SAB + SIKIDS = awesome

Big news! We've signed a deal with Sports Illustrated Kids to publish graphic novels and chapter books. We're already at work on the first set of books, and it is shaping up to be action-packed and exciting. Here's the article on PW.com.

ALA events

Meet the Authors
Capstone Author Signings at ALA 2009!
Booth 2040

Meet graphic novelist and bestselling author Donald Lemke! He will be signing copies of his popular Stone Arch Books titles Zinc Alloy vs. Frankenstein and the 2008 Junior Library Guild Premier Selection Captured off Guard: The Attack on Pearl Harbor, in addition to Investigating the Scientific Method with Max Axiom from Captone Press. See him at the booth during the following signing sessions:
Saturday: 3:00 p.m.—4:00 p.m
Sunday: 11:00 a.m.—12:00 p.m.

Interested in engaging your reluctant readers? Meet Anastasia Suen, prolific blogger and author of more than 100 books for children. She will be signing Picture Window Books' The US Supreme Court (featured in the conference session Nonfiction Book Blast: Booktalks for Reluctant Readers) and the brand new Stone Arch Readers series Robot and Rico. Anastasia's available at the following times:
Sunday: 1:00 p.m.—2:00 p.m.
Monday: 11:00 a.m.—12:00 p.m.

And Thanks for All the Monsters!

Author Martin Powell reminds me that this week is the anniversary of Ray Harryhausen’s birthday (June 29, 1920). Harryhausen was the creator of some of Hollywood’s first, best, and oddest special effects. He made all those creepy, Claymation creatures in such Grade-B classics as Jason and the Argonauts, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Martin grew up on these movies, like I did, which partly explains his love of the horror genre, as well as his talent for fast-paced thrills and adventure. Martin was nominated for an Eisner Award for his Sherlock Holmes/Dracula page-turner, Scarlet in Gaslight. We were lucky enough to have him pen several graphic retellings for Stone Arch Books, including The Hound of the Baskervilles, Rumpelstiltskin, and Red Riding Hood. He knows scary! Thanks, Martin, for telling me about Harryhausen’s birthday. I remember watching his The 7th Voyage of Sinbad on TV as a kid. I always screamed for my mom to come and stand in front of the screen whenever the giant Cyclops came on. That monster scared the pudding out of me, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn off the TV. Boy, I haven’t thought about that movie for years. . .

Maybe I should call Mom.

"Let There Be Lightbulbs!"

Like most authors, I’m a packrat. I hoard old journals and notebooks, out-of-date atlases, out-of-print magazines (remember Omni?), crinkled newspaper clippings, and phrases I copied from books back when my handwriting was better. I came across this line the other day from Osbert Sitwell’s 1949 autobiographical Laughter in the Next Room. He describes the “permanent stain of blue or purple ink on the inner side of the middle finger of my right hand.” Up until the advent of the computer keyboard, this was the distinguishing mark of the professional writer. Our high-tech society has cleaned up our writing spaces and created another challenge: Lighting.

There are so many choices now -- backlighting, overhead lighting, side lighting, ambient, indirect. Here in the Stone Arch Books office, every editor and designer has his or her own individual preference. Here’s a small random sampling:

Sean (Billy Blaster): No overhead lighting. Has spillover from another editor’s light. Also, uses a retro looking desk lamp perched high above his keyboard.

Hilary (Robot & Rico): She inhabits the darkest cubicle! One lone 40-watt bulb burns in front of a 3-foot high face of Daniel Radcliffe from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Emily (Katie Woo): Lots of lighting! But she hates fluorescent lights, so the building manager removed one tube from each overhead fixture above her space. Their radiance is softened by the glow of a small lamp.

Brann (Zinc Alloy/DC Batman chapter books): Built-in desk lighting that he almost always turns off. Sometimes he turns on a standing lamp that is adorned with a golden Hello Kitty coin bank and an Indiana Jones-style fedora. Apparently, if you remove his lamp, poison darts shoot out of the walls.

Is That How You Spell Myers-Briggs?

Yesterday I spoke at the Southdale Public Library to a group of parents, kids, and teen library volunteers. I talked about my mysteries and scary stories, including Curtains! and The Book That Dripped Blood. We had a great discussion about monsters, poisons, and Agatha Christie – your basic library discussion when eager young readers are involved, right? Then, a mother of two young boys asked me, “Do you have to be a good speller to write books?” Hmm. I answered that no, you don’t. But -- and this is a big but -- anything you submit to a publisher should be as polished and professional looking as possible.

Weirdly enough, a few days earlier I had been working in my office at home and came across the results of an old Myers-Briggs test that I had taken. Remember, those? They helped you identify the way you processed information or related to those around you? I was labeled as an INFP: introverted, intuitive, feelings-centered, and flexible. In the M-B universe, there are 16 basic personality types. The INFPers, however, are the only ones pegged to make great editors. And that group consists of a mere 1% of the population. In other words, it’s not easy to find a good editor. The publishing industry has known that for years.

Good editors are not simply good spellers. They are good readers and listeners. They are sensitive to the way a character speaks, and how a scene is described. Like a skilled stand-up comedian, they have great timing. They know when and how events should occur on the page. I work with a terrific team of editors at Stone Arch. We have discussions on phrasing, pacing, shifts of tense, if a joke bombs on the page, when to introduce a villain in a story. Yeah, I know, it sounds geeky, but it’s lots of fun. For those of us in that 1% of the population, this is the stuff we dream about at night. We might not have nightmares about poisons or books that drip blood, but we can wake up in a sweat wondering if we used an adverb correctly. Or accurately. Or precisely.