When superheroes get into social networking

My baby brother made this video - voiced it, shot it, drew it! I especially love the voice!

Happy Random Things

So today, I had the choice of blogging about something really serious, heavy and mind blowing about the publishing industry or just chilling and sharing two really random but nice things I read online. Guess which one I chose.

First really nice thing: Nathan Bransford, the uber-blogging agent in New York (I think. You think Nathan's in NY?) - one of the 1376 commenters on his blog the other day pointed out that the world of publishing is turning into mush was no reason to be negative. So he's been positive all week. Which made me feel really positive too. Let me share the last two very positive itemsfrom his positive blog post Ten Commandments for the Happy Writer:

9. Be thankful for what you have. If you have the time to write you're doing pretty well. There are millions of starving people around the world, and they're not writing because they're starving. If you're writing: you're doing just fine. Appreciate it.

10. Keep writing. Didn't find an agent? Keep writing. Book didn't sell? Keep writing. Book sold? Keep writing. OMG an asteroid is going to crash into Earth and enshroud the planet in ten feet of ash? Keep writing. People will need something to read in the resulting permanent winter

Second really nice thing: I was just browsing through the vlog (VIDEO blog - how many times do I have to explain this?)of the brothers Hank and John Green - John being the award winning YA author - when I came upon a 2007 item called "How Nerdfighters Drop Insults". What's so cool about John is in most of his posts he manages to (A) Tell kids it's okay to be nerdy (B)Make literary references that might get kids interested in reading. In this video, he quotes Shakespeare:

Treasure from Manila: Pieces of Me

MANILA -- On the flight to Manila to visit my mother, I read Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (thanks to Daoud for lending it to me), and it was just as dazzling as one critic described it. A blurb from the Observer said:

“Mister Pip is the first of Jones’ six novels to have travelled from his native New Zealand to the UK. It is so hoped that it won’t be the last.”

Discovering that there are more novels by an author you've just fallen in love with is like winning the bonus question in a game show. How wonderful that Lloyd Jones has more treasure for me to uncover ... IF of course UK publishers deign to bring them over.

I went to Bologna last year to attend the SCBWI Conference that precedes the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. I was stunned by the number of book stores, stuffed with books in Italian. Books I will never read unless I find a way to become proficient in the language.

Makes you think, what a disadvantage it is to have just one tongue and access to just one canon of publishing. All those books waiting to be read out there ...

I count myself lucky to have access to an ‘other’ world of books in my native Philippines –although bookselling sensibilities here definitely deserve the description ‘Developing’ in Developing World.

Charging around Manila visiting bookstores, I was at first disheartened by the thick wallpaper of Stephenie Meyer at shop entrances, the thicket of American titles in front and a puny selection of Filipino books hidden away in a corner. At several shops, I was escorted to the Filipino book section by staff who seemed bemused that anyone should be interested in local writing.

But at one book store, I was excited to find Filipino authors mixed in with Western authors, instead of hidden away in a dusty exotic corner. The display tables that other bookstores reserved for Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling were given over to picture books that starred water buffalos and monkeys instead of fluffy bunnies and red-breasted robins, there were Filipino thrillers and romance novels, and even children’s historical fiction. Bravo, Power Books.

Here is some of the treasure I’ve amassed from trawling the bookstores:

Tiger on the Wall by Annette Flores Garcia, illustrated by Joanne de Leon
The Very Good Carabao by Rosario Calma and illustrated by Liza Flores.

I must have read these books a hundred times to my three year old nephew. These are published by the pioneering children's book publisher Adarna Books (someday I hope to become one of their authors!).

The graphic novel scene in Manila is exciting, with ranks of local graphic novels on display everywhere. I picked Martial Law Babies by Arnold Arre - because I was a child during the Martial Law years in the Philippines.


I was so excited to find young fiction by Carla M. Pacis - a middle grade chapter book Owl Friends that described the friendship between two refugees of the Pinatubo volcanic eruption, a tribal boy and a little girl. Enrique El Negro imagines the story of a Filipino boy named Enrique who is recorded by Pigafetta to have travelled with Magellan as a translator before Magellan's death in the Philippines in 1521.

Owl Friends, Illustrations by Yasmin S. Ong
Enrique El Negro, Illustrations by Mel Silvestre

I also found this beautifully designed book about the use of fruits and vegetables in folk medicine - it will be a treasure trove of research for my novels which always have Philippine folk elements.

Medicinal Fruits and Vegetables
by Jaime Z. Galvez Tan and Rebecca Marana-Galvez Tan

And then there was this fantastic fact book about the Aswang, a Filipino vampire monster - another great character to add to my bestiary. The Aswang Inquiry based on a report by Frank Lynch, retold and illustrated by Gilda Cordero-Fernando, one of my favourite Filipino authors. I also acquired collections of Filipino folk stories and legends, books on superstitions, DVDs of classic Filipino movies - all in the name of research ... and fun.

