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The problem with this Fusenews feature is that if I don’t do them regularly then the news out there builds up, builds up, builds up, until there’s so much of it out there that I’m almost embarrassed to do anything with it.  Such is the case today!  And, as per usual, I’ll say that I’m just going to type these pieces up very fast, when in truth it’s pretty much going to be the same kind of thing I always do.  Truth!  Let’s do it.

• I highly recommend that each and every last one of you guys move to Illinois.  The people here are so freakishly nice it’s amazing!  Case in point, SCBWI-IL and The Center of Teaching Through Children’s Books are pairing up to have me talk to a whole bunch o’ folks on the evening of October 7th.  Isn’t that kind of them?  If you live in the area, please come by.  I like to blather and while doing it in my own head is fine, it’s much nicer when there’s a healthy number of other people out there to absorb the blow.

• In case you missed it the National Book Awards Longlist for Young People’s Literature was released last week.  A very YA-centric list indeed with only two clear cut books for kids.  Yet look in other categories and you’ll find that children’s authors do not relegate themselves solely to the children’s category.  For example, in the adult nonfiction section you’ll see that our beloved Sy Montgomery has been nominated for The Soul of an Octopus.

• New Blog Alert: Reading While White.  You might argue that that is the unspoken title of most children’s literature blogs, but in this case they’re acknowledging the fact freely and commenting on what that means all the while.  There are some fascinating pieces on there already, so if you’re anything like me you’re checking it daily.  Ooo, I just love folks that aren’t afraid to touch on potentially controversial topics for the sake of making the conversation at large a richer experience.

• In a particularly unfunny move, The Roald Dahl Estate has closed down the beloved Roald Dahl Funny Prize that was the brainchild of Michael Rosen.  Why?  There are hems and haws to sort through here but I think the key lies in the part where they say that in conjunction with next year’s centenary celebration, “the estate would be focusing on a new children’s book prize to be launched in the US.”  So clearly they didn’t want two Roald Dahl prizes out there.  One wonders if this mysterious prize in the US will also be for humor.  I suspect not, but I’d be awfully interested if any of you have further details on the mater.

• If you were once again faithfully checking your Iowa Review this season (ho ho) you might have seen three interesting things.  #1 – It contains a “portfolio” all about children’s books this month.  #2 – The cover is by Shaun Tan.  #3 – Phil Nel’s piece A Manifesto of Children’s Literature; or Reading Harold as a Teenager is free for viewing online.  I should note that the actual issue also has pieces by Jeanne Birdsall (yay!), Mr. Tan, and Kevin Brockmeier, so get thee to an academic library!  Stat!

• I don’t do much in the way of Instagram myself, but even without knowing it I can acknowledge that this Buzzfeed piece on what would happen if Hogwarts characters had it was rather inspired.  Thanks to Travis Jonker for the link.

• You ever hear the one about the bookseller who would get artists to draw their best beloved picture book characters on her arms and then she’d tattoo them there?  Yes?  Well, I hadn’t heard about her for a couple of years so I decided to check in.  And lo and behold, one of my new neighbors here in the Chicago area, Eric Rohmann, was the creator of her latest tat.

• If someone asked you to suggest a children’s book that they hadn’t read but should, what would you choose?  It helps if the person asking is British and wasn’t practically required by law, like those of us here in the States, to read certain books in the U.S. kidlit cannon.  My suggestion was actually Half Magic by Edward Eager.  See some of the others here.

• Wowzer. Children’s authors have power. Don’t believe me?  See what Marc Tyler Nobleman pulled off with DC Entertainment. Well done, sir!

• Speaking of superheroes, two years ago Ingrid Sundberg drew a whole host of children’s and YA authors as spandex-wearing, high-flying, incredibles.  It’s still fun to look at today here.

• Me Stuff (Part Deux): It’s a little old but I was interviewed by Joanna Marple not too long ago.  There’s some good stuff there, like shots of the dream office I aspire towards (hat tip to Junko Yokota, though).

• I feel a bit sad that I never read Lois Lowry’s Anastasia books when I was a kid.  I think I would have related to them (or at least to her glasses which originally rivaled mine in terms of width and girth).  How I missed these books I’ll never know.  Now I’m reading all about the changes being made to the newly re-released series.  Some make sense but others (changing Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst to Anastasia Off Her Rocker) don’t make a lick of sense.  I get that “analyst” is not a common term these days. I care not.  The term “off your rocker” is, after all, no less dated.

