Yesterday, I met a thirteen year old who was talking about how she enjoys writing Warrior Cats fan fiction. I told her about how when I was her age, I also enjoyed writing Warrior Cats fan fiction. I was thirteen several years before she was born.
Anyways, I had no idea that Warrior Cats had this much staying power.
Oh god yeah, when I sold kids books we had an entire bookshelf dedicated to the series.
Tonight I gave Art Spiegelman the National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. And we're both being banned. Some of you may think this is a good thing because you don't like my books or you don't care for Maus. But I guarantee that there are books you love on the banned lists too. That's why libraries and librarians fight for their rights to have all the books on the shelves and for your rights to read them. And it's why I support them.
Just reblogging because none of the threats to books and libraries have gone away. Mostly they've got worse. If you are capable of joining your Library Board or School Board do it...
Pour one out for all the stories you'll never find again, that you barely remember in totality, but that left an impression on you that you'll never forget.
The short stories from standardized tests that you only had a few minutes to read, but those minutes will last a lifetime.
The books on the library display shelf you used to occupy time until your mom could come pick you up from school.
The graphic novel you picked up when you were first getting into comics and could never find again.
The single lines or themes from stories you otherwise don't remember, save for the one thing that you saw and internalized as a new part of your personality.
Let's pour one out for the books that built us, even if we never could find them again, and couldn't of we wanted to.
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022) dir. Charlie Mackesy, Peter Baynton
nothing like rereading a book you loved when you were younger only to realize the author can't write
I should be compensated for having to walk into a bookstore and see "booktok."
I have to acknowledge that 90% of the reason why I ever manage to finish my novels is that I'm just a little freak for turning raw text into hot, hot formatted ebook.
These is the most engrossing activity known to mankind (by which I mean "me, specifically.") I am going to gay lesbian poly marry Scribus and Sigil both.
#top is the EPUB#bottom is the PDF#bottom would also be the format for the physical copy (if i did that) only the margins would be adjusted#both of these programs are freeware if you want to use them!#Sigil for EPUB and Scribus for PDF/physical#Sigil has gotten easier since i started doing visual novels somehow#and Scribus was always easier than InDesign from the get go#i need to wrap up SH's EPUB stuff today and then i can schmoove on to the next two books
I have to start this process soon and I hate it, but this is really useful as a reference to the software available, so thank you - and I love what you've done with your pages! Your books look gorgeous.
man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.
This is your reminder that a lot of public libraries actually have little summer reading programs for kids AND adults!
We even have PRIZES for when you finish filling up your sheet with stickers!
Support your local library. There may even be a sticker for you at the end 🌟
children’s book illustrators r literally the cornerstone of society im not kidding. where would we be w/o that little business worm in the apple car or the brambly hedge animals making their feasts and flying their kites like literally WHERE . do not even get me started on frog and toad
Love Is Love @jeffsmithsbone @cartoonbooksinc
My youngest niece and nephews agreed to be the first official reviewers for my picture book, and they said they liked it! I was particularly overwhelmed by the fact that the youngest nephew MEMORIZED the whole book because of how much he enjoyed people reading it to him ToT. I think that's the highest compliment that I've ever gotten for my work. Emi Isn't Scared of Monsters is coming out on August 2nd, 2022 and you can still preorder it now!! Go to whatsupbeanie.com/links or look it up in your local bookstores :). It's a silly story about Emi, a little girl conquering her fear of the dark to find her puppy. Book birthday so soon!!!
Contact your local library (or comment on their social media) positively for any pride/LGBTQIA+/queer-related displays or events they have going on.
Seriously.
What I’m seeing and hearing from the (mostly US-based) library workers in my groups and social circles is that the anti-queer (anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-drag queen story time, etc.) comments and complaints that have ramped up in the past year aren’t going away. Even library workers with supportive coworkers/bosses/boards are steeling themselves to deal with an avalanche of garbage, or are second-guessing their displays and events because the amount of vitriol can wear a person down so much. And the ones without supportive people or work environments? It’s worse.
Give the library something else: give them both the ammo (by being one of the numbers they can count worth the positive group) if they need to show their community isn’t wholly negative. Give them the compliment of knowing that their work got appreciated.
Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.
But they could provide new and different opportunities for their own kids. They were doing so in Loudoun County, one of the hotbeds of America’s culture wars over public instruction about race and gender. To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.
“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”
There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.
When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".
It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.
It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".
Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.
When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.
It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.
That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.
That's how you process cattle.
It's fucking disgusting.
Penguin Random House? The ones who no longer sell ebooks to libraries; they now have 2-year expiration dates - so there's no ability to permanently have an ebook available; it's always subject to "is it still licensed (and available) in two years?" Oh, and those two-year rentals are $55. These are also the ones who tried to acquire Simon & Schuster and the US DOJ blocked the merger on monopoly grounds.
PRH is not your friend.
But as with Disney vs DeSantis:
This is routine stuff for us librarians, too. This is a good one- I like these kinds of requests.
