Winter Blog Blast Tour: Elizabeth E. Wein

She's a woman of many enthusiasms. Change Ringing. Planes. Folklore. Traveling. Punting. Time machines.

Okay, I made up that last one, but her books so far all take place in the long-ago and far away, and the detail with which she writes them convinces me there's something fishy about the reason she now lives in Scotland; I'm pretty sure she's found a time machine. A brilliant student of folklore and myth, archeology and history, Dr. Elizabeth Gatland neé Wein -- which is actually her real, non-writing name -- lives what appears to be a pretty blissful live in the gorgeous city of Perth here in Scotland with her husband, two cute kids, and random wild things.

Wonderland is really really privileged to take a moment of her copious free time (apparently she works less than a sleeping hamster, according to her daughter's nightmares) and invite her to share a bit about her life and her work and her awesome books.

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Finding Wonderland: Hi, Elizabeth! First of all, your website says you were “born in New York City and grew up in England, Jamaica, and Pennsylvania.” You’ve also lived in both England and Scotland -- how have the places you’ve traveled and in which you’ve lived informed your writing, or have they? How are you liking Scotland? Will you, as people always ask Tadamack, ever write a “Scotland novel?”

Elizabeth E. Wein:Wow, that's at least three questions in one!
The places that I've traveled always inform my writing. The Winter Prince, my first novel, is set in the place I used to live in England (Artos's estate at Camlan is superimposed on our house in Mottram St. Andrew in Cheshire, and I am fully willing to believe that there is an undiscovered Roman villa buried beneath the cabbages in what was our back garden). The exotic setting of the subsequent books has given me more of a chance to draw on my Jamaican childhood.

I kind of ran wild in Jamaica. We ate everything and anything that grew—the countless trees in our untended garden produced at least 12 different kinds of tropical fruit, and I thought nothing of climbing on a neighbors' roof to get at the varieties we didn't have. The neighborhood kids all had routes to each other's gardens through the fences and down the gullies (the ubiquitous Jamaican riverine storm drains). Some pretty desperate and hungry homeless people used the gullies to hang out in, too, and chopped fruit out of our gardens with machetes, and once there was a knife fight which ended with the arrival of the police, and at times rival kids would hurl rocks at each other—I was one of the few white kids around but rather blissfully unaware of this difference, since the more obvious difference was whether or not you had a garden in the first place. All of which is to say that my child hero Telemakos's clandestine, scrappy, but privileged early life is in large part based on my own.

I had only been living in Scotland for a year when I wrote The Sunbird, the first book in which Telemakos plays a starring role, and in writing it I used a lot of my recent tourist experience climbing around in castles. As I mention in the note on the back page of the Firebird paperback edition of Sunbird, Britain was under a pretty serious quarantine while I was writing the book. So political and cultural reality were being very much reflected in my fiction.

Another way my life in Scotland turns up in my fiction is in Telemakos's closeness to animals. I see a lot more wildlife here than I ever have before—not just garden birds and squirrels, but seals and dolphins, osprey and heron, roe deer and red deer and foxes and leaping salmon. The seals swim right into the middle of the city of Perth, following the salmon. A buzzard—not an American vulture, but the European hawk buteo buteo, which looks like a small golden eagle—killed and devoured a pigeon in our front garden this morning. Also, having little kids around has driven me to the local petting zoos and safari parks. When we play a "Safari Trivia" game that my son got for his eighth birthday, I'm the one who says, "Go on. Ask me a hard question about lions. Go on, ASK me something about lions I don't know."

I adored Scotland when I first moved here, but lately I am finding it Just Too Cold. I am constantly cold. It is kind of grinding me down. Apparently the lions at the local safari park grow long winter coats and enjoy frolicking in the snow. But unfortunately the park is closed in winter so I haven't been able to witness this.

A Scottish novel… I kind of feel like Jane Yolen keeps getting there first! Telling an original Mary Queen of Scots story is as difficult as telling an original Arthurian story. The honest answer is I don't know. Telemakos's father, Medraut, who is also the narrator and anti-hero of The Winter Prince, is supposed to have been born and raised in Orkney. I suppose I could go back and tell the story of his childhood at some point.


I know there are a few readers out there who wouldn't mind another story about Medraut. (We know WE certainly wouldn't!)

FW: What were the first words that you wrote of Telemakos’ story? Did they change, or stay the same?

E. Wein: A.) 19 July, 1999: "When I was twelve, our kingdom had been sealed off from the rest of the world in a self-imposed quarantine for the past five years."

The first person narrative did not work for Telemakos. I have tried it again since, and it just isn't right for him. He is not self-conscious enough to pull it off (some would say Goewin isn't, either). He is not boastful, he's not self-deprecating, and he doesn't have any guilty history he wants to get off his chest; you have to have some combination of those, I think, to want to talk about yourself.

So, two days later, I made another attempt:

B) 21 July, 1999: "Telemakos could not remember a time when his aunt had not lived in his grandfather's household."

After a few pages of this effort is the note: "Jeepers, how am I going to make this interesting?"

C) 1 September, 1999: "Telemakos lay among the aloes at the edge of the fountain in the Golden Court. The marble lip of the fountain's rim just cleared the top of his head, and the imported soil beneath his chest was warm and moist. He was comfortable. He could move about easily behind the plants, for the sound of the fountains hid any noise he might make, and the black and white colobus monkeys that were chained there helped to disguise his movements. Telemakos was watching his aunt."

For the sake of comparison, here is the actual first paragraph of The Sunbird, published in 2004:

"Telemakos was hiding in the New Palace. He lay among the palms at the edge of the big fountain in the Golden Court. The marble lip of the fountain’s rim just cleared the top of his head, and the imported soil beneath his chest was warm and moist. He was comfortable. He could move about easily behind the plants, for the sound of the fountains hid any noise he might make. Telemakos was watching his aunt."

I wrote the whole of the first chapter of The Sunbird in September 1999, and then I literally began to feel sick whenever I thought about what was going to happen to Telemakos at the salt mines… and I had to stop. I did not start work on the second chapter till 6 March 2001 (I have a good excuse: in early 2000 we moved to Scotland and I had a baby). But once I got going again I used the first chapter almost entirely as I originally wrote it.

That's actually pretty awesome -- in a thoroughly unawesome way -- to be so convinced about what's going on with your own character that it literally makes you ill. It WAS a horrible, rough scene, too. {And if you haven't picked up this book yet, we're certainly not going to TELL you what happened. Read. The. Book. Go on, now.}


FW: Many of our readers and fellow bloggers and writers love to know about a writer’s process—and we’d love to hear about yours. How do you start your writing day? What feeds your creative process, and what do you do when you get stuck? What part do creative things like flying and change ringing play in your writing process?

