Today's word of the day is Blog Tour, a fun and sociable book promotion that allows organized folks like Padma to become virtual train engineers while less organized bloggers like me play at virtual stationmasters.

I wasn't organized or motivated enough to do a blog tour for my book even though book tours are so cool and trendy, but I'm honored that Padma Venkatraman has asked me to host a stop on her magical mystery tour for CLIMBING THE STAIRS, which was just released by Penguin-Putnam to amazing reviews.

Padma thought my blog would be a great place to talk about taking advantage of one's multiple interests and talents in creating a book. In addition to writing, I do boring stuff like designing websites or practicing law--while Padma steers her self-described "schizophrenia" in more interesting and unusual directions like oceanography. Dude!

Padma says:

Are you slightly schizophrenic? Do you suffer from mild or not so mild attention deficit disorder?

A colleague who’d gone to grad school told me he’d read a book that said all scientists suffer from ADD to some degree or another. I have no idea who wrote that book, but this is true for me. Here’s how I try to make it work for me.

I hope my editor isn’t reading this post, because I’m going to confess that I hardly ever work on just one manuscript at a time. I usually have 15 billion ideas floating around, and I just write whatever I feel like writing each day. And somehow along the way, manuscripts get completed – some sooner than others.

Of course, there are times when I feel that a character is breathing down my neck, telling me to write his/her story, and then I buckle down and complete it in a flash of inspiration. Well, if flashes can last a few months, that is.

To show you precisely how schizophrenic I can be, I’ll jump now onto the multiple lives I lead, rather than delving into the multiple manuscripts I’m juggling in my brain at the moment.

As you know, Greg, my training is in oceanography. NOT Marine biology. I repeat, I yell, NOT MARINE BIOLOGY. It is amazing how people jump to the conclusion that all oceanographers are biologists. I am not and never have been a biologist, because I am not good at chopping up fish and things. My specialization is in physical chemistry – so even in my science, I am schizophrenic. I did my post-doc in an engineering department because environmental engineering is part of my field – so hopefully that show you how un-biological I am.

Why did I become an oceanographer? Because traveling across the ocean on a ship is one of the most wonderful experiences in the world.

My first research expedition occurred more than a decade ago. Well over a decade ago. I’m not going to say precisely how long ago. It was the eve of my 21^st birthday. I had spent all day deploying various instruments into the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, off the coast of Virginia, in the United States.

At the end of my first day at sea, I was incredibly tired. It had begun to rain and it had darkened early. I was cold, wet and miserable. I was too tired to notice how cramped my tiny cabin was as I lowered myself into my bunk bed.

I was nearly tossed out of bed early that morning, by waves that were rocking the boat as though it were a toy. Minutes later I was clambering out onto the cold wet deck, pulling on my bright red life jacket, hanging onto the rail and retching.

“Sea-sickness isn’t a true illness, just your brain being confused by clashing signals. And happy birthday, by the way,” an experienced colleague called out. I was anything but grateful at being told that I was not experiencing a “true illness” and anything but graceful that day as I spilled the contents of my stomach on the heaving sea surface.

That night, as others on the research vessel celebrated my birthday, I crawled into my bed without supper and tried to fall asleep. The waves were calmer now, but I had had to try and work in spite of my sea-sickness. I was feeling miserable. Why had I ever wanted to study the ocean?

Early the next morning, I awoke. My sea-sickness had magically subsided. I peeped out through the porthole. The first pale pink streaks had started to spread themselves across the sky. I pulled on a warm float coat and stepped cautiously onto the deck.

The sun rose out of the blue water with a magnificence unmatched by any sunrise I had ever seen on land. For miles around, there was no sight of land. It was quiet except for the gentle lapping of the waves on the hull. I stood there transfixed and silent. When the sun had finally lifted itself above the water surface, I noticed that the captain was standing next to me.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he asked. “Can you believe it is the same sea that we saw yesterday?”

I didn’t answer. I nodded instead. Between us there was suddenly a shared bond. A love for the sea, its vastness, it blue monotony, it restlessness, its varying moods. I knew then that I had chosen the right area of research. What other scientist would be able to see such beauty, and be paid to take voyages across the oceans? How many others had the unique experience of being miles and miles away from civilization, surrounded on all sides by water?

This enforced aloneness was a type of meditation.

Five years later, I was shouldering the responsibility of being chief scientist on a research vessel, measuring pollution in the Baltic Sea, coordinating teams of ocean physicists and chemists such as myself, and marine geologists and marine biologists. I was the only woman, the only non-native German, the only person under six feet tall, and the one in charge of the vessel, supervising all the scientific activities. Yes, I had come a long way.

So why did I give that up? Well, I haven’t given it up entirely, but other things took over. My book of short stories for the middle grades (The Forbidden Temple, published in India), was going into second edition and being translated into different languages. Rather a good thing. And I began to see that writing was something I loved even more than the ocean, and I began to shift gears, so I could write my novel, CLIMBING THE STAIRS.

And, I’m jolly glad I did, too. Because I love CLIMBING THE STAIRS – the book, every aspect of the book, even the title, which I feel passionate about (and am so glad that Penguin-Putnam decided to retain) because it’s a metaphor for my life…I feel like I’m always climbing the stairs, and I enjoy it!

A lot of people ask me how I manage to juggle all that I do. I still teach and work part-time at the university, in addition to writing. I think the key is that I am really passionate about all that I do. If you’re passionate about something, time warps in a magically way and allows you to do what you want.

For the most part, anyway…

At least, I’m hoping it will because over the next few days, I have a lot left to do. Finish my blog tour, for one thing…

1. Thursday, May 22^nd. Overview of the book and the different themes in the book, questions/issues of current and historical relevance raised in CLIMBING THE STAIRS, and information about writing and publishing at http://www.saffrontree.org/
2. Friday, May 23^rd. Exploring issues of faith, culture and colonization in CLIMBING THE STAIRS; Gandhi and Martin Luther King at Olugbemisola Perkovich’s blog http://olugbemisola.livejournal.com/ (author of Eight Grade Superzero, coming in 2009).
3. Saturday, May 24^th. Travel, living in different Indian cities and different countries, how this has influenced my writing at http://blogpourri.blogspot.com/
4. Sunday, May 25^th. Being a writing mom, finding time to write, parenthood and writing at http://desimomzclub.blogspot.com/
5. Monday, May 26^th. Where were the British colonies during WWII? A few funky facts I unearthed while doing background research for CLIMBING THE STAIRS at author Laura Purdie Salas’s blog. http://laurasalas.livejournal.com/
6. Tuesday, May 27^th. CLIMBING THE STAIRS. The process of writing the novel, weaving together the different threads. http://the5randoms.wordpress.com/
7. Wednesday, May 28^th. Oceanography, research and CLIMBING THE STAIRS. Making my schizophrenia work to my advantage. My (at least two) personalities. What it’s like to spend your 21^st birthday on a research vessel at author Greg Fishbone’s blog. http://tem2.livejournal.com/
8. Thursday, May 29^th. What exactly is that dot on the forehead all about? Arranged marriages, Women in India in the 1940’s, Indian marriages today, gender equality issues in CLIMBING THE STAIRS, anything else you ever wanted to know about India at author Carrie Jones’s blog. http://carriejones.livejournal.com/
9. Friday, May 30^th. The grand finale. Moving to America, Becoming an American, Multicultural writing at author Mitali Perkins’s blog. http://www.mitaliblog.com/

Today's word of the day is Mothers, the most beautiful people in the world.

