Dancing the Macabray

via Neil Gaiman

Audio Tweets

Starting October 13 at Noon EST, Neil Gaiman (known as @Neilhimself) will launch a special round-robin interactive storytelling experience. He’ll tweet the first line of the story and then the rest is up to you! Just login to your Twitter account (registration is free) to continue the story.

Twitter an Audio Story with Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman’s Library

No, that is not my school’s lovely library, and it certainly isn’t mine. It is  @neilhimself’s “downstairs library.”  I only wonder what the upstairs library looks like!  More here.

The Does and Don’ts of Conventioneering, ALA Edition

***Warning — this is a very self-indulgent post with lots of me in it.***

Do bring a wrap for the chilly convention center.

Don’t walk by a Payless while already in the convention city, think that perhaps 3 inch heels would indeed be more elegant for the Newbery Banquet than the cute little patent leather flats in suitcase, go in and try on $20 pair, buy them and then hobble about the night of the Banquet.

Do enjoy wonderful books personally signed by lovely authors at dinners.

Don’t get sucked into the “There’s an ARC, I better take it” situation and then have your shoulder sag and sag and sag as you take more and more and more.  (If you do, be sure to mail them though.)

Do network and have fun seeing old friends.

Random House gave Florence Parry Heide a lovely 90th Birthday Party.
I adore the above book as evidently does Lane Smith, another old friend, who has illustrated Florence’s latest book. (We first met many, many, many years ago when a student of mine took me along while she interviewed him — her mother knew his wife from college — in his incredibly cool NYC studio.)

Don’t even attempt to get a book signed by Neil Gaiman the day after he gives his Newbery speech. (This line is OUTSIDE the exhibits.  It was segmented and HarperCollins folk –editors included — were doing a fantastic job managing something that took many hours.  I wonder if anyone has done a signing at ALA quite like it.)

Do get prettied up for the Newbery Caldecott Wilder Banquet as did these lovely ladies I’m standing with: Patty Rosati, marketing wiz at HarperCollins and Jennifer Hubert Swan of Reading Rants).

Don’t overlook fathers and sons like Walter Dean Myers and Chris Myers.  Their forthcoming Egmont book, Looking Like Me, is going to be a hit, I predict.

Don’t overdo the confetti eggs!  Here are Starr LaTronica and Melanie Chang dealing with the result of one.

Do be as starry-eyed as you want after finally meeting someone you admire, have an extended conversation about reading aloud, and then go off to sit at his publisher’s table to see him get his Newbery Medal.

Don’t think you aren’t noticed when you slip back to the dais to twitter or something like that.

Do run around like everyone else taking photos for fun!



Here are Jenni, Kathi, and Ashley!

Don’t feel guilty for being unable to cover everything (partly because I’m a lousy photographer and my camera’s batteries were dead the first day).  It was just great to see friends, see new and forthcoming stuff, consider issues like translating (USBBY session on this was fantastic), blogging (the Booklist session on this was great too),  and just have a blast talking and talking and talking about what we all love so much — books.

Do go home tired, but happy.

Away to Chicago

I’m off shortly to ALA in Chicago where I will be seeing many friends from the publishing world — authors, illustrators, editors, marketers, publicity folks, agents, librarians, academics, reviewers, educators, teachers, bloggers, booksellers, and book lovers of all stripes. Can’t wait to see them all and do some socializing, gossiping, hear about and see new and forthcoming books, and otherwise have a grand time.

In addition to all the socializing and networking, I also plan to:

• Stop by the Mo Willems reading at the Art Institute’s “Picture Perfect: Caldecott Award Books: 2006-2009) exhibit on Friday afternoon, 3-5.
• Wander the exhibits on Saturday morning. (This is perhaps my favorite thing to do — see what is coming down the pike for all of us.  I’m also on the look-out for next year’s Battle of the Kids’ Books contenders.)
• Meet up with some fellow child_litters for lunch on Saturday at the convention center food court (thanks to Cheryl Klein for organizing this).
• Hopefully make it to the Saturday 1:30 session, “Books and Blogs: Made for Each Other?”
• Sit in on the Notables meetings (their discussion list is available here) at various times.
• Also on Saturday, at 3:30, get to the session, “Mixing it Up: The Process of Bringing International Children’s Books to the US” with Cheryl and others.
• On Sunday at 1:30, go to The Pura Belpré Celebración; I’ve never been before and hear it is wonderful!
• Be at the Newbery Caldecott Wilder Banquet on Sunday.  I went to my first one of these in 2002 when my dear friend Roxanne Feldman was on the committee that honored Linda Sue Park with the Newbery Medal for A Single Shard.  She arranged for me to sit at the FSG table where I had a blast with Jack Gantos.  Since then I’ve gone yearly and it has been wonderful each time.  Last year was, of course, particularly special because it was when I was on the Newbery Committee and we got to see one of the best banquet speeches to date by our winner, Laura Amy Schlitz.  Neil Gaiman is an amazing speaker (and, as this blog’s readers well know, I was a huge advocate for his book winning), but I’m dubious that even he can beat Laura’s mesmerizing presentation of  last year. Still he is NEIL GAIMAN, arguably the biggest celeb to win this award (biggest outside this world of children’s books, I mean), a great guy, and a wonderful storyteller in his own right — so I’m sure it is going to be one hell of a night.  I cannot wait!
• Listen to Melba Beals on Monday morning.
• Attend the presentation of the Batchelder, Carnegie, Geisel, and Sibert Awards later on Monday morning.

