For those who celebrate National poetry Month, I hope you enjoy this relevant excerpt from Sleeping Freshman Never Lie ( Read more... )

The nicest thing about knowing I wouldn't get any sort of listing or honor from the 2013 ALA awards is finding out I was wrong. I just got an email from Don Gallo, letting me know that First Crossings, which contains my short story, "Pulling up Stakes," was picked for the Popular Paperbacks list. The list contains 90 books in four categories, but ( Read more... )

You know, I spent the entire election tolerating the comments from the other side on my Facebook acount. Sometimes we argued. Sometimes, we reasoned. I accepted some of your points, and tried to see your position. I have had several excellent debates with young men of middle-school age, and gained a great deal of admiration for several adult Romney ( Read more... )

Most people are disturbed when they see Tea Party and other far-right Republicans speak against the abortion rights of a rape victim by using the argument, "A life created by rape is still a gift from God."  There has been much debate about when life begins, and there are strong feelings on both sides about abortion.  But there's another aspect of ( Read more... )

The Ban-Proof Bookshelf 
Don't you just hate having your day interrupted to deal with a book challenge? Whether it's in the form of a shouting parent, a sign-waving picket line, or a smoldering pile of burning books setting off the sprinklers in the YA section, there's nothing like a protest to put a crimp in a peaceful afternoon spent monitoring ( Read more... )

Today's special word is "Mittiotic." Pretty much anything Mitt Romney says is stupid, but on occasion, he rises to special heights of Mittiocy.  The thing is, as simple as his mind is, his Mittiocies tend to have layers of complexity. For example, everyone is jumping on his statement, ""You can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in ( Read more... )

Twitter is currently down, so I can't post the one liner I just came up with.  Instead, I figured I'd use this space to show the thoughts that led to the joke.  It started when I saw, on Facebook, that Mick Jagger just turned 69.  The post included a picture.  Skipping over the first glimmer of the sort of tasteless response that generally rises ( Read more... )

On December 7th (no symbolism there) of 2011, Marshall Cavenidsh Children's Books announced that they had been sold to Amazon. This announcement would have meant nothing to me, except that on March of that year, I sold a young-adult short-story collection to them. Extremities: Stories of Death, Murder, and Revenge is a book I had been trying to ( Read more... )

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There's a place for bad behavior...

A boy gets an alien death ray from his uncle. A gamer gets hooked on casino gambling. A bully steals steroids from an enormous athlete. What could possibly go wrong? Once in a while, I'll write a story that contains an item, a scene, or an action that might be considered inappropriate for classroom reading. ( Read more... )