This afternoon, my first box of review copies arrived from No Flying No Tights! Glorious, glorious graphic novels. Readery has commenced already, with reviewery to follow shortly. My thesis and my term papers can just, like, write each other, right?
Goings-On! And Thesis!
It’s thesis time! By which I mean it is my last semester, and I’m having oodles of fun working on my thesis, which is a study to try and determine the most effective and popular way to shelve graphic novels in public libraries. I’m super-psyched about this project. It would seem my department likes it, too – they gave me an award for the best research proposal of the semester. Woo!
Several months ago, after meeting with the director of my hometown’s public library, I located all of the eighty-plus graphic novels in the building. They were scattered through the Juvenile Fiction and Juvenile Nonfiction, Teen Fiction and Teen Nonfiction, Adult Nonfiction, and even Science Fiction, sections. I took note of all of them and started recording how many times they checked out each month.
After getting three months’ circulation data, I have moved to Phase Two of the project: pulling all of the graphic novels to place in a separate section. They are now marked in the catalog as graphic novels, and green tape on their spines will hopefully get shelvers to return them to their new spot – here.
Another shot:
I will now see whether, and how, the circulation rates change. My hypothesis is that they will go up, as I suspect many patrons who like graphic novels simply didn’t realize the library had these.
The display on top could be a spurious factor, certainly, but I put it there for two reasons:
- It promotes the new section – and graphic novels! – for the library and its patrons, the interests of whom are at least as important as the pristine scientific nature of my study.
- I need it to display, and give IRB-required information on, the survey that I’m asking patrons to fill out about the new section. Hopefully, this will help to support the data I gather on circ rates by showing which shelving system patrons actually prefer.
Also, I worked hard on it.
All those middle-school posterboard projects finally pay off! Huzzah!
A Fantastic Quiz
For my Popular Materials class, a partner and I presented on the fantasy genre. To kick off our presentation, I handed out a quiz I’d written – not to be collected or graded, which might have gotten me assassinated, but to show classmates that they already knew more about fantasy than they might have thought.
(About certain kinds of fantasy, anyway.)
The quiz was so popular with my classmates that I thought I’d post it here.
Really Puts My Grad School Experience in Perspective
(This video may take awhile to load, but is totally worth it.)
Surely You Qualify . . .
. . . for at least a few the marvelous creations of the Merit Badger. Why don’t you check and find out which ones?
In other news, blah blah back at school blah. Just got an internship at the Carrboro Branch Library! Which is a public library located inside a middle school! And which may or may not include use of my always-questionable and now extremely rusty Spanish skills! Will be starting on Wednesday.
Good News in the World of Me
I just got an offer to work at the library again this summer! Am super-psyched. All this learning about libraryish things has made me eager to do some more actual librarying.
Also, I’ve learned that I will be able to get graduate credit next semester for a class I wanted that isn’t in my department: Victorian Literature and Contemporary Issues. (An English class.) I’ll be taking that, two required courses, and Web Development I. I expect a fun and exciting fall semester!
Talking Books, and Some Unhappy News
I’m going to put the post I was going to write before I heard this news first, mostly out of hope that the bad news will turn out okay.
The good news is that I did my first booktalk today. I did it on two books, Artemis Fowl and Mister Monday, presenting them to my YA Literature class. It took six or seven minutes, and went very well, which is good considering that I rehearsed it for literally hours over the past three days, and now my housemates probably think I not only talk to myself, but do so very repetitively, and about fairies.
As I say, the presentation went splendidly. Two classmates told me afterwards that they “don’t usually read fantasy” but thought they might pick these up based on my booktalk. This is heartening, especially considering that my ideal booktalk audience would contain some people who actually do read fantasy, and are perhaps even the ages for which these books were, strictly speaking, written.
While I don’t know anything about what the audience might be, I may have a chance to do a booktalk at the open house of the new library in my hometown. (You know, the one that’s AMAZING.) I’ll have to pick out a set of books, maybe eight or so, of which the library has at least one copy. (Artemis Fowl stays, and I might be able to convince them to get a copy or two of Mister Monday – or donate one myself.) Since booktalking is a skill I’d love to practice, I’m thrilled about this opportunity.
Speaking of practice, I learned two important things from my ridiculous amount of rehearsal for this booktalk:
1. Practice from different angles. I started out giving my booktalk to a mirror, but then when I tried it without the mirror, I realized I’d been taking visual cues from my own reflection, if that makes any sense. I’d also gotten used to fixing my eyes on what is possibly the least likely thing for me to see during the real presentation, i.e. me. Similarly, when I practiced the presentation while pacing in my room, I found myself cuing off my footsteps. Doing different kinds of practice kept any of these from becoming crutches I couldn’t work without.
