’re banding together to cross-promote and do local appearances together. Tiffany Trent, author of In the Serpent’s Coils, is a member of the Class of 2k7, so pop by and check it out.
The other thing. Here’s an idea.
If you’re in the Seattle area, you might celebrate Teen Read Week by volunteering at the library. I volunteer at the NewHolly branch for their Homework Help program, and though they’ve scheduled Homework Help for three evenings a week, they only have enough volunteers to staff one night. They need people who can help students of all ages, from elementary to high school, with a variety of the basic subjects (English, math, science, social studies). If you have 2 hours a week you can commit to helping these kids for the school year, contact the Volunteer Services Coordinator in the central branch of the Seattle Public Library and let her know. Even if you can only volunteer occasionally, they’re always in need of volunteers for events and other sporadic things.
If you’re not in the Seattle area, go see what you can do in your own community.
Go forth and read!
This is Teen Read Week as you’ll know if you read the LJs and blogs on my friends’ lists. I point you to those because many of them have great suggestions for things to do this week to celebrate.
Myself, I’m going to finally post part of my list of book recommendations. I still haven’t gotten my LibraryThing going, so this list is incomplete (and often lacking in publication information, and I’m not going to bother with links, sorry), and I’m only going to post the YA recommendations, but it’s something. If you haven’t read these books, you should (sorry for the lack of pretty-ness for this list):
Historical Fiction
Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson—Newbery Medal—Louise is jealous of her twin sister, Caroline
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fairy tale retellings/Fantasy/Adventure/Science Fiction
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire
Goose Girl, Shannon Hale—fun tale by a Newbery Honor author
Princess Academy, Shannon Hale—2005 Newbery Honor
The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley
The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley—Newbery Medal
Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure
Beast, Donna Jo Napoli
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Sabriel, Garth Nix
Lirael, Garth Nix
Abhorsen, Garth Nix
Power of Three, Diana Wynne Jones—my favorite of DWJ’s books
Cart and Cwidder, book 1 of Dalemark Quartet, DWJ
Drowned Ammet, book 2 of Dalemark
The Spellcoats, book 3 of Dalemark
The Crown of Dalemark, book 4 of Dalemark
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
The Folk Keeper, Franny Billingsley
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
Many Waters, Madeleine L’Engle
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L’Engle
Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion (2002)
Among the Hidden, Margaret Peterson Haddix—book 1 of the Shadow Children series
Running out of Time, Margaret Peterson Haddix
Turnabout, Margaret Peterson Haddix
Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
Pretties, by Scot
t Westerfeld
Specials, by Scott Westerfeld
Midnighters Series—The Secret Hour, Touching Darkness, and Blue Noon, by Scott Westerfeld
Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbaleister
Realism
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (Doubleday, 2003)
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow, 1993)
Seek, Paul Fleischman (Marcato/Cricket, 2001)
A Step from Heaven, An Na (Front Street, 2001)
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (Farrar, 1999)
Cuba 15, Nancy Osa (Random, 2003)
The Gospel According to Larry, Janet Tashjian (Holt, 2001)
The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton (Viking, 1967)
The Pigman, Paul Zindel (Harper, 1968)
Zibby Oneal, In Summer Light
Brock Cole, The Goats
Kazumi Yumoto, The Letters
Francine Prose, After
Cynthia Voigt, Dicey’s Song
Poetry
Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems (2001)
Helen Frost, Keesha’s House
Nonfiction
Jack Gantos, Hole in My Life. Even though he writes for a middle-grade audience, this book is definitely for a young adult audience.
*There’s a lot more great nonfiction out there, but my reference list was incomplete. I might get around to expanding it at some time.
ETA: I was in such a hurry to post this that of course I forgot to mention that OF COURSE you should also read Mirrorstone books! Go find the Practical Guide to Dragons, now #3 on the NYT chapter book list. Then read Time Spies (granted, not a teen read, but still quite fun!), Dragonlance: The New Adventures, Star Sisterz, and Knights of the Silver Dragon. 🙂
Just got back from a Scott Westerfeld signing at a library in Bellevue. Was able to get my copy of Midnighters signed (the first book of the series, anyway), and bought my own copy of Uglies to get signed. I’d checked it out from the library back when I was raving about it. Also had the chance to let him know that reading the series caused one of my best dreams of all time.
