Author: Kurtis

My pal Laurel Snyder linked me to a shaggy dog story about a guy giving a school chaplain a hard time. I’m reluctant to link to it because some potential readers might take offense, if not at the story, at the accompanying illustration. OK, you’ve been warned. Here it is. The opinions and gestures at that linked page do not necessarily reflect those of the weblog author and linker, etc.

I’m only bringing it up because I enjoyed one line in particular, to wit:

“She left the [theater] in tears and the audience in silence.”

This is a perfect example of zeugma, a literary trick where one word serves two clauses. It can be simple, like saying “At the bookstore I went straight to the magazines, she to the new releases,” but it becomes a lot more fun when you mix two meanings of the same word, as above. These are easy to come by in sports headlines, such as the apocryphal:

“Peterson breaks rushing record, collar bone.”

Or the too easy:

“Belle hits three homers, fan.”

The zeugma was a favorite of E.B. White, who wrote of his dog:

“When I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes.”

I like a few examples from the Wikipedia page, which also informs me that this use of zeugma is called “syllepsis.”

“[H]‘e hastened to put out the cat, [t]he wine, his cigar and the lamps.” – Michael Flanders

“Are you getting fit or having one?” – M*A*S*H (I believe this was Hawkeye to Winchester, who is exercising)

You can get really coy when you use homonyms with different pronunciations:

“I resent the check, but also the implications that I lied about the first.”

Or play with grammatical constructs:

“I tend to my garden in the morning, and nap in the afternoon.”

A good sylleptic zeugma is hard to find! Please post your own, either found or made up on the spot.

W.C. Fields once said, “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore, always carry a snake.” Here is more sensible advice from the remarkable Thea Litschka-Koen, who lives in Swaziland and saves both mambas from people and people from mambas (find out more about her here and here). The tips are taken from an article Litschka-Koen wrote for BBC Knowledge magazine and are used with permission. The article is now filed under Resources for Mamba Point.

The round-robin interview with baseball authors continues at The Happy Nappy Bookseller’s blog.

In my efforts to keep the public aware of the stupidity of doing as my hero does in Mamba Point, here is a story about the high cost of keeping poisonous snakes as pets, even when nobody gets bit. 

I don’t like just offering up two links, since these things are supposed to happen in threes. Oh, I know. Here’s something kinda awesome — Mudville is nominated for a Beehive award, given by the Children’s Literature Association of Utah. I got a very nice email from somebody about it yesterday. My Minnesota pal Laura Purdie Salas is also nominated (but in a different category, so go Laura!), as is Alan Gratz…. it seems like I’ve been running into that guy a lot lately.

“The Happy Nappy Bookseller” blog invited me and eight other authors of youth baseball novels to a few innings of exhibition ball… which is to say, we all answer a series of questions about writing and baseball, inspired by our books. Every few days she’ll post a new question and our answers.

It’s an all-star line up with some terrific authors. I’m in the three-hole, right behind lead-off hitter Gene Fehler and future hall-of-famer Linda Sue Park. Slugger Alan Gratz is batting clean up.

Here’s the introductory post… I’ll try to post links as the entries go up, but why not just subscribe to Doret’s great book blog to follow the fun in real-time?

Edit: Ooh, and here’s the first entry in the series.

It’s interesting, having written about Africa, to find this razor-sharp essay, “How to Write About Africa,” cataloguing basically all of the cliches about Africa in Western literature.  I think it’s interesting, and should be required reading for anyone who writes about Africa, particularly if they are not African.

http://www.granta.com/Magazine/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1

Here is a great reading of fragments of the essay (the reader intentionally or accidentally mistates the title)

If you click through to YouTube, there are also videos of the author talking about the essay under “related videos.”

Having written about Africa, of course I use it to self-evaluate, and am glad I fare well by it, though I don’t get a perfect score. Mamba Point does feature a loyal servant, for example, and he is afraid of snakes. There is magic in my book, too, but no more magic than I’ve placed in Minnesota and New England. Otherwise I don’t think I commit any of the grievances the author lists. But that’s my opinion, and it’s not objective. Ultimately readers and reviewers will decide that for me. 

To be fair, my second novel isn’t really “about Africa” anyway. It is set in Africa, but it’s about an American kid who moves to Liberia. Some of the people he meets are American, some are African, and one is a snake.