I stocked up on books by Jose Y Dalisay - a fabulous writer who really ought to be writing more short stories intead of newspaper columns. I am at the moment reading Killing Time in a Warm Place and it's brilliant.


In Mister Pip, a girl in Papua New Guinea is read the story of Pip from Great Expectations by her English school teacher:

Mister Watts had given us another piece of the world. I found I could go back to it as often as I liked. Not that I thought of what we were hearing as a story. No. I was hearing someone give an account of themselves

Bringing these books back from the Philippines is just like bringing back pieces of me that I had left behind long ago.
 
 

Ten simple pleasures on my visit to Manila

MANILA -- On Facebook, I keep getting invitations to create lists – 25 random thoughts, seven things about me, 10 unusual facts I know etc.

Well here’s a list. And all my online friends can breathe a sigh of relief ... I’m not tagging anyone to do the same.

Watching London engulfed in snow on TV, with the electric fan on full blast.


Drops of water on palm leaves after a tropical rainshower.


The Indonesian print on my mother’s pyjamas.


Seeing this lovely painting of Remedios Circle, a place near the flat where I used to live. It’s become quite rundown now, and I’m glad there’s a memory of its better days here.


Going to a good bookstore. Power Books in SM Megamall.


Stumbling upon an empty restaurant with a piano, late at night, while in the company of musician friends


Having my family go bananas playing bananagrams.


Watching my niece play volleyball for my university.


Enjoying the way Filipinos find their use of English so hilarious. Without Further Adieu illustrated by Elbert Or, published by Tahanan Books


... and PURPLE plants!

Brilliant Animation on Meg Rosoff's Blog

The problem with Meg Rosoff's blog is that you can't subscribe to the diary. So you have to keep checking back in case she posts something.

So I checked back today and found this.

I'm so in touch with that emotion.

(If you can't see the animation, click here)

More Catherine Tate Procrastination: Queen At Two O'Clock Sketch

So I'm still taking Catherine Tate's work process advice.

So this is Catherine Tate doing 'Am I Bovvered' for the Queen at a Royal Thingy Performance. Warning though, have a pillow handy to muffle your laughing so nobody else knows you're procrastinating.

Font Comedy: Appealing to Your Inner Geek

Over at Jane's There Are No Rules (which has moved swiftly up my list of must read blogs) a hilarious video that appeals to my inner geek!

Shots rang out, as shots are known to do

My writing pal Christopher Klimowitz forwarded this hilarious list of similes and metaphors formulated by kids in school essays - makes you revise that manuscript a bit more closely!

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are known to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Doris Lessing on the Inconvenience of Success

So apparently winning the Nobel Prize has been a "bloody disaster" for Doris Lessing - now incessantly dogged for interviews and photo-shoots .

Lessing, only the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature says she no longer has time to write:

It has stopped, I don't have any energy any more.

In fact, she says she's giving up writing completely.

This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don't imagine you'll have it forever.

Use it while you've got it because it'll go, it's sliding away like water down a plughole.

Mind you, she's 88.


Listen to an interview with Doris Lessing on BBC 4's Front Row on 12 May

Another reason why we should all engage with technology

I am constantly bashing on about how children's authors have to engage with the internet, technology - with the default world that their readers are growing up with. A few days ago, I received this birthday greeting from my nephew in the Philippines - which absolutely made my day. Although it's made by his parents of course, this is a kid who doesn't see anything unusual in video-taping a message or chatting to me on webcam. He's cute, too.

Punish Angela Whether We Like It Or Not

So I have this mad friend, Angela, who really ought to be writing her novels but instead has launched an insane blog called Reviewed Here First.

The idea is she MUST BE THE FIRST TO REVIEW a children's book. Or else.

And now this raving if talented YA writer wants me to set up some punishments if she fails in the task.

I mean, good grief.

As a compulsively helpful person, I must do her bidding.

If Angela fails (as in, if someone else has already reviewed a book), she must be PUNISHED. So, Angela, SHOULD YOU FAIL TO REVIEW A BOOK FIRST:

1. You must post a picture of yourself doing an animal face - preferably an ape face, my favourite.

2. OR you must rewrite a chapter from any of your novels in picture book style.

3. OR you must rewrite a picture book text in YA style.

4. OR you must take a famous picture book text and add werewolf / zombie / vampires or a horror element to it - to fulfil agent Sarah Davies' statement in Bologna: "horror is the new fantasy".

Any other insane suggestions - stick to children's writing themes please - heartily accepted!

This Panda has Nothing To Do With Writing For Children

But it's hilarious!

Happy World Book Day (in England and Ireland)

Happy World Book Day (although apparently only in England and Ireland) ...

To celebrate, I want to share a moment of joy I had yesterday.

I came down for breakfast, grumpy as usual. On the dining room table, I saw that the loaf of bread was wearing a hat.

I turned around and on the kitchen counter was a vase of tulips and an egg.

I don't know why but I was happy for the rest of the day.