Happy day to all the moms out there!

Goodreads has a 10,000-character limit on book reviews?  Who knew!  My Word of the Day: 70's post actually reads much better when edited down to that length, so I'm posting it here in that form.

Stuck in the 70's by D.L. Garfinkle
Putnam (2007)

** spoiler alert ** Randomly surfing channels last weekend, I came across a classic "Three's Company" episode in which Mrs. Roper takes a cafeteria job because she's fed up by the miserly allowance her husband gives her to maintain the household. This episode from 1979 remained in my head as I read Trapped in the 70's by D.L. Garfinkle, which is set in 1978.

In the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Grey are a typical California couple having marital difficulties to which their children, 17-year-old Tyler and...more

Randomly surfing channels last weekend, I came across a classic "Three's Company" episode in which Mrs. Roper takes a cafeteria job because she's fed up by the miserly allowance her husband gives her to maintain the household. This episode from 1979 remained in my head as I read Trapped in the 70's by D.L. Garfinkle, which is set in 1978.

In the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Grey are a typical California couple having marital difficulties to which their children, 17-year-old Tyler and 15-year-old Heather, remain willfully blind. Mr. Grey has become absorbed in his work and isolated from his family, while Mrs. Grey is unfulfilled to the point where she cries herself to sleep at night. A crisis point is reached when Mrs. Grey takes a job at, yes, a cafeteria, just like Mrs. Roper. But instead of being prodded to her act of rebellion by a pair of spunky 20-something tenants named Janet and Chrissy, Mrs. Grey finds her encouragement from Shay Saunders, a time-traveling teen from the early 21st Century.

The story of women's lib and marital strife is really just a subplot of Trapped in the 70's, with the main story being a boy-meets-girl drama in which the boy is a 1978 native while the girl is an unwilling visitor from 2006 who appears one night, naked and unconscious in the family bathtub--which, come to think of it, is similar to how Jack Tripper ended up living with Janet and Chrissy in "Three's Company." The narrative of the book shifts back and forth between Tyler and Shay, with margin tags and alternate fonts to help readers tell which protagonist is speaking.

As a disclaimer, Debra Garfinkle is a friend, so I am greatly biased in favor of her book. I'm likewise biased in favor of books about time travel, and ones in which beautiful naked girls suddenly appear in random bathtubs on page one.

Four observations:

1. Star Wars was still in the theater at this time of this book, mostly because teens like Tyler and his friend Evie kept going back for multiple viewings. Younger kids like me did as well--I was seven and probably went to at least a dozen showings. Evie especially is obsessed with the character-themed collectibles. I understand trademark sensitivities when writing a book like Stuck in the 70's, but in real life Tyler would have relentlessly pumped Shay for every tiny detail about the next five movies. Also in the real world, Shay would have called up George Lucas and warned him not to create Jar-Jar Binks.

2. Strange that Tyler doesn't mention (or doesn't realize) that Shay didn't come from the future entirely by herself. She also brought with her a bathtubful of 2006 water. If only somebody had thought to save a sample, it could have been analyzed against water that hadn't travelled back 28 years in time. Perhaps it would have been different on a subatomic level, or would have shown quantum entanglement with the 1978 version of its molecules. Great mysteries of the universe might have been solved by even a tiny drop.

3. It was interesting that Tyler's and Shay's school, which each of them attended in their respective eras, did not seem to have changed much in 28 years while the local mall underwent a major transformation. Shay instantly masters the politics of popularity in the 1978 cafeteria, but she is nearly crippled by the lack of a Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, or frozen yogurt stand. I've had a similar experience. The mall my family shopped at when I was a kid has since expanded from two anchor stores to four, added a food court, tacked on a second level, and most recently popped out an entire new wing of upscale trendy shops and restaurants. Meanwhile my old high school, essentially unchanged since it first opened in 1973, is now considered inadequate and obsolete. A new $200 million school is currently under construction to replace it.

4. From the setup--modern teen travels back in time by, more or less, a single human generation within the town of his or her own birth--I expected Stuck in the 70's to be more in the mold of Back to the Future. One of the things I took for granted was that Shay would run into her mother as a teenager, or the parents of friends from her own time. She does run into her future housekeeper but that's really not a substitute for Marty McFly trying to set his future father up with his future mother.

I also expected that there would be a "closing of the circle" that time-travel stories are known for. One way or another, Shay is going back to 2006--either by some sort of time machine or by living through those 28 years and aging accordingly. She could even die before 2006 and still "close the circle" by sending a message to her mother on the day after her disappearance. I maintained the expectation of a closed circle until the very last page because I couldn't help thinking of this book as primarily a time-travel story, but it's not. The essence of the book, when the setup and setting are boiled away, is all about identity and percpetion.

Mrs. Grey is only one of several characters in the book who, through the chain of events begun by Shay's slip through time, come to realize that they are not being true to their inner selves. Mrs. Grey develops a life outside the home, Mr. Grey starts to appreciate his family more, Shay develops some much needed self-esteem, Evie learns to express herself, and Tyler gets a new haircut and bitchin' surfer duds.

This is what separates novels like Stuck in the 70's from sitcoms like "Three's Company," in which characters are not allowed to learn and grow from their experiences. At the end of the episode I described above, Mrs. Roper simply quits her job and Mr. Roper gives her a raise in her allowance--enough so that she'll now be able to buy the maple syrup he likes when she does the weekly shopping. The episode ends with the status quo restored, which is the golden rule of 70s sitcoms.

Would I, as a teen in the mid-1980s, have picked Stuck in the 70's off the shelf to read? Actually, I can avoid answering that because this book, as a time-travel story with teen protagonists that also includes underage drinking, sex, and drug use, would not have existed in the mid-1980s. But if a copy had somehow fallen through a temporal wormhole from 2007 and landed on my desk in 1986, I think I would have been disappointed by not seeing that circle closed at the end. Which is why I'm proposing an alternate ending as my latest episode of Book Review Theater!

<BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER>

Exterior, night, outside Jake Robbins's house in 2006. Three adults in their mid-forties sneak up the front walkway and hide in the bushes. They are TYLER, EVIE, and SHAY.

TYLER (nodding at an illuminated window above): So you're up there?

SHAY: Yeah.

TYLER: Right now?

SHAY: Yeah.

TYLER: Having sex with...Jack?