Lately I’ve been taken up with the Jack Aubrey novels by Patrick O’Brian, and it occurs to me that these are sterling examples of what middle grade novels ought to be. I’m not putting the books down by any means, just seeing that what O’Brian does are particularly good habits and strategies for middle grade authors. Here’s a short list of what I mean.

1. Jack Aubrey is, quite simply, an arse. He’s arrogant, closed-minded on a number of topics, ambitious, brash, and impolitic. We like him anyway because he is bold and extremely capable. He knows everything about being master and commander of his own ship, and he’s willing to take charge. I find that middle grade heros are often defined by their weaknesses — the kid who strikes out every time, the victim of the schoolyard bully, etc. Let your heroes be defined by their strengths and desires, not by their ineffectualness. They don’t have to be perfect by a long shot, but if they like themselves and care deeply about something, we will follow them anywhere. For a middle grade example, see “Wimpy Kid” Greg Heffley. He is a lazy, self-centered and judgmental kid, and doesn’t even have any outstanding talents, but millions of readers still happily follow his exploits because he likes himself and is enterprising.

2. Many writers intuitively drop a best buddy into a book without quite realizing their potential for character development, exposition, and plot agency. Stephen Maturin is all three. We learn so much about Jack from their interactions; and so much about sails and munitions through Stephen (literally and figuratively) learning the ropes, since he’s a physician and not a sailor; and of course Stephen figures into the plots as he saves Jack (from others and himself), overhears mutinous plots, and so forth. Moreover, Maturin is a principled and thoughtful character who sees Jack Aubrey for who he is, and is still completely committed to him — this builds empathy for Aubrey despite his flaws.

3. O’Brian’s books are exhaustively researched, and so should any novel, even if it’s for children. If the main character is deeply interested in something, he or she should know a lot about it, and hence so should the author. Whether you’ve decided the hero is madly interested in baseball, or dinosaurs, or fashion design, you need to make yourself equally fascinated by the topic and steep yourself in it for a while. Since you will be steeped in it, it’s best to pick something that genuinely does interest you, but to be fair, I didn’t know a thing about mambas before writing Mamba Point, and although I love animals snakes were far from my favorites. I did set out to learn everything I could, though, and found out those fanged monsters are actually amazingly interesting. They say “write what you know,” which I disagree with. But “know what you write.” You can learn it as you go.

4. Don’t force yourself to be funny. I think it’s conventional wisdom that middle graders love humor, so practically all middle grade novels are at least occasionally funny. Some are over the top zany, but I’m not a big fan of the silly names and potty talk path to the reader’s funnybone — it smacks of desperation. Patrick O’Brian can be quite humorous, but only when it happens naturally and comes from the characters’ personalities: Aubrey’s frank “sailor talk” at a high-class party, or the sudden squeamishness of hardened naval warriors when Stephen begins to describe a birth. In the middle grade set, I think Rick Riordian has a flare for this, injecting humor when it emerges naturally in the story without pulling out the cream pies and joy buzzers. It’s enough humor for kids, and usually a joke is funnier if it’s unexpected, instead of every page being a laugh riot.

5. Last and most importantly, when the story seems to be foundering, put in another battle scene.

I’ve got my green shirt on and The Pogues on the stereo in celebration of my Irish heritage. Here’s a poem by the emerald isle’s finest poet, William Butler Yeats, and a kid-friendly one to boot.

The Cat and the Moon

The cat went here and there

I’ve added a slide show to the snakes gallery. Here’s a snake, er, sneak preview. If you want your own snake art to appear in this lovely gallery, all you have to do is click on over to the “contribute” info and then, you know, draw a snake.

Like Chuck said, Mudville is now in paperback. It officially went on sale today! So if you still haven’t read it, or you’ve been meaning to pick up an extra copy for a pal, now’s your chance to pop over to an independent bookstore and pick up a copy. You’ll probably also find it at Barnes & Noble or Borders. And of course you can get it from Amazon.com.

In order to serve my blog readers better, I’ve revised the categories; adding some which were sorely needed to direct people to the best content (like Bonus Stories and How to Draw Stuff), renaming some (Guys Read became the less proprietary Books and Boys) and folding some together. It’s hardly worth mentioning except that there might be some folks with links to category pages that don’t work any more. I’ll be sweeping through all 377 posts (!) and making sure they are properly categorized. In the meantime, if you have a nomination for “all time favorite posts,” let me know. I want to direct newcomers to this site to the best KurtisScaletta.com has to offer, and have listed a few of the entries that got a good response.