Also got to meet Justine Larbalestier, Scott’s wife, who wasn’t there to present but still kindly signed some of her own books. Sadly, I couldn’t find my copy of Magic or Madness anywhere this morning. I could have sworn I just saw it here the other day, but maybe it’s actually in the office. But I did get a chance to quickly chat with her–after stepping on her on my way in the door, trying to sneak in during Scott’s reading/Q&A time. :/ Sorry Justine!
Both of them are the nicest p
eople, and I’m glad I got a chance to chat with them.
Also, while Scott was talking, it occurred to me that he bears a striking resemblance to someone.
Do you see the resemblance? On the left, we have Michael Weatherly, best known as Logan Cale from Dark Angel and currently playing Agent DiNozzo on NCIS. (Loved the first season of Dark Angel, thought it was a really wonderful science fiction story with originality and great characters and great ideas. It tanked for me in the second season, though it was still interesting enough to say it was okay because I still wanted to know what happened to the characters.) On the right, we have a photo of Scott Westerfeld at some sort of appearance. They could be brothers!
Justine didn’t bear any striking resemblance to anyone, but that doesn’t matter. You should still read Magic or Madness and pay special attention to the fact that it has a magic system that really asks tough sacrifices of its users. It also has a sequel, Magic Lessons, which I haven’t had a chance to read yet.
Also talked to two local writers, Jen and another woman whose name I should have written down because I’m horrendous with names. Much better with faces-
-if we ever met again, I’d remember your face! (Funny–I’m very visual. I’ll remember a name once I’ve seen it written down.) Anyway, if you pop in here, I’d love to hear from you!
Buried treasure
My office at home is a mess. Well, actually, it looked great, but that’s because the boxes I have yet to unpack from moving to Seattle from Boston a year and a half ago are stacked so neatly. The boxes are filled with all sorts of goodies, like bills from Boston that I paid two years ago, the bouquet I carried at my sister’s wedding, and all sorts of odds and ends that I probably wouldn’t miss if I lost the entire box.
However.
It’s a good thing I take after my grandpa and never throw anything out. Because in going through two boxes, three file cabinet drawers, and several expandable folders in search of a particular project from grad school, I found some really cool stuff. Like my “scrapbox” from high school. I didn’t have a scrapbook, so I just threw everything into a box to scrapbook later when I grew up and could afford one. In this box was the buried treasure referenced above. I found:
- My Galva High School Scholastic Team Study Notes, informing me of all-important information such as RALPH WALDO EMERSON – THE TRANSCENDENTALIST! and EMILY DICKINSON – “greatest Am. female poet!” who was the “spinster of Amhearst.” My coach really liked exclamation points and all-caps, and he also couldn’t spell well, apparently. I want to read it now and see if the greats we had to memorize are really the greats I learned about in college. For example, does anyone know who Bret Harte is? Apparently he was a “local colorist influenced Twain.”
- A manila folder entitled in purple and red marker “Artwork & Writing Attempts.” I wish I had a digital camera, because I would show you my teenage handwriting, which makes me giggle because I used to think it was so elegant. Plus you’d be able to see the reason why it’s both purple and red. The original purple reads “Art & Writing,” but in a fit of self-consciousness at the quality of my work, I added “Attempts” at the end, and apparently thought that “Artwork” sounded better than “Art.”
What’s really fun about this folder is that it contains my entire junior and senior years’ English journals, rich with entries such as:
10-5-90
Felipe says I should write about him. So there, I wrote about him.
Okay, so now what should I write about?
In answer to your question, yes, I do date Tim. Tim and I have been going out for about a year and nine months now. We started dating my freshman year.
It was January 13, 1990, after the basketball game against Cambridge. I think we lost, but I don’t remember. It was semesters day, so my brain was fried (I thought). (Now that I’m older I know that freshman year tests are nothing compared to junior and probably senior year!) There was a social hour after the game. I went, and Tim went. We danced, and I asked if we were official. “Yep!”
[skipping…]
I do remember Mr. Bittle [a teacher who had died about a year previous in a drunk-driving accident–a teacher for whom I and my sister had babysat]. I had him for English I first hour. He was a really neat guy, and always late! I remember sitting in the halls waiting for him to get there. He’d come walking slowly down the hall, coffee cup always in hand. Usually he would just laugh at us for having to sit out there and wait. Once in a while, he’d tease us that we were late and that we’d have to go get a pass since we weren’t in our seats!
