Month: September 2010

Book challenges, Gianna Z. paperback, Skype, Scrivener & PBS

Well, I think that subject line should just about cover it.

Yes, this is one of those mix-of-everything blog posts, mostly because I’m  back to teaching, and so half my brain is at any given moment occupied by thinking about which kid is going to love which book and making stacks next to my lunch bag.  But I do have some newsy, linky things…

This brings me great joy… There will soon be a Scrivener 2.0 release with nifty updates. Scrivener is right up there with chocolate on my list of things a writer needs.

Alexis O’Neill is sharing a great post on Skype author visits at her School Visit Experts site. It includes a link to "An Author in Every Classroom," my latest SLJ Skype feature that includes quotes from a bunch of LJ friends like  ,  , and  .

Banned Books Week begins September 25, and Emily Kristin Anderson is running a great series of guest posts from educators on her blog. I’m there today, talking about how I try to be proactive in heading off book challenges by educating parents of my middle school students.

Emily was nice enough to write a little note about my books at the bottom of the blog post and mentioned that the paperback of THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. comes out tomorrow. My reaction, I’m a little embarrassed to say, was "Really??? Tomorrow?! Wowza!"  I don’t know why, but in my mind, the release date was later in September.

But look!  If IndieBound says it, it must be so. I plan to run through some falling leaves in the morning to celebrate. Anyone care to join me?

THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. is also in the September Arrow flyer for Scholastic Book Clubs (It’s listed as a back-to-school special on the back cover for $3!)  And if you’re a Kindle or Nook sort of person, you can download Gianna Z. on your e-readers starting tomorrow, too.  That is a whole lot of Gianna.

But just in case it’s not enough… A while ago, I taped an interview for Mountain Lake PBS Author Spotlight, and it’s airing this week.  Here’s a link to producer Paul Larson’s blog post on the feature.  In the interview, I talk about the stories behind the story of Gianna Z. and my December figure skating book, SUGAR AND ICE, as well as how my teaching-authoring roles have come to complement one another.If you get Mountain Lake PBS, you’ll be able to see it on Mountain Lake Journal Extra Thursday night at 8:30 – then again Friday at 6am and 12:30, Saturday at 7:30, and Sunday at 10:30.

One last thing…I’m reading ELI THE GOOD by Silas House right now & really enjoying it. I’m fascinated by the point of view – since the main character is a young boy (10, if I’m remembering right) but it’s clear that he’s looking back as an adult telling the story with that older, wiser perspective. It’s something I’ve seen more often in adult novels than in YA or MG, but it works, at least for me.  Beautiful writing, and a fascinating story so far – I’ll post more thoughts when I’m done.

STOLEN by Lucy Christopher

Never get into bed thinking you’ll read "just another page or two" of a psychological thriller, especially when you’re within a hundred pages of the end.  Here is the reason I’m a bit bleary-eyed this morning…

…and I’m not sorry. Not one bit.  Lucy Christopher’s YA novel STOLEN is just magnificent.

16-year-old Gemma is kidnapped from the Bangkok airport when a handsome stranger (but he looks familiar…he is a stranger, right?) buys her coffee, drugs it, and hurries her away from the gate where her parents are waiting for her for a family trip to Vietnam. She finds herself waking up hours later in a landscape so harsh and stark it might as well be the moon.  Her captor, Ty, is a young man with a haunted past of his own. He promises he doesn’t intend to hurt her physically but says that he needs her, that he always has, and holds her captive in a complex of buildings in the Australian outback that seem to have been built for the purpose of keeping her here.

The desert and the animals and plants that have adapted to survive its rugged conditions mirror the antagonist in the way they both hold Gemma captive and eventually enthrall her. Like Ty himself, the desert fascinates Gemma, and she finds herself acclimating and becoming drawn to its mix of danger and beauty. So how, in the midst of those hopeless conditions and her own psychological changes, can she ever hope to find her way home to London again?

STOLEN is written in second person, as a letter from Gemma to her captor in a voice that is believable and raw without ever feeling forced. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that was so beautiful and so creepy all at once. Even though the kidnapper in this book had done something I’d consider unforgivable, even though he drugged a teenager and stole her away from her parents, I couldn’t hate him or even think of him as evil.  And perhaps that’s what made the book the most chilling of all. It’s a great, great read.

Here’s my teacher-note – This book will have wide appeal to older middle school and high school students, and it’ll be a great literature circles choice – so much to talk about. While I’m dying to share it, I’m going to wait just a bit before I put it out for my 7th graders, since some of the language & situations are intense and it’s a book I’ll feel more comfortable recommending to individual kids after I’ve had longer to get to know them and their reading tastes.  And one more teaching thought…for a high school English class, this would be amazing paired with Ann Patchett’s BEL CANTO.

