In the Mail!

FIRST: I've been having some problems with the internet at my house. Something caused a short in the phone wires, so the landline and internet went *poof* for a week. But we had a VERY nice man named Scott from Expenet Communications* in to fix it this morning, and he did an amazing job, so the blog is back in business.

I answered a knock at the door the week before last, and GUESS WHAT THE POSTMAN HAD FOR ME!

A box from your publisher can only mean one thing...

IT’S REAL!

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG...

Of course, I had to spend some time playing with different ways to stack them up.

Swirly spiral style...

All stacked up!

My publisher told me that BITE INTO BLOODSUCKERS will be available in September. That’s THIS MONTH!! Aaaaaaah!

To celebrate the release of my FIRST BOOK (!!), I’ll be holding a fun contest and giveaway, so watch this space!

Meanwhile, I’m going to go back to stroking that gorgeous** cover…

Me and My Book!
Photo taken by Kristi Penny

How is your week going?

*Scott Hinchcliffe is a miracle worker who is very nice, very fair, and who likes to talk politics. In other words, he is my kind of telephone repair person. If you live in the GTA and you have phone issues, you should call him.

**Gorgeous is relative. I have argued on this blog that mosquitoes are gross, and even that the very photo of a mosquito that graces this cover is gross. But at this point, any cover with my name on it is a gorgeous cover.

Cover Reveal! Goodies! HUZZAH!

I’m just back from a whirlwind weekend at the SCBWI Canada East conference The Art of Story in Montreal - and what a conference! I saw so many people, and learned SO MUCH, and have so much to share...

But not yet, because I need to decompress and gather photos together and collect my thoughts a bit first. My post-conference post (har har, SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) will come later this week.

In the meantime, guess whose book has a final cover!

It's coming...

This girl's book!

I don't know how covers have gone for you guys, but this cover went through a LOT of changes. A LOT. But boy, do I love this version. Just look at that proboscis! Just look at the hairs on that mosquito! Just look at that blood-filled abdomen!

MOSQUITOES. THEY ARE SO GROSS.

But I love it. I am giddy with cover love.

And look what the UPS man brought me? GOODIES!

Witness my two-tone gorgeousness!

I ordered this awesome tote bag and hat to promote my book! In case you don't know yet, BITE INTO BLOODSUCKERS is the non-fiction book for 7-11 year-olds that I wrote with Kari-Lynn Winters. I got the bag and hat from Vistaprint, and I just LOVE them! Aren’t they gorgeous? (Well, okay - the mosquito isn’t gorgeous. But the MATERIAL is gorgeous! I love the two-tone look.) The tote bag is made of sturdy canvas, and it’s big enough to hold ALL THE THINGS. It’s going to be perfect to bring to school visits! And the hat is just perfect for summer weather!

I am going to be carrying this bag and wearing this hat EVERYWHERE!

To find out more about BITE INTO BLOODSUCKERS (my first book!), which is coming SOON, and to pre-order a copy, check it out online at Amazon, Chapters, and Books-A-Million. (You guys! BOOKS-A-MILLION!!!)

Thanks for your support, and thanks for stopping by!

It's a Party!

This is my second blog post in as many days.

I know. Crazy, right?

It’s a little ridiculous. But sometimes, life is just ridiculous.

I’m posting here to direct you to a party! What kind of party? A Facebook party! Which is the best kind, because PAJAMAS, amirite?

ANYWAY.

Some friends and I have teamed up to put together an event to celebrate our books. Come join me, LE Carmichael, Helaine Becker, and Joan Marie Galat while we SPRING into Science! We’ll have cool links, some science chat, a bit of origami, and, best of all, PRIZES! Including four GRAND PRIZES - one from each of us - for four lucky (randomly drawn) people who email us at the designated Spring Into Science email address posted on the event page.

My prize is this awesome collection of Bloodsucker-inspired cookie cutters. 

These will make the BEST COOKIES!

There’s a horse to represent the horsefly, lips to represent the kissing bug, a butterfly (Did you know there is a blood drinking butterfly? Have I given you nightmares now?), a chick to represent the vampire finch, a fish to represent the candiru, and a vampire bat. Awesome, right? I kind of wish I could keep these for myself. Think of all the possibilities!

The party is all online, so click THIS LINK between 1pm and 5pm TODAY, March 7th.

See you there!

Flash Fiction: Jurassic Park meets Indiana Jones

I decided to take part in Chuck Wendig's flash fiction writing exercise this week, just for fun. The assignment was to randomly pick a topic from column one and a topic from column two, and mash them together to make a story. Be sure to visit his blog, where everyone else who participated linked to their creations, and read some of the other entries.

I used a D20, and got Jurassic park meets Indiana Jones. So here it is:

MUMMIES ALIVE!