SHAY: Jake. And it's not me, you know that. It's my seventeen-year-old former self from the future.

EVIE: Except the future is now the present.

TYLER: I should go in there and break that up.

SHAY (grabs his arm): Don't you dare!

EVIE: We can't afford to mess this up, Tyler. We only get one shot and the entire space-time continuum depends on making things happen the way they're destined to.

SHAY: But I do appreciate your overprotective nature...Dad.

TYLER (blushes): I only had that one-night stand with your mother in 1987 because the paternity test said I had to, or else Shay wouldn't exist. You know Evie's my one true love.

EVIE: Thanks, babe. Hey, here comes Mariel!

MARIEL steps up the walkway and glances into the bushes. Shay flashes her a thumbs-up signal. Mariel nods and begins pressing the doorbell over and over again. A crude dragonfly tatoo can be seen on her wrist.

SHAY (winces): I told her not to get that tatoo.

EVIE: She had to, so things could happen exactly the way you remember. That's why Mariel had to take a job as your family's housekeeper and pretend to only speak broken English. I bet that's been almost as hard for her as it's been for me to get any work done without my best lab assistant.

TYLER: But you did get the time machine done, right?

EVIE: You bet! Funded by the enormous fortune we've amassed using Shay's knowledge of stock results and sports scores for the past 28 years, and using my obsessive investigations into quantum mechanics and the secret files Tyler obtained as Albert Einstein's official biographer, I've wired up Jake's Jacuzzi to a working flux capacitor...in theory.

SHAY AND TYLER: In theory?!!

EVIE: I had no chance for a test run. 1.21 gigawatts of electricity doesn't grow on trees.

TYLER (as Mariel is finally let into the house by a towel-wearing Jake Robbins): She's in. Now we just listen and wait for the signal.

SHAY (listening to a portable radio receiver): She's reaming teen-me out in Spanish. That really takes me back. I don't know how Mariel ever put up with-- Oh, there's the code word!

EVIE presses a button on a remote control device. The street lights dim, then come back up. The trio anxiously watch the window above them.

MARIEL's voice from Shay's receiver: What you do with her? Where she go? Where you hide her?

JAKE's voice from Shay's receiver: I don't know! I didn't do nothing! Please don't call the cops--I don't want to go to jail!

TYLER, SHAY, and EVIE break down laughing.

SHAY: Mariel's getting her revenge. Poor Jake--I almost feel sorry for him.

TYLER: I'll give her another ten minutes, then Jake's getting a visit from Shay's father.

EVIE: Go get him, babe!

Caption across the screen: AND WITH THAT THE CIRCLE WAS CLOSED, THE END.

</BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER>

Today's word of the day is 70s, a ten-year period of polyester and platform shoes, when disco balls ruled the world.

I'm starting this post with a classic television show followed by a segue into a work of modern YA fiction--stick around if you're interested in that and feel free to leave early if you're not. Also, if you're looking for a comprehensive survey of how the spirit of a decade can be reflected in contemporary artifacts as well as nostalgic works with the benefit of distance and context, I can't really help you, since all I've got are two stories from or about the 70s which happened to come at me from two directions at roughly the same time...

First, randomly surfing channels last weekend, my wife and I came across a marathon showing of classic "Three's Company" episodes from the late 1970s. We had to watch a few, in memory of the late John Ritter, who was so funny and full of life on that show.

If you're not familiar with this series, it was adapted from a britcom called "Man About the House" about one single man and two single women sharing a single apartment in an arrangement that was totally innocent, or would have been if not for all the other people assuming it wasn't. In the United States, "Three's Company" milked double entendres and unlikely misunderstandings for eight seasons, which was enough time for a very young me to grow into its sensibilities and then beyond them. But the life lesson of "Three's Company," boiled down to "don't jump to any assumptions based solely on overheard snippets of conversation," remains drilled into my head and has served me well ever since.

Four observations:

1. My wife and I wondered whether Norman "Mr. Roper" Fell was still alive. I didn't think he was but had to had to look it up to be sure. He died in 1998. Cancer. He was 74.

2. What about Mrs. Roper? Was she still alive, and did she ever appear in any other major roles? Audra Lindey died in 1997. Leukemia. She was 79.

Aside from "Three's Company" and her co-starring role in its spinoff, "The Ropers," Lindey's IMDB page reads like a brief history of television. It starts in the 1950s, when shows were named for their corporate sponsors and helpfully included the word "television" in the title because people were still likely to try tuning them in with a radio. If you were looking for Audra Lindey in those days, your viewing options boiled down to whether she was being sponsored by an aluminum producer, an electronics company, or the makers of individually wrapped slices of American cheese.

In the 1960s, Lindey did shows with promising sci-fi or occult-type names like "Another World," "Search for Tomorrow," and "The Edge of Night," all of which, upon further research, turned out to be ordinary daytime soap operas.

In the early 1970s, Lindey was all about the sitcoms. "Chico and the Man," "Maude," "Barnaby Jones..." I'm not sure the last one was a sitcom, but what else could you do with a name like Barnaby other than work as a circus clown? During and after "Three's Company," Lindey made TV movies, guested on shows like "Matlock," "Tales from the Crypt," "Murder, She Wrote," "Friends," and "Cybil," and even had a few theatrical releases. Long story short, she kept very busy!

3. The economics of 1979 were such that a two-bedroom apartment near the beach in Santa Monica cost $300 per month--and every month was a new struggle for three working adults to pay the rent. All right, make that two working adults plus Chrissy. And Jack was attending cooking school, so he had an excuse for being perpetually short on cash. But Janet had a solid job at the flower shop, so no reason for her to complain about beachfront living on $3.50 a day.

4. There's a line in the opening theme song that doesn't sound like English and goes something like "Dominominay voo." I always assumed it was French, back before the Internet made lyric searches so quick and painless, so now... "Down at our rendezvous!" Of course! It's only half-French!

These episodes showcased 70s hair and clothing styles, 70s technology, and 70s moral values. We see the singles' scene before AIDS--without any mention of STDs, really, but specifically without the foreknowledge that a fatal new disease would soon put an end to the Sexual Revolution. We see outrageous stereotypes based around the fascade of presumed homosexuality that Jack Tripper must affect for the sake of his landlord, Mr. Roper, who can apparently accept gays more readily than he can acknowledge the possibility of platonic friendships between members of the opposite sex. And we see some then-controvercial issues of feminism.

Case in point, one episode featured Mrs. Roper taking a cafeteria job because she's fed up by the miserly allowance her husband gives her to maintain the household. Yeah, that's right, a grown woman was receiving an allowance like a child might get and her husband is outraged that she might want to do something with her day other than cooking and cleaning for him. This was an episode from 1979, just a stone's throw from the 80s, so recent and so blatant that I could hardly believe it was thought up by 70s sitcom writers for a 70s show that was broadcast to a 70s audience as just another episode.

