. . . is a term of power and sorrow, anger, dissolution, humor, and victory. Among other things, it is the title of Richard Wright’s novel about a man driven to violence by his realization that the world values power and that the single individual is “nothing.” This little essay is the first of an occasional series on the concept of the outsider.

As readers of her fiction and letters will know, Flannery O’Connor won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award in 1947. She had been a student of the School of Writers at the University of Iowa, and her short stories, a few of which would become chapters in her novel, Wise Blood, were submitted by her teacher in the School, Paul Engle. The award included an advance of $750 against royalties if the publisher, Rinehart, in New York, accepted the finished novel.

Flannery came from the tiny town of Milledgeville, Georgia, but had made friends at Iowa and later at and through the writing colony of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs. Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Engle; she was appreciated by writers and critics of the highest level, and this, before she was much published.

Things did not go well with Rinehart from the beginning:

January, 20, 1949, to her agent:

“Here are the first nine chapters of the novel, which please show John Selby [the editor at Rinehart] and let us be on with financial thoughts.”

February 17, 1949, the same:

“I received Selby’s letter today. . . . I presume [he] says either that Rinehart will not take the novel as it will be if left to my fiendish care (it will be essentially as it is), or that Rinehart would like to rescue it at this point and train it into a conventional novel.”

There is more, and writers of all stripes are urged to read about these first months of Flannery’s dealings with the publishing world, but this last line touches on what I mean by outsider. With the help of her agent, she is able to disentangle herself from Rinehart, move to Harcourt, from whom Wise Blood appears in 1952, and finally follow Robert Giroux to Farrar, her publisher until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.

There were undoubtedly miscommunications on both sides — when Flannery pulls away from Rinehart finally, she describes it to her old friend Engle thus:

“Selby and I came to the conclusion that I was ‘prematurely arrogant.’ I supplied him with the phrase.”

This also is important, the more so because the phrase was hers. Flannery learns she has lupus in 1950 and soon decides that she cannot live north any longer and returns to Milledgeville to live with her mother.

During her life, she published two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and a collection of stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. After her death, a second collection of stories appeared, Everything That Rises Must Converge, a selected letters, The Habit of Being, and a miscellany of occasional prose, Mystery and Manners.

Finally, from a brave series of letters in her last weeks:

June 17, 1964, about her posthumous collection:

“I wrote Giroux and asked him to hold off the publication date of the stories until spring. In that way I thought I could probably manage another story.”

July 15:

“I have drug another out of myself and I enclose it. . . . I’m still in bed but I climb out of it into the typewriter about 2 hours every morning.”

July 21:

“I’m still puttering on my story that I thought I’d finished but not long at a time. I go across the room & I’m exhausted.”

July 28, her last letter before her death on August 3:

“Don’t know when I’ll send those stories. I’ve felt too bad to type them.”

. . . was the title of a book published by the Modern Curriculum Press of Cleveland when I was a youngster. To my recollection, it was my textbook in the primary grades (maybe as early as first grade), so it must have been available in the 1950s (perhaps it was used mainly in Ohio), though I can’t locate a copy from my standard out-of-print acquisitional aid, abe.com, earlier than 1968.

First Fun in Phonics is the book that helped me learn to read. I hope it helped me learn to read. In the tangled history of that event I remember nothing so much as the encouragement my mother gave me along with a life-changing copy of The Wind in the Willows. About First Fun, I have little real memory — its activities, tests, assignments, pleasantries, what was so fun about it — other than its alliteratively clever title, which I recall loving because it seemed a sort of insider joke, a trick of language for the very young. (Imposters have jumped on the bandwagon recently with such tortured title variants as Fun First Phonics and Phonics Fun. What a falling-off was there!)

Learning to read words, understanding how they work singly and then with one another, and then how they work with the reading mind to signify a meaning that goes beyond the page into the world out there — all this precedes the discovery of anything that the writer of those words intended and, by extension, that the reader can gain from those words.