E. Wein: I would say that the most vital nutrient to my creative process is coffee. It has become something of an inside joke with myself, and you can spot it in my books. I tend to use it to symbolize both sovereignty and sex (!!!). Medraut, Artos's (Arthur's) son, symbolically sells his kingdom for a cup of coffee. In the story I'm writing now, "drinking coffee with Gwalchmei" has become a sort of euphemism for sex. Telemakos is a coffee lover but is rarely allowed it; in The Empty Kingdom, the morning after his guardian tells him "You are no longer a child," the queen of Himyar leaves coffee out for his breakfast (AND it is hinted that she fancies him, too!). I am making myself laugh as I write this and think about it (a cup of coffee is standing protectively guarded between my wrists as I type)—coffee is what you sip from the Holy Grail.

But what does that have to do with my writing process?

I feel like such a charlatan these days. Over the past few years I haven't had a process; I do laundry and fool around on the Internet and drink coffee and do the garden and then maybe about eleven o'clock in the morning I panic and move to a different room and write a page and then make a sandwich. I run up to the kids' school three times a day because my eleven-year-old daughter never remembers to take her glasses or her lunchbox. This morning I sat watching the Raptor Show in the front garden for two solid hours. (I took a lot of pictures, too, but they are on the film camera and might take a while to print.)

This year we have installed a so-called "summerhouse" in the garden. It is a glorified shed, but it is a MAGIC SUMMERHOUSE. It transports you to Walden Pond and it MAKES YOU WRITE. So lately, whenever I want to work, I take a cup of coffee out to the summerhouse and sit there and I get tons of work done (I am sitting there now). I write longhand in spiral bound notebooks and transfer this, chapter by chapter, to the computer. I still have a sense that paper is more permanent than electronic print, and I like to see my first drafts written down.

This is only true for fiction. I blog away at the keyboard like anyone else.

I try to carry a notebook with me wherever I go. I have conversations in my head between characters and if I don't write them down right away I tend to forget them. I ran a writing workshop last weekend and one of the people who came said that she keeps bathtub crayons in her shower so that she can make notes while she's showering—what a great strategy, as the shower is where I get some of my best ideas! Note to self: Must buy bathtub crayons.

Obviously flying and change ringing don't have much to do with ancient Ethiopia, but I have written four (I think) short stories about flying. The most recent will be included in Sharyn November's Firebirds Soaring (Firebird Books, Spring 2009). It's about a girl who disguises herself as her dead brother and flies fighter planes in the Battle of Britain in 1940. Of all the short stories I have ever written, it is my absolute favorite.

I've got a short story about change ringing in The Horns of Elfland, edited by Ellen Kushner, Donald G. Keller, and Delia Sherman (Roc/Penguin, 1997). And there is an unpublished novel, the old "manuscript under the bed," which has change ringing as a theme. But the problem with writing about change ringing is that it's so complex and arcane that you have to spend pages and pages explaining what's going on, or else leave the reader in limbo not understanding that end of things (as Dorothy Sayers does in The Nine Tailors), and that doesn't really work in a children's book. The symbolism of bells are wonderful, though—they ward off thunder and the devil, they warn of fire and flood and invasion. They're always female (a bell is a "she," not an "it") and they all have individual names. Some of them are also very old. I used to thrill to ring a certain bell in Magdalen College, Oxford, because it predated Columbus's discovery of America. Most musical instruments that old are in museums, not in public use.

I have all kinds of tricks for getting around writer's block: drawing pictures of my characters, acting out a scene with myself, writing out the problem in a kind of conversation with myself. Taking the project to a café or a beach or a public library and working on it without the usual distractions sometimes helps. Every writer should have a summerhouse.

(Definitely!!!)

FW: Aksum is a compelling and dramatic setting for the story of Medraut, Goewin, and Telemakos. How much of the setting and society is based on verifiable history, and how much was imagined? What attracted you to that setting?

E. Wein: Goewin's story, A Coalition of Lions, is as much a story of Aksum as of Goewin. The society Goewin describes more accurately resembles medieval Ethiopian society than that of ancient Ethiopia, which we don't know a lot about, but the history is certainly verifiable. Where I have to make things up is in the social mores rather than in the furnishings or the food.

The setting was originally suggested to me by an uncle, Roger Whitaker, who had been in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia in the late 1960s. But what really attracted me to it—indeed, what drove me to ask Rog to suggest a North African or Middle Eastern setting in the first place—was the desire to introduce some diversity to the books.
A lot of my characters are based on real people. Imagine my surprise to discover this afternoon that Abreha, the enigmatic king of Himyar who gives Telemakos such a hard time in The Mark of Solomon, has got his own Wikipedia entry. Most of the historic data matches up. But who knew he had a wife named Raihäna? And it says he abducted her, too, which I suppose should not come as a surprise somehow. The source for this information was published in 2007, the same year as The Lion Hunter, in which my version of Abreha is married to a woman, invented by me, named Muna (who happens to be Telemakos’s second cousin). When I discovered Raihäna, do you think my first thought was, “Oh, I got the name wrong?” (Sabaean girls’ names being hard to come by, most of the female characters in The Mark of Solomon have modern Arabic names). No—it was more along the lines of, Oh, so Muna dies and Abreha gets married for a third time, the slimedog.

Hah! I can totally see that one, too. Eew.

FW: What made you decide to tell the story of "post-Arthurian" events from the viewpoint of Medraut, Arthur's illegitimate son who is often portrayed as untrustworthy if not downright evil?

E. Wein: It started with Hamlet, really. Medraut is really an extension of Hamlet. The king's nephew and ALSO his son, get it? With a bit of a taboo crush on his mother? Eh, I was deeply in love with Hamlet. What can I say. I was 15, and within a year my mother had been killed in a car accident, my adored younger brother was in a coma and permanently paralyzed, I had just discovered that my father was gay. All of that together took some dealing with at fifteen. I thought I was the reincarnation of Hamlet.

I had just got over The Lord of the Rings and I was also obsessed with King Arthur—a natural progression, perhaps, from The Lord of the Rings, which had been my obsession at fourteen—the difference being that now I wasn’t stuck reading the same novels over and over, because there was so much written about King Arthur (my English teacher recommended both Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural). And it kept coming—when I was fifteen, Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, Mary Stewart’s Merlin series, and Gillian Bradshaw’s Arthurian trilogy were all half-finished. John Steinbeck’s Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights was released that year. The Mists of Avalon hadn’t been written yet. I had a theme.

Mordred was the most Hamlet-like of Arthur's family, I suppose. I hated him quite vehemently at first, and, like Guinevere, was eventually seduced. My Medraut would point out that he, too, is considered untrustworthy by many people.