Because I'd so recently watched this "Three's Company" episode, it was hard not to keep it in mind while reading Trapped in the 70s by D.L. Garfinkle, which is set in 1978. In the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Grey are a typical California couple having marital difficulties to which their children, seventeen-year-old Tyler and fifteen-year-old Heather, remain willfully and blissfully blind. Mr. Grey has become absorbed in his work and isolated from his family, while Mrs. Grey is unfulfilled to the point where she cries herself to sleep at night. A crisis point is reached when Mrs. Grey takes a job at, yes, a cafeteria, just like Mrs. Roper. But instead of being prodded to her act of rebellion by a pair of spunky 20-something tenants named Janet and Chrissy, Mrs. Grey finds her encouragement from Shay Saunders, a time-travelling teen from the early 21st Century.

The story of women's lib and marital strife is really just a subplot of Trapped in the 70s, with the main story being a boy-meets-girl drama in which the boy is a native of 1978 and the girl is an unwilling visitor from 2006 who is found naked and unconscious in the family bathtub--which, come to think of it, is similar to how Jack Tripper ended up living with Janet and Chrissy in "Three's Company." The narrative of the book shifts back and forth between Tyler Grey and Shay Saunders, with margin tags and alternate fonts to help readers tell which protagonist is speaking.

As a disclaimer, Debra Garfinkle is a friend, so I am greatly biased in favor of her book. I'm likewise biased in favor of books about time travel, and ones in which beautiful naked girls suddenly appear in random bathtubs on page one.

Four observations:

1. Star Wars was still in the theater at this time of this book, mostly because teens like Tyler and his friend Evie kept going back for multiple viewings. Younger kids like me did as well--I was seven and probably went to at least a dozen showings. Evie especially is shown as being obsessed with the characer-themed collectables. I understand trademark sensitivities when writing a book like Stuck in the 70s, but in real life Tyler would have relentlessly pumped Shay for every tiny detail about the next five movies. Also in the real world, Shay would have called up George Lucas and warned him not to create Jar-Jar Binks.

2. Strange that Tyler doesn't mention (or doesn't realize) that Shay didn't come from the future entirely by herself. She also brought with her a bathtubful of 2006 water, assuming she didn't sploosh naked into a tub of 1978 water that had been left out overnight. If only somebody had thought to save a sample of that water, it could have been analyzed to see if it differed from water that hadn't travelled back 28 years in time. Perhaps it would have been different in some subtle way, maybe on a subatomic level, or maybe it would have shown qualities of quantum entanglement with the 1978 version of its molecules. Great mysteries of the universe might have been solved by even a tiny drop of that water, which would have remained untainted a lot longer than a 2006 girl breathing 1978 air and eating 1978 food.

3. It was interesting that Tyler's and Shay's school, which each of them attended in their respective eras, did not seem to have changed much in 28 years while the local mall underwent a major transformation. Shay instantly masters the politics of popularity in the 1978 cafeteria, but she is nearly crippled by the lack of a Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, or frozen yogurt stand.

I've had a similar experience. The mall my family shopped at when I was a kid has since expanded from two anchor stores to four, added a food court, tacked on a second level, and most recently popped out an entire new wing of upscale trendy shops and restaurants. My old high school, essentially unchanged since it first opened in 1973, is now considered inadequate and obsolete. A new $200 million school is currently under construction to replace it.

4. From the setup--modern teen travels back in time by, more or less, a single human generation within the town of his or her own birth--I expected Stuck in the 70s to be more in the mold of Back to the Future.

One of the things I took for granted was that Shay would run into her mother as a teenager, or the parents of friends from her own time. It's not really a disappointment that this didn't happen, since it might have been a little too much like Marty McFly trying to set his future father up with his future mother, but it seemed to defy the odds that the only future-adult she meets is her future housekeeper who just happened to spend 1978 as a cleaning lady in the diner where Shay takes a part-time job.

I also expected that there would be an explanation for how and why the time travel event had happened, or at least a closing of the circle. Closing circles are almost mandatory in traditional time-travel stories. One way or another, Shay is going back to 2006--either by some sort of time machine, or by the same mysterious force that sent her back in the first place, or by living through those 28 years and aging accordingly. Even if she ends up dying before 2006, she can still close the circle by sending a message to her mother on the day after her disappearance, explaining some of what happened. I maintained the expectation of a closed circle until the very last page because I couldn't help thinking of this book as primarily a time-travel story, but it's not. The essense of the book, when the setup and setting are boiled away, is all about identity and percpetion.

Mrs. Grey is only one of several characters in the book who, through the chain of events begun by Shay's slip through time, come to realize that they are not being true to their inner selves and that they can change for the better. Mrs. Grey develops a life outside the home, Mr. Grey starts to appreciate his family more, Shay develops some much needed self-esteem, Evie learns to express herself, and Tyler gets a new haircut and bitchin' surfer duds.

This is what separates novels like Stuck in the 70s from sitcoms like "Three's Company," in which characters are not allowed to learn and grow from their experiences. At the end of the episode I described above, Mrs. Roper simply quits her job and Mr. Roper gives her a raise in her allowance--enough so that she'll now be able to buy the maple syrup he likes when she does the weekly shopping. The episode ends with the status quo restored, which is the golden rule of 70s sitcoms.

Would I, as a teen in the mid-1980s, have picked Stuck in the 70s off the shelf to read? Actually, I can avoid answering that question because this book, as a time-travel story with teen protagonists that also includes underage drinking, sex, and drug use, would not have existed in the mid-1980s. But if a copy had somehow fallen through a temporal wormhole from 2006 and landed on my desk in 1986, I think I would have been disappointed by not seeing that circle closed at the end. Which is why I'm proposing an alternate ending as my latest episode of Book Review Theater!

<BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER title="Stuck in the 70s">

Exterior, night, outside Jake Robbins's house in 2006. Three adults in their mid-forties sneak up the front walkway and hide in the bushes. They are TYLER, EVIE, and SHAY.

TYLER (whispering to Shay and nodding up at an illuminated window): So you're up there?

SHAY: Yeah.

TYLER: Right now?

SHAY: Yeah.

TYLER: Having sex with...Jack?

SHAY: Jake. And it's not me, technically. You know that. It's my seventeen-year-old former self from the future.

EVIE: Except it's not the future anymore. It's the present.

TYLER: I should go in there and break that up.

SHAY (grabs his arm): You know that's not how it's supposed to happen.

EVIE: We can't afford to mess this up, Tyler. We only get one shot and the entire space-time continuum depends on making things happen the way they're destined to.

SHAY: But I do appreciate your overprotective nature...Dad.

TYLER (blushes): I only had that one-night stand with your mother because the paternity test said I had to. You know Evie's my one true love.

EVIE: Thanks, babe. Hey, here she comes!

MARIEL steps up the walkway and glances into the bushes. Shay flashes her a thumbs-up signal. Mariel nods and begins pressing the doorbell over and over again. A crude dragonfly tatoo can be seen on her wrist.

SHAY (winces): I told her not to get that tatoo.

