storyfires

I love to run...er, I would love it, except that I always seem to get injured when I do it. Which is why I read this book. Because I'd had plantar fasciitis for six months and done absolutely everything doctors and everybody else recommended, including never going barefoot and buying orthotics and special shoes with extra arch support, and my heel pain kept getting worse. And then I heard something about a book called Born to Run and how some tribe in Mexico runs like 80 miles a day for fun with barely any shoes on at all. So I bought the book, but my daughter snatched it, and then she lost it. Meanwhile, a guy at the shoe store was telling me that going barefoot might actually make a person's arches stronger, and my brother was telling me how he and my nephew had been running barefoot and how much more fun it is to run without shoes. So I walked my dog to the park one day on my miserable, screaming heels, took off my running shoes, and ran two miles barefoot in the gr...

It's book-buying time of year (we hope!) and at least a couple of other bloggers have great Christmas book suggestions: check out Shannon Hale's (Goose Girl) recommendations and writer Matthew Kirby's . And then, more book suggestions by me: How could I have left Calvin and Hobbes off my list of boy books ? The collected volumes of the comic strips by Bill Watterson ( Something Under the Bed is Drooling , Sunday Pages 1985-1995 , etc.) have been my ten-year-old's (and almost every one of his friends') standby for the last two years. Great vocabulary builder. You'll find kids will start asking you about things like Cubist art and sex-discrimination, so be prepared. Reluctant readers will happily wade through difficult words because they want to understand the joke, even if it seems too sophistacated for a kid that age. My 10 and 12-year-old quote from Calvin as much as from movies. For the grown-ups (or serious teen-readers), how about a classic? Books...

It's easy: buy books--for everyone. Nothing better than curling up with a great new book during down-time on Christmas Day. Besides, books are cheap. They go well with chocolate. And cozy Christmas fires in the fireplace. They don't even rot your brain. If you're stumped about which book to buy for the kids in your life, let me take care of that problem for you right now. Here's my list of this-year's book recommendations after twenty years of reading aloud and talking about books to kids, as well as watching how kids respond to the read-aloud experience of individual books. All the books on my list have passed the story-under-fire test: they've grabbed and kept real-life kids' attention, whether the kids are reading-addicts, or not so easy to please. Besides, they're all great, high-quality books I've read and happen to love myself, or I wouldn't put them on my list:) Eat-the-book phase (babies): *   Pat the Bunny , by Dorothy Kunhard...

I've noticed  a trend in my writing: I think I might be slightly obsessed with names. For instance, my princess story has a main character who loses her name--and has to find another; my witch story centers around a girl who's stuck with probably the worst name on earth; and my current work-in-progress has a main character who's a slave boy with no real name at all. One of the things my princess, slave boy, and witch each discover, I think, is that a name is often not some floating thing you toss or take up like a bit of seaweed, even if you manage to change it (which I'd do in a heartbeat if my last name were Bloodvessel, for instance, like a particularly-nasty character in one of Joan Aiken's books); it's often attached to something else--to family and origin, history and genetic traits, even culture, place, and heritage; it defines, at least a little bit, our sense of who we are. Unfortunately, in Romeo's cas...

Hubby put the Christmas lights up and I mailed off Hepzibah to my agent at last. I expect to do some more revisions before we send her out into the publishing world, but I feel a little bit like I've just sent my baby to her first day of Kindergarten. Except I couldn't cry. I did laugh aloud. There's a little story behind all this. It begins Once upon a time, H was my first novel ever, and I worked on it non-stop for about a year, all the while attending conferences and reading like a mad-woman, but I never found a beginning I liked, so, after about 35 *&%$#! beginnings, I got sick of it and set it aside for a couple of years. Meanwhile, I wrote a second novel--the novel which got me an agent--and began three others. I learned a lot in those three years of writing and reading every day and studying novel-writing. When I picked H up again, I realized she needed a complete overhaul, poor girl. I kept getting her out and tin...