Series writing — books published originally in paper — is looked down upon by large segments of the children’s reviewing industry, though, if I may, I don’t believe it’s seen that way from the vantage point of either the library or the classroom. Teachers and lovers of reading know the value of books in series. Early or struggling readers will naturally seek out a second book with characters they have already met. And a third. And a tenth. And what happens over the course of these two hundred, three hundred, these thousand pages, but that the reluctant or young reader becomes a more confident reader, better able to discern the words on the page, to move more quickly through the wonder of story, to look ahead as he or she should to more challenging works. Hardcover books are at a disadvantage here. They are not as literacy-friendly as less expensive and more easily available paper series books are. I’m just going to come out and say that paper originals are a more important tool for literacy in libraries and classrooms than single hardcover novels. Of course, a novel’s charge is different. Of course, of course. But before taking on the three-hundred page novel, I betcha young readers, poor readers, distracted readers, most readers get their foundation skills with paper originals.

It’s true, after all, that words are cheap. A writer of any kind of book assembles them by the hundreds or thousands each day, and it’s easy to lose sight — when you are deep into character, story, metaphor, structure, and so on — of the primary, basic need to comprehend what those words are and what they mean.

To realize this is wholly within the spectrum of what a children’s and teen’s writer is about. Sure, set the words on the page. Carve them. They are music. They’re deep thought. They breathe and sigh and curse. They can change worlds. They can change individuals. But in the moment of creation, how dare you think about a reader? You can’t, not at first. Isn’t a reader an end impossible to see — or see clearly — from the vantage point of the beginning? Character determines story. Story determines words. Words are put out there. It’s done.

But, of course, it’s not done. Maybe it’s long after your people and your story have gone from your desk, but readers come to your words. Maybe not many, but that’s okay. It doesn’t take many. Readers come. They come from all sorts of different places and directions. But when they open up the cover — paper or board — then the real mystery of the comprehension and wonder and understanding and thinking and acting and changing begin to happen. So you look backward from the end of your story to the beginning of its absorption into someone else’s consciousness. And you stand back and watch the fun.

Last year I was invited to present a workshop or two at The Primary Conference — an annual meeting of classroom and writing teachers in grades K-3 — on, as the organizer said, “writing techniques you think teachers can share with their kids.”

Hmmm . . .

As I told him, I think of myself as a working writer, and while I do a lot of school and library visits, keynotes, and writing workshops with students, I’ve never actually done a workshop for adult teachers. Looking at the conference website, I was a bit put off by the expertise of teacher/speakers on the one hand and the “performance” aspect of the storyteller/writers on the other.

Besides that, there lingered a misconception from my first days of speaking to adults: that to be successful, one has to rise to the level of the attendees’ usual debates, absorb the intricate and specialized knowledge of their work, and speak in kind, as a fellow worker in the vineyard. To address a room of librarians, for instance, you have to equip yourself with a good knowledge of librarianship; of teachers, with a thorough acquaintanceship of teaching theories and techniques. If you didn’t do this, you would be made to feel underqualified, an outsider, a pretender.

I’ve mostly given up this silly idea. Any seasoned conference goer will tell you this is exactly wrong, anyway. If you are outside a certain field, conference sponsors don’t invite you to be knowledgeable in what they do, but in what you do. Attendees want to decide how your unfamiliar information will help them do their work.

It was the smart organizer who finally convinced me to take it on. In essence, he said: “As a writer of many books, you know this stuff already. You simply haven’t put your knowledge into this particular form yet. Just tell us what you know, and it’ll turn out great.” I totally paraphrase. Looking back at the emails, I see didn’t use the word “great.” He never came close to using the word “great.” But you get the idea. I agreed.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was asked to submit descriptions of the presentations. Uh-oh. My bluff was being called. As anyone will know who writes outlines or summaries of anything not yet existent, these descriptions present a kind of ideal that, being put out there, must eventually be lived up to. Of course, anything months away seems perfectly doable. Besides, over the last few months I’ve been chatting with teachers and other writers and massing notes and texts to help me form the workshops. The conference is in November, still a few weeks away, but the material is gathering. I’ll share war stories afterwards. Here are the summaries I came up with.

