OO! I’m so glad I dropped by Scott Westerfeld’s blog today! I often forget to stop by blogs that aren’t on my friends page as feeds. (I wish I knew how to locate feeds better.)
Turns out he’s going to be in Seattle signing next Saturday. Here’s the info:
Now, that means I need to actually go out and buy my favorite books of his, because I’ve read all of them from the library. No, I have Midnighters #1, and I have Specials in ARC, but that’s not the same as having a nice book.
I believe I’ve said here before that Westerfeld writes some great science fiction, better contemporary science fiction than I’ve seen around in literature in a while. I especially recommend the Uglies trilogy–Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.
Go read them. And if you’re in the Seattle (well, technically Bellevue) area, drop by and see him. I know I’ll be there. Here’s the info:
Saturday, October 14
3:00PM
And here is where:
Lake Hi
lls Library
15228 Lake Hills Blvd.
Bellevue, WA 98007
425-747-3350
See his blog for a map.
And yes, I think I’ll be using the goggles userpic for a while. 🙂

I figured I’d try out a paid account and see if it might expand a few things for me. Today’s the goodies day, too. I’m working on a post of recommended books, and I think I’m going to try starting a librarything, though I’m not sure it’ll let me post code in the sidebar, even with a paid account. Perhaps my coding friends can help me with that? My friend Jordan was bored a while back and offered to help tinker with my coding, but he might be less bored now.

Because my new user icon is irresistable. Meet my little nephew–this is from when we went swimming when I went home over the summer.

Isn’t it beautiful? We’re very, very excited about Hallowmere. Stop by Tiffany Trent’s LJ () and tell her congratulations!
This is the cover for the advance reader’s copy. Subject to change for the final book, of course.

ETA: Oh! I forgot to add the cover copy, because of course you’ll want to know what the book is about!
As the Civil War ends, Corrine’s nightmare begins.
Ever since her parents died, Corrine’s dreams have been filled with faeries warning her of impending peril. When she’s sent to live at Falston Manor, she thinks she’s escaped the danger stalking her. Instead the dreams grow stronger, just as girls begin disappearing from school.
Then Corrine discovers letters of forbidden love by a medieval monk who writes of his entanglement with a race of vampiric Fey—the same Fey who haunt Corrine’s dreams. Who are t
hese creatures and what do they want? Corrine knows only one thing for sure: another girl will disappear soon, and that girl just might be her.
In the Serpent’s Coils marks the debut of Hallowmere, a dark, edgy historical fantasy series that teens won’t be able to put down!
Coming to bookstores Sept. 2007.

I’m going mad with the mystery. I want to know NOW! I think this is why I love books. While a TV show is only an hour long, if there’s a season-long mystery, they sure do love to drag it out. In the case of lost, it’s a 3-year-long mystery that shows no signs of being solved anytime soon. They’re driving me crazy, I tell you!
Despite that, the season premiere of LOST did get me excited for the season. However, I might just let the next few episodes pile up on my Tivo before watching, so I can have the instant gratification of being able to go to the next episode right away. Delayed gratification for instant gratification.
And I just have to say: I love Jericho!
you can tell that this is being written by a YA author in some spots (thanks to the YALSA listserv, I know that one writer on the show is the author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky).
****SPOILER ALERT**** I especially love the nerdy teen character, whose name I’m forgetting already, whose mom died in Atlanta and who works at the local grocery store. When he hears
that Jericho needs food and that the owner, a middle-aged woman whose name I also forget, didn’t get her weekly train shipment due to the nuclear bombs, at the end of this last episode you see the kid out in the middle of nowhere, investigating a train wrecked with a car. He opens one of the train cars and the last image is of all that food, the food intended for the grocery store’s weekly shipment. What a good kid.

Mirrorstone’s site just launched again with a new design. Check it out–www.mirrorstonebooks.com.
Especially useful is that author bios and teacher/librarian resources are easier to find. Note the button in the middle that leads you to reviews, teacher guides and reluctant reader kits, and information on how to get an author to visit your school. And you get to see the authors’ ugly mugs now–head shots are included. 🙂
If you visit each series’ site, you’ll notice that there are new games. I especially love the coloring book game on the Star Sisterz site. It’s so fun!

I received an email today commenting on my last post on reluctant readers. Author Darcy Pattison said:

I just read your livejournal post about the panel on reluctant readers and fantasy. I love what Mirrorstone does with the reluctant readers and fantasy. Sounds like the BN Educator’s Day you went to was more lively than the one I attended here!

I wonder if there’s another readership you might explore, too.

