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Best Post Ever

9/15/2013

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Met with my editor and assistant editor on Tuesday in a restaurant where crispy pork bellies were on the menu but the waiter wiped them off with a damp cloth. We discussed the many sentences I write in which a pronoun’s antecedent is ambiguous. I argued that for a humor writer this can be a good thing. They (the editors, not the pork bellies) did not agree.

Discussed my next book, tentatively titled The Book that Proves Time Travel Happens, due out from Little, Brown in April of 2015, which only sounds like the far future if you’re mentally sitting at home on Friday, September 8, 1966, watching the premiere of Star Trek, which I perpetually am, communicating only during perceived commercial breaks, which makes conversation spotty. By 2015 we will all have flying cars and people will be reading books by swallowing them as pills, and I expressed the hope that mine would be published as a chewable, since the intended audience is children, but my editor informed me that by 2015 Amazon plans to be selling children’s books in the form of PEZ candy, while offering the proprietary Amazon PEZ dispensers at cost or slightly below in a ploy to corner the market.

Upon returning to the offices of Little, Brown Young Readers, which are made entirely of Legos, - except for the board book section, which is made of Duplos - I was able to secure copies of Paolo Bacigalupi’s Zombie Baseball Beatdown and Karen Harrington’s Courage for Beginners, so I had something to pretend to read on the train while actually watching Spock and Kirk battle salt vampires. Both books look pretty good, though.
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Karen Harrington's Courage for Beginners is the book hiding behind the one about zombies, allegedly because Courage's cover hasn't been officially released, but much more likely because, hey, zombies are scary.
Walked the dog when I got home. She spent a good five minutes sniffing the base of one particular stop sign, reading the traces of all the dogs who had passed that way earlier, then added a trace of her own, and I realized this is how dogs blog, which she verified by rubbing her back against the sign and looking up at me as if to say Best Post Ever.
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My dog Blogger. Not to be confused with my blog dogger, that crazy guy who claims to have read every single one of my blog entries.
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Zombies

9/12/2013

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It’s late September and I really should be back in school, but tuition is so horrendous I’ve decided to sit this semester out, and listen to old Rod Stewart records instead. (Don’t you hate it when a blog entry begins with a sentence that should have been used as a tweet? I know I do. It used to be one of the rules of good blogging grammar, but nobody's teaching good blogging grammar anymore.) Where was I? September.

The Eva Perry Mock Newbery Award nominees (so far) have been announced, and What We Found in the Sofa is on the initial list! 

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Mock Newberys are chosen by a number of different Mock Newbery book clubs, organized by libraries and schools across America. Kids in the clubs read books written for kids, and try to guess what the actual, non-mock Newbery committee, composed of mock children (that is, adults) will select in January as “the most distinguished American children's book published the previous year.” (And, of course, it’s that “distinguished” part that greatly diminishes the winning chances of any book featuring a hot-air balloon in the shape of a giant toilet bowl. What was I thinking?)

The twenty-five kids in the Eva Perry club have so far narrowed down the possibilities to nineteen titles, which they’ve listed alphabetically, and fortunately for me, National Book Award finalist Paolo Bacigalupi published Zombie Baseball Beatdown this year, so What We Found in the Sofa is not the last book on the list. (I, for one, never expected to use the phrases “National Book Award finalist” and “Zombie Baseball Beatdown” in the same sentence, but sometimes life throws you a curve, and it turns out to be a severed zombie head.)

If you click on the above screen capture of the book club website and go to the blog entry entitled “Favorites (so far) for 2013-2014” there are two photos of the extraordinary kids in the club. Click the photo at the top to see the kids who will  probably vote for Clare Vanderpool’s Navigating Early. Click the photo at the bottom to see the kids who will probably vote for What We Found in the Sofa. (Or possibly Zombie Baseball Beatdown. Zombie is definitely a dark horse. Or maybe a flesh-eating cow.) The vote is going to be close; there’s almost the same number of kids in each group.

However it works out, gang, I’m really impressed with what you’ve read this year!

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    Henry Clark 

    Pictured here on the day he sold What We Found in the Sofa. His mood is cautiously optimistic.

    You should see him when he's happy.

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