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?

If you are a bookseller, librarian, teacher, or reader, my questions are:

• 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?

Thanks much for your help. I’ll compile the best suggestions and make them available to all.

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.



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




Seriously, if you have one of these toys, go to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission site at www.cpsc.gov 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!

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.

Today's word of the day is: Giffys

Giffys, pl. n. 1. Items presented in TV commercials as ideal gift items but which seem more "iffy" than "gifty".

November/December are prime gift-buying season. Businesses can plump their bottom lines by positioning their products as giftables. I understand all that, but is anyone really deciding that this is the year to give out Lincoln Navigator SUVs with gigantic bows on top? Really? One for the mailman perhaps, and one for the paperboy, and one for the Secret Santa exchange at work... Pretty soon it adds up to some serious money!

Two other commercials suggest lottery tickets or gasoline as ideal holiday gifts. Lottery tickets and gasoline... One's a slip of cardstock that's almost certainly worth absolutely nothing and the other is a strong-smelling liquid capable of burning down your house--probably for folks on Santa's "naughty list" who already have an allotment of coal.

Hopefully folks on Santa's "good list" will be receiving copies of THE PENGUINS OF DOOM this year--and Santa can get about 4,000 copies for the price of a single Lincoln Navigator!

Does anyone else have a favorite "giffy" they've seen advertised this year?

Today's word of the day is: Evel

I had an Evel Knievel playset when I was nine or ten. Everyone had an Evel Knievel playset back then. It consisted of an Evel Knievel figure in a white jumpsuit with blue stripes and stars, a little motocycle for the figure to ride, and a set of ramps. If you pulled a string of grooved plastic through the motorcyle's workings, it would shoot forward in any direction it was pointed. Sometimes mini-Evel would make a spectacular jump over the family pet, and just as often mini-Evel would make a spectacular crash down a flight of stairs. It was always one spectacular extreme or the other, just like the real-life full-sized stuntman!

Evel was a visionary.  Most people would look at a row of buses and think, "elementary school field trip," but not Evel. When he looked at those same buses his thoughts turned to how fast he'd have to go on a motorcycle to jump over them. He had the same thoughts when he looked at the fountain at Caesar's Palace Casino. Or Snake River Canyon. So maybe he had a one-track mind that tended toward motorcycle jumps, but that didn't make him any less of a visionary.

And he was extremely tenacious in his chosen line of work. Some authors get discouraged from a few rejection letters, but Evel wasn't dissuaded even after he came up short on a landing ramp in Las Vegas, tumbled over the handlebars, and skidded across the pavement into the Dunes parking lot. He received a crushed pelvis and femur, fractures to his hip, wrist, and both ankles, and a concussion that kept him in a coma for 29 days--and that was at the start of his career, rather than the end. Take that, rejection notices!

If anyone has ever seemed immortal, it was Evel Knievel--but as many times as he cheated death through daredevilry, he finally succumbed yesterday to a terminal lung disease at 69 years old.

Evel had always wanted to jump the Grand Canyon and even employed NASA technicians to design a rocket-powered motorcycle to make it possible, but he never received permission from the government to make the attempt. In his honor, I've had Septina Nash try it with a skateboard. Good luck, Septina!

Today's word of the day is: (snow)

(snow): n. 1. A sprinkling of white stuff from the sky that vanishes into a clear liquid if you blink your eyes. Not to be confused with SNOW!!! that accumulates and can be made into coal-faced statues or spherical projectiles.

We had our first (snow) of the season today.  I actually had the experience of brushing something off my car windshield before the temperature rose a half-degree and it all disappeared.  Still looking forward to SNOW!!!

In other news...  My cable company sent a card to thank me for being a customer. To show that they're down with the community, the card depicts a building that purports to be "Town Hall"--except that it's actually the public library. Even if you didn't know the building, you might be clued in by the word LIBRARY carved in two-foot letters along the portico. The real Town Hall is a few blocks down on the other side of the street, in the same place it's been since 1854.