FW: Which traditional mythological cycles--besides the Arthurian legends that most readers know about—were a source of inspiration for your series? What literary and historical sources were most useful or compelling to you in writing these books?

E. Wein: If anyone asks me where I get my ideas, I just answer Star Wars. (HAH!) Actually, I had mapped Lleu and Goewin to Luke and Leia well before anyone knew that the latter two were supposed to be twins as well. And then there's the matter of Luke's hand getting chopped off (as a teenager, I was disgusted that he immediately got a new one. Where's the melodrama in that?). And isn't Ras Meder obviously Darth Vader? (HAH! Seriously, I just had NOT put the two together... but, now...whoa.)

To be fair, part of the reason I loved "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" as a kid was because they both so obviously drew on the same archetypes, themes, and cycles that I loved. Lleu the Bright One, the narrator Medraut’s young foil in The Winter Prince, is named after Lleu Llaw Gyffes, the hapless sungod figure of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion (which is the 13th century Welsh legend that Alan Garner used as his basis for The Owl Service, another of my favorite books). It was inevitable, perhaps, that I should try to blend the story of Lleu Llaw Gyffes with Arthurian legend. The Mabinogion, which means simply “Collection of Tales,” is divided into two parts. The first four stories, or “branches,” are referred to as the “native” tales—they’re straight-up thirteenth century Welsh. The rest of the stories are Arthurian. They bear some strange resemblances to the French Romances—the Welsh “Peredur” and Chretien de Troyes’s “Perceval” have many similar elements, but some scholars believe (and it seems to me) that both are based on an independent tale rather than either one being influenced by the other.

So I made up children for Arthur and Guinevere, who were canonically childless. (In my very earliest version of the story, Merlin magically engineers this.) In my own authorial role as Merlin (or God), I gave Arthur and Guinevere legitimate children, twins, Goewin and Lleu, named after characters in the fourth of the Mabinogion’s “native” tales—tales which, it seemed to my naïve fifteen-year-old self, a historic Arthur and his wife would surely have known well. I love the name Lleu—a word so ancient it is basically untranslatable, but which most likely means light—the Bright One.

Tolkien is there in the background, too; when I reread The Lord of the Rings a couple years back (when the films came out), and I got to the scene where they're fleeing the mines of Moria, I was amazed at how much it reminded me of the scene in The Winter Prince where the copper mines at Elder Field collapse. Not in terms of plot so much as in the way the rhythm of the scene plays out. Here's the Tolkien:

"With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered, and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. "Fly, you fools!" he cried, and was gone."

Compare Medraut's words (my words):

"For answer—it was an answer—came a low rumble and clatter from deep in the tunnel, and the lower shaft collapsed. It sealed itself from the roots outward, as though some starved inner core hungered to consume the entire hillside. I have killed another friend, I thought, buried alive six men; and so imagined the abyss closing around me, and plunged into the devouring darkness."

I certainly didn't intend any similarity, but I think the general tone is very evocative of Moria to anyone familiar with the scene. (Seriously. Wow.)

I won't go into the profound influence T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" has had, and continues to have, on my writing. But it's there, very deeply, in all the books.

FW: Surprisingly, you visited Ethiopia after writing your first two books. What was the most memorable part of those travels? What of your visit will you incorporate into later books, if anything?

E. Wein:The whole thing was eye-opening and unforgettable, but certainly the most exciting part for me was being in the city of Aksum and visiting Debra Damo, the clifftop monastery that features in A Coalition of Lions. Mind you, I did not get to go inside, because like Goewin, I am a woman… Unlike Goewin, I am not princess of Britain and friends with the Aksumite emperor. I had been taking notes like crazy all through our two-week trip, and during our tour of the ancient necropolis in Aksum (which also features in Coalition), my uncle Rog said, "Why aren't you taking notes?" My aunt Susan answered for me: "She already knows all this."

Rog called it "retro-research," a term I like. I did not feel that I'd got anything drastically wrong, but I did feel like I'd left things out. Little details, like the green leaves strewn about the floor during the coffee ceremony, or the way all the kids walk hand in hand, or the sticks that the shepherd boys carry across their shoulders. The Lion Hunter and The Empty Kingdom have more of these minute details included.

I really felt that there is a great effort and excitement alive in Ethiopia—that its people are absolutely determined to better themselves. You don't get this feeling when you watch the shows the media gives us here in the west, you just feel that they're all starving or ill or at war. The feeling that I got was that they are all working, inexhaustibly and in spite of the worst odds and conditions possible, to build a country they can be proud of.

I would love to take my children there.

A more detailed description of my trip is up on my web site. If anyone would like to comment on it, the same story (but without pictures) is up on my blog.

FW: THE MARK OF SOLOMON is part political thriller, part family story, and thoroughly engrossing. Do you think you might ever revisit this world and tell a story from a female point of view? What do you think eventually happens to Athena?

E. Wein: I have, in fact, recently started writing a thing from Athena's point of view. (Oh, yaaaay!) She's about twelve in this venture; it takes place back in Aksum. I told myself that the book I'm working on now (NOT this one) "ties everything up," so technically Athena's story isn't dependent on what goes before. And the characters we've come to know and love are just so grown up by the time Athena is twelve, you know?

I have always imagined her as becoming a Vet. (Partly because it's what my daughter wanted to be for a long time, and partly because it makes sense.) She keeps homing pigeons.

It is fun making up babies for everybody so she can have a crowd of cousins!

FW: When THE EMPTY KINGDOM released this year, you introduced many of your American readers to an organization called Ethiopia Reads. Please tell us a little about how you discovered that organization, and what prompted you to get involved?

E. Wein:I'm only tangentially involved with Ethiopia Reads, in that I promote it whenever I get a chance—and of course make donations, both in books and in US dollars, when I can. Ethiopia Reads, formerly known as the Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation (EBCEF), was celebrating the First Annual Children's Book Week in Ethiopia when I was there. (Here's a the full history of the organization.) I got a very brief look at the organization in action On Site—although the actual library was closed and they were in a marquee in a public square to generate some publicity at the time.

I found out about Ethiopia Reads through Jane Kurtz (www.janekurtz.com), the author of over 25 books for children and educators, many of them set in Ethiopia. She grew up there (her parents were missionaries) and she was one of the "first readers" for several of my books, a great help to me in spotting cultural or geographical bloopers.

