I heard about this book for the first time over Thanksgiving this year while watching some network that was showing the first Home Alone on loop.

I had a bit of a work-related moment in the middle of my holiday and began obsessing about the cost of that 30 second TV ad.  It boggled my mind. That was an -expensive- TV slot and it ran multiple times during the two times I watched Home Alone that night.  Beyond that, the production value would have to have been incredibly high to produce this video in full CGI.   I couldn’t imagine who had the money to back a children’s picture book like that and how it could bring enough revenue to cover the cost.  When I executed my google skills, even more amazingly The Elf on the Shelf  turned out to be made by a mother/daughter team who had been self publishing this book for the last four years.

My mind was officially blown.  I still couldn’t imagine how they were making their money back on this, or who was buying it.  This thing is $47.77 on Amazon!  Granted the package includes more than just a book, you also get a Christmas shadowbox containing your very own Elf for your shelf that watches you….  It’s a cute idea in theory, but just a tiny bit creepy in my opinion.

Now that was not the last of Elf on a Shelf.  I’ve seen it on a couple blogs recently.  I’ve seen it in a shopping bag.  5 star Amazon reviews keep going up. And then it shows up in PW! Turns out the thing is a bestseller at B&N.com!

The PW article informed me of their rather odd ordering policy,.  Turns out a minimum of 12 copies must be ordered in order to ship.   Although the article says independents are having a harder time justifying orders, I imagine that a few independent stores have probably taken the plunge anyway or worked it out with neighboring competitors & sister stores to split an order as PW suggests. Still since the stores have to order so many, I suspect the book receives a lot of attention from their employees and is well placed on the shelves. Never underestimate the power of word of mouth I guess. Even if it is a small pool to begin with, sometimes all it takes is a strong sense of core enthusiasm to get the buzz rolling.  Being a self-published book I wonder what the return policy is for booksellers, or if there even is one.

I know it may seem like I’m being really negative about this book.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a great idea and concept as a product.   Personally speaking, I would never buy it for a kid because of that $47 price tag.   I’m simply shocked that it’s able to earn back the expense and sell at such a high price point.

When I worked for a children’s picture book publisher I remember how risky and hard it was to make a new $16 dollar holiday hardcover work since the retail window is so small and how at this time of year, the classics are so much more in vogue.  The Polar Express, A Christmas Story, and Holly & Ivy, those are the holiday books every parent or grandparent is buying.  Creating a new Christmas tradition is pretty ballsy.

So the success of Elf on the Shelf is pretty amazing and a real notch on the belt for self-publishing proponents.

OMG!  Orbit is offering Orcs this month by Stan Nicolls.  I’ve been wanting to read this book forever, but I never felt like laying out the money for the trade paperback because it seemed like a risk, not being my usual thing.   The covers for Orcs, Bad Blood, and Army of Shadows are amazing though, and everytime I walk by I’ll pick them up .  This is perfect!  Grab it now, while you can. Maybe now I’ll have an excuse to buy the next two for my bookshelves. That is of course if I can catch up on some of the older books that have been hanging about.

Summary: (From Amazon)

This shelf-bending omnibus comprises the first U.S. release of Nicholls’s Orcs trilogy (Bodyguard of Lightning, Legion of Thunder and Warriors of the Tempest), originally published in the U.K. in 1999 and 2000. When a warband of orcs run afoul of their tyrannical mistress on a mission to retrieve an invaluable artifact, they set in motion a series of cataclysmic events that could free their race from long-standing persecution or obliterate them from the realm forever. Pursued by an irate sorceress, ruthless bounty hunters and two vengeance-obsessed armies, Captain Stryke and his misfit band of mercenary orcs embark on a desperate quest to find a set of ancient “instrumentalities” that could save them and their magic-filled world from destruction at the hands of human interlopers. With grand scale world building, labyrinthine plotlines, extensive backstory and pedal-to-the-metal action, Nicholls captures adventure fantasy at its very best. This edition-which also includes a short story entitled “The Taking” (a prequel to the three novels), and an in-depth author interview-will be a cult classic with quest fantasy fans on both sides of the Pond.

by Kazusa Takashima
Publisher: Tokyopop
Release Date: September 2009
List Price: $10.99  Page Count: 208

Summary: (From Tokyopop)

Meet Kujou Yamato. Sure, on the outside, he appears to be your average teen, pursuing love and happiness in his school’s hallowed halls… The problem is on the inside: Kujou is really Kaito, the prince of the demon realm, who has escaped to the human world to avoid a marriage he wants no part of. Kaito’s dad, furious, sends a clumsy trio of demons to retrieve him, and a mad love chase ensues… But it’s going to take a lot of luck and cleverness to avoid being dragged back home! From Kazusa Takashima, the creator of the popular Man’s Best Friend, comes a devilish comedy of errors set in the most evil of places: high school!