Today's word of the day is: Digital Bandwagon

I don't know where the whole "five things on Friday" practice started but more and more of my LiveJournal buddies seem to be pitching out five random and often unrelated items of bloggage at the end of the each work-week. Am I the type of person to jump onto a digital bandwagon? Considering the fact that I have a blog, a MySpace page, and a Facebook profile, the answer would seem to be yes.

1. This weekend, my thoughts will be with friends attending and presenting at the annual convention of NCTE, the National Council of Teachers of English. Speaking of which, you'd think that teachers of English would follow Strunk & White's advice and keep their organization's name as concise as possible: the National Council of English Teachers, or even the English Teachers National Council.  All I can think of is that they didn't want their organization to be called ETNC and possibly confused with the East Turkistan National Center.  With those two superfluous prepositions, all they have to worry about now is confusion with that other NCTE, the National Center for Transgender Equality.
2. I'm nursing a pseudo-cold. Usually my colds typically start with a scratchy throat and progress through a predictable sequence of symptoms--sore throat, congestion, fever, and cough--over the course of three or four days. This time I battled the scratchy throat for three days and nights until it finally developed into a minor sore throat and just enough congestion to give me the cool Barry White voice that is the only upside of this illness. The voice only lasted long enough for me to belt out a couple songs in the shower and is already returning to normal. A quick and easy recovery will hopefully continue.
3. This Sunday's Patriots/Bills football game has been rescheduled from early afternoon to 8:15PM, allowing sports fans in New England to watch the New England Revolution play the Houston Dynamo in the Major League Soccer Cup game at noon.  It's extremely considerate of the Patriots to reschedule the game time in order to accommodate people who might want to watch both games.
4. I've been thinking about fairy tales lately, since I have a child on the way and will eventually need some bedtime story fodder. I want to provide my daughter with stories that provoke her developing imagination, draw on traditional sources, and present a comfortably consistent story world.  I know that retold fairy tales are a huge genre with many new and innovative books coming out every year, but the author in me wants stories that are mine all mine--which means I should probably start putting them together now.
5. My just-released book, THE PENGUINS OF DOOM, grew out of a story I wrote over ten years ago on the Superguy list--and coincidentally the Superguy world seems to be suddenly springing back to life with new stories from veterans Gary Olson, Eric Burns, Mason Kramer, Chris Angelini, Dave Van Domelen, etc.  Cool stuff.

That's five and I'm outta here!

Today's word of the day is: Team

I'm trying to be strict about only following one sports team at a time, because otherwise I'd never get to do any writing, websurfing, or games of Spider Solitaire.  The Red Sox are my team from April through October, but after that it gets tricky because the Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins have all chosen to play their seasons at the same time.

But this year it was an easy choice.  The Red Sox season officially ended on October 30th with the World Series championship parade of duck boats through the city of Boston and free Red Sox tacos for everyone in America, courtesy of Taco Bell.  And there on the wall of Taco Bell, where we elected to go instead of having our free tacos delivered, was a poster for the Eastern Division MLS semi-finals.  The Patriots and Celtics may be off to great seasons, but the New England Revolution soccer club beat them both to the playoffs.

So I've been diligently following the Revolution as they demolished the New York Red Bulls (in a crushing 1-0 shutout) and the Chicago Fire (in another devastating 1-0 match) to reach the MLS Cup game.  Those lopsided scores don't even begin to reflect how dominating the Revolution have been in the post-season--which I've had to follow on the Internet because the games don't seem to be televised on a network I have access to.

Now it all comes down to Sunday's MLS Cup game at R.F.K Stadium in Washington, D.C., where the Revolution face off against the defending champions, the Houston Dynamo, in a rematch of last year's Cup classic. America will be watching!

After this upcoming weekend, I'll check in with the Patriots or Celtics to decide which team to follow next.  I hope they've been having good seasons so far.

Today's word of the day is: Nominations

Little Willow (slayground) has posted a list of the nominees (so far) in the middle grade category of the 2nd Annual Cybil Awards, which are selected by and judged by panels of prominent bloggers.  There are lots of great nominees, which supports my thesis that 2007 has been an awesome year for books.  It's an honor to have THE PENGUINS OF DOOM included on such an amazing list.