Writer, teacher, blogger and mom.
This Marvelous Middle Grade Monday I’m going to feature another Vancouver author represented by my agency, The Carolyn Swayze Agency: Gail Banning whose book OUT ON A LIMB is also set in Vancouver. Here’s the blurb: Rosie and her family’s financial problems find them living in the most unexpected of places a treehouse, on the … More MMGM – OUT ON A LIMB
Back in March, Jodi Meadows, the author of INCARNATE tweeted “Colored pencils should be easier to erase”. Now I know she meant “they should be easier to erase than they are”, because let’s face it, they are unholy hard to erase. But how I read it was “They should be easier to erase than regular … More Colored Pencils Should Be Easier to Erase
For this week’s Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway asks “what was the best book you read in April?”. I’ve been having a huge reading month (and a crap writing month but that’s often how it goes). With nearly a week left I have already read fifteen books. There were definitely some standouts and some that didn’t work … More ROAD TRIP WEDNESDAY – APRIL BOOKS
There nothing especially terrific about this week’s teen, Misaki Murakami, whose soccer ball was found in Alaska after being washed away in last years’s Japanese tsunami. Murakami seems to be a normal boy, well, except he survived an earthquake and tsunami, I suppose that’s pretty terrific, for him anyway. But I love this story. I’m … More Trans Pacific Soccer Ball
Last month Katie Dekoster from Book Love speculated that Novels in Verse (NIVs) were becoming the new vampires. I certainly hope so, since I have one coming out next year and another (the sequel) in 2014. I’ve written about novels in verse many times on this blog, and people are becoming more familiar with this form. … More Marvelous Middle Grade Monday: Verse Novels
My father left me a pair of magic shoes when he died. I had no idea they were magic. I had no idea that I would end up wearing them almost every day. It’s not like I thought about extracting them from his widow (not my mom) along with the cartoon collection, which I got, … More MY FATHER AND HIS MAGIC SHOES
I’m not a huge consumer of writer’s tech tools. I’ve poked at Scrivener and other things. I swore by ScriptThing when I was screen and playwriting. But for prose and poetry, Word for Windows is all I need. So I thought, anyway. To me, writing has always been story telling. I probably spend about 75% … More Your Very Own Robot Editor
NOTICE: If you have come here for help with your homework on this book, please see my more recent post here. Matt De La Peña was one of the contributors to a recent Up For Debate segment on the New York Times website with his piece Seeing Themselves in Books. After reading this piece I … More WE WERE HERE by Matt De La Peña
Maybe you’ve all heard that a teenage Katy Butler is behind the changes in the rating for the documentary BULLY which opened in theaters recently. Originally rated R (for profanity) with a small tweak from the film-maker the film has scored a PG13 rating. What Katy and her supporters hope this means is that teenagers … More Terrific Teen Tuesday – Bully and the Bad Bad Words
Today was a flip flop day. Some of you will know what that means, how important it is. Some won’t. The latter group may never fully understand me, how people consciously or subconsciously struggle with the constraints that “civilization” forces upon them, or what it means to be Canadian. If you don’t understand flip flops … More The Magic of the Printed Book
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