Peter checked his watch. Four more minutes until sunset, but it was still boiling. His shirt was soaked. He was sure he had lost at least a quarter of his body weight. And the tour guide was still talking.

When would they get to the good stuff? He had been excited about their family trip to Egypt, but that was before he had realized that the “exciting trip to see the pyramids” meant literally looking at the pyramids while boring tour guides droned on and on for hours about names and dates that nobody cared about.

Who wanted to look at pyramids? He wanted to go inside one!

He edged away towards the back of the crowd. His parents were so caught up in the lecture and the view of the Sphinx that they didn’t even notice. Within a few seconds, he was bolting across the sand towards the sphinx. His mom could take all the pictures she wanted; he was going to get a REAL souvenir.

Peter ignored the shouts coming from behind him. Twenty more yards... Ten... Yes! He collapsed against the rough stone, panting from the sprint. Maybe his dad was right - he needed to lay off the donuts. He reached up to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and saw a smear of blood across his forearm. He hadn’t even noticed, but he must have grazed himself on the rough surface of the sphinx’s base.

He stepped back and looked up. This thing was huge. It was like a skyscraper, but on its side - it was much wider than it was tall, and it was really tall. He jogged along the base, looking for an entrance. An angry voice was getting closer, and he needed to find a way in quick if he was going to find what he was looking for before they caught up to him and dragged him back to the hotel room.

Finally, he saw it - about fifteen feet up. He threw a glance back over his shoulder - a guard was almost on top of him! - and jammed his foot into a sizeable crack, reaching up with his hands to find finger-sized holds on the weather-pitted surface. Climbing as quickly as he could, he was just out of reach when the guard arrived at the base where he had been standing.

“Come back!” the guard cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing! It’s not safe!”

Peter kept climbing.

“You don’t know what’s in there! Please, come back!”

Peter scoffed. He knew what was in there: dead people and treasure. And he was going to get a piece of it. The kids at school wouldn’t believe their eyes. And he’d be guaranteed a good grade in history.

“PLEASE!” The guard screamed. Peter didn’t know why he seemed so scared. Maybe the guards had a plan to keep all the treasure for themselves. All he knew was, if those guys wanted Peter to come back so bad, they could come up and get him.

Finally, his right hand found empty space, and he reached up over the ledge and hauled himself up. His arms and legs were shaking with the effort, but he had made it. Maybe he could afford to keep eating his daily donuts after all.

He stood up and lumbered into the gloom, and a piercing scream shook the air.

“What the...”

Maybe his ears were playing tricks on him.

He stumbled forward another twenty feet. It was practically pitch black by now - he could just make out some old characters carved into the stone wall. What were those called? Heiro-something or others? He didn’t care. They were cool, but they weren’t treasure. He kept walking, fumbling in his pocket for a flashlight.

He felt something brush against his left shoulder, and he froze. “Hello?”

Moaning came from all around him. He snapped his flashlight on, and a linen-wrapped figure appeared not two inches in front of him, its dirty bandages hanging limply from its limbs.

Peter screamed. The Mummy lurched. Peter turned to run, but his feet caught on a dangling loop of cloth, and as he fell he hit his head on the cold stone wall.

His flashlight skittered away, rolling back towards the tunnel entrance, where it dropped into the security guard’s outstretched hands.

THE END

I hope you enjoyed it. It was fun to write.

Thanks for stopping by!

New year, Same Old Me

Hey! It’s 2015! Happy New Year!

So, I never did the whole “Round-Up” thing - you know, Best Books of the Year, Best Movies of the Year, Best Board Games of the Year, Best Cute Pet Gifs of the Year. So many people do that already, and I don’t know about you, but I find those “Best Of” lists pretty overwhelming. Like I’m now obliged to read/watch/play everything, because those are The Best, but everyone’s list is different, so now I have a hundred books that I Must Read Now instead of ten. I didn’t want to add to an already crowded pool, you know?

But maybe you guys really want to know what my favorite reads and watches of the year were? I don’t know. If you’re interested, I can do one. Let me know in the comments.

As for 2015, I hope to do everything the same, but better. So there will be the same type of content here, but I’d like to do it more often. I’d like to get back to video blogging again, especially when it comes to book reviews and book-to-film reviews and the odd bit of nerdery. You can also look forward to more writing samples appearing here, since Chuck Wendig posts some pretty fun writing prompts and I plan to participate more often in those.