My thoughts:

The art style is the winner here in this slapstick shoujo romance.  There is plenty of action and rich textures to make the visual story very engaging.   And of course as you would expect of any shoujo series, the boys are all beautiful.  I’ve never read any of Takashima’s previous works, Wild Rock and Man’s Best Friends, so I don’t know how this compares.  Unlike Man’s Best Friend this is not a straight up Yaoi, but it there is a pretty suggestive friendship forming between Kaito/Kujou & his friend the older, taller Taiki.

The story is pretty shallow and short though.  There is a glut of villains all trying to find the missing prince and drag him back to hell; however, the only way to confirm the prince’s identity is by a tattoo on his back.  This degenerates a series of repetitive shenanigans as the bad guys try various angles to get Kaito/Kujou naked.  Everyone is pretty sure Kujou is Kaito and are aware that other demons are also investigating him.  I can’t fathom why they wouldn’t just nab him and drag him back to hell.  Is proper identification really all that necessary?   It’s a shame because the volume started off strong.  I enjoyed the humor the first time; it just wore thin by the end.

Much as I loved the art style, this one probably won’t be on my list to continue at that $10.99 price point. (I like supporting the manga sales at the brick and mortar stores over Amazon.)  Maybe.  I say that…but I really want to see Kaito/Kujou’s true form.

Tis the season for snow, sugar, santa, and charity.  Whether it is because the spirit has moved you or you are looking for a way to up your karma and stay off the naughty list one more year, there are a ton of ways to get involved with organizations that support literacy and education.

One of my favorite ways to give back is by going through Donors Choose.  Donors Choose is an organization that enables school teachers to reach out to the public and ask for donations for individual and specific projects that they can’t obtain funding for. What I like about it is how personal the process is.  There are a ton of ways to search through open projects if you feel like giving based on specifics like location, need, materials, or intent. You can give partial donations to suit your own budget or pay off a project in full.

The main page can be found here: Donors Choose. And if you’re looking for a creative gift this year for someone they have some really cool gift cards which the receiver can then “spend” on the website.  Instead of a shopping spree, it’s a donate spree.  Pretty niffty in my opinion.

Just to give you an idea of what some of these projects entail, here is one I found on Donors Choose from a teacher looking to expand her curriculum to include graphic novels as an alternative to the required reading.

Location: NYC
Materials needed: 30 copies of Maus by Art Spiegleman
“With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility” I teach Special Education English in a Charter High School. We are in a low income neighborhood, and most of my students have been left back or are over age for the grade they are in at the school. They have talents, and this project is geared towards what they love to do and accomplish what is required of them for school.

“The pages of the book are not coming to life for me…so I don’t read.”  This is how my students feel, and the wall I am trying to climb to get through to my students. I would like to substitute a required reading with a book that they would find enjoyable and hopefully want to read. I will also create a project based on their talents and likes.

Click to lend a helping hand or see the full project detail.

By Patricia C. Wrede
ISBN: 978-0545033428
Publisher: Scholastic (April 2009)
Page Count: 320 List Price: $16.99

Summary: (From Amazon)

In this alternative history, a magical barrier protects most people from the dangerous magical creatures of the Wild West. Eff is a 13th unlucky child who supposedly will cause doom and misfortune, and is twin sister to Lan, the lucky and extra-magical 7th son of a 7th son. This novel covers a lot of ground both in time, following Eff from when she’s 5 until she’s 18, and in distance, as Eff’s family moves to the Western frontier when Eff’s magic-professor father and practical mother decide that the move will hide Eff and Lan’s differences. Then Lan’s potential is revealed after he causes an annoying classmate to float. When he leaves to go to school back East, Eff follows her own path to learning more about magic, including assisting in caring for the magical creatures at her father’s college. Her narration provides background about life in this version of early America, where magic helps with daily chores but brings its own dangers. Eff’s life in Lan’s shadow will ring true to all siblings of a particularly talented child, but at the conclusion it’s Eff who uses her own magic to rescue her twin. Reminiscent of Orson Scott Card’s “Alvin Maker” books (Tor), this is an interesting, but often slow-moving tale.—Beth L. Meister, Milwaukee Jewish Day School, WI

My Thoughts:

I spotted this on a train the other day in HC.  Okay…so I spotted the dragon first.  As soon as I could, I googled it up, and boy did I get more than I asked for.  There was whole mess of controversy that I had apparently missed, but first thing first: let’s talk about the packaging. <3

I love covers like this where an imaginative treatment is given to text and that becomes the main component of the cover.  It reminds me of an old newspaper or farmer’s almanac; however, this is not a trend I’d like to see widely used.  Can you just imagine the tunnel vision if this sort of treatment were as prevalent in the bookstores as the current photo-realistic, single female standard?  Oye.

