Fusenews: I Mean, Who WOULDN’T Want to Read a Book Starring a Kid Named Jupiter Jones?

Prepare for thine jaw to plummet in a downward type fashion.  We’ve heard that the occasional children’s author has gone the route of writing a novelization in their time.  I just never knew how many of them had.  Peter has the scoop.  Fun facts may include knowing that Todd Strasser is "The King of Novelizations" (go, fellow Foundry author, go!) while "Norma Fox Mazer — had already been a National Book Award finalist when she wrote a novelization of the (flop) movie SUPERGIRL in 1984."  Gets you to thinking.  If you could novelize something, what would it be?  I’d chose something really bad, with the potential for extrapolation.  Maybe the novelization of Superman IV or Gymkata.  Oo!  No, even better.  I’d do the novelization of movie version of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.  Oh the fun I could have

• What is this Bookscan of which you people speak?  And why is it determining numbers incorrectly?  Sirrah, prepare my horse!  I shall not stand idly by whilst such peculiarities persist.  Thanks to Shaken & Stirred for the link.

• When I heard about this New York Times article I was trying to think up a good name for my piece about it.  Then I saw that reporter Mary Jo Murphy beat me to the punch with her Nancy Drew and the Secret of the 3 Black Robes. Touche.  Essentially what the piece comes down to is that after discovering that Supreme Court hopeful Sonia Sotomayor read Nancy Drew as a child, Ms. Murphy scouted around a bit and discovered that Judges Ginsberg and O’Connor shared this predilection as kids.  So Colleen over at Chasing Ray has interviewed a swath of authors, finding out their own thoughts on kicking girl protagonists.  Personally, I was a huge Three Investigators fan as a kid.  And it wasn’t just because of their junkyard headquarters.  When are those books coming back in print, by the way?  I know they’re handicapped by the strange and ancient technique of having the boys report back to (I am not making this up) Alfred Hitchcock, but who cares?  They still beat the boring Hardy Boys any day of the week.  Oh yeah!  I said it!  You wanna piece of this?

• Remember that rebuttal Lisa Von Drasek wrote in reference to the lamentable Wall Street Journal article " It Was, Like, All Dark and Stormy"?  Looks like after she sent it to the paper itself, the WSJ printed the puppy!  Woot!

• There is a site out there going by the name of Entertainment Legends Revealed.  According to my husband its original purpose was to record urban legends as they related to comic books (insofar as that goes).  Eventually that expanded.  Now the site has started its own little Picture Book Legends Revealed series.  Technically, Collecting Children’s Books already has that area of expertise covered, but it’s always fun to see people talking up picture book topics anyway.  Funny that he mentions the Madeleine orphanage misunderstanding and not the other Madeleine mystery, though.

• What makes a person becomes an editor of children’s books?  Where’d they get the drive?  T.S. Ferguson, a junior editor at Little, Brown & Co. has started a new series on his blog called the Junior Editor Spotlight.  First up: Molly O’Neill.  Those of you who know Molly, love her.  Those of you who don’t, she has a blog called 10 Block Walk that I enjoy reading.

• A very big and much humbled thank you to Ms. Houghton’s Class for awarding me a One Lovely Blog Award.  I apologize to her for wanting to write "Mifflin Harcourt" after her name.  Now I know that school librarians read me sometimes, but I’ve not heard from many teachers before.  Thank you kindly, m’dear.  Plus the list of other blogs nominated makes for a fabulous mix.  Good reading, particularly if any of them are unfamiliar to you.  Cheers!

• A fun little article from SLJ asking various children’s authors what they’re reading this summer.  Such an interesting notion, planning out what you’re going to read.  I’m sort of a haphazard beast, myself.  Perhaps organization is the way to go.

• Oy!  I just learned from PW Children’s Bookshelf that " Patricia Lee Gauch, v-p and editor at large at Philomel Books, will be leaving the company on September 30, to return to writing and lecturing fulltime."  Durn!  I swear, soon as I learn someone’s name they’re gone again.  And Patti’s such a superior kind of editor, I will be sad to see her go.

• Man.  That ShelfTalker blog just keeps coming up with consistently good posts.  For the librarians out there, merely take Elizabeth Bluemle’s newest piece Promotional Emails: Do’s and Don’t’s and substitute every time she writes "bookseller" for "librarian".  The message is the same.

• Daily Image:

All I have for you today is an illustration by Mirko Hanák for Bambi – A life in the woods, a book by Felix Salten released in Czechoslovakia in 1967.

Somehow, it’s enough.  Thanks to Drawn for the link.

Filed under: Fusenews