And, of course, more writing off the blog, which will lead to more news! Things are always in the works and moving forward, and I can’t talk about anything yet, but I hope to have good news in the world of writing and publishing soon, so watch this space. (Obviously, I have the launch of my first book to look forward to this year! Kari-Lynn and I are really excited to be bringing BITE INTO BLOODSUCKERS into the world, and you should keep your eyes peeled for GIVEAWAYS in the coming months. March can’t come fast enough! If it can’t come fast enough for you either, you can pre-order a copy of it on Amazon here, from Barnes and Noble here, or from Chapters here. NOTE: The Barnes and Noble site lists me as an illustrator. HAHAHA I wish. Sadly, I do not possess the kind of photographic skill that is required for that job. I am the co-author, though. They totally got that right.)

Overall, my motto for 2015 will be this: Plan for the future, but live in the now. You have this day. Make it a good one.

How about you? What are your plans for 2015?

Good For You Is Good Enough: On Chapter Books, "Reading Up", and Stressed Out Kids

I’ve been thinking a lot about Chapter Books lately. Actually, all books, ALL THE TIME, but since I wrote a Chapter Book that I’m querying and I read a lot of those books in particular, I think about them. And I think about the concept of “reading up”, and I think about stressed out kids.

I haven’t been at this writing gig forever, and I haven’t been a parent forever, so I don’t know everything. But I do know this:

There is a lot of talk, on the news and in magazines and in the media generally, about how we are currently raising a generation of stressed-out, high-anxiety kids.

At the same time, there is a lot of talk (usually in the same places, often within the same program or in the same magazine issue - the unintentional irony is amazing) about how to get our kids reading younger, how schools expect them to be reading at an earlier age, and about how to help your kid “get ahead” and start “reading at a higher grade level” than their enrolled grade, so they can “get ahead of their peers and get a head start on life”.

There are levels to the problem here. First, we have the whole expectation that EVERY CHILD will somehow be ahead of every other child in every area, which is ridiculous and unrealistic and also unnecessary. (America, in particular, has an especially bad case of what I like to call "First Place-itis", both on an individual level and also as a nation. Unless you have traveled, one could be excused, based on what we hear from the American Propaganda Machine, for thinking that other countries - the ones that are Developed Nations, but that aren't the Top Dog - lack basic things like central heating and flush toilets and traffic lights. Trust me, America - being Number Two or Number Five or Number Twelve really ISN'T the end of the world.)

But the other level to the problem is the whole idea of encouraging kids to consume media that was not intended for them. I wonder if the people who write the articles encouraging parents to get their kids to read Harry Potter at the age of five have actually read the books themselves. Because when I was five, reading about a kid being hunted by a bad guy and then (SPOILER ALERT!) burning the bad guy’s face off at the end would have freaked me the hell out.

I know that if you’re a parent reading this, or maybe even if you’re an author or a publisher reading this, you’re probably defending the whole “reading up” thing. This is understandable. Parents want success for their kids, and publishers want to stay in business. And maybe your 5-year-old kid really can handle watching a man’s face turn to ash and then slowly drop away from his still standing corpse. (I guess this is me coming out against the idea of showing your kid the movie to help them understand the book that was written for kids much older than they are. Because, DUDE: if you don’t think they’re ready to read it? The beauty of books is that the images to go with the words are formed based on that child’s experience. Movies? Not so much.) But given the frequency of reports that our kids are more stressed out than kids have ever been, it seems clear that maybe more of us are wrong about that than we think. Maybe some of the kids who seem to be “handling it” are actually freaking out inside.

ASIDE: No, I don’t think it’s good to “desensitize” our kids. I want violence to always be an abhorrent, shocking thing to my children. Because once they accept it, they are one step closer to practicing it.

It saddens me that, in search of books for their ten-year-old “voracious readers”, parents hand them books like The Hunger Games and Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars rather than handing them books like When You Reach Me and The Tale of Desperaux. Not because the first set of books aren’t good books - in fact, I think they’re AMAZING books. But they are books written for teenagers, with the interests of teenagers in mind. They’re books written with the understanding that the people who read them will be concerned with things like how governments can wield power responsibly and what that does and doesn’t look like, and whether smoking pot is as bad for them as their parents say it is, and whether they should have sex with their boyfriend or girlfriend this weekend. Whether they’re “ready”, and what being “ready” even feels like, anyway.

Is your ten-year-old thinking about that stuff?

I hear people in the publishing world say that kids should be able to read whatever they wish, and that they will put a book down if they aren’t ready for it. I don’t completely agree with that. Because you can never un-read something that you weren’t ready for.

I think a valid question here is: why do we bother writing “for children”? What are the distinctions between “chapter books” and “middle grade” and “young adult” for, if we are going to encourage people to flaunt them? Those labels are signposts, guys.

I do not advocate censorship. I do not advocate the banning of books, or the removal of books from libraries and school curricula. I DEFINITELY do not advocate the sanitizing of books. (My WiP is a YA about a school shooting. It’s not sanitized. But it’s a YA, and it’s not for ten-year-olds.)