It’s so simple, but it all works.  The font is elegant, but sharp.   The starkness of the tea stained background really sets off the text and the simple images of a farm and dragon.  It’s obvious that it’s Victorian, maybe steampunk-esque but you can’t tell much else from the cover.

I’m looking forward to picking this up in paperback in April 2010 all controversy aside.  You can hit up the Amazon comments and reviews for a briefing on all of it.  The removal of all Native Americans from this alternate American landscape and a comment or two by Patricia C. Wrede during the writing process of this book was the heart of it during the whole RaceFail 09 saga.

From a consumer standpoint, I am disappointed that these societies were removed from the story because it’s something I would have liked to have read.  From what I can tell of the premise, there is a lot of cross-cultural blending of magic systems and beliefs. I’d have liked to have maybe seen Native American spiritualism interact with some of these things, but ah well.  I remain interested and excited for this book. It is was it is.  The whole point of alternate and fantastical histories is to explore a moment in time with additions or subtractions contrary to the known timeline.

/End of Line

~ L.

Most everyone knows about NaNoWriMo, and I image many of you went so far as to participate this year.  November may be over but in case you didn’t quite get your fill or want to keep up the momentum, might I steer you over to writer, Nick Enlowe’s website to check out December’s Novel Push Initiative.

It’s the holiday’s and we’re all tired so the rules this time are pretty laid back.  250 words a day, for a month.  Easy, no? The important thing is consistency and not your word count. In my opinion there really is no better time for a drive like this, especially if you’re coming off the heels on an intense NaNo.  50,000 words during a holiday month can turn a brain into –mush-.  And sometimes that takes a measure of recovery time.  I’ve heard veteran NaNo-ers complain about the time it takes them to get back into the swing of writing after NaNo.

And that’s why the minimum is usually so low for Novel Push.  250 words? Psh, you can do that without batting a lash. Of course you’re welcomed and applauded for hitting a higher daily word count, but there is no pressure.  It’s important to write only an amount that is satisfying to you personally and to write every day.

Even though we’re already three days into the month, remember this is the laid back edition.  You are more than welcome to join up and join the fun.  The hastag on twitter is #novelpi which many of us have been using to post our daily updates.  And if December’s no good for you,  keep checking back at 5-Rings.  Nick has been really great about running these every few months or so.  This will actually be the first time that I have little enough major life going-on’s to participate!

Exciting stuff!

Oh boy, where do I begin explaining where the hell I’ve been.

This cold and flu season has not been kind to me. Since September I’ve gone down three times for at least a week of solid bed rest each go around.

Then in between getting caught up and falling back behind again on all my work a lot of changes have taken place in my life. The biggest of which is that I’ve moved, upgraded to a bigger place after my old residence flooded. But the one thing that is most pertinent to my lack of blogging would be that in the aforementioned flood, my computer was taken out.

I only just recently got back online with the purchase of a new netbook. There are a lot of back comments, spam or otherwise, and even a few e-mails that I’ll be getting to in the next few days. Hopefully now that I’m online again, I’ll be able to execute some of those changes to the site that I had mentioned before my untimely break.

Stay tuned sports fans.

School bells are ringing and all across the nation, kids everywhere are massively bummed out.  It’s that inglorious time of year when it’s time to pile onto the school bus once again and truck off to academia.  Hopefully you got your required summer reading out of the way, and hopefully you got to read books you might actually -want- to read.

A few of my friends went to more progressive high schools than my own where this was already the case.  I, however, spent my adolescence in podunk north Georgia where this was anything -but-.  Nor had it changed much in my younger brother’s time in the county school system  three years later.

Today though I want to give a shout out to a rural school system that is doing it right.  My best friend was looking for a job in education, and excitedly e-mailed me the summer reading list for Dawson County high school.  Dawson is a fairly small county in the North Georgia mountains that abuts my own hometown. Amongst the usual suspects like Dickens, Faulkner, and Wells, there they were the works of Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ursula K. Le Guin.  Dude! I never thought I would say it, but GO DAWSON!