Friday Five: Back to School Edition

1. This was back-to-school week, for me as a 7th grade English teacher and for my two kids. It kicked off with a bang, as I realized Wednesday night that I was supposed to be at a cross country meet and two parent orientation meetings simultaneously.  Have we mastered that cloning technology yet?  Thankfully, my daughter’s teacher served these amazing peppermint patty brownies at her meeting – hello, dinner.

2. Today, we’ll start our first read-aloud of the year in my classroom.  It’s Sharon Draper’s OUT OF MY MIND. I have my Kleenex ready…

3. I’m reading Lucy Christopher’s STOLEN, which is written by a kidnapped teen as a letter to her captor. It’s delightfully creepy so far, with a beautifully drawn sparse setting that’s almost a character in itself.

4. I gave my students a quick technology survey yesterday so that I can try to do a better job integrating the kinds of technology that they actually use at home and like. It was interesting. I teach in a district where about a third of the students get free or reduced price lunch, but of 64 students, all but two have computer/Internet at home, and those two have access at a community center nearby. Twenty have uploaded videos to YouTube, and more than half are on Facebook.  We’re going to try edmodo this year — it’s an educational version of social networking with forums and such — to see if it’s a good way to continue our classroom conversations and booktalk after the bell rings.  I’m also wondering if it might make sense to set up a class Facebook Group for our kids who are there, so they can help one another with assignments & book suggestions, but I’m still noodling on that one.

5. I handed out books from my classroom library hand-over-fist yesterday but came up short on one request. Hockey books for middle school kids.  Any thoughts on that one?  Chris Lynch has ICEMAN, but I’ve heard that’s more older YA, as it WAITING TO SCORE. 

Hope those of you who are teachers and parents and back-to-school kids are having a great start to the year, too. Enjoy the weekend!

Need a Calculator for your iPad? I know just the guy…

You may have noticed that even though I have two kids, they don’t often make appearances here. I don’t post photos or even mention them without their permission because, you know, they’re not the ones writing a blog and they have the right to some privacy even though Mom’s an author.  But today I’ve been given rare clearance to blog about something cool in the life of my 14-year-old son.  After months of teaching himself how to write code for iPhone and iPad applications, one of his apps has been approved by Apple and is for sale now in the iTunes app store!

If you know anything about writing apps, you know it’s kind of complicated. As a matter of fact, I looked into it a while ago, thinking I’d write a quick application to go along with my skating book, Sugar and Ice. I looked into it…for about ten minutes, discovered there is no such thing as "a quick application," and promptly suggested to my son that he learn to write apps so I could hire him to write one.  He did. (He’s working on it, so the Sugar and Ice app will be forthcoming, with fun stuff for skaters, a book excerpt, and an audio file of me reading Chapter 1!)

Watching the boy go through this process has been fascinating and not entirely unlike the process of writing a book. There have been false starts, times when he thought he had everything figured out, only to load code onto a test device and have it crash, and times when he submitted an app and had it rejected. He’s learned not only how to write code, but also how to try, fail, and try again. He’s turned to the Apple Developer Forum online for help and had conversations with fellow developers, most of whom are adults and had no idea they were talking with an 8th grader at the time.  We were amused by one response he got that included the line "…and then the rest is pretty straightforward. I mean, a 15-year-old could probably figure it out."  He attended a week-long tech camp on writing apps at MIT this summer, and most recently, he’s learned about reading multi-page legal documents and deciphering international tax codes, since Apple only handles taxes for countries that have tax treaties with the U.S.

Yesterday,  his first app went on sale in the app store. It’s a full-screen calculator he developed for the iPad (which doesn’t come with one like the iPhone does) with a customizable background. He wrote code that allows a user to choose any image from his or her photo library to use as the background.

Pretty cool, huh?  And yes…this is one of those proud-mom posts.

So…if you are in need of a 99-cent calculator for your iPad, you can follow this link to the boy’s app page online and then click "view in iTunes" or just search the app store for "calculator with custom background" on your device, and you’ll find it.  But you won’t be the first download…

The boy woke up yesterday and reported to my husband that he’d had one download, before the app was even listed in the "Newly released" section. Suspicious, he checked my iPad and confirmed his suspicions. "It was Mom."  I couldn’t resist being his first sale.

Writing Advice, Sugar and Ice Giveaway, & My Classroom Library

Two quick things today…

First, I’m guest-blogging over at   today on the topic of making time to write. Whenever I give workshops for writers or teachers, the number one question I get is, "You teach full time and have a family? How do you find time to write?"  This blog post answers that question in detail with some thoughts on making time for some things and letting other things go.

