I spent my Saturday last weekend at the inaugural Tweens Readin Houston. In many ways, I think it represents a harbinger of many more things to come for people like us who deeply value books, kids, reading, writing and teaching.

Sure, it was an amazing event but it felt like a critical one as well. So many positives were on display that I’m not quite sure where to begin.

First off, the organizers (regular ol’ librarians and English teachers) targeted a specific audience: tweens. This built unofficial parameters into all the choices which were made about how to execute the day. They weren’t going for a “splatter” approach; they sought to rock the house for readers in grades 4-8.

As one could easily see by the faces of the kids, put one in the win column on this front for Tweens Read. It was a knock out day.

Next, they solicited the publishers to send out authors on the publishing house’s dime (as opposed to trying to figure out a way for the festival organizers to foot this bill through sponsorship). Turns out, if you can promise hordes of kids and teachers and librarians, all the major publishing houses have money put aside for this type of PR. Disney footed my travel costs, Penguin footed those of Richard Peck (yes, that Richard Peck!), authors like Obert Skye, Michael Buckley, Lis McMann, Lindsey Levitt, Jason Pinter, Crystal Allen, Kat Falls, Matthew Kirby, Clete, Smith… (okay, you got the point)… we’re talking a day filled with heavies were out in full force. Of course, when heavies are out more kids, teachers, parents and librarians come, too. (Which came first, the reader or the egg?)

This leads to the very smart decision to bring in an independent bookstore to handle all of the sales, title gathering and so on. Another big win for all who were involved. (BTW, is Blue Willow Books not one of the most rockin’ outfits in the nation?) By my count, 5 of my own titles were on sale. As an author, this resulted in me having a line of kids stretching 45 minutes deep and the words “sold out” to be beautifully whispered in my presence. And I didn’t even have the longest line in the building.

Of course the bookstore did a ton of legwork but they certainly wracked up a whole heck of a lotta sales. Were the parents bummed about buying their kids books? If they were, their frowns were being blotted out by the pride and smiles of seeing their own kids so fanatical about getting this super-cool chance to meet real authors, be exposed to new titles and get their hands on personally signed books.

Lifelong readers aren’t built through bludgeoning kids with 6 pound textbooks in core academic classrooms; lifelong readers are built by exposing young readers to the excitement, passion, energy, magic, power and beauty of real books. One parent even told me (with a beaming smile) that her 5^th grade son was whining about how their was some double point Madden X-box tourney or something and he was entirely sour about missing it when she dragged him to the event that morning. At 3:30 in the afternoon that very same kid cajoled his mom out of her last $20 bill so that he could buy a copy of the new title by… (which he just had to have even though she’d already bought him 4 books that day).

What better way is there to build older readers than to start by building younger ones. Tweens Read, you rocked! Thanks for inviting me out.

(Side note: Through me tweeting about this event, the city of Orlando wants to see if they can get something like this going. Tweens do read and I could see something like this catching on in cities across the country. Are reading festivals about to be on the rise?)

I am heading to Tweens Read Book Festival in Houston. This rodeo goes down on Saturday and though it’s my first time appearing there, I am entirely fired up.

How can you not love the celebration of kids reading books? Truly, every major city in the United States of America could take a lesson from the good folks who organized this shin-dig.

Bunches of authors. Scores of librarians. Droves of teachers. And – of course – kids, kids, kids hungry for books, books, books.

As the program rhetorically asks…

Who is invited to participate?

• The target audience is tweens who are in grades 5-8.
• We welcome teachers, librarians, parents, and other advocates for children’s and adolescent literacy attending with their tweens.

What more could a person want? And is there a better way to spend a Saturday? As the good folks ask in TX say, “Y’all fixin’ to come?”

Hope so. As the ridiculous assault on librarians marches forwards by nincompoop politicians, I wonder if there is a more intelligent way to battle the nitwits than through positive experiences such as this?

Been laying low on the blog front for the past few weeks cause lots of stuff is on the plate. All exciting. Lots good. Challenges galore. Hey, it’s life – and while there have been many times in the past when I felt a bit numb, as if days were “just passing” in uneventful, unremarkable ways, this certainly has changed for me. It’s pedal to the metal at this point of my life and in that mindset I am finding more fulfillment than ever before.

