Wrapping Up Week One
Ooooo, this has been a fun week! I’ve loved sharing all the bits and bobs I’ve collected about space travel, and bus travel, and middle names — all things that would really matter to the characters from my middle grade novel, THE GREAT GOOD SUMMER.
What my character Paul Dobbs wouldn’t do to get a load of these suits! Or even one of the rewards, like “a boot print from the Apollo 11 mission on a mega-attractive Cling-On Decal.” Maybe we can go ahead and donate since Paul really can’t.
Share and Win!
Please like, comment or share — here, on facebook, or on Twitter (#greatgoodsummer) — to be entered in a weekly drawing for a copy of the book and a lucky strike extra or two. The first drawing is this Sunday, August 16 so toss your name in now! And thanks!
Day Four
Thanks for stopping by, friends! If you visited earlier this week, you know that I’ve started a new blog series called Stuff That’s Great Good. The whole point is to share news and links to things that would mean something to Ivy Green and Paul Dobbs, the main characters of my book The Great Good Summer.
What’s In a Name?
So far I’ve shared stories of journeys — be they by bus or by spaceship — but today I found something that would’ve meant a lot to Ivy long before her mama disappeared, long before she set off on her own great good adventure.
One of Ivy’s old sorrows (we’ve all got them, I think) is that she wasn’t given a middle name when she was born. Her parents have their reasons, but that does nothing to assuage Ivy’s feelings of inadequacy and deficiency. She’s ached for a middle name her whole life, and spends part of The Great Good Summer looking for one.
Ivy would be so relieved to find out she’s not alone!
Share and Win!
Share or comment on any of my Stuff That’s Great Good posts, here or on twitter or facebook using the hashtag #greatgoodsummer, and you’ll be automatically entered into a weekly drawing for a free copy of the book and who knows what else? Some fun little Paul-and-Ivy related things! Good luck! And thanks….
Active Denial
One of the things that is most fun about writing a novel is really getting to know the characters as people. And one of the hardest things about finishing is giving them up, releasing them to the pages of the book and moving on.
So this blog series is sort of my form of Active Denial. I can carry on thinking of Ivy Green and Paul Dobbs as living, breathing 12-year-olds and this world we live in is their oyster.
Kinda Cool, Kinda Creepy Yesterday I shared some links to Greyhound and road trip-related articles because I just know that Ivy caught the travel bug during her GREAT GOOD SUMMER. But today we’re heading back up into space. Because would Paul think that news from Mars was cool, or what?
Share and Win!
To learn more about Ivy and Paul than just the stuff I’m sharing on my blog this month, enter to win THE GREAT GOOD SUMMER (plus an extra treat or two)! Simply share this post on twitter using the hashtag #greatgoodsummer, leave a comment here on the blog, or leave a comment on my facebook page. And thanks!
Welcome Back!
Hey friends — Thanks for your great response to yesterday’s kick-off of my new blog series: Stuff That’s Great Good. I’m excited to spend the next few weeks sharing some of the cool, creepy, weird and wacky stuff in the real world that I know my fictional characters would dig — and I hope you will too!
Stuff That’s Great Good
We started off with Paul — the pal and co-conspirator of my book’s narrator, Ivy Green. Paul is a science kid and hopes to be an astronaut someday. Ivy, on the other hand, considers herself more a girl of ideas than a girl of action. Still, with Paul’s nudging, the two of them take off on a brave but risky adventure. What she learns along the way is that she’s made of tougher stuff than she’d imagined.
Ivy’s only twelve in THE GREAT GOOD SUMMER, and by the end of the book she’s headed back to the small (fictional) town she grew up in, but somehow I imagine that the road is going to call her name from now on.
I hope if she goes for it, she’ll write about it….
Share and Win!
(To join Ivy and Paul on their original adventure, enter to win THE GREAT GOOD SUMMER (plus an extra treat or two)! Simply share this post on twitter using the hashtag #greatgoodsummer, leave a comment here on the blog, or leave a comment on my facebook page!)
Paul and Ivy Would Love This!
So the main characters in my novel THE GREAT GOOD SUMMER are pretty cool kids. As in, they’re interested in things that are wild and mysterious and, well, interesting. So much so that even though I finished writing the book many moons ago, I still see articles online and hear stories on the radio and think, “Oh, Paul and Ivy would love this!” (Yes, I know that they’re not real people. But y’know, if they were…)
Anyway, I’ve decided I can’t stand it anymore — I want to share these discoveries! And if I can’t share them with Paul and Ivy, I’ll share them with you! Over these next four weeks, I’ll be posting every day or so about the things my characters would get jazzed about — and that you might get jazzed about, too.
Share and Win!
And also (because why not?), I’m turning this whole thing into a give-away! Share any of the posts on twitter or facebook using the hashtag #greatgoodsummer and you’ll be automatically entered into my weekly drawing for a free copy of the book and who knows what else? Some fun little Paul-and-Ivy related things!
So. Yes? Yes!
Stuff That’s Great Good Now, here’s a teaser of how this is gonna go. Paul Dobbs — the slightly antagonistic pal to my narrator, Ivy Green — is a freak for space. He flies remote controlled airplanes and he hoped to someday fly a Space Shuttle. But alas, the Space Shuttle program is no more and he grieves it throughout the novel.
