What I’m Doing

I’ve done a bit more sleeping this weekend than I normally do, but that’s because I’ve been playing catch-up. From 8:30 Friday night until 8:30 Saturday morning, I was locked in the library with 18 teenagers and my fellow able, willing and slightly crazy chaperons at the library’s annual teen lock-in. There were games, a graduation ceremony and lots of junk food but very little sleep. It’s an exhausting event but a fun one as well. As a young adult author it’s nice to spend some time hanging around with teenagers and it’s refreshing to see that the library has such an active program for teenagers. Teenagers of today, if you will permit me a moment of geezerness, you don’t know how lucky you are. Not only do you have...

The theme for tonight’s storytime is creatures that live in or spend a lot of time in the water. It’s in keeping with the Make A Splash at Your Library Summer Reading theme and by expanding it to other water-loving creatures I can include things like whales, penguins and, as I pointed out on Facebook earlier today, my mother, who are not technically fish. Well, so the book about my Mom has not yet been written, but I did include some other water types in my selections. I’m bringing along a nice stack of stories and depending on the patience of my attendees I’ll be reading some fish tales: The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen and Shark in the Dark by Peter Bentley. Then there’s a story about a snail and a whale called appropriately...

It’s been raining so much the past few days, that I just might be able to paddle my way to the library for storytime this  evening. That would be appropriate since tonight’s theme is boats, and that reminded me of this picture taken a few years ago: This was staged (we don’t regularly go on boat rides down the library stairs!) and taken for a bulletin board we put up when the summer reading theme was Get a Clue at Your Library. The bulletin board’s theme was library lawbreakers, and in case you were wondering the law being broken here is that universal library law, No Boating in the Library! Of course, it works just as well for this year’s summer reading theme, Make a Splash at Your Library, well except for the fact that...

It’s been a busy week. Here are a few of the things I’ve been doing: Read What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell, and you should too. This YA book won the National Book Award. Even though,historical fiction is not my favorite genre, I decided to give this one a try, and am glad I did. It’s set in post-World War II America, and does an excellent job of capturing the mood of that time in a coming of age tale. Judy Blundell has been writing some different series books under other names for years, but this is the first book she published under her own name using her own original idea. Something tells me that this will be the first of many Judy Blundell books. Laughed out loud while reading The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk. I had...

Here’s a quick update of what I have been doing this weekend in the order of occurrence. 1. Yelled at a DVD I watched the movie Adam Friday night. It was a sort of Asperger love story. In general it was a good movie. My yelling didn’t come until the very end. Rose Byrne plays Beth the love interest of Aspergian title character played by Hugh Dancy. Beth is a teacher who dreams of being a published children’s book author. So far so good. At one point she tells Adam about her hope of someday winning a Newbery award. I was impressed that the moviemakers at least had some familiarity with children’s publishing. That all fell apart at the end when we finally got to see the book that Beth had been working on in published form. The problem? It...