Building Stories from the Ground Up

Featured Speaker: Tony Abbott
Target Audience: Grades 2-3

Author of The Secrets of Droon and more than thirty other books for young readers, Tony Abbott shares his own genre series — fantasy, science fiction, adventure, mystery — and discusses how series fiction spurs literacy among reluctant readers in the early grades. He describes the basis of all stories, from Goodnight Moon to War and Peace, details the no-nonsense tips and techniques he uses to write his own works, and shares how these concepts can inspire writing in your classroom.

Ideas are Everywhere. But Just in Case . . .

Featured Speaker: Tony Abbott
Target Audience: Grades 2-3

Children’s author Tony Abbott shares the top secret ways he finds and uses ideas, what fun things you can do to spur ideas in young writers, how there’s no such thing as “writer’s block,” and the care and maintenance of each student’s “imagination machine.” You’ll learn what to do with inspiration when you have it, how to elaborate, to color, to question, and to “twist” ideas, generating more than you and your students can possibly handle.

Wow, I wanna go to these workshops myself! Ultimately, I’ll rely on my fairly good idea of what it means to be a working writer. Maybe it’ll turn out great!

Next to my computer sits the copy of What Hearts that Bruce Brooks autographed for me in May 1994 at the IRA Annual meeting in Toronto. Because my first book had just appeared, I’d been invited to speak on a panel of writers. I was on completely new ground. I knew no one in the industry, didn’t know how to act or speak or move, and when Bruce happened to be breakfasting in our hotel one morning, and something about our paraphernalia indicated we were both there for the meeting, we greeted each other. He was unfailingly polite, cheerful, and giving to a novice, and, aside from my writing teacher Pat Giff, probably the first real writer I had met.

Then I read his books.

Let me start with Everywhere (1990), a gem of a novella that (and I know already that this may not be understood) has this crazy sense of movement — like a young boy moves across a lawn — from beginning to end, and — further — itself ends in a gesture, a flash of motion that not only sums up everything in the preceding sixty-nine pages, but is a gesture that you take with you beyond the book and into your life.

There are few writers’ works that are at once beautiful and successful and resonant, but that also become a primer for other writers — at any level. Bruce’s books carry in their phrases and in their form and in the boldness and subtlety of their dialogue, the full library of American fiction.

What I mean is this: you know how sometimes when you read a book for younger readers, you sense the thinness of the writing, the awkward simpleness of its thought, the frailty of its knowledge base, the sterility of its invention, which all speak to the writer’s disrespect of the adult reader, and ultimately (of course) of the younger reader?

Bruce Brooks’s stories are the antithesis of this pervasive cheapness. His craft, and his art, are calm and wise, and we know when we read his prose that we are in the presence of a someone who has read widely and absorbed it all. Examples are on every page. Here, from the beginning of Everywhere:

The sidewalk along my grandfather’s street was a single, long slab of dimpled concrete. Sidewalks were a pretty new idea in this part of Richmond, and that is how they built them; when someone stepped on it at any point, the steps vibrated along the whole block with a kind of clack and boom.

Rich. Full. Colloquial and aware. Read the words again, and you realize that there are several things going on in them. First, there is the discrete historical reference for a book written in 1990 — Sidewalks were a pretty new idea — showing readers without telling them, that we are in the past. There is also the fact of geographical knowing — in this part of Richmond — which presumes a familiarity with other parts of Richmond, acknowledging the writer’s authority, which young readers easily sense.

Then, for readers of a certain age (who I am certain the author considers as vital to his audience as younger readers), there is the actual recognition of that vibration and the clacking and booming that one’s weight causes on a long unbroken strip of concrete. Simply, we have walked on such sidewalks, whether in Richmond or Cleveland or Bridgeport or St. Petersburg.