Okay so I didn’t really graduate from a full degree program; I only had a little more than the minor.  (Electives for the win, without the hassle of the senior project) But it’s a sentiment I’ve heard expressed from my fellows who have come through full degree programs and are now transitioning out of the life of a student-writer. Confession time:  I’ll admit it, I have this problem too.  I am one of those writers who have since fallen a part during the transition -out- of a creative writing program. 

For two years now I’ve been able to blame my lack of writing on grad school, and the excuse is true enough.  I honestly did not have time to do much between a job, internships, and my course work.  It is also true that I didn’t try very hard to get anything done either, but it was okay because once I graduated I’d have time again to pursue my writing.  Right? (Hah!) Well it’s been three months now and I’ve produced very little – as in under 10,000 words when I used to be cranking out 10,000 at least, weekly. 

Initially, I freaked.  And to be honest, I’m still a little freaked but I’ve recently come to a better understanding of the problem.  The initial conclusion that I jumped to was that – Oh noes!!1!  I must be irreparably broken!  But that’s really not true, just some passing melodrama. It’s not quite writer’s block that I have.  If anything, I’m too attached to the world building process at the moment. I have five solid ideas right that I’ve been developing.  (Three of them short stories or perhaps novella length.) And in my head they continue to grow. The problem isn’t of inspiration; the problem is that I suddenly find the act of writing, uncomfortable and alien.  

I’ve grown so used to writing within the structure and safety of a classroom environment that I am now totally spoiled. Being a student was great – an able and willing support/critique group was always on hand.  There were deadlines to keep you moving forward, and prompts at the ready when I got stuck. I had a schedule.  Pieces were turned in on Friday so I wrote Monday-Thursday.  I would write before dinner and edit afterwards before bed time.  I couldn’t slack off or procrastinate, or else I wouldn’t have anything to turn in and that would have been bad.  Bad for my GPA.  Bad for my graduate school prospects. Etc. Etc.

It was a  magical time, but tricky.  Writing ceased to be a solitary activity and became something done for an assignment, for a teacher, or for a grade.  There was always an external reason to be working on a student piece, and I feel like I’ve lost sight of that internal satisfaction that I used to get from writing in the first place.  And it’s my own damn fault really and I have no one to blame but myself.  The change was just so subtle, evolving slowly over the course of four years.  It snuck up on me!  So now in addition to finding my groove once again, I’m dealing with the guilt of having allowed myself to end up here in the first place.  The guilt thing is stupid, needless, and not helping matters so I really ought to just let it go.

It will be okay though.  This is just a temporary (hopefully) and awkward transitional period.  I do not write this to point the finger at college writing programs or to imply that they are evil. They are what they are.  They take an adjustment and they require a readjustment. I learned from them and grew as a writer.  Now I just have to grow -beyond- that environment.  

If any of you have any advice on how you weathered this or personal stories, I would love to hear it.  Or any other words of encouragement or commiseration if you to are a recent graduate too.  Share and share alike; we’re all in this together right?

/End of Line

~ L.

To be fair this may only be true of teen fiction, but it seems like vampires these days are impervious to well…everything.  Would the Corey’s have stood a chance against Keifer Sutherland’s band of lost boys if they had been Cullens?  What the hell happened to vampires who exploded on a sunny day like a decent creature of the night should!?  -I’m- more allergic to garlic than these young, modern vampires are!  Argh!

I’ll confess, I really liked the whole “sparkle in the sun” thing in Twilight and I could buy that as a sort of evolutionary advantage left over from the primordial times.  (like how fish are attracted to shiny lures) But now, more and more it’s seeming like -the standard- that vampires are unfazed by their traditional weaknesses.  The only weaknesses these new vampires seem to have are those of the heart and psyche.  To apply the old Superman argument, what fun is it when your hero is impervious to bullets? These new vampires seem to be blest with all the perks (immortality, lightning reflexes, beauty, grace, magic yadda yadda) but little of the baggage.  Just think of how much more interesting it would be to see the human protagonists deal with the full weight and consequence of becoming a classic vampire.  Bloodlust and heightened sensuality is only the tip of the iceberg.  Really think about what it would be like to -never- see the sunlight again.  What would that do to you?  What if you were a christian and could no longer pray on a rosary or on holy ground while these changes were happening to you?  There is a lot more serious and psychological ground that -could- be covered in vampire fiction that isn’t  (particularly in YA fiction).

/End of Line

~ L.