EVIE: She had to. We've got to make things happen exactly the way you remember. That's why Mariel had to take a job as your family's housekeeper and pretend to only speak broken English. I bet that's been almost as hard for her as it's been for me to get any work done in the particle physics lab without my best research assistant.

TYLER: But you did get the project done, right?

EVIE: You bet! Funded by the enormous fortune we've amassed using Shay's knowledge of stock results and sports scores for the past 28 years, and using my obsessive investigations into quantum mechanics and the secret files Tyler obtained as Albert Einstein's official biographer, I've wired up Jake's Jacuzzi to the world's first and only working time machine. In theory, it should work.

SHAY: In theory?

EVIE: Like I said, we only get one shot. 1.21 gigawatts of electricity doesn't grow on trees.

TYLER (as Mariel is finally let into the house by a towel-wearing Jake Robbins): She's in. Now we just listen in and wait for Mariel to give us the signal.

SHAY (listening to a portable radio receiver): She's reaming teen-me out in Spanish. That really takes me back. I don't know how Mariel ever put up with-- Oh, there's the code word!

EVIE presses a button on a remote control device. The street lights dim, then come back up. The trio anxiously watch the window above them.

MARIEL's voice from Shay's receiver: What you do with her? Where she go? Where you hide her?

JAKE's voice from Shay's receiver: I don't know! I didn't do nothing! Please don't call the cops--I don't want to go to jail!

TYLER, SHAY, and EVIE break down laughing.

SHAY: Mariel's getting her revenge. Poor Jake--I almost feel sorry for him.

TYLER: I'll give her another ten minutes, then Jake's getting a visit from Shay's father.

EVIE: Go get him, babe!

Caption across the screen: AND WITH THAT THE CIRCLE WAS CLOSED, THE END.

</BOOK-REVIEW-THEATER>

Today's word of the day is Lexicon, a compendium of words and meanings taken from a body of source material.

When Orson Scott Card speaks his mind, he's always entertaining even when (or especially when) he mangles facts and logic to reach conclusions diametrically opposed to my own. But he also has an infamous tendency to overreach and express some ugly and indefensible views. Most recently he got downright personal and ad hominem about the copyright infringement lawsuit between J.K. Rowling and a publisher that is attempting to publish a fan's online lexicon of the Harry Potterverse.

Card is outraged that Rowling would have the audacity to block a derivative work when her own series is so "obviously" derivative of works that have come before--including his own.

I feel like the plot of my novel Ender's Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling.

A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world.

This paragraph lists only the most prominent similarities between Ender's Game and the Harry Potter series. My book was published in England many years before Rowling began writing about Harry Potter. Rowling was known to be reading widely in speculative fiction during the era after the publication of my book.

I fully expect that the outcome of this lawsuit will be:

1. Publication of Lexicon will go on without any problem or prejudice, because it clearly falls within the copyright law's provision for scholarly work, commentary and review.

2. Rowling will be forced to pay Steven Vander Ark's legal fees, since her suit was utterly without merit from the start.

3. People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.

"...I am deeply troubled by the portrayal of my efforts to protect and preserve the copyrights I have been granted in the Harry Potter books and feel betrayed by Steven Vander Ark, as a person who calls himself a fan. I am particularly concerned about [publishing company RDR Books's] continued insistance that my acceptance of free, fan-based websites somehow justifies its efforts to publish for profit an unauthorized Harry Potter "lexicon" directly contrary to my stated intention to publish my own definitive Harry Potter encyclopedia. Such a position penalizes copyright owners like me for encouraging and supporting the activities of their respective fan communities....

"RDR's position that fans of the Harry Potter series can simply buy two encyclopedias is both presumptuous and insensitive. RDR's position is presuptuous because it assumes that everyone would want to have two Harry Potter encyclopedias and insensitive in thinking that everyone that would want both could afford to purchase both. Although Harry Potter is now a worldwide success, it had its roots in a time when I was very far from wealthy. While I am extremely fortunate now, having had periods in my life when I worried about having enough money to feed and clothe my daughter, it is obvious to me that many people do not have money to buy every book that appeals to them....

"For seven years, Harry Potter was nothing more than an ever-growing pile of paper and notebooks on which I worked very hard whenever I could make the time. By the time of the publication of the seventh novel, I had been writing about Harry Potter for 17 years. As a result I feel intensely protective, firstly, of the literary world I spent so long creating, and secondly, of the fans who bought my books in such huge numbers. I feel that I have a duty to these readers to ensure, as far as possible, that Harry Potter does not become associated with substandard versions.... I believe that RDR's book constitutes a Harry Potter 'rip-off' of the type I have spent years trying to prevent....

"I am very frustrated that a former fan has tried to co-opt my work for financial gain. The Harry Potter books are full of moral choices and ethical dilemas, and, ironically, Mr. Vander Ark's actions tend to demonstrate that he is woefully unfit to represent himself as either a "fan of" or "expert on" books whose spirit he seems entirely to have missed...."

Today's word of the day is Orphan Works, copyrighted works for which it is difficult or impossible to locate the copyright holder.

Some of you might remember the Orphan Works Bill from a couple years ago during the last wave of copyright reform legislation. The bill included a controversial provision to carve out a copyright exception for "orphan works" whose owners couldn't be reasonably identified. The number of orphan works has been growing annually since 1976, when the United States changed from a limited-term opt-in copyright system to an opt-out system that remains in effect, potentially, for generations (currently the creator's lifetime plus 70 years).

Every story, email, or blog post you write automatically falls under copyright protection. So does every picture you draw and every photograph you take. Since everything you do is brilliant, and since everyone is still entitled to the standard "15 minutes of fame" treatment, it stands to reason that somebody will eventually want to share your words or images with the world, sometime before the copyright expires in the year 2078 or later. If the work has your name on it, it might be relatively easy for somebody to find you and obtain your permission to reprint or adapt your stuff. If all they have is an excerpt that doesn't include your name, they might find you by doing a search for the work online or in a database of similar material. But after that, the search may become too time-consuming or expensive to be worth their while.

When orphan works go out of print, or if they're not widely distributed in the first place, they may become lost to history. They are less likely to be reprinted for fear that some copyright holder will someday step forward with a fat infringement suit. This mainly concerns big publishers and other corporate interests, but individual book creators like me might also need to obtain rights for a poem, picture, or song lyrics to be included in a larger story--and it's a real hassle if these turn out to be orphans.

Photographers, graphic designers, children's book illustrators, and other visual artists had issues with the Orphan Works Bill because their works are most likely to be circulated without attribution and appropriated under the proposed law without recourse and with only nominal recompense. Authors and musicians would have been affected as well, but to a lesser extent, because text and lyrics can be searched for more easily than pixels.

The original Orphan Works Bill fizzled out in 2006, but now it's back in the form of two similar versions introduced in April 2008 in the House and Senate. Some of the old concerns have been addressed and new ones introduced. There's no telling yet whether the current bill will be defeated, amended, or passed as written, but the potential remains for some big changes to our collective rights and protections.

