Something Rotten's second good news

It hath begun! Check out the write-up of Something Rotten on Propernoun.com.

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Something Rotten's first good news

Something Rotten doesn't hit bookstore and library shelves until October, but I've just gotten word from Editor Liz that my YA murder mystery has been picked up by the Junior Library Guild! This is great news. The JLG has great taste in books, and often their picks predict what will be well-reviewed and popular in the coming months. And of course they had the great taste to choose Samurai Shortstop last year. :-)

I suppose it's getting on toward that time when reviews and buzz (if there is going to be any) will begin to trickle in. I'm glad I stopped biting my fingernails back in eighth grade. They'd be stumps already.

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Vashti Project, Day 5

The Vashti Project continues. We had a busy day yesterday - meeting with our builder, taking Jo for a playdate at the lake with all of her friends from school, and (oh yeah) work - so our materials were non-messy, no-drying-time markers and crayons. I've been in to drawing patterns lately and Jo has been doing some too, so we decided to do patterned dots. Here they are. . .

This time we tried tracing around a plastic lid for the dot. Jo was a little frustrated that the lines for her stripes weren't perfectly straight so I showed her how to use a straight edge. I especially love how Jo's repeat alternated shades of blue/green with shades of red/purple. She tested out the combination on a piece of scrap paper before committing to it.

I went for all cool colors, through there's a bit of a yellow cast to the green crayon. I'm in love lately with this wavy checkerboard pattern.

I also got the machine sewing done on the sleeve and binding for my new quilt. We're going to DC this weekend (Alan is hitting the ALA conference and Jo and I will be hitting the Smithsonian museums) and I hope to get a lot of the hand-finishing done in our hotel at night after Jo crashes.
Thanks so much for the nice comments on the quilt binding tutorial. I took pictures of the steps to make a hanging sleeve so there will be a new tutorial soon.

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All booked up

I've added a few new events to the calendar!

First, I'll be at the Annual ALA Conference this weekend (June 23 & 24) in Washington, D.C. for a VERY limited engagement (all day Saturday and half of Sunday). Penguin plans to push Something Rotten galleys from 11-12 on Saturday morning, and I'm going to be there to shake hands and sign books.

Next up I'll be one of the judges at Malaprop's Bookstore's Harry Potter Party on July 20th before book the seventh goes on sale at midnight. If all goes well, I'll be going dressed as Hagrid (as I'm fairly Hagrid-sized) and I'll post pictures for you.

I've also added the Haywood County Book Mania festival on August 3rd and 4th, sponsored by the good folks at Osondu Books in Waynesville, NC. I was invited to this event last year, and look forward to it again (especially since it's now a lot shorter drive!)

And last but CERTAINLY not least, I've added two "launch parties" for Something Rotten this fall - first the o-fficial launch party at my hometown Carpe Librum Booksellers in Knoxville, TN at 2 p.m. on Sunday, October 21st, and then a reading and signing at my NEW hometown bookstore, Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville, NC, on Friday, November 2nd at 7 p.m.

Hope to see you at one of my upcoming events. And as always, you can keep up with where I'll be (and when!) on my calendar at www.alangratz.com!

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Vashti Project, Day 4

This time Jo got to select the medium we'd be working in for our dots. She opted for glitter glue. Jo ALWAYS opts for glitter glue. If she wants to do art and I ask her what she wants to work with, she'll stand in front of her art supplies, carefully considering everything, and then pick the glitter glue. So here you have it - two more pieces in the Vashti Project.

Jo made a couple of dots with glitter glue in squeeze bottles and then she went for the jar of glitter and snowflakes swimming in glue that you spread on with a brush. She used it to fill in one of her dots and to make a new dot, and then she discovered that she could make "duck feet" by mashing the brush down on the paper. So there are lots of duck prints moving all around the dots.
My dots were all straight from the tube. Jo wanted me to fill in the whole page with dots, but I liked doing a more random cluster.

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Build a Quilt - finally

Remember the Ten Quilt Project? I showed pictures of the stack here but I finally took some pictures of them hanging.
Here's the thinking behind Build a Quilt Squares. Each square is its own quilt, but you can combine squares to make larger compositions. So here's an example.
Start with a Checkmate block.
Add another block and you get something different. You could hang them so the blocks are touching in order to really play up the way new shapes are created where the blocks touch.
Add a third and you get something nice and tall and skinny.