Last summer I got excited about the idea of showcasing snake drawings to go along with Mamba Point, which is all about a boy who draws snakes, so I set up a gallery and invited people to send in their snake drawings. In fact, I still am excited about it, but even with the temptation of prizes I haven’t gotten many drawings that I didn’t bully my friends and family into drawing. So I’ve decided to bring more attention to the gallery by bringing those snakes home. While before they were off in their own corner of KurtisScaletta.com (they made the other blog posts nervous), they are now right here in the main HQ. You can find them under “Mamba Point Extras” on the right sidebar, under “Extras” at the top, or uh, click here. You can still also go to http://kurtisscaletta.com/snakes, but you’ll get sent to the new gallery.

I promised prizes, and they still stand, but I’m moving the deadline way back to October 1, so people who read the book and are overcome with the desire to sketch a serpent can participate. I’ll do two a month (or so) and pace it out. One prize per month will be random, for all the folks who’ve participated so far, and one prize per month will be for a really outstanding snake drawing that I’ve received. All previous entrants will also be eligible for that, too. The prizes will be books, toy snakes, Liberian flags, and other things I might find and throw in.

So: please send me a snake drawing if you haven’t yet.

I will also regularly be featuring a new or previous snake to remind people of the gallery. Here’s one my cat Pippi. (I think my wife helped.)

Somebody recently found my blog by googling “mudville hard words,” which I guess was done to fill in a blank on a book report. I’m not a big fan of book reports, but it set me to thinking about how for me some words are inexorably linked with the books where I learned them. To me, radiant means shining like a milk-washed pig and curious is how you feel when you’ve just seen a waist-coated time-conscious rabbit.

One I remember particularly well is tedious, which is how Mr. O’Brien describes the chore of chewing through a rope for a field mouse in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I rarely do some tiresome task without thinking about that little mouse gnawing at the rope. For me that is the very definition of the word. I am even encouraged by remembering her diligence.

And so might you be, as you page through Mudville in search of hard words. Let me know if you find any.

Apparently there’s some TV show about marital spats mediated by celebrities. I didn’t catch it, but I happened upon an Internet discussion about the show. One of the couples were arguing about the husband’s pet tortoises.

“He keeps pet tortoises like dogs!” one person exclaimed.

“What kind of person in his right mind keeps a tortoise like a dog?” another asked rhetorically.

Apparently, the whole discussion was so urgent it was picked up by Oprah right where Alex Baldwin and Jerry Seinfeld left off. Should folks have tortoises like dogs? Oprah asked. To her credit, I’m told she took the side of the tortoises.

moar funny pictures

Still, I’m bemused by the repetition of “like a dog,” as if that’s the only frame of reference for a pet. I keep cats like dogs who never go outside. I have kept hamsters like little cage-dwelling dogs and fish like little brightly-colored aquatic dogs. I have friends who keep horses like big, rideable dogs in a stable. I have friends who keep lizards and turtles like little tiny reptilian dogs. I’ve read about people with pet owls, monkeys, elephants and pigs. It’s actually a favorite topic of mine — there are all kinds of incredible animals in the world who can have great relationships with humans. This is a major theme of my second novel, though it’s also a major theme that people shouldn’t keep wild, dangerous animals as pets.

Still, I was struck by the silliness of the conversation. It’s not the biggest problem in the world or anything, but I’d like people to be a bit more broadminded about what constitutes a “pet”, rather than assume anyone with an exotic pet is out of his or her mind.  To me there’s no discussion about whether a tortoise should be kept “like a dog,” although there may be a very sensible one about whether and how a tortoise should kept as a pet “like a tortoise.”

I’ve been feeling kind of interviewy lately, and have been on both sides of the microphone. Yesterday I took the A side with Carl doing the Q over at BoyLit.com, a new blog to talk about boys and reading. Boys don’t read as much as girls, as you probably know, and the book blogosphere is decidedly female. So BoyLit.com is a welcome new face in the kids book blogosphere. Drop by and see the interview and say Hi to Carl.