For those who have never experienced the sensation, the author’s rich description creates the knowledge. For a reason. It underpins the rest of the paragraph. The book works like this all the way through.

Similar mastery is at play in What Hearts, though of a deeper, more involved sort. The conversation between Asa and his classmate Joel’s mother on the eve of a school show is a model of subtext that is nearly impossible to describe. The words are in no way invented. They are not crafted. The author seems (merely) a scribe to an event that actually happened; though, of course, we know it happened only on his page, and it will only happen again when we read it there. I know I’m telling you nothing about the conversation; you have to read up to it and read it yourself. In this book, context is everything.

One last point about context, the slow build to the moment when the meaning of the book’s title is at last stunningly revealed is one of the finest moments I’ve read in children’s books, and Bruce’s natural artistry here utterly blows me away. In a sense, that brief moment encapsulates what I believe we are all trying to do in books for young readers: notice, describe, empathize with, and make possible the moment when a child moves forward into his or her future. What else is there?

Sorry to miss last week’s Report; more for my own sake than for any presumption of a readership. You know, you get to a stage of your life and it hurts to renege on a promise, even a whispered one. But life takes over. Days sweep on, one after the other, until you look around and find it’s this time next week.

Last weekend I attended the SCBWI Annual Conference in Los Angeles. There are enough round-ups of what happened at the conference seeping onto the Interweb (as Tracy Jordan calls it), that I won’t add to them here. For those writers for children who have never attended, however, the event is nothing less than a celebration and a call to arms. You cannot help but be buoyed by listening to the first rate faculty on such nuts-and-bolts topics as Revision (Lisa Yee) or Story Beginnings (Sara Pennypacker). I found myself taking detailed notes, more than I ever expected to, if only to remember what great sessions those were. The keynotes ranged from boldly inspirational (Bruce Coville) to quietly emphatic (Mark Teague) to funny with props (Rachel Cohn).

If the juggernaut of daily life so easily overwhelms the filmy artist you imagine yourself to be (think armored tanks vs. a lone horseman), this conference is a shield and a buckler, a mighty fortress, for four days, at least, in which every breath establishes the real value of writing for children. And that knowledge is what you take back home with you.

This is about as personal as I think I’ll get, but my own little moment of pride came a day before the conference when I put together a hundred pages of a new novel and sent them to my agent and to my editor. As noted below, I’d despaired of finding the time to do this properly, but in four intense days at my desk got to a place where a sizable fragment, if not complete, would nonetheless give a fair idea of how I wanted to tell the story. And telling the story properly was the only reason to write it.

Now we wait.

A few weeks ago, a writer friend asked if I would be interested in doing a workshop at an emergency center for kids. The organization is called Kids in Crisis, whose mission is “to protect, infants, children, and teens from abuse and family crisis. To this end we provide free, round-the-clock crisis intervention, counseling and emergency shelter, prevention programs in local communities and advocacy throughout Connecticut.”

I said I would.

Writing is such a huge and many-faceted topic, as minute and detailed in its nuances as any subject can be, and yet I imagine that writers are often so involved in the day to day and sometimes frantic workings of whatever stories they are working on that they may not think about how basic a human activity it is. Even a mundane task like helping to clean out my mother-in-law’s house showed me that writing is a normal function of a normal life. She wrote (and saved) countless notes, letters, greeting cards, postcards, diaries, and journals from the 1930s on, without ever thinking of herself as a “writer.” And that’s the beauty of the craft and art of writing. The universality of it — the great spectrum of words from grocery lists to The Sound and the Fury — creates and founds the audience for serious writing, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and all words we hold dear.

When the representative of Kids in Crisis (let’s call him Chad because that’s his name) called on Tuesday to touch base before the Thursday workshop, I had to admit that deadlines had prevented me from doing much preparation, but that I would. He encouraged me, Chad did, to think about basic activities to get the group warmed up about writing and stories. Some of the kids, he warned me, may not exactly want to be at the workshop. They were residents at the house, and would be there for a little while or a longer time as they awaited transfer to a more permanent place for them. I was to imagine that the kids had been taken from abusive situations or homes in some sort of crisis.