Here's the history of the project. Jane became involved when Yohannes Gebregeorgis, a native of Ethiopia, enlisted her help. He'd been taught in high school by Peace Corps volunteers—exactly what my uncle and aunt, Roger and Susan Whitaker, had done in Ethiopia—and came to the United States as a political refugee, took a master’s degree in library science and became a children’s librarian. The dearth of books available in any Ethiopian language in his own San Francisco library, despite a large population of Ethiopians there, spurred him to organize the non-profit Ethiopia Reads in 1998. Jane and Yohannes set about publishing a picture book for Ethiopian children in 2002. It's called Silly Mammo and it is the first ever bilingual book in both English and Amharic, as well as being one of the few books at all published in any Ethiopian language. The book was used as a fundraiser, and after six years and some huge amount of further fundraising effort, 15,000 books were shipped to Ethiopia and in 2003 became the basis for the Ethiopian Children’s Book Center, the first free library for children in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, a city of more than three million people.

In their own words, "The main purpose of Ethiopia Reads is to improve literacy and create a culture of reading in Ethiopia, in order to bring hope, vision and educational skills to this generation of Ethiopian children."

In the last month Yohannes Gebregeorgis has been named a "Top 10 Hero of the Year" by CNN, out of more than 3,000 individuals nominated by viewers throughout the year. The full story is here, and you can vote for Yohannes to be named THE Hero of the Year over here.

This is pretty time sensitive, as the The Top 10 Heroes will be recognized in CNN's "All-Star Tribute" to air on Thanksgiving Day, so vote now!

FW: Now that THE MARK OF SOLOMON duo is completed, we know you’re not just coasting on your wings. Can you give us a sneak peek at what you’re working on now? Will you include change ringing or flying in what you publish next?

E. Wein: The big project at the moment is The Sword Dance, which is supposed to wrap up the Arthurian/Aksumite cycle that I tend to call The Lion Hunters—the cycle that began with The Winter Prince and which includes The Mark of Solomon. My facetious working title for The Sword Dance is "Telemakos in Love."

The facetious working title for the Athena book is "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (moving on from Star Wars)—because, well, it is. In addition to "Telemakos in Love" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" I'm ALSO in the process of revamping the Novel Under the Bed, the one about change ringing. That's called The Oysterman's Opera—it's a huge departure from my usual setting, as it takes place in New Jersey in 1936. Harry Alden, the pilot character from "Chasing the Wind" (in Sharyn November's Firebirds, 2003), is the 14-year-old viewpoint character of Oysterman.

All my characters are distantly related somehow. The heroine of "Something Worth Doing," the flying story that will be in Firebirds Soaring next spring, is a contemporary of Harry Alden. Somewhere in the distant future I'd like to expand on that story, too.

It is a curious fact that whenever I invent a pilot, he or she is also a bell ringer.
It's hard to come up with a REAL sneak peek that isn't full of spoilers, but try this (there is technically a spoiler in here, but it's kind of an obvious one):
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Telemakos's small sister was not allowed to eat with the adults when there were guests. You could no longer call her a baby, but unlike Telemakos, no one had ever put much effort into teaching her courtly restraint. You could count on Athena to point out a visitor's every smallest imperfection, and to try to plait his hair for him while he ate, and to turn out her apron pocket to show off a collection of owl pellets and bits of discarded snakeskin. She had once made a nest for a family of mice in the bread basket. When there were guests, Athena was required to eat in the cooking hut.

Telemakos joined her there, while the guests were appropriately welcomed into Grandfather's household with hot baths and clean clothes belonging to Grandfather himself. They were presently to be served a small feast of a dozen different kinds of wat, including a stew of Telemakos's gazelle; Telemakos's mother and his aunt were going to wait attendance at the meal. Telemakos ate his own supper in the kitchen with his sister.

"You always bring dead things home," Athena said mournfully to Telemakos, folding her bits of meat into her injera bread with such minute delicacy that you scarcely noticed her fingers moving. Her own manners were exquisite, for all her inattention to other people's tastes. "You bring big dead animals to the house and everyone is happy. I bring little ones in alive and everybody shouts at me."

Telemakos laughed. "I take mine to the butchery to be cut up in tiny pieces. You drop yours on the table where they run about."

"Who are those white men you came in with today?" Athena asked.

"They are our kinsmen. They are all princes, in our father's homeland."

"The red one kissed Goewin. It was very improper."

"He meant it as a formal greeting. They do things differently in Britain. He is her cousin, and her servant," Telemakos repeated. "He has been ambassador in Himyar, and liege man to Constantine, Britain's high king…"

He could not eat. He had not expected this summons to come quite so soon.

"You need a bath," Athena said, leaping from topic to topic as usual. "You should go wash up or they won't let you sit with the guests tonight."

"What a good idea, little Athena."

"Mother and Goewin will give them coffee in the little court after they eat," Athena said. "The red man has brought something for you. Goewin says I can open it."

"I say so too."

Telemakos washed at the water butt in the walled kitchen garden. He ran inside and changed into clean clothes, then made his way through the cool stone hallways of the house to the private inner courtyard where the family sat on summer evenings. The weather was fine, and the woven grass awnings were drawn back. There was a dark blue square of night overhead. Moths fluttered about the hanging lanterns; stars littered the sky.

"Are you getting ready to serve coffee or start a war?" Telemakos inquired.

Gwalchmei's sword was drawn and lay bare across his knees; the orange flames of Turunesh's coffee burner flickered gold in the shining blade. On the floor by Medraut's side lay a dozen short spears, and an assortment of spearheads, Telemakos's entire arsenal; and Ras Priamos, the emperor's cousin and translator and Aksum's former ambassador to Britain, was brandishing a very antique Roman short sword in earnest demonstration before Gweir and Owain. Similar weapons from at least three different kingdoms lay bare-bladed on the flagstones, among the pepper leaves and white rose petals that his mother always spread about the floor when she made coffee in Adwa in the summer.

"What are you doing with my spears?"

Everyone looked up at Telemakos as he spoke. His mother stopped pouring cold water into the spout of the coffee pot to keep it from boiling; she sat poised over the burner, her dark eyes shining. Goewin had Athena on her lap. They were making a wreath with the pepper twigs. Athena gathered up the twigs and passed them to her aunt, and Goewin bound them into a garland. She was weaving among them a narrow saffron-colored ribbon that she had pulled from her own black hair, shimmering now like a fall of silk down her back as she bent over Athena's shoulder to tie the leaves together.

Athena snatched the green-gold garland from Goewin's hands and waved it at Telemakos.

"Look," she cried. "We've made you a crown."

"Telemakos Morningstar," Goewin said quietly, patting the old stone floor at her side beneath its carpet of spice leaves and flower petals. "Come sit here, my king."

Copyright ©2008, Elizabeth E. Wein, all rights reserved.

***

FW: And just that fast, the magical spell is woven again. Oh, we SO WANT TO READ THIS BOOK!!

