Was going to post this evening, but realized that I need to do a little more fact checking on the content. Today’s installment will be posted tomorrow, instead. See you then! 🙂
Word Game Review: Pairs in Pears
The other day, I posted about Bananagrams and how I was waiting for the companion books and Pairs in Pears game to arrive. Well, they did, and I’ve already enjoyed several hours of word puzzle fun.
One of the reasons I decided to order Pairs in Pears was that Amazon’s Product Description was, “A fun way for children to develop memory and cognitive skills while learning alphabetical order, word construction, consonants, and vowels, vocabulary, rhyming, etc. Entire alphabet in each of 4 patterns (104 ivory-like tiles) Ages 5+.”
Banangrams is for ages seven and up. I am closer to up, so that was what I had put on my birthday list. My youngest son is actually seven, but is unable to play Bananagrams easily, due to a learning disability (sort of like dyslexia for the ears). As a result of his issues, he has difficulty rhyming and sounding out words. I hoped that Pairs in Pears might help him and be fun at the same time.
There are many ways to play, all of them simpler than Bananagrams. In each variation, the players split up the letter tiles and try to make crossword pairs, with three or more letters in each word. When my son and I sat down to play, I was pleased to see him enjoying himself, mastering words for once, rather than being frustrated by them.
As the game progressed, I noticed that being able to hold the tiles in his hands and move them around seemed to help him figure things out. Rather than commiting the letters to a page (and getting them “wrong”), he could manipulate them until they seemed right. When we were done, he wanted to play again.Â
School is out in a few weeks, but next week is his last visit with the reading tutor. He told me that they only write things down in her class, so we’ve decided to get her Pairs in Pears as a goodbye gift. Maybe my son can teach her a thing or two.
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Gone But Not Forgotten: Author E. Nesbit: 1858-1924
Last weekend, I scoured the Kindle Popular Classics in search of something good to read. Paging through, I spied a familiar children’s author, E. (Edith) Nesbit. I had read and enjoyed The Enchanted Castle as a child, but her other titles hadn’t been available at our library. Out of curiosity, I downloaded The Railway Children.
I have no idea what age group the book was originally intended for (I would guess second-graders), but now it would definitely be considered Middle Grade (9-12 year olds). Written in 1906, the language is somewhat dated, but it’s interesting to note that Ms. Nesbit was ahead of her time in style, employing minimal dialogue tags. I am several chapters into the book, and so far have only seen “asked,” “said,” and “cried.” The use of adverbs is limited, as well, although adjectives are used freely. So far, other than a red-haired maid, there have been few descriptions of the characters. I know how old everyone is, what their names and nicknames are, and have a general impression of the clothing/setting/era, but Stephen King would be proud.
Nesbit was one of the first writers to incorporate magical events into the lives of otherwise realistic characters. In fact, she was quite a renowned author in her day, and her work heavily influenced other authors of the time, including C.S. Lewis and Edward Eager, as well as more modern authors such as J. K. Rowling.
Not unusual for a writer in any era, she had an interesting personal life. Ms. Nesbit was born and raised in England, and her father died when she was four. Her family moved frequently throughout her childhood. She didn’t marry her husband, Hubert Bland, until she was obviously pregnant with their first baby. In addition to the three children they had together, Mr. Bland had a long time affair with another woman, and Edith raised their two children, as well. She and her husband were extremely active in politics.
Although her lifestyle was far from exemplary, it did not seem to affect her popularity as a children’s writer. Some of her more famous titles were, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Five Children and It, The House of Arden, The Railway Children and The Enchanted Castle, many of which are available on Kindle Popular Classics (for free), and at Amazon.com.
Try one — they’re good.
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Going Bananas
I have been waiting impatiently since last week for a box to arrive from Amazon.com. One might presume that it is a book order, and it is, but not the sort of book order one might think. It is a BANANAGRAMS order!!!Â
I got the game Bananagrams for my birthday last month, and I love it. First of all, it comes in a zippered banana. Inside are letter tiles similar to Scrabble, but weightier in the hand and ivory smooth. Each person selects some tiles and forms their letters into a crossword. Everyone takes more tiles from the center, as needed, and the other players are forced to do the same until someone’s letters are gone and he/she has an uncontested network of words.
The game is fun, but I also like the companion puzzles included in the instructions. They are simple challenges, such as starting with five words and adding an A to each to make five new words, etc. They are only about a “one” in the difficulty factor, tempting crumbs which lead to the advertisement for the Bananagrams book.
Much to my joy, when I went on Amazon to look for it, I also discovered More Bananagrams, and another game by the same company called Pairs in Pears, which I ordered, too. (There’s another one called Appletters, but I’ll have to wait until Christmas for that.)
All of the items were eligible for Free Super Saver Shipping, but of course, that takes longer.
And so, I wait.