Chad said I might find a way to draw them in, but shouldn’t be alarmed if they didn’t participate. Okay. Sounds like my house. Taking a clue from Dickens, who used to organize his talks with several points, which he would tick off, finger by finger, as he delivered them, I decided to divide the 45-minute session into five or six parts, knowing that if one brainy idea was falling flat, or I was dying a bad comic’s death, I could bounce along to the next topic without a tragic loss of dignity. I was armed with MapQuest directions, a healthy amount of material (and who is the writer who can’t fall back on talking for days about his work?), a gentle forewarning, and a stack of books to give out, should all else fail.

As it collected itself this afternoon, the group consisted of seven kids, joined later by an eighth, ranging from 13 to 17, mixed boys and girls. Chad tried, like a warmup comic, to get them settled and into place, then I came in. I had a thought to enter doing a pratfall to break the ice, but thought better of it. The kids were alert and smiling, mostly. One head was on the table. A girl yawned into her arm. Hi. Hi. And we began.

I started with the idea of control. You know that life is messy, incomplete, things don’t go the way you want, things don’t go at all, but writing — besides being a way to put all those things down on paper (or in blogs) — is a tool of control. You can shape your words and the stories they form. If you can’t govern your life, you can govern at least one thing when you write: you control your story; and that means controlling its characters, where it goes, what happens from first line to last. I wanted to make this basic, so didn’t talk about all the times that’s not quite true (characters who thumb their nose at you, etc.). The first question: describe yourself in a single word as you are right now. Second question: describe the person you want to be. The point? These words are the beginning an end of the story. What comes in between? How do you get from where you are to where you want to be? The answer to those questions become the roadmap of the story. Life is a journey; so is writing. Basic point.

Next, I told absurd stories which were meant to be bad and incomplete. What was wrong with them? One had no character, another no setting, a third had a character and a setting, but no problem to activate that character. We had a buoyant time coming up with silly and serious problems to give the story what it needed. A younger boy, F., shared his process, which was to create pictures and let others take the story from them. Simple and profound. (Thanks, F, for the take home.) All in all, this was a good activity and could have gone further, but I felt we could do more if we moved on.

Favorite movies. What is your favorite movie and can you tell me at least one character, setting, and problem faced by that character. I was thinking, naturally, of Gone with the Wind or Chinatown, or even The Dark Knight, but the movies the kids mentioned (none of which I heard of because I am of a certain age) worked just as well. (Note: know movies kids see if you plan to do this on a long-term basis; you’ll know more about your workshop participants.) The idea was relate the kids’ enthusiasms to the concept of how a story is constructed and how it works.

I talked a little about the idea of memory and how it can inspire you to write. This was a bit prickly because a childhood memory for me is a quite different animal from whatever has sent these kids to the group home. I wanted to make the point that storytelling moves on from memory and fact to create something new. This didn’t work. It was too involved an idea and not helpful.

To end, I set up the story that today is Thursday (which it is, as I write this) and that The Big Event is happening on Saturday. And we are characters in this story. First of all, what is the event? Several ideas from a summer jam to meeting the president to going to Hershey Park. Second, what happens to us between now and Saturday. And that is our story. Simple enough. Insightful suggestions. You find out the big event is scheduled at the same time as your grandma’s birthday party. (Thank you, A., for that one!) What do you do? Blow off granny? Or tell the prez sorry, maybe next time? Another suggestion, you break your leg; now what do you do? That could be comical. Or not. Aliens attack. There’s always that possibility. The president is . . . missing (see, kids, I changed that one). Now, getting from here-and-now to there-and-then becomes the texture, and the structure, of our story. And . . . time’s up. The kids had to go to their next session or class or activity and I was gone.