• Daily Image:

There are fans and then there are fans.  And best beloved is the author or illustrator who meets a fan who knows, really knows, how to quilt.  Ms. Sibby Elizabeth Falk showed this to Jane Yolen recently.  It’s Owl Moon like you’ve never seen it before:

• First up, my little sister.  My daughter recently had her third birthday so my sis came up with a craft involving what she calls Do It Yourself Cupcakes. Each cupcake sported a teeny tiny cover of one of my child’s favorite books.  Then we took them to her daycare where she delightedly set about pointing out all the books she knew.  I have zero crafting skills but if you do then you might want to try this sometime.  It was kind of friggin’ amazing.

• Now in praise of Kevin King.  The Kalamazoo Public librarian has long been hailed as one of the best in the country.  Fact.  Children’s authors and illustrators everywhere know his name.  Fact.  But when a man attended a summer reading kickoff  for Kalamazoo Public Library with a gun, who confronted the fellow and asked him to please leave?  Kevin King.  So basically, he’s an amazing librarian AND he has the guts to talk to someone packing heat around children.  Kevin King, today we salute you.  I don’t know that many of us would have the courage to do what you did.

• Look, we all talk about how we don’t have enough of one kind of book or not enough of another.  But what do we actually DO about it?  Credit to Pat Cummings.  She doesn’t take these things lying down.  Check out the Hero’s Art Journey Scholarship then.  As the website says, “The Children’s Book Academy is proud and excited to offer merit scholarships for writers and illustrators of color, identifying as LBGQTI, or having a disability, who are currently underrepresented in the children’s publishing industry. In addition, we are offering scholarships for low income folks who might not be able to take this course otherwise as well as to SCBWI Regional Advisers and Illustrator Coordinators who do so much unpaid work to help our field.”  The first and only scholarship of its kind that I’ve certainly seen.

• Sometimes it’s just nice to find out about a new blog (even if by “new” you mean it’s been around since 2012).  With that in mind, I’d like to give a hat tip and New Blog Alert to The Show Me Librarian.  I believe it was Travis Jonker who led me to St. Charles City-County Library District librarian Amy Koester’s site.  It doesn’t have a gimmick.  It’s just an honestly good children’s librarian blog with great posts like this one on Reader’s Advisory and this one on picture book readalouds.  Them’s good reading.

• Jules would never alert you to this herself, but don’t miss this interview with the woman behind the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog as conducted by Phil and Erin E. Stead.  Even if you know Jules you’ll learn something new.  For example, I had no idea she enjoyed Marc Maron’s podcast too.

• Speaking of Jules, who is the most tattooed children’s author/illustrator (since we already know the most tattooed bookseller)?  The answer may surprise you.

• “There’s not just one way of believing in things but a whole spectrum.”  That would be Philip Pullman talking on the subject of fairy tales and why Richard Dawkins got it wrong.

• I’m sorry.  I apparently buried the lede today.  Else I would have begun with the startling, shocking, brilliant news that they’re bringing back Danger Mouse.  Where my DM peoples at?  Can I get a, “Crumbs!”?  That’s right.

• I don’t read much YA.  Usually I’ll pick out the big YA book of a given year and read it so that I don’t fall completely behind, but that’s as far as I’ll go (right now deciding between We Were Liars and Grasshopper Jungle).  But I make exceptions and Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles fall into that gap.  Now I hear that Meyer wrote a prequel called Fairest giving her villain some much needed background.  That’s cool enough, but the cover?  You only WISH you could see more jackets like this:

• Speaking of YA, and since, by law, nothing can happen at this moment on the internet without some mention of The Fault in Our Stars at least once, I was rather charmed by Flavorwire’s round-up of some of the odd TFIOS merchandise out there.  Favorite phrase: “for the saddest party ever.”

• It’s important to remember that school library cuts aren’t an American invention.  They’re a worldwide problem, a fact drilled home recently by the most recent post on Playing By the Book.  If you’re unaware of the blog it’s run by the wonderful Zoe Toft and is, to my mind, Britain’s best children’s literature blog, bar none.  Now Zoe’s facing something familiar to too many school librarians and it’s awful.  Does anyone know of a British children’s literary magazine along the lines of a School Library Journal or Horn Book?  The fact that her blog hasn’t been picked up by such an outlet is a crime.

• “I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation.”  As a woman with a child too young at the moment to be vaccinated against diseases like measles, every parent that refuses to get their own children vaccinated is a threat to mine.  So I read with great interest what Roald Dahl felt about vaccinating your kids.  It ran on BoingBoing back in 2009 but this kind of thing never dies.

• Father’s Day has come and gone but it’s never too late to look at a bunch of adorable pictures of dads reading to their kids.  Particularly when one of the dads is married to yours truly.  See if you can spot him.