Sadly I am returning to NYC on Monday afternoon so cannot attend the Odyssey Award Presentation and Reception, the Printz Award Program, the Coretta Scott King Award celebrations (really, really sorry I can’t do these — I’ve gone to the amazing breakfast several times and this year there are more events to celebrate 40 years of the award), and too many other cool looking activities.

Revisiting: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish

“I’ll swap you my dad,” I said.
“Oh-oh,” said my little sister.

This was the year of Neil Gaiman for my class.  In the fall I read aloud an ARC of The Graveyard Book, we fell madly in love with it and made a mural, and were thrilled beyond measure when it won the Newbery Award.  The Coraline movie caused much in-class discussion (especially some of the changes from the book) and the kids also enjoyed tremendously my reading aloud Gaiman and McKean’s clever  The Wolves in the Wall.  I then wanted to read to them an earlier collaboration,  The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, but couldn’t find it.  One of my students insisted she’d seen it on a classroom shelf and  we periodically went looking for it without success; I sadly figured it was gone forever (swapped for a dad, perhaps?).  Then as I began cleaning up the last week of school — I found it — safely hidden away in a cupboard.

Of course, I read it and, yes, they liked it.

It is a shaggy dog story of sorts, a clever culminative tale with a perfect balance of words and art. Gaiman’s deadpan voice melds perfectly with McKean’s colorful yet also matter-0f-fact illustrations.  The annoying little sister*, the various pals, the irritated mother, and the dad behind a newspaper — all tropes that are wittily realized in this story.  It is long, Wolves-in-the-Wall-long, and definitely for older kids.  I’ve got the original edition with the above cover (which oddly makes me think of Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia); below is the cover for the HarperCollins edition (and you can browse the book itself here).

*We got going on annoying little (and big) sisters and I showed them one of my favorite books when really young, Shirley Hughes’ My Naughty Little Sister.

A Few Coraline Musical Links

NY1 has a little feature with some bits from the show here.

My theater companion, Betsy Bird, has a very thorough review here.    It was a lot of fun seeing it with her!

And one more positive review is here.

Coraline Musical: Impressions

Eerie, elegant, and witty,  Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is one of my favorite contemporary children’s books, one that I love reading aloud to my fourth graders.  My response to adaptations of it have been mixed. I wasn’t wild about the graphic novel as I thought Coraline looked too old in it.  As for the movie, I thought it was visually gorgeous, but have to admit that I was a bit disappointed in Coraline’s character — too petulant — and the altered ending.

And now we have Stephen Merrit and David Greenspan’s musical version.  The first thing to know is that it is NOT FOR YOUNG CHILDREN and that is just fine.  Merritt has made this very clear, but there were still children under the age of eight in the audience at the performance I attended yesterday, one of whom was sitting near me and began sobbing midway through. His parents attempted unsuccessfully to console him and finally took him out.

Okay, is that out of the way?  For it is quite a theatrical experience for the rest — the  staging is both magical and creepy, the performances engaging,  Gaiman’s book is intact, and the whole thing is quite mesmerizing.Most of the music is done by piano — conventional (I think), prepared, and toy.  Occasionally other instruments are used — say balloons.  The set is delightful; the lighting gorgeous.  The acting, singing, dancing, and movement is also quite splendid in its way.

For someone who knows the story, there is a delight in seeing how it is represented here.  The mouse circus, the two aging vaudeville stars, the cat, the parents (original and Other), the souls, are all imaginatively conceived. Most of all, Coraline IS Coraline as I knew her in the book — crafty, clever, and brave.I’d read about the casting of a middle-aged woman, Jayne Houdyshell, as Coraline, and had admittedly wondered how that would go, but I gotta say that in the context of this production, it totally worked. She was terrific.

How it will fare with those who don’t know the story will be interesting to see. The plot is complex and often Coraline has to tell us that she is now somewhere else.  We in the known are amused, but those not?  I’ll be interested to see how it works for them.

An extremely eccentric, odd, fascinating, beautiful, and very satisfying piece of avant-garde theater.

HMANs

About half way down in this post, Neil Gaiman quotes this bit from a blog reader (who was no doubt reacting to an earlier post on entitled readers):

If you are writing (or doing anything else) for the sheer fun of it, and may sell it and may not, then you are on your own time, and can go throw popcorn at the TV all you want to.

If you have taken an advance or a contract, YOU ARE WORKING FOR SOMEONE ELSE, and you have the same obligation to produce quality work, ON TIME, as a soldier in Iraq does.

If you didn’t know that all cats can levitate, and that it’s already been studied exhaustively, then you are an idiot, and your cat thinks so too.

Neil responds thus:

Mm. You were doing okay until you threw in the bit about Iraq. (I assume the flip side is, “Soldiering. Well, it’s just a job. What are they complaining about? Why are they nipping off to hospitals and complaining about the facilities and treatment? Soldiers in Iraq have the same obligation not to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and not to put themselves in harm’s way that a novelist in a rose-trellised cottage Devon does.”) (And I keep having fantasies about a trained platoon of Her Majesty’s Armoured Novelists being put through their paces by an irascible RSM “… on the double – wait for it wait for it, what do you think you’re doing, you horrible little man, contemplating litotes? -on the double, quiiiiiiiiick PLOT!”)

Normally, I’m the one marching up and down trying to explain to the world that writing is a job, and it’s not romantic and it’s not clever and it’s not special. For the most part, that’s what this blog is about.

Sage Gaiman

Neil Gaiman on Entitlement