Virtual book stuff from a not-very-virtuous author

Hi, everyone,

A Difficult Boy is being officially released this week (even though there have been 4 cartons sitting in my living room since March 26)! To celebrate, the Class of 2k8 is having a virtual launch party on the class blog , where I'm the featured blogger all week. Not sure exactly what a virtual launch party is? Drop by and find out. No RSVP required, no driving, no hassles, and you don't even have to change out of your pajamas or do your hair. Unfortunately, though, you'll have to drink a glass of virtuAL champagne, which is altogether too virtuOUS!

I’m also going to be doing guest blogging or online interviews on the following dates and sites:

Wednesday, April 16 - Enchanting YA Reviews

April 18 and 22 – Nineteenteen

April 25 - Author Jessica Burkhart’s blog

Hope to see you there!

MPB

Is that cool or what?

My book is real and in my hands!! Is that cool or what? A little more than a week ago, boxes of books materialized on my front porch--real ones, with my name on the cover! 3 weeks ahead of schedule! And they're in bookstores even as I write this. (Well, I hope they're in bookstores--I still haven't seen any personally. On Friday the only bookstore I found that carried it had sold out--a good sign. So if anyone out there has an actual sighting of A Difficult Boy on an actual bookstore shelf, please let me know!) I've been running around so frantically trying to set up and publicize signings that I haven't even had time to blog about it until now. And next week, I actually get my first radio gig!

On Monday, April 7, 1:00 pm (Eastern Standard Time), Dennis Picard, Director of Storrowton Village, and I will be guests on "Shooting from the Hip," Vincent Dowling's radio show on Valley Free Radio, 103.3 FM, Northampton, Mass. Those of you not in the Northampton area can listen at the station's website, which has a live mp3 stream. (The show will be repeated next Monday at 1 pm, so you even get a second chance.) I haven't met Vincent Dowling yet, but from his c.v. and what Dennis tells me, he's a pretty formidable talent. An actor and director and writer, he is former Artistic Director of The Abbey Theatre, Ireland's National Theatre. If that's not impressive enough to have me quaking in my boots, I don't know what is--especially since one of my main characters is Irish. Will my character be credible to a native Irishman? Will Mr. Dowling say "How dare you have the audacity to write about Irish characters, you...you...you, French-Canadian!!"

Actually, Dennis reassures me that Mr. Dowling is quite nice and that this should be a fun time. But I'm very, VERY glad and grateful that Dennis will be there to run interference, should I get a case of the "um-um-um-ummmms." One of my former co-workers from Old Sturbridge Village, Dennis is a fabulous resource on just about anything historical--he did me the great favor of reading my manuscript when it was still in the 700-page very rough draft stage and catching me if I screwed up my details. (I only hope I didn't add new errors in the final edits.) I swear this man has a photographic memory! He was recently featured on Nova's "Absolute Zero" episode, which you can see online. Look for "Chapter 3: The Ice Trade" and click on the link to the video (he's near the end of the clip). Dennis is the fellow being interviewed about the 19th-century ice trade. At that time, New England ponds were supplying ice to customers around the world. Imagine--ice from Massachusetts being used in India or China or the Caribbean. Is that cool or what?

March 2k8 Launches

Welcome to the book world the Class of 2k8's March launches, Jody Feldman's The Gollywhopper Games and Elizabeth C. Bunce's A Curse Dark as Gold, two very different stories about young people trying to salvage a family legacy.

In The Gollywhopper Games, young Gil Goodson hopes to redeem his family's good name after his dad was falsely accused of embezzling from the Golly Toy Company. If Gil wins the Gollywhopper Games, he'll show the world that Goodsons aren't cheaters, and will win enough money to help his family make a new start far away from the cloud of scandal hanging over them. Gil's an engaging young hero with a quick wit, a friendly personality, and a tenacious determination to make good. Readers can solve the Gollywhopper Game puzzles along with Gil--they're challenging enough to be fun, but not so difficult that you feel like putting your eye out with your pencil. Great for puzzle-lovers, punsters, and fans of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory--and for you adult readers, the writing and characterization are MILES ahead of that recent best-selling puzzle book The DaVinci Code!