I'll post updates if there are further developments with the bill, but authors and illustrators should keep this issue on their radar screens.

Today's word of the day is Canon Sue, a stereotypically perfect fan-fictionesque character who appears in the official version of a story.

When the odometer clicked around onto the 200th episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit", the producers celebrated with a very special episode starring Robin Williams. I could have said "featuring Robin Williams" or "with a special appearance by Robin Williams" but "starring" really is the most appropriate word. This was "Robin Williams: Special Victims Unit" with a supporting cast of SVU regulars.

Robin portrays Merrit Rook, a brilliant engineer with a tragic past, a disarming sense of humor, and a problem with authority. On trial for an anti-corporate prank that went too far, Rook chooses to defend himself in court. Despite having no legal training or court-appointed advisor, Rook dismantles the A.D.A.'s case, destroys an expert witness on cross-examination, and handily wins over all twelve members of the jury. His anarchist politics and clever mind win him the fawning adoration of the entire city including Sergeant Munch, who attends a Central Park rally in Rook's honor. When necessary, Rook's sympathetic backstory allows him to deflect criticism and monopolize the camera with emotional soliloquies. When a squadron of New York's Finest attempt to arrest Rook on a second charge, while he is unarmed and in a crowded public space, he manages to not only slip away but to disarm and kidnap veteran detective Olivia Benson in the process. After playing psychological mind games with Detective Stabler, Rook dramatically escapes from custody and vanishes, seemingly into thin air.

Something bothered me about this episode, but it wasn't until later that it hit me... Merrit Rook is a Mary Sue, or a Marty Stu, or Gary Gnu, or whatever you want to call the male version of...this:

Mary Sue is perfect. All of her friends are colorful. Or, alternately, they may be the palest of shadows next to the glow of her magnificence. She speaks at least seven languages and can communicate with small woodland creatures. She knows all about quantum physics. She has an excellent singing voice and plays at least one instrument -- probably guitar, violin, or flute, even in worlds where these instruments do not exist. She becomes, without effort, a world-class expert at anything she puts her hand to.

In fanfic she is often better than the canon hero in the hero's field of expertise. She will lecture canon heroes and canon villains on how to overcome their flaws, and can singlehandedly convert an Evil Overlord to the side of light simply by the power of her Goodness.

I thought it would be fun to do a few Picture of the Day blog entries instead of my usual Word of the Day ones.  This little guy is currently Picture of the Day at Wikipedia, and comes with a creative commons license that allows for remixing and redistribution.  So...what to do with him?  Write a story? Write a poem? Make a comic strip?

"Girlie-Girlie, woke up early, went to play with Mr. Squrirely..."

That could be the start of a picture book. Either that or a jumprope rhyme.

Eichhörnchen Düsseldorf Hofgarten edit.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Fabien1309

Today's word of the day is: Reading

I did a reading this week at Cornerstone Books in Salem, Massachusetts. The Witch City!

Today's word of the day is: Workshop

I'm back from Nashua, where the New England SCBWI conference was a huge success and my four-hour workshop on web design and blogging was well-attended and well-received. The grand finale was a live update of my website to include news about the presentation itself, thanks to a kind volunteer photographer in the audience.

That's my new website design in the background, and see how exhausted I looked by that point? Since I was presenting for both sessions on Sunday, I didn't get to attend the equally well-received workshops going on at the same time:

• Toni Buzzeo on self-promotion;
• Brian Lies and Lita Judge on illustration;
• Sarah Aronson on point of view;
• Harold Underdown on an overview of the basics;
• Debra Garfinkle on humor writing;
• Emily Herman and Anne Sibley O'Brien on writing tools;
• Sarah Shumway on pitches; or
• The Write Sisters (Janet Buell, Kathy Deady, Muriel Dubois, Diane Mayr, Andrea Murphy, Barbara Turner, and Sally Wilkins) on critique groups and collaboration

Today's word of the day is: Twenty

The 22nd Annual New England SCBWI conference is in full swing and, in fact, I'm blogging on my phone from Laurie Halse Anderson's keynote (and she's very funny and inspiring, of course).

John Bell, Debby Garfinkle, and I arrived here yesterday afternoon by way of visiting the baby--who was thankfully well behaved for her visitors. I brought a photo album with me to Nashua, and conference critique registrar Valarie Giogas had her baby's pictures as well, so it felt more like a baby conference than a writing conference. The Honorable Carrie Jones (D-Ellsworth hopeful) said the pictures were "made of awesome" which goes to demonstrate her cool sense of language, wonderful sense of humor, and great taste in babies.

But getting back to the topic of writing, a disturbing moment... I had a discussion with someone who "read somewhere" a general rule that it takes 20 rejection letters before a first book publication. This statistic might be a general average, and I probably had almost that many myself, but this author was multiple-submitting unpolished manuscripts as quickly as possible to get her 20 rejections out of the way. Please, please, please don't do this! There are so many paths to publication that there's a different one for every author and every book. Collecting rejecion letters like they're bottle-caps that can be turned in for "Pepsi stuff" is not the way!

So, back to the conference, where Laurie is still speaking. She's taken a picture of the audience for her blog--I'll add a link later as well as a photo of the view from the back of the room. You won't believe how many creative, talented, and commited folks that have gathered together in a single place.

Today's word of the day is: Road Trip!

Last weekend was baby's first road trip to New York for her cousin's 2nd birthday party.  Baby was quiet and well-behaved on the ride down and back, four hours each way.  Baby loves to travel--who knew? 

This weekend I'm off to Nashua, sans baby, but I am bringing along
dlgarfinkle
 and John Bell.  It's New England SCBWI conference time and Debby is giving workshops on writing series, writing humor, and breaking the rules; John is giving a workshop on plotting challenges in children's book; and I'm giving a double-session workshop on how authors and illustrators can establish and maintain an online presence using websites, blogs, and social networking.  This car ride is going to be a workshop factory on wheels!

Another chunk of my workshop is going to be on the topic of social networking and the use of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In addition to those are author/illustrator networks like JacketFlap and DeviantART, and general book networks like Library Thing, GoodReads, and Shelfari.

Here are my questions for you...

If you are an author or illustrator, my questions for you are...

• Which social networking sites do you belong to? 
  
• If you don't use social networking sites, what have been your primary deterrents?
• Do you prefer different sites for different purposes?
  
• What are your "rules" for requesting, accepting, or rejecting potential "friends"?
  
• How do you use the sites to promote or raise awareness of your writing?
• How do you use the sites to keep track of what other authors/illustrators are up to?
• How much time do you spend on social networking sites, and does it interfere with your writing/illustrating time?
  
• What would be helpful for you to know at a workshop about social networking?

• Does having an author or illustrator's in your friend list influence your reading decisions?
• Does an author or illustrator on a social networking site seem more approachable?
  
