someone else!

Much like everything else in life, he will find what he’s looking for where he least expects it…

A quick one for this week. I love the film noir era so I wanted to give our little character the same feel. I don’t know what it is but something’s missing…no pun intended..but I didn’t want to add anything else since I don’t want to over complicate it.

P.S. I sooo want an Ipad.

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by James Leck Kids Can Press  2010 A trio of hardboiled detective stories for the upper middle grade set. Jack Lime is a kid people go to when they need to have problems solved.  Problems like cheating boyfriends and missing bikes and gambling rings and kidnapped... hamsters. As with all detective stories, Lime has to wade his way through the sort of half-truths and double-crosses he's

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by Martin Chatterton Peachtree Publishers 2009 It's a teen Holmes and Watson Down Under, with a transgendered Bond villain and animals run amok!One day, in a fit of odd behavior, a pod of whales gang up and attack a whale watching boat on Farrago Bay, Australia killing all involved. No one knows why and the mystery was never solved.Two years later, a new kid known as The Brain arrives with an

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It was a sloppy rainy day, and my diaper was less than fresh.  I was due for a change but I had my focus on my job.  Pretty little Lizzy Lightfoot had crawled onto my play mat with a problem, and a big reward.

 

Seems Lizzy was more than just cute red cheeks and adorable chubby arms… she was THE major candy supplier this side of Halloween, and her stash had gone missin’.

 

I wasn’t a candy fiend like some… Elsie Pike whose fingers and mouth we perpetually stained ruby red or Mikey the Mooch who would sidle up behind at the slightest hint of sweetness.  Sure, I had a lolly now and then to unwind after a long day’s play dates, but I knew when to say when.  In my book, candy was sweet but Peekaboos and This-Little-Piggies where sweeter.

 

So when Lizzy toddles in, snot dribbling from her nose alluringly, and tells me that I has to help I says “What for?”

 

She reached into her diaper and pulled out Miss Daisy, the bright orange playpen ball so shiny it could blind Lady Justice all over again.  Miss Daisy hadn’t been seen around “Lil’ Ones Daycare” for approximately 3 days and therefore, its existence had been completely forgotten.  “You!”  I manage to say after wiping a bubble of saliva from my mouth.

 

 

“Me,” she says coyly, batting those eyelashes with only one or two goobers still in them from the afternoon nap.  “And I’m willing to share Miss Daisy with you at play time if you help me retrieve my goods.”

 

“Where are they” I asked, sweating hard to suppress the urge to shove that Golden Orb all the way into my mouth.

 

“Mikey the Mooch swiped ‘em when I was gettin’ a change but he couldn’t keep a lid on it.  Word spread and that’s when Big George showed up.”

 

“I see,” I managed to say, eyes still on Miss Daisy.

 

Lizzy noticed my hungry gaze upon Miss Daisy and put it behind her.  Out of sight, out of mind.  “So you’ll help me?”

 

I nodded, wiped the dribble from the corner of my mouth and set off for The Corner.  Big George spent a lot of time in The Corner when the big people put him in time out.  He figured he’d save everyone time if he just set up camp there.  He popped into this world a brawny 11 pounds and 3 ounces, and he hadn’t stopped there.  He was a full head taller than me and I was no slouch.

 

“Hey, Big George,” I say, wastin’ no time.  “You got somethin’ that don’t belong to ya’, and Lizzy wants it back.”

 

George looked at me with an amused grin, “No can do, Sammy, you know I have a sweet tooth.”

 

 

“We all know you haven’t got any teeth,” I say, “and if you did, I’d knock ‘em right out.  Hand over the candy.”  It wasn’t the smartest plan, but I really hadn’t developed the capacity for strategy or consequence judgment yet.

 

 

Big George gathered himself up to his full 26 inches and put his huge mitts on the straps of my overalls.  I was a goner for sure, I closed my eyes and prepared to cry, but no blow came.  Big George released me and I was free.  When I opened my eyes, I saw Big George lumbering away lustily towards the beautiful Miss Daisy as she rolled slowly away.

 

Lil’ Lizzy clutched her bag of lollies to her chest and looked me and gave me a wink, “Too bad, Sammy.  Looks like George has your goods now.  And who’s left to help you?”  She giggled and toddled away with her hoard.

