I also take the advice of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott, because even if I don't remember everything she says, that core concept is comforting - we all have to begin somewhere, and might as well take it bird (word) by bird (word). Though I read this before grad school, I believe it was suggested or required reading for a course or two, and so I enjoyed it again, along with Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, books I'm not sure I would have picked up had it not been for classes Writing I & I. 
Some of my favorite books on writing are actually for children, most notably Avi's A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End: The Right Way to Write Writing, illustrated by Tricia Tusa. This book is a sequel to The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant), which, while not about writing, does make some clever commentary about the nature of books and fables. As extra prizes for the Odyssey Book Shop's annual children's writing contest last year, I had the pleasure of handing out both A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End and another book on writing for children, one about the more technical aspects, entitled Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Handbook by Ellen Potter, Anne Mazer, and illustrated by Matt Phelan. Both present encouragement and advice for aspiring young writers.
Just at the time I began writing this post, I discovered two more books about writing I need to look through. One, How Fiction Works by James Wood, has been compared to E.M. Forster's work mentioned above, but the second is the one I'm most interested in. Off the Page: Writers Talk about Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between is a compilation of authors' input marketed as a "literary tell-all". Edited by Carole Burns, with an introduction by Marie Arana, authors are quoted under section titles such as "Haven't I Seen You Somewhere Before?: How Characters Come to Life", "All That Jazz: Playing with Language and Style to Suit the Story", and "Good Writers Borrow, Great Writers Steal: The Writers Whom Writers Love and Why". The list of authors includes Tobias Wolff, Colm Toibin, Art Spiegelman, Marisha Pessl, Tim Parks, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Mosley, Alice McDermott, Andrea Levy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Cunningham, A. S. Byatt, Russell Banks, and Paul Auster to name a few.
Some of the authors who immediately come to mind (who use pen names) are children's book authors like R.L. LaFevers (real first name - Robin) and E. Lockhart (the E stands for Emily, but her real last name is Jenkins). I don't know why R.L. LaFevers writes under that name, but E. Lockhart writes on her website: 
She put the book in her closet to give to me as a graduation gift, and lost it until yesterday when she cleaned out the closet.
The dust jacket is missing, the binding is beginning to unbind, and the front matter has turned the color of a nicely-toasted marshmallow, but it's absolutely beautiful. I delighted in reading the original first line on one of the original first pages: "When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse." Two days after the book was released, Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, read that line and told White he had made "one serious mistake." Jill Lepore recounts their conversation in her article "The Lion and the Mouse: The battle that reshaped children's literature." Apparently, Ross shouted at White, "You said [Stuart] was born. God damn it, White, you should have had him adopted!" White heeded his boss and in later editions changed Stuart's first appearance from "born" to "arrived."
Moore-ish fashion, though, she felt that it was more her book than anyone else's and insisted on seeing a copy before its release. Nordstrom begrudgingly sent a galley...and Moore utterly despised it. She hated it so much she sent a fourteen-page letter to the Whites, had a closed-door meeting with Nordstrom about pulling it from the Harper list, and ordered Frances Clarke Sayers, her successor at the NYPL, not to buy the book for the library. (Sayers did buy a copy, but she kept it hidden under her desk.)
1. Philip Ammon from Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost, one of my top 5, all-time, desert island, favorite books. He's engaged to Edith, but he tries so hard to be a good guy and do the right thing to be worthy of loving Elnora. And of course, if I'm thinking of Philip, I have to put in Freckles, the title character from GSP's Freckles, and the Harvester, the title character from GSP's The Harvester. Really, all of her men are worthy "good guys".
I just finished this fable, fairy tale, 20th c history, and loved the language, and Gerstein's ability to weave so many worlds. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Middle grade, but adults would love it too. I think the picture book, called A BOOK that he created in 2009, has a bit of this flavor too.....
White Cat (The Curse Workers #01)
City of Bones
This was a post I intended to publish over a year ago. Now in paperback, I'm finally going to post my review of Ron Rash's Serena.
David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, whose most famous work, Infinite Jest, was included in Time magazine's All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list.
For those folks living in, around, near, or feel like traveling to the Pioneer Valley in Western Mass (an area consisting of towns such as Amherst, Northampton, & South Hadley), a traveling area picturebook exhibit is making its final stop.
Hans Christian Andersen's The Perfect Wizard
Once I Ate a Pie
The exhibit has toured around the Pioneer Valley, most recently at Mount Holyoke College, and now is installed in its final exhibit space at the Forbes Library in Northampton (20 West Street, Northampton, MA - 413.587.1011). The exhibit will be up through the end of May. Stop by and check it out!
(Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns)
For beginners, from a beginner, here are ten terms to know about book creation. (Would be most grateful if the better-informed will correct or clarify in the comments! --Carol)
Thermography: "Method of printing using colorless resin powder that takes on the color of underlying ink. Also called raised printing." Printers can even make the raised part metallic, pearlescent, or glittery! (source)
Thank you to Google for reminding me that today is the 205th birthday of Hans Christian Andersen. Google has a five-image series of Andersen's Thumbelina surrounding their logo today.
