Rumblegut

I love being interviewed! So check out this one by D.L.Kingwriter . I answer all of your questions, or hers actually, and only make up a few things.

Book readings are the best way to see the reaction of an audience to your work, especially for a children's writer. Reading to a critique group of adults is great for the writing process, and scanning a review once in a while, well, that's a mixed bag. Too many reviews are much too brief to be of any help. But reading to a group of kids can tell you a lot about how your intended readers will respond to your story. I wrote my book, Roll Up the Streets! while reading it a chapter at a time to fifth-graders at Holmes elementary school in Spokane, Wa. Every Friday I'd sit down over lunch and read a new chapter while watching the kids chomp on whatever horrifying public school lunch was offered that day. The whole idea of centering my story around evil corndogs came from those lunch readings as well as half the gross passages in the book. I owe a lot to those kids. I'm holding a book reading on Oct. 9 at the Tinman Too children's bookstore in Spokane on Oct. 9. It...

Roll Up the Streets! hit the streets this week! My first book, finally available. Book readings/signings to follow. Stay tuned.

How do writers break out of the isolation of their own writing to share it with others before sending it to an agent or editor? Everyone knows writing can be a lonely business and that writers are the worst judges of their own work. Some think everything they write is gold, others hate every word. Rarely is either true. I have a great first reader who happens to be a writer herself and a good and honest judge of my work. She doesn't coddle me, but always gives great advice and isn't afraid to tell me when something makes no sense or just doesn't work. I also have an agent who does the same thing, but she sees things at a later stage. But I also have a third, invaluable source of criticism, my critique group. This group of writers meets every month to share new work and give constructive criticism to any and all. We focus on children's books from picture books to middle-grade, my thing, to Young Adult.I would never have been published without the criticism of the peop...

Review copies are the coolest thing in the world. I just got a big box of my new book, Roll Up the Streets! dropped on my front porch. Inside were these glorious brand-spanking new books with shiny covers and filled with words that I had written. Now all those people who thought I'd made up those stories about getting published can see the actual proof. A real hardcover book is so much cooler than a flickering image on a screen. I just love the corndogs and the swirling ketchup and mustard on the cover. My favorite image is this one from the back cover. You'll have to read the book to find out who the lovely, and for some reason annoyed looking woman is. Now to get it into other people's hands.

It's almost here! My new middle-grade humor novel, Roll Up the Streets! is nearly here. Barnes & Noble has finally put up the cover art so you can see what it looks like. I'm pretty excited. Corndogs will do that to you, especially if they're EVIL corndogs. It's a fun story about a sarcastic 12-year-old, (is there any other kind?) Jake Machet, who moves to a small town that smells like the inside of his shoe, and I think we all know what a 12-year-old boy's shoes smell like. The only problem is that he's the only person who can smell it. Well, that's not the only problem, there are the greasy, plastic tasting corndogs everyone eats all the time, and the gooey streets and some kind of conspiracy to take over the world. But other than that things are just peachy for our hero Jake and his only friend Sammie, a smart-alecky girl with a history of pig-poop busting. Did I mention that it's funny too? Pick up a copy for your sarcastic 12-year-old.

You may have heard about the upcoming April 3, release of Apple's new Ipad, the world's most expensive feminine hygiene product. But in case you haven't been keeping up with the computer company and seller of the iPhone's attempts to recreate the very nature of reading and writing, here's the most recent news from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. (AP) April 1, San Francisco: Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs announced today in advance of the release of the company's newest gadget, the iPad, that "henceforth, publishing and writing will be a totally different experience, an experience completely controlled by yours truly." The publishing industry has been rampant with rumors over the past year in expectation of the impact of the iPad on their business models, and today they were given the word from Jobs. "Publishing as we know it is dead," Jobs intoned. "The dinosaurs of the business have just been hit with a comet called the iPad and the i...