oversaturated with content

Our brains are great.  They’re complex, elastic, they do so many things simultaneously that breaking down something as simple as the brain activity involved in the mechanics of a sneeze into its component parts would probably fry Deep Blue in a nanosecond.
But but mine has had enough.
There’s so much to read, so many websites and [...]

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the battle of the summer reading list

There’s about a month left in a school, which means the summer reading lists are coming home.
Joy.
What came home in my going-into-sixth-grade daughter’s weekly notices was a 12 page booklet of suggested titles – over 100 in all – broken down by genre and category, each titles annotated as either “challenging,” “more challenging,” and “most [...]

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re: the new Newsweek redesign

Uh, it sucks.
They seriously cannot have focus-grouped this thing on people who read magazines regularly.  The font, the layout, the tracking – everything about the new redesign makes every page and every article look EXACTLY like those “Special Advertising Sections” that are really paid ad supplements meant to look like the magazine, but never do.  [...]

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got you covered

Over at Oz and Ends J.L. Bell has a pretty funny (to me) story about some wrong-headed research, and it concerns a book whose cover is all wrong.
It’s the cover that has me thinking.  Why do books, especially in YA, feature photo representations of the main character?  Why are we being shown a person selected [...]

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who are dangerous?

Part of growing up and growing old is having to shed some of the dreams and desires that are just flat out unattainable.  There just comes a point where you realize that going to art school was not the proper choice for becoming the first astronaut on Mars, or when the people you looked up [...]

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front line market research

Last night I went to a school-wide book group with my older daughter.  Twice a year the school holds these groups for the upper graders, reading grade-level books on a particular theme and then having kids and parents come in, break into small groups, and discuss the book.  I think it’s a great idea and [...]

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off the map

This is neither about the legality of former slaves or about the senior President Bush.  This is about deadlines, and re-envisioning the middle grade book, and the panic of feeling like I cannot write.
Third semester in a row now on this middle grade novel and fourth entirely different approach.  The more I revisit this story, [...]

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