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Just a Trim, Please…
I took my boys to the barber today for their quarterly haircuts. I wanted them to get summer cuts (short) so that they wouldn’t need to go back until school starts in the fall. Neither boy wanted to go, but my youngest was philosophical. “Just tell Char that I want it like it is now, but shorter.”Â
My oldest was another story. At the end of fifth grade, he is very aware of what’s cool and what’s not, and apparently short hair is not. The most prevalent style at the school he attends is basically what he already had: overgrown, slightly past the collar, with bangs pushed just far enough to the side to not interfere with his vision.
In the waiting area, he went through various stall tactics until he realized the futility of that (I threatened him with cutting it myself) and sat down in the chair. Stone faced, he would not speak to the barber, and I finally took pity on him and told her not to buzz it or anything, just trim it a little bit and keep it long in the front.
Several minutes later, I looked over and saw that she had not understood. It was shorter, and she had left it long in the front, but the sideburns were somehow non-existent. The whole look was similar to a cube with a face in front. My son had tears in his eyes, and I could understand why. “Uh, maybe trim up those sideburns a little bit, and expose the ears,” I suggested.
“But this is how they’re wearing it,” said the barber.
“Not at his school!” I said.
She did what I asked and it looked better, but as far as my son was concerned, the damage had been done. He glared at me as she vacuumed his neck, and was muttering fifth grade cuss words as I paid her. Rather than expressing gratitude for my saving him from total humiliation, he whispered, “I hate you.”Â
It occurred to me that the process of editing was similar for me. I liked my manuscript the way it was. I didn’t mind trimming a few adverbs here and there, and was grateful when critique partners pointed out echoed words, but when they suggested some changes that were more dramatic than that, I experienced a great deal of conflict. It was not that I didn’t see the value of their ideas, it was that I knew what I wanted it to look like, and that’s what I wanted to go with. Striving to be reasonable, I weighed their suggestions and realized that the story might benefit from some of them. The current version is not dramatically different, but the pace is better and the action begins earlier. I suspect that it is more marketable than it was.
As we left the barbershop, I noticed that my son’s hair actually looked pretty good. In my opinion, there had been a happy compromise between what each of us wanted and what he’d ended up with. I don’t expect him to admit it, but I think that he basically felt the same way. By the time we’d made it to the parking lot, he was playing with the little car he’d chosen on his way out, and hasn’t mentioned the haircut since.
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On Giving Up
Cate Woods blogged recently about beta readers, and the comment that I wrote has been rolling around in my brain this week, due to the rejection of yet another partial manuscript.
I have sent out more than sixty queries. One agent has requested to see my full manuscript, and six others have requested partials. All of these submissions were ultimately rejected. Many of the responses have been that the manuscript seems like a good, well written story, but no one is AS in love with it as they would need to be to sell it in this market, and/or they are not sure where they would place it.
This is discouraging. It makes me wonder if I should throw in the towel, and maudlinly reflect that my manuscript might just be too beautiful to live. But then I start to think of why I should keep going.
When I was finished with the original draft, I contacted a few teacher friends around the country to ask if they would offer it to students in my target group (gifted middle-school boys) to read and answer an accompanying questionnaire. I didn’t want kids who knew me, because I thought that might interfere with the honesty of their answers.
I ended up with ten guinea pigs beta readers, all tempted by the promise that I would put their names in the acknowledgments section if the story gets published. A few girls wanted to read it, too, which was fine with me. I stressed in the questionnaire that I wanted to know what was wrong with it, and that anything just written to be nice might hurt the chances of it getting published. I also asked them to write down the words they didn’t understand, so that I could include it in a glossary (gifted kids enjoy things like glossaries).
Although one girl wanted me to work a vampire into the story, the rest of the readers really liked it. They mentioned a few questions they’d had that had gone unanswered (which I fixed), said that they would recommend it to friends, and offered unsolicited ideas for sequels. One said to his teacher that Jim and Jack is one of the best books he has ever read.
One question on the form was about whether or not they thought they were the right age to read it, and if not, what age would they recommend? The students ranged from 11-16, and each thought that their age was exactly the right one, for different reasons. None of them wrote down words for the glossary, which didn’t surprise me; gifted boys don’t usually like to admit when they don’t know something.Â
This is what keeps me going, when I am feeling down about querying, and when adult beta-readers/critique partners suggest that it might be MG instead of YA. I’m not sure exactly how to find an agent who thinks like a gifted teenaged boy — that’s not the sort of information that gets shared in profiles or on websites. If there’s one out there, though, I intend to hang in there until I find him/her.
What keeps you querying?
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Wednesday’s Post
Oops, it’s almost Thursday and I haven’t posted yet. See you tomorrow! 🙂
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Over Rated?
Last week, I was participating in a group chat on Agent Query Connect (discussing the recently hot topic of whether or not to use swear words in YA), when the subject of rating books came up. I have privately considered this notion before, and was surprised when several people expressed concern, referring to the idea as “a slippery slope.”