Or a long horizontal row.
Or make a block of four squares.
Or as many squares as you want. Fun, eh?
These aren't nicely cropped yet - and you really have to ignore the ugly trim in our temporary house. Hopefully we'll get official (and prettier) pics on my website soon.

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Vashti Project, Day 3

I've been on the road for work, so no dots for a few days. But now we're back. For several months now Jo has been collecting random wrappers and scraps of paper in a "collage box." She's never used any of them until now - and she was pretty excited at the thought of bringing them out.
This one was simple. Draw a big circle on a piece of paper and fill it up with stuff from the collage box. Here are the results.

I used only candy wrappers and I wanted to fill every bit of space in my dot, including covering up the circle outline. Jo didn't want to put any limits on her materials, and she was much more interested in doing the dot within a dot within a dot composition in the middle of her dot. When she found the square glass gem in her box that was pretty much the highlight of her project. And really, to a four year old, what's better than finding a surprise glass gem? You can see it now in the very center of her dot.

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I've been two-timing you

Author and writing instructor Darcy Pattison asked me to guest blog for her while she's on the road, and my post about revising Samurai Shortstop is up at her Darcy Pattison's Revision Notes blog. Check it out!

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Vashti Project, Day 2

I think day one of the Vashti Project must have been successful - the first thing Jo said to me the next morning was, "What kind of dots are we going to make today?" So for day two we did a fun thing with melted crayons.

We covered our electric pancake griddle with aluminum foil and set it on the lowest setting. While that warmed up we cut circles out of plain white paper. Then we pulled out our container of crayon stubs (now I know why we never threw those away!) and removed any paper wraps that still remained. We drew shapes and swirls with the crayons on the aluminum foil, letting the colors melt together. When we liked the look of things we made prints by dropping the paper circles on the melted wax, lifting them up, and letting them cool.
After we had printed all of our dots we pulled out a bunch of construction paper and played around, deciding which dots looked better on which colors. Then we glued them down and signed them. Here are our favorites.

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The Vashti Project

So I've been casting around for an idea for something to do with Jo this summer. Some ongoing project that could be broken down into smaller projects - like every day identifying a tree in our new yard, but less her-looking-over-my-shoulder-while-I-look-things-up. On Saturday we spent all day visiting studios for the Toe River Arts Council Studio Tours and also down in Asheville for the open studio day in the River District. I decided to cap off the day by reading a few of our favorite books about creativity with Jo. We started with Milli, Jack, and the Dancing Cat. I love that one. Then we moved on to The Dot by Peter Reynolds (featuring the very best art teacher in the history of the world) and it hit me. We could spend the summer making dots!
In the book, Vashti won't even try in art class because she thinks she can't draw. Her teacher encourages her to make a mark and Vashti (who is clearly feeling pissy) just jabs a random dot on the page and shoves it at her teacher. Her teacher, undaunted, picks it up, looks at it thoughtfully, then hands it back and asks Vashti to sign it. The next time Vashti comes to class she finds HER little dot, hanging over the teacher's desk in a swirly gold frame! Wow! She decides she can make a better dot than that and she's off on an artistic bender. It's awesome.
So I mentioned the idea to Jo and she loved it. I told her we would start the next day and we would use paint. As soon as she woke up she asked when we were going to make dots.

So here is round one. It's always fun to get out the paints and mix colors. Jo and I each made a few and these are her favorites - one favorite from me and one from her.

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The Father of Japanese Baseball

My friend Judy Eastwood sent me a newspaper article from the Maine Sunday Telegram of May 20th, which tells the story of a Gorham, Maine man who went to Japan in the late 1800s to teach English, and ended up teaching them far more:

On a day in 1872 or a year later, depending on who's telling the story, Horace Wilson decided his students at the First Higher School of Tokyo needed to get away from their class lessons. A little physical exercise in the form of hitting a ball, throwing it and running would get the blood pumping.

The game was baseball, of course. If you've read the end notes to Samurai Shortstop, you'll know that Horace Wilson is credited with introducing baseball to Japan--although the sources I had said that Wilson wasn't a teacher at First Higher, but at Tokyo University. (Otherwise I might have used him as a character!)

What I find most interesting about the article is how Japanese baseball officials went looking for someone from Horace Wilson's family to represent him during Wilson's induction into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001:

A century passed before a representative of Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's national newspapers, showed up at the Wilson farm, now owned by Abigail Sanborn and Balcomb. "We didn't have any idea what he wanted," said Balcomb, who teaches calculus and contemporary math, among other classes, at Saint Joseph's College of Maine.

