This guy...

Guest post from a 4th grader

This drawing was shown to me after a school visit about Napoleon, Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase. It is by a 4th grader who enjoyed the assembly.

If you can't read it, it says, "I have bought ze moon! YAAAA!

I like the little pistol pocket. Who am I kidding, I like EVERYTHING about this.

Meet the Provost, and some news!

Here's the Provost!

Fun news this week. ONE DEAD SPY has climbed to #3 on the New York Times Hardcover Graphic Novel list! Number THREE! That's only two spots away from the top! If you have been waiting for a good week to pick up ONE DEAD SPY, this would be that week. Do it!

And along with that fantastic news, it's official: Hazardous Tales books #5 and #6 have been ordered by the publisher. The Research Babies are eyeball deep in research right right now.

It's a big week!

2nd Graders and Leprechauns

I happen to be traveling at the moment and I don't have access to my scanner or my handy-dandy computer drawing system. My plan was to draw some blog posts with my iPad this week, but I'll start that tomorrow. Today, I'm giving you a rare peek into my school visit presentation.

Since getting into graphic novels and US history, my school visit audience is usually 3rd-8th graders. I don't visit many K-2nd grade classes anymore--which I did when I was doing mostly picture books. Today was fun, though, because I got to do my old picture book presentation. The finale is a group effort where the students help me draw a monster, or, since it was St. Patrick's day, a leprechaun.

I have a marker and an oversized piece of paper on an easel. I start with the head, and take suggestions for each monster part down to the feet, and then we name him/her/it. Since these are leprechauns, they all have the classic hat and belt--and a last name starting with "Mc".

These are what three separate groups of 2nd graders came up with:

 Fishy McShamrock has chickens for arms, and fish tails for feet.

 Gorilla McDonald has "wavey" fingers, and also "wavy" feet.

Fanae McWilliker has five arms and frogs for hands. We couldn't figure out how she eats with frog hands, or if she feeds herself by letting the frogs eat.

I've done this drawing exercise with kids for years. It's very strange to see the shifts in specific body part requests. Four years ago, there was not a SINGLE monster that didn't get a "Uni-brow". Kids were insane for the "uni-brow." More recently, it's been mustaches. Today's had a strange similarity, pointy noses and zig-zag mouths. All three groups, not knowing what the other groups had chosen, asked for those two traits. I drew them differently, so the monsters--I mean leprechauns--would be different when seen together.

Another odd similarity is animals for limbs. I was stunned at the weirdness of "chickens for arms", and then the third group asked for "frogs for hands."

I don't know what any of it means. But it's interesting.

As I'm posting these leprechauns, there are a few hundred 2nd graders who are writing stories about them for homework. The frogs for hands issue is now theirs to work out.

A Quiet Celebration

One Dead Spy is now on it's second week on the NYT bestseller list. We've moved up to #4! And Batman got his revenge (a Batman book has jumped to #3).

Along with our celebration, we'd like to send out a big THANK YOU to everyone who bought ONE DEAD SPY--you put us on this list!

The author is too stunned to post

This is the New York Times best-seller list for graphic novels (hardcover).

Look at number 5.

Dark Souls Day part 3

Another day of Dark Souls with me and Uly.

What is Dark Souls, you might ask, and why am I making posts about it here on my blog about children's fiction? It's a Playstation game--and it's my favorite video game series of the last decade.

It's Japanese, it's incredibly difficult and frustrating--just like the games I played as a kid. There's very little dialogue, no cut-scenes, no story arc, just grueling dungeons that test your skill and patience. My son and I have fairly difference tastes, but we can agree on this. This is our favorite game series ever.

My son's been sick with a cold for the past two days, he stayed home from school, so we have logged some serious hours passing the controller back and forth.

For long-time blog-readers, the long-ago Land Of Doom story (about surviving children's book publishing) was partially inspired by the first game in this series, Demon's Souls.

I'll do one more for Friday, then we'll move onto more wholesome topics. I know kid-lit fans are big fans of violent video games.

Dark Souls day part 2

Our Dark Souls II special edition arrived. We stayed up way too late playing.

First boss: Defeated