2. You know how they always tell you that if you mess up during a performance, you should just keep going? This is good advice, but it can be hard given that generally, if you’re like me, you don’t do this during rehearsal. If I mess up while practicing, I tend to start the line over. This is fine when you’re still in the memorization stage, but once you know the lines, it can be helpful to work on delivery the way you’ll actually do it. This includes actually practicing the ability to gloss over any little slips.
Even though today’s presentation was a success, I hope to get to a point of a little more spontaneity. Apparently my booktalk today came off as smooth and natural – at least, according to a friend in the class – but I definitely had a script in my head. I knew how to deal with little slips, but I felt like a bit of a recording. Funnily enough, the words were a lot like my original, spontaneous descriptions of the books, just a little more eloquent and polished – and then practiced like crazy to keep them that way, and to make sure that I didn’t freeze in front of the class. I wouldn’t want to try a totally off-the-cuff booktalk, because it would likely include, “Oops, and I forgot to tell you . . .” and “Oh yeah, but before that . . .” Well, I’ll keep working.
***
And the unfortunate news. Apparently, Diana Wynne Jones has cancer. She’s doing chemo and radiotherapy. Join me in willing good health to my favorite author in the world.
New Life Skill!
Making book trailers is absolutely a life skill! I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Yes, I have created my first book trailer! It is not for any book of mine, but part of a presentation for my Young Adult Litearture and Related Materials class. Because we were encouraged to do our presentations on books we had not read, I ended up with Flyy Girl, which is urban literature. This is not, as my friends might guess, My Cup of Tea. Strictly speaking, I don’t even like tea, but prefer a nice foamy cocoa, while “street lit” is, mood-wise, somewhat more akin to a mug of blood-spattered gravel.
(I’m not even talking quality here so much as grittiness. Although if you’re looking for quality writing, there are still – cough – a few – books I would recommend before Flyy Girl.)
But I’m not here to bash anyone’s writing, and I had a great time making the book trailer. Here it is!
Crossover!
My Human Information Interactions class has assigned a paper. I have to write about a time when I had an information need, how I went about trying to resolve it, and how that played out. (This need must not be a simple factual question that can be answered easily.)
Writing has provided me with an unthinkable number of choices for this paper. Ye gods, I made acorn cakes from scratch to resolve an incredibly minor point. I am a research fiend. I’ve decided, though, to do my paper on my extensive research on albinism, which I started for the purpose of writing The Dogwatchers.
It’s funny how many bizarre things I have, at some time, dedicated myself to researching. None of these searches is ever totally over. I may be satisfied, but if I happen to run across new information or a new possible source, I’ll jump on it. Witness my searching UNC Chapel Hill’s library for information on albinism when The Dogwatchers was nearly finished, after years of harassing doctor friends, the Internet, etc. on the subject.
(The real question is, will I have the faith in my own tact to ask my dad’s new coworker, who has albinism – I think it’s even the same type as the character in The Dogwatchers – to read it? “Ahem, so, [Adorable Young Music Professor], your position is tenure-track, is it not? Remind me, is that one of those committees my father is on? It is? Oh, no reason. By the way, I’ve written this book . . .”)
(Okay, I could probably be more tactful than that.)
They Call it the Middle . . .
. . . but it’s actually full of beginnings and endings! Of chapters, that is. And every one an opportunity!
One hears a lot of suggestions about how a book shouldn’t begin: character waking up, cheap hook that doesn’t really tie in well, disconnected dialogue, long chunks of description or backstory. The same things don’t necessarily apply to openings of chapters after the first. Obviously, you still don’t want a cheap hook that doesn’t tie in, but “character waking up” is back in the game, especially if the previous chapter ended with the character being knocked unconscious or going to sleep in a strange place. Similarly, dialogue or description can hold a reader’s attention better when the reader already has a reason to care. For example, a detailed description of a bank may be hard to pull off as the opening to a book, but work well at the beginning of the chapter after the protagonist decides to rob it.
Chapter openings are great opportunities for changing pace. If one chapter closes with a closely-described scene, the next might start with, “The next day . . .” or “For the rest of the afternoon . . .” or “Over the next few days . . .” You can do this by changing scenes, of course, but a chapter break is cleaner and more decisive. Alternately, you can shift from summary to scene.
And now,