Weird how, like a magnet, I have always been drawn to people who find deep meaning in (and hold great passion for) their work. My best teachers always reflected that. The people I idolized as a kid always seemed to represent this. And though it’s taken me way, way longer than I ever would have imagined to “get comfortable in my own skin” the dawn of this phenomenon is upon me. The older I get, the shorter life seems, yet the richer and more wonderful, too. No one is exempt from pain in this world but freeing myself from self-inflicted pain and having stopped being my own worst adversary really has helped me a ton.

It’s a skill I wish someone would have taught me a long, long time ago. (Oh Common Core, the shortcomings you have.)

Indeed I am reading, reading, reading all the time but the thing about all the reading I am doing is that it never feels like I am getting the chance to read enough. (I even wonder if I get to write enough, which is another reason I have pulled back on blogging so prolifically. I was cranking 5,000 blog words a week there for almost two years… but I think that ship is sailing for me. The deeper writing of constructing meaningful stories for young readers beckons more than any other type of writing right now and with so many hours in the day, one must make choices, right?)

Family, literature, friends, yoga, good food, meaningful work, an occasional glass of wine and travel. The math of my mid-life is adding up to these things. Low key yet rewarding. Simple, for the first time ever, suffices. More than suffices, actually. Simple rocks! And the fact is, I am lucky to be able to have all that I do. (Side note: 20 years ago, I probably would have said “bo-ring”. Nowadays, exotic seems way over-rated.)

The other day I asked if there was a gender bias affecting student reading habits. It was a callback to a piece in the NY Times about boys and books and reading.

In the world of teaching, I am not sure what the numbers look like but I’d venture a guess that the profession of education (and classroom teaching in particular) are dominated by females. More women are at the front of our rooms… by a lot.

And more women are behind the desks of our libraries. By a lot. (What’s left of our libraries, anyway. A tragedy I’ll save for another day’s discussion.)

And, as an author, an overwhelming amount of the people with whom I work in the publishing industry are female, too. All of my book editors have been female. (I’ve now published with 4 different houses.) Almost of the people in the school and library divisions are female. Almost all of the people with whom I currently work with in the PR departments are female. There are occasional males around - my agent is male, certainly some copy-editors and company employees and the such – but indeed, book publishing, libraries and teaching are dominated by the ladies.

That’s just plain as day.

The NY Times article I mentioned above, however, points a bit of a finger at this as a potential cause for our dilemma with boys and reading. Thing is, I don’t think I ever noticed that the world of books, reading and literacy was a world being dominated by the ladies until I read the article. Gender, for me, was a non-issue. I saw ability and competence, not feminine bias, as driving factors.

For me, it’s never been about the sex of the person; it’s been about their ability. Yet, am I naive? Is something seeping into the world of books which we can’t quite put our finger on and yet is having an influence we might not want to admit.

Does it take a gal to reach a gal? Does it take a guy to reach a guy?

On one hand, I don’t think so. On the other hand, I just wrote a book called THE DOWNSIDE OF BEING UP which is a comedy about an 8th grade boy who suffers (like all 8th grade boys do) from a tragic case of unpredictable erection-itis.

Could a woman have written that book? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I dunno. But my editor on the book is female and she did one heck of a great job as far as I’m concerned. And not once do I recall her gender being a factor – much less an impeding factor – in our process.

BTW, can I mention that it feels a little bit as if I am nearing “the third rail” by even raising this topic, risking wrath and accusations of me being a sexist simply by even bringing this subject up?

Hmmmm…

In August there was an interesting essay in the NY Times about books and boys called BOYS AND READING: IS THERE ANY HOPE?

This particluar paragraph has sorta stuck with me for the past month:

The current surge in children’s literature has been fueled by talented young female novelists fresh from M.F.A. programs who in earlier times would have been writing midlist adult fiction. Their novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers. It’s a cliché but mostly true that while teenage girls will read books about boys, teenage boys will rarely read books with predominately female characters.

The implication is that the overwhelmingly “female imprint” in the world of book publishing might be one of the causes as to why boys are not reading as much as we’d like. The essay hints – actually, it’s stronger than mere hinting – that as a result of so many women in the world of book publishing, boys are missing the “boy” factor behind the scenes and as much as a woman might want to coach a fella as to how to buy a jock strap, unless you have actually been a jock strap wearer, it’s all speculative. (Note: the converse is true: guys leading the bra-shopping march would run into the same problems. Unless you actually know, you just don’t know.)