The Japanese weren't satisfied with the notion that baseball just happened to take root in their country. They wanted the man responsible for planting the seed. Their evidence pointed to Horace Wilson. To honor him properly and promote baseball in Japan, his family had to be found.

In June 2001, a small delegation arrived at the farm to formally invite Wilson family members to Japan. The newspaper, along with Japanese baseball federations, planned a ceremony to recognize Uncle Horace before the 83rd National High School Baseball Championship Series at the famed Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Dice-K had pitched his Yokohama team to the championship at Koshien three years earlier.

"It was a terribly hot day," said Balcomb of the second visit. "We were haying. I was in the barn, up to my knees in manure, milking, and one of the Japanese came in to watch. He didn't speak English."

Click here to read the whole article.

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Ta Daaaa!

It's been a great week. I took a couple of days off work to do some serious sewing while Jo was visiting her grandparents - and I finished a new quilt top! This is one that was requested by Grovewood Gallery - I love saying that. I still need to layer, baste, quilt, bind, etc. but I love finishing a top.
This one was a bit of a departure for me, color-wise. I usually go for brighter, high-contrast colors like this, but the good folks at Grovewood asked me to be inspired by the mountains around me now. So I was. There's a beautiful spot by our post office (I love our post office - they still use scales with metal weights and the postmistress has worked there since she was nineteen and she knows EVERYONE in town). Anyway, the post office is right on the bank of a river and when all the trees were starting to leaf out it was just beautiful. It was still mostly brown with the trunks and the leaf litter, but there were some patches of dark green pine and mountain laurel, occasional clouds of pale green buds on the deciduous trees, and one lone dogwood in full snowy bloom. It was a challenge to work with such muted colors (and I ended up tossing out some yellow-green blocks that just didn't fit in) but I ended up really happy with the result.
Please excuse the deck detritus surrounding the quilt. I was losing light fast and I wanted to get a picture tonight so I just scooted everything to the sides. It's still pretty dark. I'll get a better picture when I lay it out again to baste.
Now I'm off to finish a bit of hand sewing to finish a couple of projects for Lark Books. Crisp black and white with bright lime green!

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Samurai gets the scholarly treatment

Check out the great review of Samurai Shortstop at The Age of ______? blog written by Tom Philion, and Associate Professor at Roosevelt University in Chicagoland. Inspired by a writing prompt observed during another teacher's lesson that encouraged students to fill in the blank with the one word they thought best defined their age, Tom began to think about ways English teachers could encourage that kind of examination all the time. The answer, he thinks, is in contemporary young adult literature.

I happen to agree.

Here in Tom's words is the motivation for his project:

[T]his project is an effort to explore how young adult literature might be used to encourage deeper, richer, and more critical thinking about the contemporary world in middle school and high school English courses. Like many teachers, librarians, and publishers before me, I believe that young adult literature is a powerful tool for inviting teens to critically examine and take seriously the social roles and responsibilities that they are on the cusp of assuming.

Good stuff. His blog is fascinating. He's working his way through four Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) lists from last year - the 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults (which is where he found Samurai Shortstop), the 2007 Alex Award winners (ten adult books recommended for teen readers), the 2007 Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, and the 2006 Teens Top Ten (a list of outstanding literature selected by teens themselves).

Tom has even returned to Samurai Shortstop in a more recent post, in which he examines the influence of seppuku on suicide rates in contemporary Japan. The whole blog is great reading, and I love the scholarly attention he's giving young adult literature as a whole.

I also can't go without sharing Tom's Video Booktalk for Samurai Shortstop, which he has posted to YouTube and to his blog:



Thanks Tom!

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Stack o' Quilts

I've been busy, busy, busy. I can't show half of what I've been working on because they're projects for an upcoming book, but I HAVE been making progress on the Ten Quilt Project (here and here). In fact, I'm just about done. What you see here is a big stack o' quilts. All I need to do is add the picture hangers and hang them up. But I'm not going to get to it today. I have to go out and buy more picture hangers and today I am not leaving the house. Jo is staying with her grandparents and I am going to sew all day long. That's right - I'm starting a new quilt - the one Grovewood Gallery requested. I've got my fabric bought, washed, pressed and folded - all ready for me to start cutting and sewing. Yee haw!

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