Paul’s like a lot of us — he thought the end of that era was a death knell for the adventure of space. But there seems to be mind-boggling space news nearly every week lately. And I just can’t help but think Paul would get a huge kick out of it all. Like the fact that you can follow Buzz Aldrin on twitter. Seriously. And what about this look at Buzz’ Customs Declaration Form, submitted when he returned from the Apollo mission to the moon.
Cool, huh? Yep. That’s what Paul would think….
More tomorrow, I promise! In the meantime, share and be entered to win #greatgoodsummer
So our challenge for this month was haiku because, well, it’s summer vacation.
And we wanted something super duper easy.
Something we could just toss off in a couple of minutes.
(Insert evil laugh track here.)
I think we should re-name our challenge the “It Wasn’t As Easy As It Looked” challenge.
Anyway, we did it — haiku.
Although lots of us actually did senryu, or senryu-haiku hybrids or something.
Mine are sort of seasonal in nature (seasonal in nature — ha! — that’s a genuine haiku joke!) so maybe they qualify as straight haiku, but regardless…
Here’s the fun part:
We modeled all of our haiku after classifieds.
The old-fashioned kind that showed up in, y’know, newspapers.
Here are mine….
Free for the taking:
All food except raspberries
(seasonal cuisine)
Hot girl seeks sweater
and a/c that’s much too cold:
Summer Matinee
Wanted: stolen hours
huge latte, a comfy spot.
(I can’t put this book down)
To see the lovely, witty, perfect poems written by my partners in crime, go here:
It’s hard to believe we’re more than half-way through this year of form challenges.
The whole thing has been equal parts hard and dreamy, really.
And this month, no exception.
So our agreed-upon challenge was to write a poem “In the style of….” and we finally decided to write “in the style of” e.e. cummings. Because who, pray tell, writes in a more recognizable style than e.e.?
We each chose a different poem, wrote our own piece based upon the original, and then recorded that piece so that we could experience the echo both on the page and aurally.
It was tricky to decide how closely we should hew to e.e.’s pieces, but what he offered up in terms of language and sensuality and risk and playfulness? WOW. What a pleasure. So, humbly, I offer up my poem, in the style of:
i liked you when you were curled within
me and now you are so yes a new thing.
Touch tiny and drift more.
i like your cry. i like how it calls me,
i like its round lips. i like to feel the weight
of your still-soft skull against my neck, and the ache
Ode: A poem in which a person expresses a strong feeling of love or respect for someone or something.
My poetry gals and I had sort of exhausted ourselves with pantoums, raccontinos, sestinas and other such ambitious craziness.
So. Yes, we said. Odes! Simple odes. Odes with no particular rules (although some odes do indeed utilize rhyme and other, more subtle directions and parameters.) Well, wait, actually — we did agree that we’d try to make them a little bit funny.
Here’s mine!
An Ode to Curls, and to my Girls
High praise to the frizz I tried to flatten
every day for decades – with a hairbrush,
a hot iron, a hand drier…
Acclaim to the curls I attempted to condition
into compliance, stretching and pulling
into silky sheets of shine (until they dried)…
An ovation to the corkscrews of crazy,
which at weddings and whatnot
behaved like bad Uncle Bruce – unpredictable,
and there without a proper invitation…
Commendations to my mop top
that doesn’t match the magazines
and is a model, in fact, of opposition,
of unapologetic civil disobedience!
My utmost regard to this mane of mine:
outrageous and tempermental, untamed
by time, unpacified by product,
in its very boldness not unlike
my daughters — my daughters! — wild
and alive with audacity.
PS — This is a little bit of a random segue, but my mom sent me this picture this week so I have to share it. It’s my sister and me with our dad and you can clearly see here where my curls came from. (And that’s my sister, the cute one in the front with the glossy hair. I’m all sunglassed up in the back. It was the 70s, dudes.)
Here’s something fun, you guys.
I was introduced to this fun Dad-son-daughter trio who have a blog going called SOMEDAY.
SOMEDAY is about getting the kids to interact with folks who have interesting jobs.
And they decided “interesting jobs” includes “children’s author”.
So, yay! My first video interview with kid journalists — Owen and Melia.
Enjoy — I did!
I was traveling today so I’m sliding in under the wire here with my pantoum. There’s the form (which you’ll notice requires quatrains, and numerous repeating lines) and then we chose to use the words certainty and/or flight (or, in my case, fly).
I worked on two different poems this month and didn’t adore either one, but this is the one I’m most comfortable with.
So Much of Who You Are
So much of who you are is what you’re called
like a hermit crab becomes his empty shell.
Be it oddball, beauty, class clown, geek,
it’s certain and prescriptive as a mother cell.
Like a hermit crab, becoming his empty shell
or maybe more a puzzle, the chicken and the egg?
Is it certain and prescriptive as a mother cell
or do you name the name yourself, by who you are?
Maybe more a puzzle, the chicken and the egg:
First you breathe, then squawk, then try to fly.
You name the name yourself, by who you are
I’m here and true, myself, beloved til I die
First you breathe, then squawk, then try to fly
Whether oddball, beauty, class clown, geek
Say, I’m here and true, myself, beloved til I die
So much of who you are is what you’re called
All my poetry sisters wrote them too, and ya’ll, they are GOOD!!!
This is a weak way of doing this, but I’m just going to link to Kelly’s here and then you can follow HER links to everyone else’s. Is that ok?