I’m a bit puzzled by this. On one hand, I am not sure I agree. On the other hand, I just might.

I wonder what others think. Perhaps I’ll dive a bit more deeply into this more over the coming week. Is there a gender bias affecting student reading habits?

I wrote THE DOWNSIDE OF BEING UP because I wanted to write a book that young boy readers would love. And, as I well know, there is nothing that young boys love to do more than laugh. Therefore, first and foremost, I really wanted to dig my writing heels in and go for, as the say nowadays, an LOL reading experience.

Of course personally, I love to laugh. However, I also feel that a lot of what people peddle as “comedy” in young adult books today is lukewarm at best. Me, I wanted to go for “spitting milk out of your nose funny”. So far, the reaction has been pretty good and while I can’t promise that everyone is going to find the book riotous, I can tell you that I laughed my rear-end off while writing it. Truly, I never laughed so hard in my professional writing life. To me this is significant because as author, I always believe I am the first audience. To paraphrase something Robert Frost once said, “I am the first crier and if my work doesn’t bring my own eyes to tears, why in the world should I expect it to have any sort of impact of the such on others?” This is true of me as well. If milk isn’t spitting out of my own nose then why would it ever spray through the nostrils of anyone else?

The teacher side of me, though, also knows a heck of lot about the critical relationship between literacy skills and academic achievement and life success. Especially, for young boys in this day and age. It can be argued – and it has – that we are raising a generation of non-readers, the implications of which are already proving to be calamitous for today’s young men. Well, the only way to elevate a young person’s reading skills is by getting them to read. And kids today, boys, will read if they are provided reading material which “speaks” to them in some meaningful way.

A comedy which sympathizes with a universal tragedy through which we all suffer, has always felt to me like a solid project on which I ought to hang my hat. THE DOWNSIDE OF BEING UP is a book that can hopefully be used as a tool to not only convert young male readers from skeptics who “don’t like to read” into “fans of reading as long as they are given a ‘good’ book”. As the old saying goes, if you build it they will come. This I believe to be true… but somebody’s gotta build it. And so I’ve tried in my own small way.

FYI, it’s a champagne day. A novel I started almost 3 years ago is officially out today.

I was sitting back reading this weekend while my daughter was goofing around in the yard in the way that 5 year olds are prone to do. It was a relaxing afternoon – a shining sun, a glass of lemonade, a red-breasted robin occasionally chirping its joy as I enjoyed a pipeful of tobacco and a swaying breeze (I’m trying to go all Norman Rockwell for ya… is it working?) – when I suddenly realized I had to stop and explain to my daughter that I was reading a book.

Why would I have to explain something so obvious? Because I was reading on my kindle and it dawned on me that one of the most important ways to raise a reader is to model the act of being a reader… but did she know I was reading since I only had an electronic slab in my hand of digital text.

For sure it was a book. An almost 1,000 page book. (I am currently reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts). And when parents read thick, meaty texts of fiction simply for the joy of reading it’s, well… a top-shelf literacy strategy. Modeling can move mountains. Yet, if she wasn’t keenly aware that I was reading a book of fiction simply for pleasure – a critical component – due to the “device factor” of reading on a kindle then I could be submarining my educational aims for her unwittingly. Being a model without her realizing I was modeling is not the greatest type of role modeling, now is it?

Of course, it’s not like I was “teaching a lesson” to my daughter; I was simply reading in the back yard. However, actions speak louder than words and there was a moment (right after the red-breasted robin melodiously let fly with a lullaby for her napping chicks) that I became all-too-aware that my kid might not have any idea what I was doing. We are the first generation to face this as parents. After all, who knows what is really going on on anybody else’s screen. (Trust me, I taught college classes for a few years and seeing students with their laptops open during class could mean diligent note-taking or Facebook photo surfing and as a professor, you have NO idea).

It was a big take-a-way for me. The more we read on screens, the more unknowable it is what we are reading. As the reader, that’s fine. It’s my screen, my eyes, my brain, my choice. But as a role model who wants to raise a lifelong reader, there are new challenges and I am convinced it would have been a mistake to assume that my 5 year old knew what I was doing just because it might have seemed so obvious to me.

