Fusenews: I So Cannot Wait Until I’m a Cranky Old Dame With a Big Wooden Pounding Stick

Yesterday I headlined with the 2009 Golden Kite Award winners.  This was in part because I got the notice early and was so excited that I wanted everyone to see the results.  Still, haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like to be a judge on a book committee like that?  Author Amy Timberlake (she of the lovely That Girl, Lucy Moon with its new The Kind of Friends We Used to Be-esque paperback cover, and The Dirty Cowboy) has presented her view of the process with statistics, pie charts, graphs, and humorous photos of ever-mounting picture book madness. A good idea. Judges should all consider doing this. It builds sympathy, if nothing else. Plus I liked the gender stats.

• You know what I’m sick of?  Me talking about New York all the time.  Blah blah, Manhattan.  Blah blah, big noisy city.  Blah blah rat kings.  Blah blah . . . oh, awesome.  Check out author Lisa Ann Sandell’s personalized map of the city on her website.  Those of you looking to pep up your own sites might enjoy it.  I like the inclusion of the Humanities and Social Science Library in particular.  So much for being sick of NYC, I guess.  Thanks to mom for the link.

• Oh.  And lest you accuse me of only caring about events that take place in New York (yay, BookExpo!) let us turn our sights now across this vast country to a little place I like to call Fresno.  Fresno, California, home of California State University which, in turn, is home to the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature.  And what will be happening at said center April 17-19, 2009?  Why nothing less than a Beatrix Potter conference, co-sponsored by the Beatrix Potter Society and the Fresno State Theatre Arts Department.  It sounds like fun.  If you go, let me know how it was. Registration information is available at http://www.arnenixoncenter.org or by email to mrianto@csufresno.edu. Thanks to Angelica Carpenter for the info.

• Looks like Random House just upped and bought Ten Speed Press and, by extension, their children’s imprint Tricycle Press.  I just received a lovely Betsy Franco poetry book from Tricycle Press (review to come), so I’m curious to see how this will affect their list in coming years.  Or if I even see it, for that matter.

• Roger tackles the fine art of giving up.  Consider picking up a book and then putting it back down before the final page has passed.  He says that he has never been the kind of person who physically must finish every book they start and he mentions books with slow starts that redeem themselves in time.  Book redemption.  The divine forgiveness of the dedicated reader.  It puts one in a holy state of mind, the ability to take a title’s sins and absolve them with your love of the (eventual) text.  Anyway, that’s off-topic.  Roger wants to know if you have rules in place when it comes to putting a title down.  Personally I have found that when I start a children’s book I tend to finish it.  The same cannot be said for adult lit.

• Leila reveals the possible actors playing Percy and Grover in the upcoming Lightning Thief film, as per  Little Willow.  Opinion pending . . .

• When I was a kid I wanted to know everything possible about albinism, the lack of pigmentation found in some animals and insects due to genetics.  The book Albino Animals would have been exactly up my alley, but sadly it wouldn’t be published for another decade or so.  So it was with interest and horror that I read this Scientific American piece on albinos in Tanzania and how they’re being killed and mutilated in droves.  I’m horrified obviously because of the violence, but also because my husband’s friend from film school, Osato, has been in Zimbabwe doing a documentary on albinism.  Osato is also an albino himself.  I was under the mistaken impression for half a second there that he’d been in Tanzania.  Glad to hear I was wrong.  Thanks to Shaken & Stirred for the link.

• Daily Image:

You know the real problem with young whippersnappers today?  Nobody takes the time to teach kids fonts anymore.  Why when I was a young lass bouncing on my Pogo Ball, listening to my hot pink and black Pocket Rocker, we had to know our Serif from our Sans Serif, and so HELP you if you got the two confused.

None of that is actually true (except for the Pogo Ball and Pocket Rocker references) but kids are getting taught precisely that.  Says the site Action Types, "The idea was to create a typographic toy to show children different types of fonts. The 3 dimensional letters consist of three very different fonts – Actiontype Bold, Actiontype Light and Actiontype Serif (slab serif). Action Types do not only provide these 3 fonts. Using them as base models, several random fonts can be constructed by interpolation."

Thanks to Swiss Miss for the link.

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