I once heard Lawrence Yep talk about reading fantasy. As a first generation Chinese-American, he grew up in an all black neighborhood, but attended a school that was mostly white (If I remember it right!). He said that for him, reading fantasy was like his life: a character is thrust into an alien environment, must learn the rules of society, and must survive.

Using fantasy to reach out to immigrants might be another avenue of reaching the right readers for fantasy stories.

I completely agree with her. Often fantasy is written from a Western point of view or using mostly British/Celtic lore, and I’ve seen many a discussion about why that is and how we might gain more multicultural readers if we used more multicultural lore. Laurence Yep’s work is a great example of using themes and folklore from other cultures to tell a great story that might appeal to readers of a more broad background. I volunteer for the library here and work with Somali and Cambodian immigrants, and it’s probably an issue they’d relate to.
But related to that, one thing I love about fantasy is that it can address issues like race and culture in a metaphorical way, so that people of many backgrounds can put themselves into an alien world and get out of it what applies to their life. That’s another thing we talked about on the panel, actually, that I didn’t cover in my post–the multicultural themes a lot of fantasy covers. Dragonlance, for example, at least in the New Adventures, often addresses racism between kender, elf, and human. Sindri Suncatcher is a kender who can do magic–something that’s simply “not possible” in the world, which causes a lot of discrimination, speculation, and comments from other characters. Elidor is a great example of an elf from a mixed race who has to deal with the racism of his Silvanesti relatives and villagers at his “otherness.”
Star Sisterz is another of our series that has alternating protagonists from many cultural backgrounds (Indian-American, Caucasian, Latina, and Asian-American—there’s one more that I’m forgetting), and we really love that it can speak to girls of all types—both in universal themes and in characters of different backgrounds. The authors were talking in the panel about how there’s not a lot of contemporary fantasy like that out there, but that high fantasy often addresses those themes. (Which does make me say, “we need more contemporary fantasy that addresses those themes!”)
One thing that fantasy addresses well is the idea of “otherness,” metaphorically. It’s one of the reasons I love fantasy, really–as an outsider socially, a nerd/geek/bookworm (not to mention a farm girl in an urban world and a member of a minority religion), I’ve experienced at least some of what it feels like to be an Other, and I think that when we’re in that position, even for a moment, it helps us to understand others who might feel like outsiders. Reading a book in which the protagonist is an “other” puts the reader, of whatever background, into their shoes and creates an experience that can help increase empathy, for those who have never felt that way, or just let the reader be able to say, “yeah, I’ve felt that way, too.”
Not that I’m advocating bibliotherapy. But I do believe we look for ourselves in the books we read, as well as looking for adventures that we’d never be able to experience in real life. Both of those elements can be found in fantasy and science fiction, especially in what’s out there for kids and teens today.

We just did this presentation the other day at the West Seattle B&N educator day that got me thinking that I wanted to post about how fantasy appeals to reluctant readers. Have you ever seen that? A kid that is really into video games finally getting turned on to reading because a book is set in the same world, or has the same magical feeling? A 10 year old boy who hasn’t read an entire book on his own realizing that Star Trek or Dragonlance or Star Wars or some other series gives him characters he can return to again and again?
I never really thought about series being both useful and fun until I started working here and editing series. Here at Mirrorstone, we make a “reluctant reader kit”* every year free for librarians, teachers, and homeschoolers that includes ideas on how to get your reluctant reader reading. Book club ideas, teacher guides, readers’ theater, and samples of the first book in each series the kit covers–each with the intention of giving teachers and librarians tools to help them help the kids and teens they work with.
But one thing the kit hasn’t covered yet that our authors discussed on the panel on Saturday is how the right kind of video games can directly give kids the skills they need to feel more confident as readers. Ree Soesbee (), who works for a company associated with GuildWars in her day job, talked about how adventure games that give the player a quest make the player have to possess or develop certain comprehension skills. She gave the example of a player coming upon a character in the game who says, “I’m lost in the woods and I can’t find my way home! But I have to find my pig first. Can you find my pig?” The player then has to figure out how to find the pig, what clues will lead him or her to the pig, find the character again and lead them both out of the woods. This takes reading skills and the ability to decipher certain clues.
I really like that connection. I grew up on Atari and Nintendo, and though I never really game all that much now (though I do enjoy our department’s weekly Eberron game, which is paper-and-pencil, rather than video), I can see the value these games have in kids’ lives, both as tools for reading comprehension and for enjoyment in and of themselves.
Ree did, of course, make a distinction about this kind of game and others, such as first-person-shooters, but she and Jeff and Anjali also brought up that even these interests can be translated into interests in books. You like first-person-sho
oter games? Perhaps you’d enjoy a spy novel (or a nonfiction book about true crime, etc.).
For those of you who work with kids or teens directly, how do you reach reluctant readers?
*For a reluctant reader kit for your library or classroom, email libraries AT wizards DOT com, or you can download parts of last year’s kit here (this year’s has more material for new series):
http://ww2.wizards.com/books/Mirrorstone/Dragonlance/default.aspx?doc=reluctantreader
http://ww2.wizards.com/Books/Mirrorstone/Dragonlance/Default.aspx?doc=Teachers
http://ww2.wizards.com/Books/Mirrorstone/Knights/Default.aspx?doc=Teachers