It was great for me, a stretch, a re-evaluation, a confirmation, a bare peek into the lives of children with things happening I couldn’t begin to imagine, but who had what every child has, the thing you see when you look into their eyes and find another human being. For them it was little enough in their cloudy day to hear an old guy blab about stories; for me it was something new, and that, along with everything else I took away but haven’t yet understood, is good.

. . . in paper, that is. For the past few weeks, my desk has been in the deep end of the pool. Multiple deadlines for two series kept me hopping from one book to another, from a first draft of the third book of a new series (The Haunting of Derek Stone) to the copyedit of the 39th book of another series (The Secrets of Droon), from an outline of the 40th book to the second draft of the third book and the outline of the fourth, and so on.

Besides that, I had interview questions to answer (for the weblog Cynsations; an absolute delight, by the way — questions make you think!), a deadline to read and judge some 20 short stories in a local fiction contest, follow up communications stemming from the recent ALA (see below), and a desperate attempt to finish reading a book before my willpower died (finally did; Other Voices, Other Rooms; a stunning first novel). To boot, I’m late with just about everything, because as I get older I find I write more slowly. Not to break the water imagery (water, which seeks it’s own level), my work expands to fill the time available to do it. Honestly, it has been something on the order of: If this is Tuesday it must be Panjibarrh. If this is Wednesday, I’m in Baton Rouge. My head is spinning, and that’s an unattractive sight at the best of times. On the other hand, keeping busy these days is a blessing.

My series editors have been great, extending deadlines a few days here, a few days there. What I’m really risking, however, are the ten days I had long ago planned to work on a couple of longer books that, while not contracted, every once in a while my hardcover editor asks me about. Those of you with more or less flexible schedules — writers, for instance — know that a calendar is an essential tool, but that, ahem, dates are often written in water. They ebb and flow. They drift. They slide. They vanish under the waves of work. So the two week window starting this past Monday that I’d carved out way back last fall (when I got my two-series publishing schedule), are now down to three days next week. Or two, if I take any longer writing this, so I’ll have to cut this week’s Friday Book Report to a smidgen. Or a smidge. A smid. I gotta go.

In this first entry of the Appreciations column, I suppose I should admit that I read very little children’s literature. I try to read books by my friends, but even then I find my tastes are extremely narrow (psychotically so), and I have so little actual time to read, and I am such a slow reader, that giving up happens more easily than it should. Part of me thinks (and this may seem snobby, but it’s so often a matter of the time allowed to us in a day, a week, or a month) that one should be reading the really fine writers — of all eras — because, in addition to their superior art, they have the most to teach one about the craft and art of writing. To be crude about it, it’s hard to spend what little time you have reading something that will give you neither enjoyment nor tips about how to write better. That may sound bad in any number of ways, but I’ll elaborate later.

Except for this: there is a time and a place for wide reading in the literature. In the beginning of your time as a writer for younger readers, you will want to read as many children’s books as you can. You need to know the market. Novelist and teacher Patricia Reilly Giff emphasizes this strongly as one of the first prerequisites of having a shot at being published. Know the field. Know it.

That being said, however, of the few children’s books I have read recently, I have to make special mention of Bird Lake Moon (Greenwillow, 2008) by Kevin Henkes. Henkes (pronounced HENK - essss, I believe, but don’t quote me) is an excellent illustrator, having a huge body of picture books to his name, both written and illustrated by, and just illustrated by. Kitten’s First Full Moon won the Caldecott Medal in 2005.

That makes it all the more remarkable (to me) that not only does he write novels for young readers, but his novels are vastly better written than most. These books, including the Newbery Honor winner Olive’s Ocean, were obviously not published as a courtesy in acknowledgment of his success in illustration. No. The guy is a writer who can draw. Puts non-hyphenates to shame, he does.