 

I saw George slobbering over Miss Daisy, Lil’ Lizzy sucking on a lolly, and felt the squishy wetness in my diaper… and cried my face off. 

 

…

Thanks Bill Waterson for ‘Tracer Bullet’!

…

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Case #1: The Case of the Fiendish Flapjack Flop written by Nate Evans and Paul Hindman illustrated by Vince Evans and Nate Evans Sourcebooks / Jabberwocky 2008A hardboiled detective series for the chapter book set is a welcome addition to the... wait. Aren't most chapter book series mysteries of one sort or another? Yes, and with good reason. The mystery story has the opportunity to instantly

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I've needed to practice drawing characters and faces as they're a huge weakness where my overall drawing is concerned, so when I received a special request to draw some for a Mystery Murder project (more on that later!), I jumped at the chance. I'm a huge fan of detective, criminal investigation and murder mystery stories anyway, whether on paper or on the screen, so this was tons of fun to do!

So here's the first one, the Mob Boss. Once I'd scanned it in I felt it was a bit too light and perhaps had too delicate a touch for the subject matter, so I played with levels and contrast on photoshop and this was my final result:

Better, I think ... off to work on the next character now :)

Mob Boss cards and products at zazzle.com

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I've needed to practice drawing characters and faces as they're a huge weakness where my overall drawing is concerned, so when I received a special request to draw some for a Mystery Murder project (more on that later!), I jumped at the chance. I'm a huge fan of detective, criminal investigation and murder mystery stories anyway, whether on paper or on the screen, so this was tons of fun to do!

So here's the first one, the Mob Boss. Once I'd scanned it in I felt it was a bit too light and perhaps had too delicate a touch for the subject matter, so I played with levels and contrast on photoshop and this was my final result:

Better, I think ... off to work on the next character now :)

Mob Boss cards and products at zazzle.com

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Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7960-9
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7960-2

Michael Sedano

Blackout is as good a title as any for this mystery set in Rio de Janeiro’s fabled Copacabana and Ipanema neighborhoods. Sadly, the blackout of the title is more a gimmick than a psychological condition experienced by the suspect. In a typical fictional blackout, a character commits a series of acts then loses memory of having performed the actions. The detectives and the character’s loved ones then must unravel clues then assign responsibility.

But in Blackout, the central character does not suffer blackouts. His problem, really, is not a damaged memory nor situational blindness but a profoundly haunting event that so terrifies him that his memory superimposes visions from that long ago upon events at hand. He acts on what he thinks he sees, then lies and covers up when he later discovers the actuality that confronted him. None of this is a blackout, so why that title?

Maybe it’s translation from some Brazilian Portugese word whose closest English equivalent is “blackout”? (I write this without the book in hand and must depend on memory. I do not remember the translator's name, nor is it listed in the publisher's website). At any rate, “blackout” is not what happens to the Aldo, a successful interior decorator married to a beautiful psychologist.

When Aldo was a boy, a neighborhood bully bloodied the boy’s face. Aldo offered no resistance, no defensive posture, only meek submission to the beating. But the beating has a haunting effect on Aldo. He develops a lifelong fear of meeting up again with that bully. Garcia-Roza fails to develop the background of this terror. Instead, the author shows us one event that foreshadows the novel’s central event.

Some time after the beating, Aldo thinks he spots the bully headed in Aldo’s direction. Terrified at the thought of another meeting, another beating, Aldo cowers behind stacks of merchandise in a small shop until the shopkeeper asks if the boy needs help. Shaking with fear, the boy abandons his hiding place to hesitantly peek out the storefront. No bully. One moment he was on the street, the next, an empty street. Who knows what set off the panic, but the reader understands Aldo has been terrorized by a figment of his imagination.

Years later, Aldo is moving his car during a thunderous rainstorm. Suddenly out of the darkness, an apparition appears to Aldo’s eyes. It is the bully. Isn’t it?

The next morning, a one-legged man is discovered dead, shot in the chest at the top of a hill. Now the mystery begins. How, or why, does a one-legged man make the strenuous trek from flatlands to the cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill? Who killed him? Why? Aldo and others were at the scene around the time of the murder, but they have no obvious connection to the nameless corpse.