E. Wein: While I've got your attention (if indeed I've still got anyone's attention at this point!), can I finish by pointing out a crazy project that my kids and I are working on—acting out the entire story of The Winter Prince (my first novel) in Playmobil? It's playing now (continuously) here. I have a web site but the real action goes on at my blog. Please drop by—it's very informal!

Thank you so much for the fun opportunity to blow my own horn here. These are great questions, and I hope I haven't made anyone's eyes go crossed with my long-winded answers. I hope I see some of the readers here on my various blogs!

FW: It's been fun to sort of visit the very brilliant and busy inside of your brain, Elizabeth! Thank you for all the amazing book recommendations, and thank you so much for coming by!

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Have just been as enormously entertained and educated as I've been? I think before the next Telemakos book comes out, I'll enjoy rereading all the other ones over again, and then tracking down the various short stories so I'll be ready for the Novel Under The Bed. Also, I *really* have to encourage you to visit the Playmobil theater. It's very amusing -- and shows a deep dedication to posing plastic toys in a literary fashion that amuses me deeply.

Sigh. Can I just admit it? I need a magic summerhouse.

There's more bookish and author-esque goodness today on this, the first day of the Winter Blog Blast Tour! Don't miss:

Lewis Buzbee at Chasing Ray
Louis Sachar at Fuse Number 8, School Library Journal
Laurel Snyder at Miss Erin
Courtney Summers at Bildungsroman
Susan Kuklin at The YA YA YAs

Poetry Friday: "How Frugal Is the Chariot That Bears the Human Soul"

It's a Dickinson Day, which means that it's a day for a poem that is compact and concise and full of a quiet passion. Go, Emily.

This poem struck a chord with me a few weeks ago, and I'm still thinking through Jen's post at ShelfSpace and the idea of creating a culture of reading. Most people I know have a book in their backpack, purse, pocket, HandSpring, or Kindle wherever they go, but there are other people who always complain that they just don't have time to read, or, see me reading and say they wish they had the time, or were as fast etc. etc. etc., blah blah. May I remind you, to paraphrase a friend, that the only thing we're born knowing how to do is wee and wail? Everything else is a learned skill.

So, anyone can become a reader.

While there is indeed no frigate like a book, there are others of the poems of Emily Dickinson which I wish I had been taught in school. I sometimes wonder at the worn and frayed Dickinson pieces which are used and overused in the junior high and high school canon (and parroted to that dreadful yellow rose song*). Why do we do that to her? And to our poor kids!? I hope teachers are discovering more of her other work through fun outings like Poetry Friday, and expanding their student's interest with words like this:

XXI. He ate and drank the precious Words

He ate and  

drank the

  precious Words –

His Spirit grew

robust –

He knew no more  


that he was poor;

Nor that his

frame was

  Dust –

He danced  

along the dingy

Days


And this Bequest

of Wings

Was but a Book –

What Liberty

A loosened Spirit

  brings –




~ Emily Dickinson


This is the unedited version of the poem; you'll notice that the lines are different from her usual stanzas, and it feels a little more organic to a jotting down in a journal type of thing. Also from Miss Emily's journal: "Not alone we fly . . . he has obligation who has Paradise."

And this is why we give books and talk about them and share them. We have Paradise. Everyone else should, too.

Happy Poetry Friday.
More poetry at Yat-Yee's place.

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* Really, it's an awfully good way to memorize a poem, especially if you're of a musical bent as I am. But... that song is an earworm of the most accurséd sort. Further, there are many Dickinson poems on which it doesn't work! But few people ever get that far in her poetry to know that. Which is a shame.

Toon Thursday: That Elusive Spark...

Well, we are officially about 2 weeks into National Novel Writing Month and I'm a) woefully behind, and b) embarrassed at the poor-quality drivel that has issued forth from my keyboard. I can already tell that, once the month is over, I'm going to have to valiantly rescue my poor characters--whom I do quite like--from the garbled excuse for a plot and setting I've inflicted upon them. Sigh.

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OK, a couple of links for you. Via the WritersMarket.com newsletter, I heard about an upcoming new site that will be launching this month called Graphic Novel Reporter, all about graphic novels and manga for kids, teens, and adults, brought to you by the folks at BookReporter.com. I've already signed up for their e-newsletter, and look forward to seeing the site!

From Susan at Wizards Wireless, I found out about Fuse #8's post about a Children's Inauguration to take place alongside the grown-up presidential inauguration in January. Says Betsy: "You would pair it alongside that of the adult persuasion and it could be a great way to promote reading, programs that support literacy, and other topics near and dear to our hearts." Sounds good to me. I thought I'd officially mention that here, since for some reason SLJ isn't letting me leave a comment.

Don't miss a really interesting new feature over at Children's Book Insider--a YouTube video series called Children's Lit Blog Posts of the Day, spotlighting interesting blog posts from around the kidlitosphere. It's sort of surreal to be watching a video about blog posts that has in turn been posted on a blog, but it's also a cool way of getting the word out.

Lastly, along with a host of other great sites including Guys Lit Wire we got a totally sweet plug from Little Willow over on SparkLife in her post about Bookish Sites to See--and Toon Thursday even got its own mention. Woo hoo!!

And one last thing...

The Prince of Wales turns 60 and gets a book edited by Quentin Blake and Michael Morpurgo. It's apparently good to be Prince.

And here's a tiny selection from the book by J.K. Rowling. I wonder if people are still really interested in what she has to say, or, if as a nation the UK feels like the have to listen to her. I always have an urge to tell her, "Um, Jo? Could you go back to work and stop giving interviews?" I'm really intrigued to see what she comes up with next...

Oh, and just so you know? We know all about Tina Fey's Super Secret Crush. Just sayin'. (We love you, too, Minh.)

Put On Your Bermuda Shorts: It's the WBBT!

Historical fiction.
It's all over the place lately. Today's Tollbooth has a great thoughtful little piece about why we choose it, what it gives us, and what well-written historical fiction gives us, it's well worth a read.

Finished with that? Okay. Check out BookBoot's historical fiction review of Gilbert & Sullivan Set Me Free. Ooh, some good stuff there, and the NY Times article from 1914 is just the icing on the very tasty cake. I liked historical fiction when I was a kid, but only as something "safe" to read for book reports. Oh, wow am I finding a new love for it now. So, shoo. Go. Read.

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Granted, the weather isn't cooperating.
At home today it's a balmy 79 degrees under blue California skies. However! This does NOT stop the party! Oh, no! It simply makes it a party with iced tea rather than the piping-hot-in-bone-china variety.

What am I going on about?