The plot revolves around the boys in two families who summer in neighboring cottages at a place called Bird Lake. Big things are going on for both boys, Mitch and Spencer. Each is suffering — Mitch because of his parents’ impending breakup, Spencer with the memory of a drowned brother. What I love is that Henkes has written these boys not as characters, not dripping with metaphor, but as real people, making their fairly simple story both a lively and deep meditation about the place of loss and longing in our lives. Ultimately, Bird Lake Moon is a book about the things that happen in boys’ heads. Henkes has a deep and humorous feel for the thickets of thought, and a very fine way with word and mood. A first-rate book, that has me searching the stores for his past novels and awaiting his next with anticipation.

Writing, reading, and publishing — for children — are the stuff of life for me, and I want to use the Friday Book Report to discuss topics that writers, readers, and publishers, as well as parents, classroom and reading teachers, school and public librarians, and anyone else who loves children’s books might find interesting. Comments are welcome. Feel free to be provocative; a lively discussion is the best kind.

Because I have a trainload of writing to do every day or the schedules topple, I thought a weekly blog might be the ticket. Of course, if something comes along that is more urgent, I’ll post more frequently, but the idea is that you can (if you want) at least count on there being something new on Fridays. You know, like the PW Children’s Newsletter comes on Thursdays (free; you should subscribe if you don’t already).

Some completely random stuff might creep in, too. Like new books I’ve read, or some old ones about which there is something to say. I also have an idea to write up what I call The Week That Was, a sort of diary of the business of writing and what happens from day to day at my desk (poor, overburdened thing that it is).

Then there is what I’m going to call Appreciations. These will be little essays about some books and authors I just can’t keep quiet about. I’ll share the reasons why I am nuts about them. Some will be topical; others decidedly not.

HOWEVER . . . to begin, I want to say a few words about the American Library Association annual meeting that just wound up. It took place in the sensory overload capital of the world, Disneyland. “Ahna—HEIM! Ahna—HEIM!” as my cabdriver described it. For four days (6/27 to 6/30), I was the guest of Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers. My lovely editor, Alvina Ling, and crew (names named below) brought me out to read and sign my novel, The Postcard. Their Fiction Lunch on Saturday hosted between forty and fifty librarians, media specialists, book lovers, and committee members. There were some good folks there, including fellow Ohioan Floyd Dickman.

Wendy Mass (Every Soul a Star) and Paul Feig (Ignatius MacFarland: Frequenaut) were fellow authors. Victoria Stapleton, Little, Brown’s supremely able and quietly hilarious library conference manager told us we each had — and I quote — “three to five minutes” to convince these folks how indispensable our books are. Quietly hilarious, indeed. Paul, Wendy, and I wept inwardly, flipping through pages to try to find the — what? — nine or ten words that would sum up our work. As I was set to go first (was it alphabetical?) I tried to make the case that I heard “three to five minutes” as “thirty-five minutes”, but alas, Victoria is nothing if not precise. To sum up, I took longer than either three or five minutes, sacrificing myself on the altar of duty, so that my fellow writers could take as much time as they needed. Much fun was had by all. Plus the food was darn good.

There was more, but I’ll wait until another Friday Book Report to get into it all. Among these things: the Newbery/Caldecott Banquet, the exhibit hall, the palm trees, incessant easy listening soundtrack, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye.

Many thanks, first of all to my editor, Alvina, who said the loveliest things about the vague stuff I told her about the book I was writing. Then there is Victoria, who made sure that my flight, hotel, food, and fun were looked after, and, hilariously, they were. Also, my guide and good sport, Melanie Chang, the legendary Megan Tingley, new mom Andrea Spooner (what a cool name), Andrew Smith (he of the sardonic humor), and Jennifer Hunt, editor of good books I have not written.

Among the personages I met: Pat Carman (of Atherton and Elyron), Michael Emberley, Ed Young (Wabi Sabi), Edel Rodriguez (Sergio Makes a Splash), the aforementioned Wendy and Paul, of course, and then, bow down now all, Christopher Paul Curtis, whose novels are quite good indeed. Saw Peter Sis, for whom I have got THE project, if there were world enough and time.

And speaking of world enough and time, mine’s run out. Until next week . . .