Fusenews: Fun with Doppelgangers

All right.  Time to bring the smackdown on my Brooklyn colleagues.  Um . . . okay, I got one.  *ahem*  Uh, hey, Brooklyn!  Yeah, you!  The one across the river!  Your libraries are so rodent infested you’ve got raccoons in your main branch!  Aw, I’m just messing with ya, Brooklyn.  Don’t think of it as an infestation, but rather a sign of a healthy ecosystem.  A raccoon couldn’t last a second in downtown Manhattan, after all.  Tee hee.  Thanks to Ann Baybrooks for the link!

• Part of the reason the Under the Green Willow blog is perhaps the best children’s publisher imprint blog out there has to do with the fact that they (A) post every weekday (B) get great guest writers.  Case in point, the recent post by Peter Glassman (the Books of Wonder proprietor, doncha know) about Diana Wynne Jones.  Take particular care when he mentions how Diana was being pursued by an “overzealous fan”.  I have my own guess as to who that might have been.

• Back in May, Alice Pope created the Alice Pope’s SCBWI Children’s Market Blog.  I’m amazed she has time to do anything but blog now!  Not only does she do this amazingly comprehensive Wednesday Tweet Round-Up, but also news round-ups about the publishing industry that really perk up one’s ears (PW has a new news blog?).  In one recent post she asked for suggestions for her blogroll.  The suggestions came rolling in, and it’s quite a fantastic list.

• Kidsmomo tweeted the other day that while watching the television show Top Chef they couldn’t help but notice that Tom Colicchio resembled Jon Scieszka.  I wasn’t believing a word of it until Travis of 100 Scope Notes (who is giving away books today and only today!) found a pretty convincing picture.  Let’s do a bit of compare and contrast then.

Which one is the real former Ambassador of Young Person’s Literature?

Thanks to Travis for the pic!

• Required Reading for the Week: In terms of CommonSense Media (an organization I first became aware of when skimming Barnes & Noble’s site only to find their opinions EVERYWHERE) you should probably read the following takes on the matter:

– Brian Kenney’s editorial at SLJ.

– Liz Burns and her post on Tea Cozy.

– Roger Sutton’s on Read Roger.

• What a difference a good looking blog makes.  While I try to beat my blog into submission on a daily basis, Walking in Public recently posted a beautiful looking take on my recent Picture Book Horoscope challenge.  *sigh*  We’re both WordPress blogs, but she makes it look so pretty.

• There was an interesting discussion on the child_lit listserv that I think is worth mentioning here today.  In the event that a children’s author is convicted of a heinous crime like owning child pornography or abusing children, should one keep that author’s books on the shelf?  This is not a hypothetical question when you learn that author William Mayne was once convicted of abusing kids and, more recently, in Oregon author K.P. Bath (of The Secret of Castle Cant) was sentenced to six years in prison for possessing child porn.  It’s an interesting question.  Castle Cant sits on my own library shelves and as a book it has committed no crime, though its author has.  What is the responsibility of the children’s librarian in such a case as this then?  There are no easy answers.

• Okay.  Enough gross stuff.  Let’s have a happy New Blog Alert instead.  Sometimes you just gotta give it up for the simple blogs that do everything right.  One of the hardest things for a new children’s literature blogger to attain is an original voice.  And voice is precisely what the Sit a While blog provides.  It’s a very basic concept.  Just a mom blogging about her two kids and some books she likes, but I’m real fond of it.  It produces new content.  Love that.

• There is time enough in this world for as many banjo pigs as exist upon this unhurried globe.  Publishers, you better get in on this.  Two artists started challenging one another to a series of banjo pig images.  Then other artists got in on the act and the result is the Dueling Banjo Pigs blog.  It’s pretty much what it sounds like too.  A couple children’s literature types have gotten in on the act like Cece Bell and Guy Francis (he’s one of the folks who started it and one of his images is shown here).  Generally speaking, though, there are a lot of artists here I’ve never heard of.  It’s a great big world out there, isn’t it?  Thanks to Drawn for the link.

• Further proving that there is no justice in the world, from Cynopsis Kids:

“Author Dean Koontz ‘s Trixie , based on the noted author’s golden retriever, is headed to the big screen in a family-friendly movie.  Ralph Winter and Terry Botwick’s 1019 Entertainment have acquired Trixie and tapped Stephanie Fitch Groff to write the screenplay.  In addition to being the subject of Koontz’s memoir, A Big Little Life , Trixie “authored” several of her own books, and is the focus of a series of kid’s picture books including I, Trixie, Who is a Dog , written by Koontz and illustrated by Janet Cleland.  The second kid’s book, Trixie and Jinx , will be published in October 2010.  All of Koontz’s proceeds from Trixie’s ventures are donated to Canine Companions for Independence, the organization from which the author adopted Trixie.  Last spring 1019 Entertainment pocked up rights to Koontz’s Frankenstein book series.”

I, Betsy, who is sad.

• Daily Image:

Some of us like to pretend we own Mo Willems art by pilfering the programs he doodles on at parties and framing his mail (uh . . . hypothetically, of course *cough cough*).  Far classier is owning some of his actual art.  Real art.  Real 3-D art that looks nice and everything, like this recent sculpture of his called “Uh oh”.

Them’s class!

Filed under: Fusenews