• Have you corresponded with authors or illustrators through social networking that you would not have contacted otherwise?

I got some great feedback on author/illustrator websites for my workshop -- what people have done, what they look for in other sites, and what can often be improved.  I was worried that I might get too technical and nitpicky so this was a good reality check and it's a lot of common sense. 

• A site should be unique, personal, and convey the personality of its owner who, in the case of an author or illustrator, is expected to be creative, expressive, and professional.
• A site doesn't have to be professionally designed and developed but many that aren't look amateurish or unfinished.  Do-it-yourselfers should look into using professional templates.  I like to browse Open Source Web Design for ideas.
• Contact information should be easy to find, and methods should be used to limit the harvesting of email addresses by spambots.
• Sites should be clean and uncluttered, easy to navigate, and consistent from page to page.
• Some author only update their sites sporadically, once or twice a year at most, in a process that requires the intervention of a web developer.  With the web options available in 2008, many of which require no technical skill or HTML knowledge, this is simply unacceptable.

Later this month I'll be in New Hampshire for the 22nd Annual New England SCBWI conference.  I'll be presenting a two-part workshop on establishing and maintaining an online presence for authors and illustrators--"online presence" being the term I'm using for the virtual version of yourself that may be the first impression someone gets of you and your books.

I probably have enough material already, between websites, blogs, social networks, electronic newsletters, and other things, but I'm very interested in broadening my presentation with ideas that have worked well for other people.

So...let's start with websites!

If you are an author or illustrator with a website, my questions for you are...

• What were the design and content considerations that went into your site? 
  
• How often do you change or update your site? 
  
• What resources do you provide that aren't available anywhere else? 
  
• Did you create your own site or hire a designer?
• What are some of your favorite author or illustrator sites and what do you like about them?
• What would be helpful for you to know at a workshop about establishing and maintaining an online presence?

• Does an author or illustrator's website influence your reading decisions?
• What author or illustrator's websites have made you more enthusiastic about a book and why?
• What are some of your favorite author or illustrator sites and what do you like about them?
• If you could give an author or illustrator one piece of advice about designing a website, what would it be?

Today's word of the day is: Cawwie

It's going to be an interesting election this year. There will eventually be a presidential nominee from each of the major parties. If you live in the right state, you'll be able to vote either for or against comedian Al Franken. And if you're very, very lucky, you'll be in the right part of Maine to help elect YA author and 2k7er Carrie Jones to the state legislature.


I'll be voting in Massachusetts, so I'll have to support Carrie from afar -- but I will be wearing my button and lending my support. Carrie is one of the coolest, nicest, and most genuine people I've ever met, which makes it a bit puzzling why she'd want to surround herself by politicians. But she'll be a breath of fresh air for any deliberative body.

Yay, Cawwie!


Edit: goadingthepen has compiled links to just a few of the thousands of Carrie Jones well-wishers who poured their support into LiveJournal yesterday.  It's a grassroots movement!

Today's word of the day is: Guide

If you have a copy of the new Children's Writer Guide to 2008, check out the article by Chris Eboch.  I haven't seen it yet myself but I'm told that I'm quoted in the article.  Thanks, Chris!

It's a bad week for penguin products. If you have a Li'l Penguin Rock 'N Ride Plush Rocker toy, or one of its pony, bull, or dog cousins, get rid of it before it kills your child.  At this rate penguin-related recalls will become a regular blog feature.



And another reminder that the Toy Penguin figures from Plan Toy can cause laceration damage if the heads pop off.  The Penguins of Doom novels still have not caused any reported injuries.

Today's word of the day is: Consumer Safety

In the interest of the product-buying public, I want to make sure that people realize that the penguins of doom being recalled today by order of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission are completely unrelated to my Penguins of Doom book.

My Penguins of Doom has never caused anyone a greater injury than a paper cut. The other penguins of doom are wooden penguin-shaped toys with sharp metal points that constitute a federal laceration hazard.

My Penguins of Doom retails for $13.95 at bookstores and online. The other penguins of doom sell for between $15 and $20 at specialty toy stores.

My Penguins of Doom transports the reader to a magical world of danger and adventure. The other penguins of doom transport the user to the nearest emergency room for twenty stitches and a tetanus shot.

My Penguins of Doom should be given to children. The other penguins of doom should be taken away from children and returned to the store of purchase for a full refund--which could then, perhaps, be used to purchase a copy of my Penguins of Doom.

I hope I've sufficiently cleared that up.



Seriously, if you have one of these toys, go to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission page for instructions on how to get your money refunded.  You can also subscribe to email alerts so you have the latest information on what toys, clothing, or furnishings have been deemed too dangerous to use.  I get several of these alerts every week!

Curious George and the Rocket
By H. A. Rey
Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Our daughter was two weeks old when we brought her to the library to take out her first board book.  She's too young to express a reading preference, but not too young to have a card issued in her own name--hooray!  So while I'm no expert on picture books, I'm suddenly in a position to read and review them in my own unique style.

Curious George and the Rocket is a shortened version of the 1957 classic, Curious George Gets a Medal, reduced to board-book size for wee-little baby-children like mine.  Lost are classic scenes of George getting himself into mischief with an ink blotter, a mess of soap bubbles, some farm animals, and various museum exhibits.  What remains is George's mission training, successful rocket trip into space, safe return by parachute, and subsequently recognized status as the first monkey in space.  As a result, George seems uncharacteristically serious in this book and doesn't get into the kind of trouble we might normally expect.  In other words, George is all work and no play!

George's space mission is coordinated by a Professor Wiseman, whose academic credentials are never given, under the sponsorship of the Museum of Science, possibly as a publicity stunt although the scientific rationale would have been compelling and significant.  There doesn't seem to be an animal behaviorist on staff, unless the Man in the Yellow Hat is being employed as such, which would be a good idea because Professor Wiseman is apparently under the misapprehension that monkeys can read and write.

The book is sparse on details, which is a shame because the scenario presents an excellent opportunity to teach children about the early days of manned (and monkeyed) rocketry.  For example, George's bravery and the Man in the Yellow Hat's anxiety could have been highlighted by a brief recap of missions that had gone before...  

The first six monkeys loaded into Air Force rockets were all named Albert, and all of them suffered horribly in the name of science.  Albert I was launched into the sky in June of 1948, went 39 miles up, and suffocated to death before reaching the edge of space.  A year later, Albert II successfully made it into space but died on impact when his rocket crashed back to Earth.  Albert III died when his rocket accidentally exploded at an altitude of about 35,000 feet. Albert IV, like Albert II, also died on impact.  Albert V died in 1951 when his parachute failed to deploy. Finally, Albert VI actually returned alive from space, but died of his injuries two hours after landing.  

In 1952, when somebody finally realized that Albert was a terribly unlucky name for monkey astronauts, a pair of cynomolgus monkeys named Patricia and Mike made it safely up and back--except that they didn't fly quite high enough to actually reach space.