Andersen was a Danish writer and paper-cut artist who not only recorded tales from the oral storytelling tradition (in the style of the Brothers Grimm), but who also wrote his own creations. His fairy tales were published in Europe beginning in the 1830s, but it wasn't until the 1860s that Americans first got a look at them (in an American English edition - maybe they'd seen them before elsewhere, people did travel back then, you know).
A man named Horace E. Scudder worked for an early version of the publishing house we now know as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, known then as Hurd & Houghton. At that time in children's publishing, children's magazines were becoming a big deal, with many publishers vying for the position of top-circulating, best-illustrated, most-engaging-stories-by-most-famous-authors children's magazine producer. The Riverside Magazine for Young People was first published by Hurd & Houghton in December 1866. Scudder had a close relationship with Andersen and was able to not only publish 17 of Andersen's fairy tales in The Riverside Magazine beginning in 1868, but Scudder also negotiated on behalf of Hurd & Houghton to publish the only authorized American edition of Andersen's stories (thank you to Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe for this information). Scudder was constantly encouraging Andersen to make the trip across the pond and visit the States, but sadly that never happened.
Andersen's tales have been made into movies - cartoon and live-action, plays, and ballets. They also continue to be collected in anthologies and illustrated as individual stories. Just last month in March 2010, Chronicle Books published a version of Thumbelina, illustrated by Sylvia Long (9780811855228, $17.99). One of my favorite versions of this story was illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger, published under the title Thumbeline (9780735822368, $6.95, NorthSouth). There is even a graphic novel version (9781434217417, $4.95, Capstone Press), and a re-imagined full-length middle grade novel with silhouette illustrations by Barbara Ensor (9780375839603, $12.99, Random House).
Of the hundreds of anthologies of Andersen's work, Lisbeth Zwerger has illustrated a beautiful edition in her signature dreamy watercolor style (9780698400351, $21.99, Penguin). W.W. Norton (a publishing house) has released an annotated collected works (9780393060812, $35), while Calla Editions, an imprint of Dover Publications, has published an immense, bound in a cloth binding with gold embossed lettering, gift edition (9781606600009, $40). Lastly, don't miss a collection of his paper cuttings - artwork that looks like reverse silhouettes, compiled by Beth Wagner Brust for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (9780618311095, $9.95).
25-year-old debut novelist Lauren DeStefano just inked a six-figure deal forThe Last Chemical Garden--the first book in a dystopian trilogy about genetics and "a failed effort to create a perfect race." The book is scheduled for an April 2011 release.
Ellen Lupton's book Thinking with Type (2004) is a basic guide to typography directed at everyone who works with words. Thinking with Type is a type book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, and anyone else who works with words. Presented through succinct, decisive language and carefully curated examples, the book explores the history, theory, and practice of typography. It serves as a handy reference, a classroom textbook, and a welcoming introduction. More info at www.ThinkingWithType.com.![Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book [INDIE PUB]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yNvcAoT2L.jpg)
The original series I recommended at the teacher's request was the Dan Gutman series, Baseball Card Adventures (HarperCollins). These stories featured a boy who upon touching a baseball card, would be transported back in time to meet, say, Mickey Mantle or Shoeless Joe.
Sluggers in hardcover/paperback (Simon & Schuster). This has a similar feel to the Dan Gutman series, in that it combines baseball and magic, but aren't high-fantasy (no goblins, trolls, etc.). There are six in the series so far. My favorite aspect of this series is that a lot of baseball terminology and slang are used right in the prose, and then defined in the margins of the page. You get to read a great baseball adventure story and learn baseball vocab - what could be better than that?
The Indian in the Cupboard (series) by Lynne Reid Banks (Random House). An oldie but a goodie, though being sensitive to the portrayal of Native Americans in literature, I have to say this series is typically lacking in its cultural sensitivity and accurate tribal-specific information. That said, I read this series as a kid and it's what, in part, influenced me in becoming a Native American studies major in college. So, you never know.
Knucklehead by Jon Scieszka (9780670011384, $12.99, Penguin). The subtitle is Tall Tales and Mostly True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka. These tales feature the outlandish (mostly true) events that occur when you grow up as one of six brothers. Pictures of Jon Scieszka and his family are sprinkled throughout the book. Some parents have been sensitive to the cover - it was designed specifically that way to reflect the covers of comic books that Scieszka read as a child that age, not as a political statement of today. 
Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things...
Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom & Frankie Pickle and the Pine Run 3000 (series starring Frankie Pickle) by Eric Wight (Simon & Schuster). This series is a little easier reading level for those reluctant readers, more of a 2nd to 3rd grade level. The "every day" scenes are in prose; it's when Frankie's imagination takes over that the graphic novel element comes to life. 
The Fog Mound (trilogy) by Susan Schade and Jon Buller (Simon & Schuster). Recommended by my Simon & Schuster book rep, this series is about a chipmunk named Thelonious who is given the chance to find out if the old stories are true - if people rather than animals once ruled the Earth, and if they did, what happened to the humans?