The 2008 Winter Blog Blast Tour is upon us! And Wonderland is excited to bring you some of our favorite authors -- including the fabulous:

Elizabeth Wein - bell ringing, plane-flying Nebula-nominated woman of many cities -- on Monday,

D.M. Cornish - the cartooning, doodling, world-spinning writing man from Down Under -- on Tuesday,

M.T. Anderson - who is giving new levels of cool to the name Tobias, and a whole new meaning to "historical fiction" -- on Wednesday,

John David Anderson - the father of three-year old twins who still managed to write a fabulous Cybil-nominated fantasy novel -- on Thursday.

...and that's just OUR little corner of the Universe. Louis Sachar, Tony DiTerlizzi, Ally Carter, John Green, Brandon Mull -- and so many more -- don't miss the full schedule and running daily round-up (posted this Friday) at Chasing Ray.

Cold or not, the fun starts next week!

Notes From All Over

It's apparently Artist & Illustrator Week. First, via Fuse @SLJ, illustrator Davide Hyde Costello draws the cutest janitor/monster. Next, Bookshelves of Doom links to an excellent ten minutes with Quentin Blake where he illustrates the cover of one of his latest books. His watercolors sometimes flow out of the lines, but the overall effect is astonishing, and makes me think I should really take a class. Someday. In my copious spare time.

Trisha@GuysLitWire posts what the funny and snarky Max, age 13, thinks boys really want to read. Publishers, take note, right? Meanwhile, Mitali knows how to relate to boys -- they LOVE her. She gets the best fan mail.

Meanwhile, while teachers and librarians and children's book aficionados are working toward pulling together a children's inauguration, to promote reading and literacy, the Irish are wholesale deciding that since they can't be American, they can just make President-Elect Obama... Irish.

No, seriously.


RIVERDANCE.
...
What's funnier is that Scottish newspapers are also saying that the President-elect is Scottish. But where's their wee catchy song, I ask you??

Malorie Blackman at The Guardian

"I hate being labelled," she says today, ensconced in the chic café at the top of Waterstone's Piccadilly, where she's requested hot water to mix with the cold remedy she's determinedly sipping on. "Through my whole writing career it seems people have always been criticising me for not tackling racism. But things like even having black characters on covers when I first started was a bit of a political statement, because I've had more than one bookseller say to me 'that book would sell better if you didn't put black people on the cover'."

Malorie Blackman is interviewed by Allison Flood at the Guardian about her book, Noughts and Crosses, which can perhaps be described kind of like Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes (the sociology classroom experiment) meets Romeo and Juliet. The Crosses have all the power and influence, and are brown; the Noughts have nothing, and aren't. An interesting series, and a fascinating interview with an author who didn't really want to write about racism, because, since she is black, it was kind of...expected.

Book Envy

Happy Monday! Hope you get a jump on some good things this week.

Mondays are usually nonfiction day elsewhere in the blogosphere, but I spotted a couple of great sounding fictional pieces out today -- first, Becker reviews The Saints of Augustine at GuysLitWire. An intense book about secrets, honesty, and friendship with two guys in trouble -- sounds really, really good.

Next, Colleen's got an excellent round-up of graphic novels at Bookslut in Training, which include the very intriguing sounding Skim, and Token, both coming-of-age novels focusing on girls, Holly Black's The Good Neighbors: Kin, which is another happy scary-fairy tale, and a nonfiction from DK Publishing called One Million Things: A Visual Encyclopedia, which sounds like a Christmas gift to me.

Speaking of Holly Black, Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Reads reviews Geektastic! Stories from the Nerd Herd edited by Black Holly herself and Cecil Castellucci. This book sounds fabulous and includes geeky stories from Holly, Cecil, and the usual suspects, including Scott Westerfeld, John Green, M.T. Anderson and Sara Zarr. The sad news: August 2009 is the release date for this. Yes. I feel your pain. ::suffers::

It's NaNo Month, which means our writing group is experiencing new and interesting fiction. (Go, S&K! Whoo!) Via Original Content, a great writing idea NaNo writers might try -- writing the story backwards, from the ending.

I wish this would work for me, but a.) do I actually ever know how a story will end? Um, no. And b.) I'd have to rewrite it anyway, because my characters generally change too much from the beginning of the novel 'til the end. While this is good, in character driven fiction, it's annoying for any kind of outlining/pre-writing purposes... would that work for any of you?

A Story About What We Wish We Knew Then

Family happens in ways that have nothing to do with what we're born into. We think it's supposed to be mom and dad and brother and sister and house and car and high school and summer camp and college and career. I think that isn't how it is anymore. I think mom and dad and brother and sister is the exception and not the rule. And sometimes the priest at the soup kitchen or the neighbor fills a role that is just as important as blood.
...
Family isn't what I thought it was at all.

Noelle and Nadio are twins, and they are very different people. Noelle's just wandering through the world, watching it go by, but Nadio is a disciplined, dedicated student, a 4.0, a little quiet, a runner, good looking, but doesn't really know it. Born on the same day, and very, very different, but it's never mattered before.

Noelle's best friend Keely has been a part of their world, kind of a loose link in the chain that forms their family. But when Keely's wealthy family sends her to Oxford for the summer, Noelle feels left behind in more ways than one. Suddenly, Keely has everything -- the big house, the good grades, the purposeful, shiny life. Free-falling, spiraling alone through the universe, Noelle feels disconnected from everyone and everything -- even Nadio. She tries to grab hold of something in the world, something that defines her. She finds Jessica, with her drinks and drugs, and Parker, with his mysterious silences and tattoos. Instead of finding herself and the love of her life, Noelle finds out she's still looking.

Meanwhile, Nadio and Keely have found something -- each other.

And Noelle is more lost than ever.

For anyone who has gone through a difficult transition in a friendship, this is a very hard book to read -- it's like living through it all over again. Growing past someone, growing apart from someone who once practically lived in your skin is immensely tough, and not every friendship survives it.

Told from the point of view of first Noelle, then Nadio, this is the story of a year of secrets and half-truths, which ate at a friendship, and what it took to pick up the pieces. There are some profound, deep insights here, and though the story moves at a good pace, the thoughtful tone and the reflective statements will resonate with readers, and make them pause and read them again.

Quotes and comments herein are based on an uncorrected proof.
Buy This is What I Want to Tell You from an independent bookstore near you in March, 2009!

Death At Their Elbows!

In TadMack's post below, she mentions Jen's great post over at ForeWord about fostering a love of books and reading in children. My mother was highly successful in that regard, for which I'm sure she is eternally happy; but I'm not sure she would expect my love of books to extend to a fondness for cheesy and antiquated book titles.

Where's this coming from, you ask? Well, one of the projects keeping me from blogging this week is a commissioned holiday card for the most excellent artist, Jim Rosenau. He creates sculptures from old books, and as a result, he's also got a rather large collection of old, musty dust jackets. For the holiday card, I've carved a linoleum block with an interesting quote ("No furniture so charming as books") which I will print over the dust jackets--everyone will therefore have a rather different version of the card. (Usually we printmakers call that an edition variée, but this is so variée I'm not sure it qualifies).