In the early 1930’s, when my father was young, there was no movie rating system to regulate what children watched. Since kids piled into the theaters on Saturdays for the matinees, my grandmother and several concerned friends happened to become involved with the Motion Picture Association, and were instrumental in persuading the movie industry to develop the rating system that still exists (although in a somewhat modified form) today.
What would be wrong with doing the same thing with books? At the very least, rating books would be a handy way for parents to monitor/supervise what their kids are reading. Most of the books being read these days have not been previously published, and parents are frequently unfamiliar with the content. As a result, children of all ages are left to discern for themselves what is, or is not, appropriate.
In bookstores or at the library, kids could have some sort of parent-authorized card with a photo ID and a magnetic strip indicating their approval level, sort of like a V-chip. A parent could approve his/her child’s card up to a certain rank, and then require special permission for anything more mature.
Ratings could be like G-5, G-8, G-12, etc., with PG added to anything that didn’t meet the G criteria (swearing, sexually suggestive – or more than suggestive – etc.). For example, Harry Potter might be ranked G-10, Rats! by Paul Zindel could be PG-13 (due to grossly disturbing content!), the Twilight series could be PG-14, and more mature selections could be R-17, etc.
Parents who wanted to opt out of regulating their children’s reading, could just program the cards for “adult.” It could even be incorporated into ordering books online. Parents could enter an authorization code, sort of like a password, for books higher than their child’s approved level.
The jacket flap could cite the specifics as to why each book had achieved it’s rating, like “language,” “some nudity,” etc., just like on the DVD covers of movies.
I know that kids would be opposed to this idea, but, frankly, so what? To me that is like letting sixeen-year-olds decide whether to lower the legal drinking age. This opinion is coming from a person who read Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight in ninth grade, during a church youth group trip to Maine. My mother would have flipped if she’d known I was reading that. And, truthfully, although it was certainly an absorbing read, I didn’t think that I was mature enough to be reading it, at the time.
If you have an opposing view, I would like to know it, because I just can’t see why the idea of rating books is any worse than rating movies, which parents have traditionally welcomed.
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Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain… or Should You?
Last night was rather exciting. We had just gotten back to my elderly parents’ house after a nice dinner out, when the lights started to blink and we could hear the thunderstorm that had been brewing all day, begin to rev up. I flicked on the TV and was startled to see some dramatic radar of their small town, directly in a tornado’s path. “It will hit Huron in four minutes – TAKE COVER!” The weather man didn’t look like he was kidding, so we hurried into the small bathroom in the middle of their house. I quickly stripped the walls of mirror and framed pictures, put them out in the hall, and grabbed some pillows to cower under. We could hear the wind swirling, and hail pounded the rooftop. After a few minutes, it was clear that the storm had passed, and we emerged unscathed.Â
Of course, this made me think about writing.
Two days ago, after I finished wrestling with some changes to my query letter, I celebrated by sending it out to an agent on my “A” list. I’d also been making some alterations to my manuscript, and wasn’t quite done with those, but I pushed away the thought that I might actually get a positive response. Four hours later, I had a request for the first five pages.
Suddenly, I was scrambling to decide whether the changes I’d made were good ones, or if I should send out the previous version. Uncharacteristically torn, I finally asked a writer-friend to read them, for an objective opinion. Her response that both were good helped me to figure things out. I responded to the agent in a timely manner with the old version, minus a few tweaks.
Yesterday morning, when I heard the weather forecast, I had a feeling that I should think about what to do/where to go if there was severe weather while we were at my folks’ house. I came up with a mini-plan, and when the time came to act, I knew what to do.
When I sent that query letter, I ignored a similar feeling, which had told me to finalize things with my manuscript before sending off an invitation to read it. Everything turned out okay, but I was in a tizzy for a while because I had to rush my normal “incubation process” of editing.
I was happy with what I sent to the agent, but the experience would have been much more pleasant if I’d been prepared. I learned my lesson, though, and spent the rest of that day completing the changes to my manuscript. Now, if that agent (or anyone else) wants to see more of my work, all I’ll have to do is push a button.
Listen to that little voice. It could save you.
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Oldies but Goodies: Great Books for Third Graders
It is time again for another edition of Oldies But Goodies, this time for third graders. Some of these were listed in my Young Advanced Readers post, and a few more in my Recommended Authors by Grade Level post, but most of them are new suggestions. As usual, just click on the link to see the titles, click on the title to see the summary, etc.
Note: Brighty of the Grand Canyon by Marguerite Henry was so unavailable that there was no review posted on Amazon, but it is a great book for both boys and girls. If you can find it at the library, get it. As for Runaway Ralph, I was really aiming for The Mouse and the Motorcycle, but it has gone out of print, at least for the time being.
Happy Reading!
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