Second, there’s a SUGAR AND ICE giveaway going on over at GoodReads.  If you’re a member of GoodReads (and I hope you are because it’s great fun to share book suggestions!) you can click here and scroll down to enter the drawing, which runs now through September 30th.

That’s all for tonight because today was the first day of school for teachers where I live, and I have lots to do to get ready for the kids. But first, here’s a photograph of my classroom library, just because I love it.

It’s still missing big piles of titles my kids from last year took home over the summer, including everything Carrie Jones & Lisa Schroeder have ever written, but this is still the most complete it will be all year. On Thursday, I get to start putting books in hands again, and I can’t wait.

Hope those of you who are starting classes along with me have a great beginning to your school year!

SUGAR AND ICE Updates!

It’s been a little while since I’ve blogged about my upcoming figure skating novel, SUGAR AND ICE (due out from Walker/Bloomsbury December 7, 2010!) and there’s some very cool news to share!

My editor recently sent me the first of the journal reviews from  Booklist, and it was a great one!

"Messner is awfully good at individualizing what might otherwise be stock characters, especially Claire, whose eagerness and apprehension come in equal measure. Of course, the (sometimes) glamorous world of figure skating doesn’t hurt for drawing readers, and even those who don’t know their double toe loops from their single salchows will enjoy reading about what it takes to make it on the ice… Satisfying and likely to have wide appeal."—Booklist

Oh, I hope they’re right about that wide appeal.  Also…that note about individualizing characters?  It made me smile in a big way, since I spent many hours of revision, making sure all those skaters felt real.

I also learned that SUGAR AND ICE will be a Junior Library Guild selection!  I’m so excited about all the copies that will be available to kids in schools as a result of that.

Plans are taking shape for a snow-sparkled book launch event at Lake Placid’s fantastic indie, The Bookstore Plus, perfect because the book is set in Lake Placid, with much of the action taking place at the Olympic Center.  If you live in the Adirondacks, I’d love it if you’d put December 11th on your calendar!  More to come on that soon…

And finally, SUGAR AND ICE has its own Facebook page now. You can click here and "Like" it if you’d like updates on an ARC giveaway (coming soon!), launch events ,and more.

There’s a final cover now, too, which I just love-love-love. 

I just love the colors and the way Joe Cepeda, who did the cover art for THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. as well, captured Claire’s spirit just perfectly.  December 7th can’t come soon enough!

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain

I took a very quick research trip to Oklahoma this week, to take photographs and talk with an expert on tornadic storms as I revise my upcoming dystopian novel, currently titled EYE OF THE STORM.

When I say quick trip, I mean quick.  My 14-year-old son came along, and we were in Oklahoma for all of 18 hours before flying back home.  But it was long enough to see some pretty amazing things at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

This building houses not only the University’s meteorology department, but also the National Weather Service office in Norman, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and NOAA’s storm prediction center,where forecasters were busy watching the approach of Hurricane Earl.

We also toured the vehicle bay and saw some of the equipment used to gather data from tornadic storms in the VORTEX2 project this spring.


The mobil mesonet is a set of weather sensors that can be mounted on vehicles for storm chasing.


Radar dishes are often mounted on trucks & vans as well.


This balloon was launched into the heart of a thunderstorm with a long string of sensors attached to it. It’s hanging here because it was badly damaged by a lightning strike!

Not all the researchers’ equipment is so high-tech. Some is simply practical.

And do you remember the movie Twister?  Remember the scenes where Helen Hunt and her costar were driving around in the red pickup truck trying to place their sensor equipment, nicknamed "Dorothy," in the path of a tornado?

The Dorothy movie prop is on display at the University…

…along with a second prop (their rival stormchasers’ device, called "DOT") and the actual meteorological tool that inspired this part of the film.

 The real version, the one on the right, is much heavier — over 400 pounds — and was nicknamed Toto. The idea was indeed to put it into the path of a tornado so it could take a direct hit and gather data.  But alas, real life is not the movies, and it never worked out perfectly, so eventually, this piece of equipment was put on display as storm chasers looked to other tools (unmanned drone planes are the latest!) in their quest to gather the data that will help them figure out how tornadoes work.

There is so much fascinating work being done by brilliant, passionate scientists at this site in Oklahoma — it was fantastic to spend an afternoon with them, and I can’t wait to share more with readers when the book comes out in 2012.  (I started working on the author’s note on the plane ride home!)

I arrived home from the airport to find my meteorologist husband packing up his rain gear.  His TV station sent him to Cape Cod late last night to cover Hurricane Earl.  In addition to doing live shots for the evening news in Burlington/Plattsburgh, he’s posting updates through WPTZ here if you’d like to check it out – and he’s @tommessner on Twitter if you’d like to follow his adventures in the rain & wind of Earl.