If you’ve paid any attention to my blog interviews, you’ve noticed they’ve all been with dudes. That’s because I’m inclined to talk about “boy books,” here, and also because most of the women I’ve invited have complained about the beer bottles and pizza boxes everwhere and the constant sports on the big TVs. However, I’m happy to welcome my first female guest, and I even picked up a little and turned off the TV in favor of a little Ani DiFranco on the stereo. Swati is a debut novelist with Knopf, and if you think that’s not enough nepotism, especially following the Josh Berk interview, you don’t know the half of it. Swati is also a Minneapolitan and Golden Gopher, so we share a publisher, a city and a campus.

Swati’s first book, Split, will be hitting bookstores on March 9. When you’re dropping by to pick up several paperback copies of Mudville, be sure to ask for Split.  I read it early and thought it was excellent. Angela also raved about it.

The jacket copy to Split explains that Jace Witherspoon arrives at his brother’s doorstep with bruises, a few dollars and change, and a secret. The story is about the bruises, but it’s also about the secret.

The bruises are courtesy of Jace’s dad, who beats up everyone in the family. (The back of the book promises that readers won’t be able to put the book down, but I actually had to put it down after some of the more harrowing scenes as Jace recalls some of his dad’s greatest hits, so to speak.)

Show Spoiler

Avasthi evokes S.E. Hinton more than once in describing brotherly bonds in rough times, and the depiction of survivors of abuse are compelling if tragic reading.

K: Swati, what do you think about the scented candles? Too much?

S: Awww, you did all this for me?  To add to the ambience, I brought a pizza and a 6-pack.

K: Oh, cool. It’s Surly, too. Thanks for supporting local brewers and, um, bringing beer. The last guy only brought soda pop. Now, be honest. Which do you like better, Minneapolis or Albuquerque (I won’t even put Minneapolis against Chicago because that wouldn’t be fair… to Chicago.)

S: You’re not a fan of the easy questions, are you?  No way I can chose.  I miss Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta, Mexican Food, the humbling mountains and, of course, the weather was a tad better out there.  But I love Minneapolis’ vibrant (if nepotistic) literary/aritistic community, lakes, school system, and political theater.  I mean, between Jesse Ventura and Michelle Bachman, there’s always some thing to shake your head and laugh about.

K: And even when the pols let us down, the sports teams are there to step up and give us a little tragicomedy… (makes a gutteral noise that sounds like something between “Favre” and “Aargh!”, tears up and reaches for kleenex, fails, and settles for some used and rather greasy pizza shop napkins. Gradually pulls self together.)

So besides the city, we also both spend our days at the U. You’re in the creative writing program, and I want to know how that experience went, both writing YA in a writing program that’s not geared to children’s lit, and dropping a 2-book deal with Knopf on them.

S: Good writing is good writing, whether it is for adults or for children.  Having professors like Julie Schumacher, who writes for both adults and children, made the experience really rewarding and I learned a tremendous amount there.  That said, I admit that there were times when I felt obliged to educate my colleagues in YA and Children’s Lit, and there are a few people at the U who see writing for kids as lesser.

K: Of course there’s some very knowledgeable people on campus who take children’s literature seriously. Jack Zipes over in languages, Karen Hoyle who curates the Kerlan collection, and the reading education faculty in the college of ed. I just wasn’t sure how it was treated over in English. I kind of wanted you to say that they’d all turned up their noses at it, then you walked in with your book deal and blew their minds. Even if it was nothing like that, I like imagining it was.

S: The book deal has been fabulous!  The faculty has been and is still very supportive as I get up to speed on the publishing industry.   I love having the resources to email someone or a few people when something inscrutable comes up.  For instance, I emailed Charlie Baxter on the day of the auction.  He is so clear-sighted which always makes his advice useful.  I actually didn’t get to celebrate with my colleagues because about 3 days after I announced the book deal, I was hit by a car when I was crossing the street.  I was laid-up for nearly 3 months and by then, a lot of the initial response had died down.

K: Yeah, I remember that. It’s like what we all think is going to happen. This is too good to be true; I’ll probably get hit by a bus. I’m glad it was only a car and you mended OK.

OK, let’s talk about Split. First, let me ask you what a lot of people are going to ask, which is how you came to write a book from a boy’s perspective. Many writers find that difficult to pull off, but I thought you did quite well making Jace a believable boy and captured his voice really well, so I’m also wondering how you got into his head. Do you have brothers, or other guys in your life you thought about when creating the characters? Did you use other books to help find that voice?