I keep meaning to post two things: the links on the side to all things children’s literature and publishing, and a list of my recommended books. Perhaps I can do the recommended books today, because I have the Word file. I was going to try to figure out how to post just the word file and link to it on the side (hence the dead links on the left, if you’ve tried them).
But this weekend I think I’ll try to update the links, too. No guarantees.
Also, if you’re in the Seattle area, be sure to drop by the West Seattle Barnes and Noble tomorrow between 11 and 4 to catch local Mirrorstone authors and illustrators discussing their work with teachers for the B&N Educator Day. Jeff Sampson, Ree Soesbee, Anjali Banerjee, and Darrell Riche will be on a panel at 1 p.m. discussing fantasy for reluctant readers, and several Mirrorstone employees in editorial, marketing, and art will be present t
o answer questions about the books, too. Here’s the address, and you can google or whatever for directions.
Barnes & Noble Booksellers Westwood Village
2600 SW Barton St Suite E-1
Seattle, WA 98126
206-932-0328

Posting frenzy this evening? I suppose. It’s been a while since I posted, and then all of a sudden I’ve got a lot to say.
So I watch a lot of TV in the evenings. For one, with being sick so much recently, it’s much easier to watch TV to entertain myself when I can’t go outside and do something for lack of enough balance or energy and I can’t read for the migraine I have. There’s only so much staring at the wall one can do. For another thing, I got DirecTV when I moved into this apartment, and I feel a financial obligation to make it worth the money I’m paying for it. It’s my entertainment budget for the month, so dang it, TV, entertain me!
Seeing as how this is the beginning of the fall season for a lot of shows, I’ve been watching all sorts of new stories. How they begin actually tells you a lot about storytelling, I think. Heroes, for example, starts entirely too slowly, and in a book, the writer would have lost me by now, despite the intriguing characters. Okay, perhaps not lost me, but I’d certainly have said to find a way to introduce the main conflict of the story more quickly. I must say, though, that the little vignettes in that show do a great job of starting each character’s story with action, especially the cheerleader.
But that’s just one show. Here are all the new shows I’ve been watching, and some not-so-new.
The shows that are standing out to me this fall
Eureka On the Sci-Fi channel, and totally worth finding. It’s like Northern Exposure or the Gilmore Girls, with its fast-talking quirky characters–but in a small town full of entirely science and technology nerds. My favorite show of the year. And the “season” is almost over already!! It couldn’t have been more than six episodes. I hope they come back with more soon.
Jericho which I’m watching right now. Love it. Though I still will always think of Gerald McRaney as a 30-something detective with a cowboy hat permanently attached to his head. I’m on the edge of my seat and I want to know what happens next NOW!
Heroes Interesting concept, but the first episode was all setup and barely any story. Give me story, people! But the characters are intriguing, so we’ll see where it goes. Like I said above, it does a good job in some areas, not so good in others. I’m willing to give it a few more episodes.
Vanished Only so-so, but for some reason I keep watching. It feels like it should be finish
ing up already after only 3 or 4 episodes, because I feel like they’ve already revealed all the secrets that would be within the realm of possibility.
Bones 2nd season, but just as fun. I really love David Boreanaz, just as much or more as when he was Angel (which I only watched all of this summer on DVD).
Shows I’m finally getting to watch from the beginning that I’ve been watching despite not quite knowing what was going on
Avatar: The Last Airbender–about the best show on TV, for all ages. SO fun! Great storytelling, funny and dramatic at the same time. Totally worth owning on DVD, which is my plan when I have an extra $40 in my budget. Until then, I’m DVRing it on Nickelodeon. It’s currently in its 2nd season.
New shows I’m not impressed with:
Men in Trees This looked like it’d be a quirky, fun show like Northern Exposure–set in a small Alaska town, but from the perspective of a woman. But it’s only okay. I’ve continued to watch it because I have hope for it yet, but I’m far more impressed already with Eureka.