I then go on to talk about how I liked his replacement, Mr. Prusator, because he taught us grammar (something Mr. Bittle, love him dearly, ignored because he didn’t like it), and then ramble on about how I wanted to join a drum corps (which I did, the summer after my senior year in high school).
Fun! Not nearly so easily made fun of as my freshman year journal, for that same Mr. Bittle. I even have the journal entry that I wrote my poetry in which prompted Mrs. Kemp—the coolest English teacher I’ve ever had—to write “PLEASE SEE ME TODAY. IMPT.” on the entry, and that day she told me she wanted to enter my poetry in the NCTE English contest. I didn’t win anything, but it was so cool she thought I was good enough to enter, especially because I’d always considered myself an agriculture girl, despite my lack of interest in science. It was the duty of every good farm kid to save agriculture, you see, especially the Family Farm. But experiences like the entire two years I had Mrs. Kemp were the ones I looked back on with joy, which eventually helped me realize the career path I truly wanted to take. (It just took a few years for me to figure it out. See how I became an editor for more on that.)
- Also in the folder: all of my senior year of high school English papers. I didn’t even remember reading Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Lagoon,” probably because I skimmed it to write the paper. Hence the 85% grade…
- Also in the folder: all the papers I did for my Animal Science class, one of the first classes restored to my high school when the agriculture program was reinstated my junior year. The writing in papers on such subjects as porcine somatotropin and the blood of farm animals was looked on with a much less critical eye by my ag teacher. The papers received such comments as “Great! Well explained!” which I doubt I would have ever heard come out of Mrs. Kemp’s lips. 🙂
- In the same box, I also found an article I discovered in grad school that I’ve been meaning to read since then but had lost. I found “Editing Books for Young People” by infamous children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom while looking for something else, and it sounded intriguing but I was under a deadline, so I copied it and set it aside for another day. Finally, that day has arrived! I think I’ll make a separate post about specifics within it, though, because it’s a great article for children’s book editors, even written almost thirty years ago.
Hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane. I sure did. It makes me want to go read all of the journal entries and see what I can mine out of them for a book.
On editing
Cheryl Klein always has a lot of interesting things to say, especially regarding the editing process. She’s got some great information on her website for writers and prospective editors, and even now, with over a year at a children’s publisher under my belt, I find her insights helpful and insightful. Today, she posted about her recent experience at an SCBWI conference, which makes me want to see her notes from her talk. I’m sure I can get quite a few good pointers on how to do my job better, and reminders on things I don’t always have at the front of my mind.
One thing her post got me thinking of, though, is that I’m going to have to do a keynote talk of some sort for LTUE. It’s not till February, so I’ve got plenty of time, but I thought I’d throw it out there as a discussion topic: if you were to attend LTUE–a local science fiction/fantasy con/symposium that invites authors, scholars, and editors on panels to discuss SFF with a mixture of fans and prospective writers–what would you like to hear the editor guest speak on?
I’ve had thoughts of the basics of children’s fantasy (because there’s so much more out there besides Harry Potter), or perhaps the roots of children’s fantasy (perhaps too academic), or perhaps how fantasy can be used to draw in reluctant readers, but these are all things other people can talk about. What can I specifically as an editor contribute? Discussion of the basics of submitting? That gets discussed on every panel about writing. Something about the editing process? Perhaps. It might be especially interesting to discuss the editing process with how a series book gets developed compared to a standalone book, but how similar they are in the desire for great storytelling and wonderful writing.
But those are all just brainstorming ideas. What am I missing? What would you all like to hear, if you could be there?
Practical Guide to Dragons hits NYT list
Today you’ll see one of my new favorite books on the NYT chapter book list at #4 (scroll down to see the chapter books list):
Congrats to Sindri (aka Lisa Trutkoff Trumbauer)!
LibraryThing
Anyone ever tried this? I’ve seen a lot of bloggers use it in their sidebars, and I think it’s a great way of showing a bit randomly the kinds of books I recommend. So I’ve spent a few hours this morning starting to add some books to it, but my LJ sidebar doesn’t appear to be understanding the javascript. What’s supposed to look like this in the sidebar:
…looks like plain text. Any smart people out there who can tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Uh, I guess that didn’t work, either.
I guess I’ll have to keep working on that one. In the mean time, it’s still a great way to catalog my books, and it’s fun to see who else has those books, and what they recommend related to them.