A Curse Dark as Gold is a fascinating re-telling of the Rumplestiltskin fairy tale. Young Charlotte Miller struggles to keep her family's woolen mill running after the death of her father. Charlotte is a practical young woman. She doesn’t believe in curses or magic until a series of weird and inexplicable disasters force her to rely on a mysterious little man who can spin straw into gold. All her instincts tell her to turn him away, but Charlotte feels responsible for the townspeople who depend on the mill for their livelihood. It's not just her own income at stake; Charlotte won't relegate her neighbors and friends to poverty. Meanwhile, she has to contend with an uncle who seems bound and determined to bankrupt her. Everything comes to a head when Charlotte realizes that to save her mill, her friends, her family, and her infant son, she must figure out how to right an ancient wrong. When the story's villain’s secrets are finally revealed, their heartbreaking stories make them as sympathetic as the main characters. A great read, but keep a box of kleenex handy!

Find out more at the Class of 2k8 web site, or on our Class of 2k8 blog, where Elizabeth will be guest-blogging all week.

March 1839 - A Good Month or Just OK?

(My novel, A Difficult Boy, takes place in 1839, so every now and then I like to take a look at what was happening back then. Thought I might share some of my findings.)

Think people in the 1830s didn't LOL or ROTFLOL? Well, okay, they may have done it, but as far as we know, they didn't abbreviate it that way. But netlingo and textspeak are just new twists on an old practice of making shortcuts for popular expressions. In 1839, you might not LOL, but you might call someone TBFTB (Too Big For Their Britches) or SP (Small Potatoes)--or, if you liked them, they'd be OK. Yup, OK. Now there are more theories on where OK came from than there are emoticons ;) {:-O (You can find a list of most of those theories here.) But the OK expert was Dr. Allen Walker Read of Columbia University. In the 1960s, he was determined to track OK to its POB and DOB (Place of Birth and Date of Birth). According to Read, OK first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post: "He of the Journal...would have the 'contribution box,' et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward." OK was short for "oll korrect"--a deliberately botched spelling of "all correct." Weird? No weirder than "lite" ice cream or Krispy Kreme Donuts. OK got a big boost in 1840 when New York supporters of presidential candidate Martin Van Buren nicknamed him "Old Kinderhook" in honor of his home town and formed an OK Club to back him in the election. Unlike TBFTB, OK survives today.

Want to find out more?
Listen to this NPR story on the origins of OK.
Or read this article about OK from wordorigins.org, where you can learn about the origins of other common words and phrases.
Wordorigins.org is the Web page of David Wilton, author of Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends (Oxford University Press, 2004)--a book you might want to check out if you're interested in an entertaining look at where common words and phrases come from.

TTFN!

February is Library Lovers Month!

Becky's Book Reviews is celebrating Library Lovers Month by issuing a challenge. She says:

"February is Library Lovers Month, so to celebrate I thought I'd try to start a new meme going around about the library. I know one went around last year. I answered it. But I'll try to think of new questions. I'd really appreciate it if you'd play along :)"

So, here are my answers to Becky's questions:

How do you plan on celebrating Library Lovers month? Well, I was going to say by returning my books on time for a change, but it's already a week to late for that! Then again, I guess my fines help support the cause, so maybe being overdue isn't such a bad thing after all! Anyway, back to the question--I'll celebrate by a) answering this meme, and b) passing along a link to a list of ways to Love Your Library and c) trying to do a lot more of the things on that list than I already do!

How often do you accidentally spell library as 'libary' when you're in a hurry? Probably more than I'd like to admit--but at least I never SAY it 'libary'!

What is the most amount of books you've ever had checked out at one time? I have no idea, but best guess would be about 20-30

What is the longest you've ever gone without visiting the library? Maybe a month...but that's because I didn't finish those 20 or 30 books I already had checked out!

What is the biggest fine you've ever had? Probably $15 (remember those 20-30 books--almost all overdue!). Bad me! Then again, as I said earlier, consider it a donation to the cause. Fortunately, I hit the jackpot when I got a job working as an archivist at a library/museums association, which means I have a "Get out of jail free" card when it comes to overdue fines--they really shouldn't enable my bad habits like that...