• And the award for Best Summer Reading List of All Time goes to . . . Mike Lewis!  His Spirit of Summer Reading list for reluctant readers can only be described in a single word: Beautiful.  Designed flawlessly with books that I adore, this is the list I’d be handing to each and every parent who walks in my library door, were I still working a reference desk somewhere.  Wowzah.

• A whole exhibit on Appalachian children’s literature?  See, this is why I need my own private jet.  Why has no one ever given me a private jet? Note to Self: Acquire private jet, because it’s exhibits like this one that make me wish I was more mobile.  You lucky denizens of Knoxville, TN will be able to attend this exhibit between now and September 14th.  Wow.  Thanks to Jenny Schwartzberg for the link.

• So pleased to see this interview with Nathan Hale on the Comics Alternative podcast.  Love that guy’s books, I do.  Great listening.

• New York certainly does have a lot of nice things.  Big green statues in the harbors.  Buildings in the shape of irons.  Parks that one could call “central”.  But one thing we do not have, really, is an annual children’s book trivia event for folks of every stripe (librarians, editors, authors, booksellers, teachers, etc.).  You know who does?  Boston.  Doggone Boston.  The Children’s Book Boston trivia event happened the other day and The Horn Book reported the results.  One could point out that I could stop my caterwauling and throw such an event myself.  Hmm… could work. We could do it at Sharlene’s in Brooklyn… it’s a thought…

• C.S. Lewis on the Three Ways of Writing for Children and the Key to Authenticity in All Writing.  Need I say more than that?

• Daily Image:

There are bookshelves that seem kooky or cool and then there are bookshelves that could serve a VERY useful purpose, if you owned them.  Boy howdy, do I wish I owned this because useful is what it is.  It’s a “Has Been Read” and “Will Be Read” shelf.

Thanks to Aunt Judy for the link.

The publishers wanted a title they could take to the bank. The original Swedish title you wouldn’t take to a dog fight: Men Who Hate Women. What were they thinking over at the marketing department? Capitalizing on a red hot cultural trend, the English publishers hit on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and they’ve been laughing all the way to ‘you know where’. Whether by accident or design, they also deployed one of the most powerful literary devices – a highly graphic unifying image. A literary tattoo!

Symbols of any kind can help us decypher what lies at the heart of a story. Think of the mockingbird in To Kill a Mockingbird, or the white whale in Moby Dick. For that matter, who can forget the Polynesian harpooner (Queequeg) and his tattoos. Every good film or book has a compelling image that serves as the theme’s touchstone, and only rarely in film or literature has it been a tattoo.

Dragon Tattoo’s most creative invention is Lisbeth Salander, the enigmatic co-protagonist who cleans up after the hateful men in her life. Without this dark and vengeful angel the book may have proved too cruel to digest. She, of course, is the woman with the dragon tattoo.

Author Stieg Larsson didn’t over-cook the dragon motif. In fact, the tattoo is barely mentioned. In my latest novel, ROXY, I treat a tattoo motif in the same subtle fashion. Central images work best that way, just as the moral of a book or film is often buried in a minor incident. Yet the detail reverberates throughout the story. It’s just these kinds of ripples repeatedly encountered that make reading long-form fiction so enjoyable. And what makes speculating upon the writer’s intention so much fun.

So, what did the late Stieg Larrson intend with his dragon motif? Obviously he wanted to add depth to the Salander character. He wanted the reader to understand her without being told in so many unwieldy words. A tattoo has the potential to do that. What might we have expected of Lisbeth Salander if, instead of a dragon, she wore a floral design, or Our Lady of Guadalupe? We would anticipate a more forgiving character – definitely not the personality Larsson had in mind. Readers rightfully expect a character simmering with a latent vengeance capable of breathing fire.

Sometimes an author will chose an icon with significance more far-reaching than he intended. It seems to me that Larsson’s dragon also speaks to inconvenient history that the plot unearths, crimes so hideous that they could only have been committed by men held hostage by their own lizard brains.

A tattoo defines my young protagonist in the novel, ROXY. I wanted her to appear both rebellious and heart-felt. A tattoo over her heart would accomplish that, a text tattoo spelling “Shangri-La”. How could this not imply something central to her life? This is the tattoo’s uniquely powerful medicine – it serves as a talisman reflecting a person’s deepest fears or desires.

Roxy’s tattoo is a reminder of her long-dead grandmother, the person closest to her heart. While that may sound so very sentimental, the tattoo is meanwhile helping to hold the story un