Anyway, some of these book covers are HIGHLY amusing, so I decided to make a list of the best ones and keep it here for posterity. Clearly Mr. Rosenau has a talent for collecting these.

• Doctor Come Quickly!


• Till Fish Us Do Part: The Confessions of a Fisherman's Wife


• The NEW Can-Opener Cookbook


• Strange Animals I Have Known


• Be Glad You're Neurotic


• This Wonderful World of Trout


• Jobs for All Through Industrial Expansion


• How Never to be Tired (or Two Lifetimes in One)


• Green Hell ("The classic account of four men who walked with death at their elbows through the dense, shimmering, fatally beautiful jungles of Bolivia.")


• Eat Your Troubles Away


• Working with Tools for Fun & Profit


• Artists and People


• The Way of a Dog


• How to Build a Record Library


• Cook, My Darling Daughter

Strangely, there was also a dust jacket for a rather recent YA novel, which I think I may have reviewed ages ago--The Book of Fred by Abby Bardi. Anyway, I'm rather enjoying this project, though I think I need to find a copy of How Never to be Tired.

SHAMELESS PLUG WARNING--if you're interested in a block-printed holiday card, I need to make arrangements before the end of the month! So please do e-mail me if you're interested. Contact info is on my website. OK, shameless plug is officially over.

Weekend Drive-Thru

The Guardian had a piece today on Angry Arthur, by Hiawyn Oram, and the illustrations of Satoshi Kitamura. This book is part of "Get Glasgow Reading" this year for the 0-5 set, and it's all about tantrums. The illustration really matches the fury of Arthur. Speaking of illustrations, via Chicken Spaghetti, the NYT has already chosen their 2008 Best Illustrated book list. A whole ton of them are Cybils picks. Yay, us.

The pink-tressed Laini (whose name I'm rather partial to!) is holding grudges in a way that totally makes me laugh -- I have to admit that even three years on, I'd go in and FIND that waiter -- which is probably a really bad use for a time machine).

Ooh, ick... Bookmoot's been sick! She's had an --ectomy or an --oscopy. Yikes! Go and wish her well while she's on drugs and won't remember! She might spill something good...

Book Evangelist Jen Robinson is guest blogging at ShelfSpace, which is part of ForeWord magazine. She talks about giving the gift of reading, and her number two suggestion in how to give kids the gift of reading really resonated with me:

2. Let the children in your life see that reading is important to you. Mention it when you encounter something interesting in a book or a newspaper. Turn off the TV, and let kids see you reading for relaxation. Bring books for everyone when you travel on planes. Listen to audiobooks in your car on road trips. Clutter up your house with books and magazines and newspapers. Demonstrate a culture that values reading, all types of reading.

I know too many people who only read TV Guide and don't understand why their kids don't just pick up the reading habit -- and a habit of excellence in their schoolwork -- just by osmosis. Go, Jen. Well said.

Like me, Sara's always a little leery of books with big buzz, thus her enthused review of Graceling has gotten me on tenterhooks to come HOME and get some BOOKS already. This is killing me!

And on a personal writing note: Just got word from Secret Agent Man that my next book, MARE'S WAR, is being shopped to the UK, and is being offered to fifteen (!) houses. That seems... a bit... extreme to me, but here's hoping something good comes out of it.

Poetry Friday Too: Extra Innings With Langston Hughes

(Poetry is song in meter.
How can I keep from singing?)

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Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes


Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.


Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!




From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes.
==============================================================
New inauguration poem? ...I think not.

Poetry Friday: That Single January Shooting Star

"Success is counted sweetest," Emily Dickinson says, "by those who ne'er succeed."

I always assume she means that this is because the one who has not achieved success continues to struggle and strive, while the successful person relaxes into the lauds and laurels that are his due.

I guess that depends, really, on how one considers the nature of the success; if we consider a success for one person, then maybe they do relax and reflect on a job well done, and then the moment is over. However, if that success is a team effort, the satisfaction of the whole makes success doubly sweet as it echoes and reverberates between the most tepid members to the fervent and earnest.

Personal victories are extraordinary to watch, as gripping to hear as personal survival stories. Everyone has their "down in the valley" tale, which they may or may not ever share, but you can identify those moments when they have struggled to the mountaintop by their joy, despite the January chill.


in celebration of surviving

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
    won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
    fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light


"In Celebration of Surviving," by Iowan poet Chuck Miller, from Northern Fields: New & Selected Poems, Coffee House Press, 1993.

Poetry Friday is hosted by librarian Ms. Mac at Check It Out.

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Pssst. Have you taken the Comment Challenge? Mother Reader & Lee Wind have cooked up a challenge to the YA and children's lit blogosphere to become a more cohesive community and support each other in blogging, thinking and writing for the next twenty-one days. That ties in all too nicely with my commitment to lift weights and start working on that running thing again (all your fault, Colleen), only the Comment Challenge will have prizes. Okay, theoretically lifting weights has prizes, too. But mostly not.

What has changed for writers, now that the President-elect is a writer? From Dr. Susan,

The universal appeal of his books may help move work by other writers of color from the "ethnic" or "black interest" bookstore ghettoes into the mainstream where they belong. (Next on the agenda: recognition that books by women and LGBT writers are also real literature. But that's another, post-euphoria post.)

Read more here, and add your own thoughts in the comments.

Toon Thursday: Noveling Madness

I suggest clicking on this one to view it larger...

Well, the Election Day madness, mania, and mayhem is over, and I've now proceeded past meltdown and back into Musing Mode (yes, it was HARD coming up with a suitable "m" phrase!), ready to continue National Novel Writing Month. (Check my personal blog if you're curious exactly how far behind I'm slipping.)

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In the meantime, here are some links I've collected. Firstly, if you missed seeing this via the Kidlit mailing list, don't miss the post at Charlotte's Library about donating books with a special bookplate in honor of Jacob, the son of Amanda at A Patchwork of Books. Amanda lost her infant son after four months of fighting for his life. Please do check out the blog post about this wonderful effort.

There's a new issue of Readergirlz out, and I'm especially excited because the featured book is Ellen Emerson White's Long May She Reign, which I recently read and reviewed over at Readers' Rants. The Readergirlz are also honoring Native American heritage this month with a chat with Cynthia Leitich Smith and Joseph Bruchac. There's also a new issue of Jon Bard's Write4Kids newsletter, with some interesting updates on Carus Publishing (damn you! accept teen short stories again, pleeeeze!!) and a feature on our own Adrienne. Woo hoo!