The IRA Annual convention is in Orlando this week and I’ll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday. I love IRA, I think the convention is always filled with so many great people who really have so much to offer – especially if you’re a geek like me who loves literacy. Books, data on reading stats, strategies for reaching the hard to reach learner… this conference is just rich, rich, rich.

Plus, it’s always filled with a ton of authors. Some are the biggest of big are always in attendance – and a host of first-timers, too. I’ll never forget when I was a first-timer.

The Hoopster had just come out and Disney had orchestrated my very first book signing at this, my very first convention under the bright lights in the big city. I was showered, dressed, caffeinated and so, so excited that I could hardly sleep. From 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. I’d be signing at the Disney booth. It was a “next level” in my career moment for me.

I had even bought six new pens (just in case 1 – or 5 – ran out of ink). However, there was little if any need for any pens at all. I sat there at a table and watched as people filed right on past. All of my excitement, all of my preparation, all of my hopes and dreams were now being met by a very harsh reality.

The Hoopster was only about 9 days old, it hadn’t swept the nation in a frenzy of Harry Potter-esque acceptance and the line for Avi, Walter Dean Myers and Laurie Anderson were clearly a wee bit longer than the line for Alan Sitomer. (And, trust me, this is taking liberties with the use of the word “line”. Occasional dot is a more apt description.)

But Disney wasn’t dismayed. The person in charge of school and marketing, Angus Killick (who has since become a a Big Kahuna publisher as well as a friend) basically said to me, “Don’t worry, one day they will line up for you. Being an author is about putting together a career, not just one book. You’ll be fine and one day you’ll remember this day as a mere stepping stone along the journey instead of the journey itself.”

At the time, the words of Angus were like most words of wise mentors who offered philosophy in the face of disappointment. And really, I couldn’t tell if they were just balm for my wounds or if they were actually genuine words of truth and inspiration.

Well, now I am at IRA again, years later, with a new book that will be launched in about 6 weeks, NERD GIRLS (Note: they will be giving out free advance reading copies at the Disney booth where I will be signing at noon on Tuesday in the Exhibit Hall but I think it’s a “while supplies last” type of thing because they have become so popular already) and, as Angus predicted, now I am the YA author who has people lining up. It’s incredible. And back in the day when I was the “new guy” I gotta say, I hoped to make it to this point, I busted my tail to make it to this point but until you actually make it to this point, I am not sure you ever believe it really is going to happen.

So for all the “new guys and gals” who ever hope to do a book signing and actually have people show up and wait in line for you to autograph a copy of your latest novel, all I can say is… keep writing, keep working and yes, it too can happen to you.

I did a book signing at The Festival of Books in Los Angeles this past weekend where the estimated there were 150,000 people who made it out to the University of Southern California over the course of two days.

Indeed, it was packed. Children’s books, cook books, YA lit, Romance, Fantasy, on and on and on and on. And two things struck me while weaving through a sea of people.

1) Those who proclaim the printed book is dead are off-base. Way off-base. It was wall-to-wall people and wall-to-wall books and, most significantly, wall-to-wall people who love printed books. Indeed, e-books have been born but just as people suspected once-upon-a-time that paperbacks would kill hardbacks and television would kill radio, I just do not think that e-books are going to kill printed books. The CD killed the cassette tape; the same is not gonna happen in reading.

2) They had more than 300 authors, more than 500,000 books, more than, as mentioned, 150,000 people and I swear, not once did I see anything at all pertaining to e-reading. It made me think as I walked through row after row after row that people are underestimating the physical community of books that books provide to us as well. Even though reading is solitary, book groups, book shops, book festivals, libraries and so on, all provide physical interaction with other people. I mean are we all going to willingly devolve into hermits. Yes, Amazon might provide that opportunity – and we might save a wee bit of cash buying tax free, online reading materials available in one-click format – but are we going to choose NOT to want to be in the presence of one another? Human beings are social creatures and books can often lead to socially interacting with the some of the most interesting types of people.

Is our holing ourselves up in a wi-fi hovel to read, read, read digital, digital, digital books actually something that represents a choice we actually will be wanting to choose for ourselves once the honeymoon of digital availability wears off? Not say I know for sure, but it might.