I DO advocate parents taking an active role in choosing, with their children, what their children read, and I advocate parents talking about books with their kids. I advocate booksellers taking an interest in helping their customers find the right book for them, above pushing the latest blockbuster. (Independent bookstores are much better at this than major chains, I find.) Some young kids really are ready to read books written for older kids, because they are asking those questions at a younger age. Also, some books on the “teen” shelves really are great for older tweens to read, just as some books on the “tween” shelf are genuinely appealing to 7-8 year-olds. But those are the exceptions, and most of them probably are not.

I wish - I really, really WISH - that we who make the books and publish the books and sell the books could continue to be be a little smarter about and more considerate about emotional preparedness. I hope that we will continue to be more sensitive to the emotional needs of children.

I wish that we, as a society, as a culture, would place “emotional needs” higher up on the importance pyramid than “reads and does math at a higher grade level than the rest of his class”.

Little children need, above all else, to feel loved and safe. And while I have never been a great fan of the litany of formulaic, sappy chapter books about fairies and ponies and princesses and puppies - IVY & BEAN and CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS are much more to my taste than RAINBOW FAIRIES and PUPPY PLACE - it saddens me to see Chapter Books coming out that open with demons and angry monsters and danger. It saddens me deeply. Because I do not think that we serve our six-year-olds’ emotional needs well with these types of books.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for stopping by.

On Delays, and Why They're Not Always a Bad Thing aka, I HAVE A RELEASE DATE WOOOO!

SO… Apart from those last two posts, it's been a while, eh?

I told you this blog posting thing would be pretty erratic. I'm pretty sure I warned you guys about this. I definitely meant to...

ANYWAY…

Update time!

Book! Much book!

Actually, not that much. Because DELAYS.

A lot of things have happened with my book. My editor got a different job, which meant that my co-author Kari-Lynn and I got a NEW editor. I could have cried about this, but both our editors have been really awesome, so I just feel lucky to have had the chance to work with TWO amazing editors instead of one. (YAY! Cue happy tears! Okay, not really… But YAY!)

But that's not why we're delayed. The delay is because our book is part of a series, and our publisher, Fitzhenry & Whiteside (which publishes excellent books, by the way - no, seriously, award-winning books), bumped the book BEFORE our book, so now OUR book BITE INTO BLOODSUCKERS, which was originally scheduled to come out in October of 2014, is now coming out in the spring of 2015. On MARCH 17, to be precise. Mark your calendars!

I know it's traditional for authors to be a little sad and down in the dumps and throw themselves a bit of a pity party when this kind of delay happens, but I'm actually okay with it. In fact, I'm BETTER than okay with it. Because when you think about it, bugs are a spring and summer thing, and while there are a few non-bug creatures in this book, (vampire bat, anyone?), the vast majority of them are bugs. So I think this timing is actually pretty perfect.

ALSO: Web Series Adaptation!

I have written a web series! It's an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and you are going to love love love it! I found a really smart, talented filmmaker named James to do storyboarding with me and co-write a few episodes with me before I wrote the rest of it and it will be awesome! James found a blogger and art designer extraordinaire named Olivia to make a set! IN MY HOUSE! I have a set in my basement where a bathroom will be one day. Oh, yeah, baby. I can't show it to you yet, because SURPRISE, but it looks amazing. I have cast most of the roles in the web series! I have FILMED (and also directed) ONE THIRD of it! (The rest will be filmed as soon as I have an actor to fill the last role, which will hopefully be soon, because among other things, it would be awesome if we could finally turn that space into a second bathroom.)

So, basically, once this baby is done and launched, I will be adding "screenwriter, director, and producer" to my list of credentials. But more importantly, I WILL HAVE CREATED A WEB SERIES!

You have no idea how absolutely terrifying that is to hold in my heart.

Seriously.

But it's also really cool, and I hope you all love it.

HOWEVER, I had hoped to have it done and launched and all over the interwebs by now, but I don't because of the whole not-being-able-to-find-the-right-actor thing. And I'm glad it's not done yet, because I've been using this time to perfect the scenes and rewrite and rethink and it is so much better than it would have been otherwise. So this delay, while unanticipated, has not been a bad thing. It has forced me to actually do a not-rushed-job on this series, and I can't wait to share it with you.

SO: here's to rolling with the punches, looking on the bright side, and embracing the opportunities that delays present. Because this is the arts, and delays are inevitable.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S. BITE INTO BLOODSUCKERS has a pre-order page on Amazon! How cool is that? There is a special place in my heart for the people who pre-order copies of my book. If you would order it, I would love you forever. Seriously. ALSO: that cover is a stand-in for the REAL cover, which will be revealed shortly.