I recently ran across a blog circle/ring/community thingy for the kidlitosphere, on NearCircle.com. I'm not sure how one joins, but it seems to either collect posts or feeds and aggregate them daily. Seems intriguing.

Lastly, hope you've all had a chance to cruise by the Cybils blog now and then...there's a post about a great review of TadMack's A La Carte, and a fascinating Q&A about one of last year's Cybils winners, the Artemis Fowl graphic novel.

Sailing

It is a strange thing to be far from home on Election Day.
It is a strange thing not to get a sticker, or a sticker and a cookie, not to be "all braggy," or a little flag pin to stick in your lapel, or just the feeling of *dusts hands* "Done!" when you come in from putting the flag up on the mailbox.

It is so weird not to be in the United States today.

Not that I obsessively watch election coverage, even during presidential elections. Generally it annoys the heck out of me, and this election coverage feels like it's been going on since 1968. We've all gotten sick to death of spin doctors and pundits, but it feels so strange to be in a country where it's mostly business as usual, and there are no flags.

I have work to do; edits to complete and a wedding to plan (on paper, anyway) in the next three weeks. I'm really hoping to FINISH. THIS. NOVEL. BEFORE. CHRISTMAS. But man, am I distracted today. And a little verklempt. Which is a surprise.

I'm neither particularly patriotic nor sentimental, but a friend of ours in Ireland posted an open letter to America on his blog this morning, and he closed it with words that made me catch my breath.

President Roosevelt wrote out these same words for Winston Churchhill, saying that the verse "applies to you people as it does to us."

(I borrowed this from Bartleby. You may read all 397 lines quietly to yourself here.)

785. The Building of the Ship
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!

Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!        380
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat        385

Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
’Tis of the wave and not the rock;
’Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!        390
In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee,
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,        395
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,
Are all with thee,—are all with thee!

...Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Such a huge responsibility. And is it really ours?

O, Ship of state. You probably have barnacles, and your paint is worn, and some of your sailors are trying to throw things -- and people -- overboard for their own reasons. But, you're our ship, and I miss being part of the team swabbing the decks today.

Happy Election Day. The Vote is still being blogged, and people, it is 71 posts strong.
Go. Read.

More than Four

"For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations."

The previous quote is from Franklin D. Roosevelt's January 6, 1941 State of the Union address to Congress (listen here), his "Four Freedoms" address. Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear -- those four became a rallying point for the United States during WWII. Because it was during a time of war, those freedoms were illustrated as ours to "fight for."

I'd like to suggest that freedoms are something for which you vote.

Four essential human freedoms. Speech. Religious or irreligious expression. Financial solvency. Confidence that the country will not end under a nuclear cloud. Such big, big things that even now trickle down into smaller freedoms that everyday people have to remember that they possess.

Freedom to ignore intimidation and vote. Freedom to be accurately informed, and then make up your own mind. Freedom not to tell anyone for whom you voted for or why. Freedom to take a contrary path, to go your own way, and to do your own thing.

I've often been dismissed as an idealist. I believe in supporting the rights of other people to annoy the heck out of me and to be as weird as they are. So, I believe in voting for the same reason. Even if we don't agree -- and we probably don't -- I'll vote for your right to utter strangeness, and hope that you vote for mine as well.

One of the most basic and cherished rights of any individual is the right to be left the heck alone. Rush to the polls, introverted people. Or, like me, mail in that ballot, and never even leave the house...

Read some other more erudite pieces on voting over at Chasing Ray's Blog the Vote 2008. On the master list of young adult and children's booksellers, authors, librarians, teachers and peers, people are talking about voting, the right to vote, and how this unique privilege has been a part of their lives.

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I've always regretted that Norman Rockwell's vision of Americans in the 1940's was one of people of a single color and culture, and I remember as a kid straining to see even one light brown person in the bunch. The Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach recently reimagined this poster with their Thoughts on Democracy show (which runs through December 8th), and you can look at the results on Youtube, or check out the blog and read what the creative teams had to say about the four freedoms. The buttons are by the creative team of Kate Spade.

Viva La Voz

Speak up, speak out, and use your vocal superpowers for good!

Another reminder from the Blog the Vote contingent (Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray, Lee Wind and Gregory K. at Gottabook) that there's still time to take part in this ground breaking and original blogging action. In a completely non-partisan way, the young adult and children's literature blogosphere is blogging the vote -- talking about why voting matters to them, and encouraging everyone to get out there and change the world. I'll be interested to see how those who have been drumming up support for specific candidates truly put their money where their mouth is and make things happen on November 4th. Meanwhile, November 3rd is for encouragement, remembrance, and exhorting each other to make a difference.

Don't miss Andromeda's piece on time off for voting laws. Do they have them in your state?

Finally, via Smart B's, SB Sarah gives us a head's up on volunteering for LibriVox. Next to being asked to write for an anthology, this is the second coolest thing I've wanted to do; voice-overs and audiobooks! Whee!

Darn It, Jenny Downham!

Right on the cover of the book is your first clue. The title. Before I Die. This is going to be A Sad Book. What's worse is that the UK version of the book has reviews from several newspapers on the back, including one from the Daily Express that says, "I defy anyone not to cry reading this book."

Sigh.
Yes.
You know now that I had to try, right?

Tessa is a sixteen year old girl with leukemia. She is going to die. She knows it, her mother, father and brother know it, the reader knows it from the outset, and only her best friend Zoey seems not to be traumatized by the fact. When Tessa decides that she has a few things to check off her list before she goes, Zoey enters into it wholeheartedly, especially because the first one is territory where she's been before -- Tessa wants to lose her virginity.

But it's not all that easy -- not just the virginity losing, but the staying on course with the fatalistic, factual attitude she wanted to embrace. Zoey's got a boyfriend and is losing interest in her, Tessa is fighting with her brother, she and her stay-at-home dad are driving each other crazy, and Tessa longs for her mother to come back to them and tune-in to the fact that her daughter is dying. Tessa wants to order the universe in a way that suits her best, at the same time, she doesn't know what would suit her.

Even dying, things are hard.
And the dying part is not easy. As Tessa finds new things to love in the fading light of her life, it seems that the diagnosis she expected is only coming faster and faster. Tessa clinging tenaciously to the last bits of life, really seeing light, leaves, hearing her father's footsteps, her mother's stories -- these things produce an violent clashing clear gratitude and enormous frustration and fury at the unfairness that it all has to stop so soon, too soon.

Life is never enough.
And then, it ends.

And though you may have to read a chapter and set it down, pace around your house, put ice cubes on your face and bake a few loaves of bread in between chapters, you can read this novel without crying.

And once you're through, go outside and live.

Buy Before I Die (and an embroidered handkerchief?) from an independent bookstore near you!