When you go to the library, do you plan ahead and make a list? Or do you browse? Yes and yes. Interlibrary loan is my best friend! I almost always shop on the on-line catalog first to pick out what I want or order something from another library. But of course, when I go to get my books, I have to check out the new arrivals, then wander upstairs to look for this and that, then by the time I'm done...you guessed it! 20 or 30 books again (well, more like 8 or 10, since I can't carry 20 or 30 home (my library is a short walk from my house)!

Have you ever been shushed or hushed by a librarian? When I was a kid. But librarians don't shush these days--at least not in the libraries I use.

What is the worst (against-the-rules) thing you've ever done in the library? You mean besides all those overdue books? When I was in college, I'd eat my lunch in the library--very bad me!

What's the worst thing you've ever done to a library book? Hmmmm...well, since in my family injuring a library book was something akin to a mortal sin, I grew up regarding them as sacred objects--that's Library Book with capital letters, kind of like the Ark of the Covenant--with pretty much the same penalty for damaging them as when the unholy Nazis opened the Ark in the Indiana Jones movie--damage a Library Book and the flesh would fall off your bones and you would be immediately whisked away to eternal damnation--or the equivalent: banishment from every library in the land for all eternity. Now that really WOULD be hell!

Have you ever had a "favorite" librarian? When I was a kid, Charlotte (I don't think I ever knew her last name) at our neighborhood library was a real sweetie--always coming up with new books to recommend, and always remembering what we liked. And in junior high, I got to help Mrs. Monchamp in the school library--funny I forgot that until you asked this question. She had a good sense of humor--she had to, to put up with us! My current favorite librarian, though, has to be my boss Maggie, who is the head of the Genealogy Library and Local History Archives at the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum--she's great at dealing with the difficult patrons, is the most supportive and most fun boss I've ever had, AND she brings me chocolate on a regular basis.

If you could change one thing about your library it would be... Hmmmm...since my town library just got a major facelift, with great new reading spaces and tons more shelf space, I think just about everything I would have changed has been done.

What's your Mushroom Factor?

Those of you who’ve ever taken up a home renovation project are probably familiar with the “mushroom factor” – you decide to fix that leaky faucet, then you discover that the leak has been going on so long that the counter has rotted out beneath it and the floor is getting kind of mushy. So you start tearing that out and you see that the genius who put the sink in decided that it was okay to cut a huge hole in a support beam to run the pipe through and now oops—the beam’s starting to crack. So you open up a little more and—oh, my God!—the mice have gotten in and are chewing your electrical wires and your house is a bonfire just waiting to happen….

Well, I’ve realized that the same thing seems to be happening with my research on the historical novel I’m working on. The last one wasn’t too mushroomy, because it developed around information I’d already gathered during the course of working at Old Sturbridge Village. But for this one, I had to send my characters on a road trip, so now I’ve got to find out about: transportation, inns and taverns, every person/business they encounter along the way (with, of course, period-appropriate names, occupations, tools, clothes, etc., etc.). Plus I have to pick out a route for them and find out about the towns along the route. Then one of my characters decided to work on the railroad, another stubbornly insists on taking up with a prostitute (I told him this was a YA book, and he said “Well, that would be the ‘adult’ part, wouldn’t it?"), a third is getting embroiled in a child custody dispute, and somehow a circus with a conjuror, jugglers, singers, and six dancing ponies have been thrown into the mix. Whew! I can see myself researching this until doomsday and never getting all the details I’ll need to make it right!

So my question for you writers out there is—does your writing have a “mushroom factor,” too? What is it and how do you handle it?

Class of 2k8 Scavenger Hunt!

Answer questions! Win books! Check out the Class of 2k8 scavenger hunt. It's a mid-term you'll want to take!

It's easy. Each quarter The Class of 2k8 will host a contest. This quarter we've gone with a virtual scavenger hunt. Simply find the answers to ten questions about Class of 2k8 books posted on the Class's contest page. Email your correct answers to contests@classof2k8.com. Once we've checked your answers we'll notify you that you've been entered into a drawing to win books from our fabulous authors! So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and get started!