Thoughts (Sans Werewolves, Sadly)

. . . although, of course, now I am thinking about werewolves.

Did my booktalk at the library this past Wednesday! It went fine, although I think some of the kids were reading at maybe lower levels and not so into it. Also, I think they didn’t know what to think of me waving books at them and going on in dramatic tones about the fates of Katniss Everdeen and Artemis Fowl.*

Still have not seen the Last Airbender movie. Plan to at some point, but not during its opening week. Perhaps I will instead watch a couple of episodes of the actual show. Meantime, have a video that rehashes in just over a minute why I’m not contributing to the movie’s opening box office haul!

On a totally different note, this is a fascinating article about what might be the effects of this whole “death of traditional publishing” thing I keep hearing about, if indeed it is an upcoming death, not an over-hyped case of sniffles.

Still editing The Dogwatchers! I hope to finish within a week or two. Have I mentioned it’s long?

*separately. That would be an extremely ill-advised crossover.

Booktalk in, er, 2-D

Photos! Courtesy of a family friend in attendance at the booktalk.

Some members of the audience. They’ve got great facial expressions, haven’t they? The girl on the far right, though she looks like she could be bored, came right up after the booktalk and checked out Uglies.

Here’s me with the two original raffle winners. The woman who won Howl’s Moving Castle then asked me to redo the drawing for it, as she wanted it to go to a kid, or at least someone who had a kid to give it to.

Me with the final winners of the raffle. Huzzah!

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Also, sad and scary news for NJ librarians.

Booktalk Flier!

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I will be heading home this weekend to do a booktalk on Saturday the 10th at the Open House of the new library. This is most exciting. And what do exciting things get? FLIERS.

(Well, okay, not all exciting things have fliers. They should. Although I suppose it could end up being an issue with paper waste.)

So, I did a drawing today which is on the fliers. Woo!

(Click to make it bigger, though still not as big as it is on the Flier to End All Fliers.)

This is totally what I look like in my head. Although, strictly speaking, my eyes are not larger than than the lenses of my glasses.

The books shown are two of the ones I’ll be booktalking. Who can guess which they are? (If you know me, then I suspect the one on the right won’t be hard.)

I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I made the actual flier in Word. The handout I’ll have at the booktalk, which contains more pictures (though they aren’t drawings) was also made in Word. I still love my Mac with a True Love That Will Never Die, but am beginning to be a bit disenchanted with AppleWorks. Strange, because graphics programs are the very reason my family has Macs – my artist parents have always used them, and they just sort of carried over into family use. But I tried making the handout in AppleWorks first, and it was not happy times.

On the other hand, I still like AppleWorks for writing, despite the fact that my Information Tools class has shown me some neat stuff Word can do for which I can’t seem to find a good parallel in AppleWorks. The main thing is that I appreciate how, unlike some Microsoft composition programs I could (re)mention, AppleWorks does not constantly try to autoformat everything. It doesn’t assume it knows better than I do. Theoretically, I should be able to turn off this aspect of Word, but I think this may be a myth. I’ve never been able to find a way to turn off the autoformat stuff in Word. I imagine that if I did find one, the program would resist. “I wouldn’t do that, Dave.”

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.

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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.