Meanwhile, back at the office, Aldo’s assistant is a hot young beauty named Mercedes. She sets her sights on Aldo and it’s only a matter of crooking her little finger and Aldo is in her bed. The triumphant Mercedes begins scheming to take Aldo from his wife and two kids. To this point, Aldo was a semi-likeable character. Now, seeing how easily he falls into adultery, the reader loses any loyalty to Aldo and is willing to sit back and let bad stuff happen to Aldo.

Aldo’s wife is murdered. But not before the reader sees her in therapy sessions with attractive women, and seemingly crossing the boundary between counselor and lover. How sad to witness three people—Aldo, his wife, and Mercedes the assistant--with such comfortable lives discarding all for a fast fling with a good-looking target.

With a cast of such unattractive, even repellent, characters, the reader cares ever more about Espinosa’s sleuthing. With the wife dead, Espinosa discovers the affair between Mercedes and Aldo. Then a clue here, a clue there, and, almost haphazardly, with only a few pages remaining, Espinosa pins their respective crimes on them.

Blackout is an engaging story but I want to know more about the characters. We see Aldo pushed around as a kid, but have no idea why the boy doesn’t fight back, nor what leads him to be such a ninny that Mercedes finds him easy pickings. We don’t get to see connections between Mercedes’ history and her predatory nature, nor what motivates her to such drastic acts.

There may be a method behind this. Although Blackout has much undeveloped territory, the lacunae help the reader understand the milieu that Inspector Espinosa and his staff work in. Since the reader knows only as much as the detectives, as the case unfolds the reader is forced to set aside logic and causality and simply watch the cops do their job. In the process, the reader will enjoy the delight of discovery and the surprises that Garcia-Roza dishes out. Not a bad trade-off, and one worth picking up the novel for.

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"I was vindicated. I'd solved even more of the mystery--Nancy Drew and the Case of the Homeless Girl ... 'I'm glad I found out. Knowledge is power, right?' If I only knew what to do with all this power I had."

That’s Janice Erlbaum writing about a homeless girl she befriended at a New York City shelter. Over the course of a difficult year, Erlbaum struggled to help this girl, uncovering some dark secrets along the way. You can read the results in her new memoir, Have You Found Her.

While fabulists like James Frey give the form a black eye, good memoirs are based on plenty of detective work, both emotionally and physically. Today, Erlbaum explains how she reconstructed the life of this troubled girl named Sam in her new book--helping us become better memoir detectives.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
Your book incorporates letters, speeches, phone messages, and other archived material from Sam. How did you collect all this material and how did you turn it into prose? Any advice for using this kind of research in an active way, so our memoirs don't end up sounding like scholarly papers?

Janice Erlbaum:
Well, I’m hugely sentimental, and a little bit of a pack rat, so I tend to keep things like letters and cards, especially when they’re from someone very dear to me. So I had a manila folder in my files called “SAM,” into which I stuffed all her letters, drawings, and etc; I also had the few emails she’d sent me in an archive.

Continue reading...

 

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Off the top of your head, name as many Caldecott Award winning picture books that have been turned into children's television shows starting . . . . NOW!

I thought of My Friend Rabbit which Nelvana tv is turning into a show. That's about it, though. Max and his Wild Things never got into syndication. Forget about the Flotsam show (though the movie potential is VAST). And what about the Smoky Night series? Yeah... maybe not.

In other news, there will also be a Mr. Men Show to boot:

Cartoon Network will be the US home for The Mr. Men Show (52x11'), a new sketch animated series From Chorion Ltd , which is slated to launch on the network in January 2008. Additionally, Cartoon Network is also co-producing the series with Chorion. The Mr. Men Show is based on the Mr. Men and Little Miss books created in the 1970s by Roger Hargreaves. The series is written and produced by Kate Boutilier and Eryk Casermiro and animated in the US by Renegade Animation .

Maybe I was just a weird kid, but that Mr. Men series creeped the hell out of me as a kid. I can't explain it. They just did.

Thanks to Cynopsis Kids for the links.

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