This was the state of monkey rocketry in 1957, when Curious George Gets a Medal was originally published.  The visionary author-illustrator team of H. A. Rey and Margaret Rey (here uncredited) apparently imagined that the first successful monkey mission would come from the academic and institutional realm, since the military hadn't had much luck to that point and NASA hadn't yet been founded. Thus enter Professor Wiseman and his backers at the museum.

Professor Wiseman can be lauded for including a video camera on George's flight, allowing the crew to view and track him in real time. He also provides George with a protective space suit that might have saved one or two of the Alberts if it had been in earlier usage.  However, some other of Professor Wiseman's mission parameters seem a little sketchy--the use of a launch platform made of flammable-looking wood, the close proximity of the ground crew while the rocket is firing, the seeming lack of sensors to monitor George's vital signs during the trip, the idea to attach a parachute to George rather than to the rocket capsule, and the reliance on George to activate his own escape sequence from the rocket after reentry--but despite the potential for disaster, the trip is an overwhelming success and George ends the book with a shiny gold medal.  

It wasn't until 1959 that a real-life monkey matched George's fictional space accomplishment.  A rhesus monkey named Mr. Able and a spider monkey named Miss Baker were the first living beings to safely make it into space and back again--although Mr. Able died four days later from a bad reaction to an anesthetic during surgery to remove an infected medical electrode.  Miss Baker lived out a very long spider monkey lifetime and is buried on the grounds of the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Had George's trip actually occurred in 1957, he really would have earned that medal, as well as the thanks of a grateful planet.  Lessons learned from American space monkeys and Soviet space dogs made it possible for human beings to reach orbital and suborbital space in 1961.

Bottom Line: The newly-shortened version of the book is recommended for its depiction of space travel but does very little to showcase Curious George's famous personality, his trademark penchant for getting himself into and out of trouble, and his carefree attitude toward life.  We see nothing of George's curiosity in the pages that remain from the larger work, so the protagonist comes off as regrettably generic. I enjoyed reading this to my daughter because I could go off on tangents about space travel, but I felt apologetic on George's behalf, as if I needed to explain that he really is a fun and clever monkey when he's not all serious and scientific.

<book review theater>

ME (using Man in the Yellow Hat voice): Look, George, you got a letter from Professor Wise Man!

ME (using Professor Wiseman voice): It's pronounced WEISS-man!

ME (using Man in the Yellow Hat voice): Professor Wise Man wants you to fly to space in his rocket!

ME (using Professor Wiseman voice): WEISS-man, WEISS-man, WEISS-man!!!

ME (using Man in the Yellow Hat voice): Professor Wise Man sure is a nice guy, isn't he?

ME (using Professor Wiseman voice): Aaaaaaaargh!!!

</book review theater>

Children of the Mind
By Orson Scott Card
(Tor Books, 1996)

I know several readers, myself included, who were blown away by Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. They then found the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, to be equally as riveting and eagerly reached for Xenocide, book three in the series, with the highest of expectations--only to be slammed with disappointment. This otherwise serviceable book, with an original premise and interesting characters, crashes to an unsatisfying and confusing ending that combines the worst attributes of deus ex machina and sequel hooking. Back in the mid-90s, it seemed that only the most devoted of Ender fans dared to approach the fourth book, Children of the Mind. The rest of us avoided it like the descolada virus itself.

Today's word of the day is: Eco-Libris

Books are made of paper, which comes from trees, so why not plant new trees to offset the environmental impact of the books you buy? This greening of books is the idea behind the Eco-Libris website. True, it doesn't offset the energy and water resources required to produce the paper pulp and transport the finished product to the store, but it's very cool to slap on a sticker that says, "A tree was planted for this book." And yes, the stickers are printed on recycled paper using non-toxic inks.

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read

Today's word of the day is: Gygax

Gygax: n. 1. A great name for a half-elven 30th level Figher/Mage with psionic powers, don't you think?

I've been thinking more about the recent death of Gary Gygax and why it struck me so profoundly. 

When an actor dies, we remember some of the roles he or she brought to life and the special place those movies or TV shows may have had in our lives -- like when Fred Rogers passed away, everybody had to acknowledge the impact his show had on an entire generation of children who learned that "everyone is special" because Mr. Rogers "likes you just the way you are."

When an author or screenwriter dies, we remember a person who created entire worlds, stables of characters, and plots.  For many people, the death of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry was especially impactful because Roddenberry created a much-beloved story universe, its major characters, and many of its most memorable plots--plus he saturated the entire series with his own personal optimism for the future of humanity. 

Gary Gygax wasn't known for bringing a character to life or for creating a story world, at least not primarily.  He was a meta-creator.  He made the rules that allowed other people to bring their own characters to life and set their own stories into motion.  Gygax's greatest contribution was the development and promotion of a creativity platform that allowed ordinary people to establish a setting, populate it with monsters, put together a workable plot, and breathe life into bold adventurers, mysterious wizards, cunning thieves, and pious clerics.  The system that Gygax made was easy enough for fifth graders to follow but complex enough to appeal to M.I.T. graduate students. 

So while there are many actors and authors in the world, we don't very often have a chance to mourn the loss of a person who is the heart and soul behind an entirely new form of media, "role-playing games," which are interactive and social in a way that books, television, or movies never could be. 

Today's Word of the Day is: Stuff

Stuff: n. 1. Collective term for a bunch of random things that have no connection with each other; 2. Mysterious substance in the middle of an Oreo cookie.

Firstly, happy belated birthday and bookday to carriejones!

Secondly, reaction is warranted to the untimely death of role-playing game legend Gary Gygax.  Although it's been a long time since I've had cause to roll the old 20-sided dice, I still have the AD&D hardcover books in a place of honor on my bookshelf and a fondness in my heart for countless hours of my youth spent trolling graph-paper dungeons, looking for hidden doors, and slaying monsters for their gold and experience points.  My friend, Eric Burns, has a more detailed remembrance that puts the life of Mr. Gygax into proper context:

For all his contradictions, for all his faults, for all his strengths and for all his weaknesses, this complicated, opinionated, genius man has had an impact on society as a whole that is literally immeasurable. I'm not misusing the word 'literally' there, either -- there is no way to measure how much influence Gary Gygax has had on the world. Certainly, the world of literature, of movies, of video games, of television (children's and adult) have all been profoundly affected by the things Gary Gygax did. Billions of dollars have changed hands based directly or indirectly on Gary Gygax's work. Take Gary Gygax out of the equation, and our entire culture becomes radically different. And Christ only knows what the internet culture would look like.

But beyond that, a man who was a monumental part of my childhood, my past, and a huge number of my friendships is gone. I listed out that long list of friends above -- but understand that's a tiny fraction of my friends from roleplaying. And a large number of my other friends are ones I haven't gamed with but who are themselves gamers. Gary Gygax gave me a social group. He gave me peers.

And he regarded me as a peer, all too briefly.

And I'm going to miss him. Terribly.