S: Thanks, Kurtis.  It’s funny you say that because I didn’t have brothers.  Two older sisters, in fact. During my younger years when we were all stilll talking about boys and cooties, I had no access to the boy voice really.  (Unless you count my dad).  And I went to a school that had been a girl’s school at one time and so my graduating class was 2/3 girls.  So my best access to a boy’s voice came through my boyfriends and my slew of male friends in college. It helps now to have a son who is getting there, and a husband, who has been there. Still, I find it almost easier to write from a boy’s perspective — something that is substantially different from my own

The harder part was actually the scenes between Christian and Jace (and there are a lot of those) because I have never seen a conversation amongst men without a woman present.  I so wanted to hide a tape recorder in a room and listen.  But I never did.  Instead, I had a few of guys read it before I sent it out.  They caught a couple of slips.

K. The other question you probably get asked is about the theme of abuse that runs through the book. I feel like I’ve seen this before from the victim’s perspective, but you took a bolder move in being somewhat sympathetic to an abusive person, and I think that sets it apart. What were your goals for taking that approach?

S: That’s a great question.  Show Spoiler

K. There’s a lot of pain and darkness in Split. How much did it affect your mood when you were writing it? Can you just turn that on and off, or do you kind of live inside the book for a while?

S:  I was able to shut out the darkness pretty easily while pondering it.  I think it came from the professional distance one learns when working with the DV population and from the fact that I have two kids so I can’t wallow in anything.  When I was writing it, on the other hand, the darkness was pretty hard to handle sometimes.  More than once, I ended up in tears.  There’s a line in Split where Jace narrates that he “showed up wrecked and raw.”  I often felt that way at the end of my writing time.

K: I think you’ve got another book in the works that’s way different from SPLIT. Are you ready to tell people about it?

S: Yep.  The working title is Bidden.  Corey, Holly, and Savitri are looking forward to their upcoming summer of free running and comic book reading when a shooting changes everything.  Corey is dead; Savitri, who is a peace activist, is seeking revenge and Holly is spiraling out of control. Like Split, it is about what happens in the wake of violence.  What makes it so different from Split, as you suggest, is that part of it is written as a graphic novel.  So, I’ve been learning a lot about a whole new form.

K: Last question, which I always ask — what’s the pet situation in the Avasthi household? Is there a big scary dog that barks her head off when you come in the door, then turns out to be a total sweetheart who just wants to put her head in your lap and have her head scritched?

S: You should drop by and see how much has changed!  We’ve added a new dog, a bigger dog!  I wouldn’t advise walking into my house uninvited, but once the dogs see it’s okay for you to enter, the only concern is the fight for attention.   Jake will do his best to push Lily out of the way to steal all the attention, and you’ll end up with two dogs’ heads — one on each leg, looking up at you waiting for you to pet them.

K: Well, thanks so much for visiting. Do you mind hauling some of these pizza boxes out to the trash when you leave?

S:  Okay, thanks so much for the interview and I’ll also blow out the candles on my way out.

Somebody found my site by googling “how to draw a mean crow.” I hate to think that people who land here are disappointed, so here is how to draw a mean crow.

It’s really just simple compound shapes — half circles, half stars, ovals and triangles.

Then of course you color it in. Crows are raven black, just to keep people on their toes.

OK, that’s a crow. But this person specifically asked for a mean crow. You can convey meanness with some cross-looking eyebrows. For added effect, give the crow a copyeditor’s pencil and manual.

Voila! Mean crow. Happy drawing.

One year ago today, my first novel was born.

They grow up so fast, don’t they? Now it’s already talking and practically walking. Next thing you know it’ll be asking me for the car keys. Sniff.

Its birthday present arrived two days early: a box of itself in paperback. It was extremely excited, but isn’t sure what to do with so many copies. Bertie wants us to hurry up and decide so he can have the box. So remember that I am giving a copy to a randomly picked someone who leaves a comment (you can do it here) and promises to pass it on to a deserving kid.

I’ve blogged before about James Preller, author of Six Innings, which is as lovely a baseball book for kids as you’ll find, and the gritty story of middle school wolf pack politics, Bystander. I recently visited him in the New York tropics. The conversation is here. He goes above and beyond in his interviews. There’s photo illustrations and snacks and everything.

What wordless picture book was turned into a short film featuring David Bowie?