All of us trotting around in the polar regions, including you penguins down in Antarctica, should be happy with Monday’s announcement that Geraldine McCaughrean’s WHITE DARKNESS had won the Printz Award for best book for young adults in 2007. I’m among the legions who hadn’t read or even heard of WHITE DARKNESS, but I plunged […]
I spent enough time in the business world to understand the benefits of specializing, but I’ve had a hard time subscribing to that message for my writing life. After publishing a couple of young adult novels, I switched to picture books. Novels are fun, but I loved the succinct, lyrical form of the read-aloud. A
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Ohboy and goodygumdrops. It’s my favorite time of year. You might think people like me don’t exist, but I actually like both holiday fruitcake and New Year’s Resolutions. I won’t burden you with sharing either of these pleasures, other than to say that 2007 has been almost all fabulous and I’m eager for what 2008
Rule number one for aspiring authors: write for your audience. Along comes the blog phenomenon. Who’s your audience? Big shrug. Don’t know. Don’t care. I’ve got something to say. Now people are going mobile with blogging. They’ve got lots to say, and they can’t wait till they’re home to say it. I have lots to
I’ve mentioned the un-Alaskan before. We have our standards here, and one of them is snow on the ground before Halloween. We had a little, but it melted. Fall extended itself, and it has been lovely. No leaves on the trees, but nice warm 30-ish weather for hiking and biking and such. Did about 7
Birds are coming to my feeder by the droves. I may have jumped the gun on putting it up. I’m still getting used to life in Anchorage, and one of the changes is that you’re not supposed to feed the birds until after the bears go into hibernation. That’s if the bears go into hibernation.
It was a great trip – my “whirlwind tour of the Midwest.” There were great stops along the way, and lots of visits with family and friends. Of blog-worthy note, I saw Into the Wild in Tacoma. It’s a beautiful film. I don’t know about the rest of the viewers, but the four of us
It would be un-Alaskan not to weigh in on Sean Penn’s well-hyped film Into the Wild based on Jon Krakauer’s exploration of what went right and wrong with the soul-searching of Christopher McCandless back in 1992. I’ll start with a disclaimer – ten years have passed since I read the book, and except for a
Amazing writers live in Alaska. That is not hyperbole. Alaska is a long way from the nation’s pub hub, but maybe that’s a plus. We know what’s bigger than us, what’s meaner than us, and most of all, what really matters.We’ve got our flaws, like everyone else. We’re embarrassed that our state’s entire congressional delegation
