As I walked off of a middle school campus in Brockton, Massachusetts earlier today after doing a series of huge student assemblies for the incarcerated – I mean, scholars – a moral conundrum struck. There, as school let out and I crossed back to my vehicle, a few kids were tossing a football around. (Or rather, tossing around a football, I should say… as you’ll see why in a moment.)

Happens all the time across America everyday, right? And then, out of nowhere, I heard the scream right next to me: “Look out, you’re gonna get ranned over!”

And sure enough, a boy was preparing to dash into the middle of a car-infested street to chase down an errantly thrown football. That’s when my stumper, my perplexity, the riddle amongst all riddles set in.

“Should I save the boy or correct the grammar?”

No one ever prepared me for such dilemmas when I was working on my Master’s degree, I tell you that.

The child blindly stepped off the curb, keyed in on only one reality: get that football.

And yet, the other boy had just used the word “ranned”? (Seriously?)

Could I remedy both potential calamities at the same time? Impossible, I deduced. Should I lurch for the child with an eye towards the oncoming vehicle, I’d surely lose out on my opportunity to remediate the faulty verb usage of the incorrigible on the curb. Yet, if I addressed the notions of syntax, participles, faithfulness to the queen’s english and diligence to to matters easily referenced by Strunk and White, then a kid could be ka-putt.

What to do? But there was no time to think. Instinct took over.

I extended my arm, grabbed the kid and pulled him close.

“There is absolutely no such word as ranned,” I said. “Never, ever incorporate this vocabulary word into your speech again, okay? Ranned is NOT a word!”

Then I turned and walked serenely away, my back to the loud, yet oddly unfazing screeeeech.

Always, remember, we must do all we can to save ‘em one kid at a time.

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 learned a new word today when my literary agency was hornswoggled.
What a great word “hornswoggled” is. I mean I had to look it up but I could just feel it’s definition in a way. Some words are like that. Makes me a fan of the English language when I can kinda sorta figure stuff out about it even though I am unfamiliar with an actual definition. That’s a skill we should teach to our kids for the bubble tests, no? I mean it beats the crud out of simply doing this to improve pass rates.

Do you know what hornswoggled is? I bet you do. Here’s the story to which I am referring. See if you were right.

Oh yeah, there’s also a lesson in this for all aspiring writers: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I feel bad for the authors to whom this happened. And to Jodi Reamer. Really, is there anything worse than being hornswoggled?

BTW, the free online dictionary says this about the origin of the word (for those of you, like me, who might be interested): We do not know the origin of hornswoggle. We do know that it belongs to a group of “fancified” words that were particularly popular in the American West in the 19th century. Hornswoggle is one of the earliest, first appearing around 1829. It is possible that these words were invented to poke fun at the more “sophisticated” East. Some other words of this ilk are absquatulate,also first appearing in the 1820s, skedaddle, first attested in 1861 in Missouri, and discombobulate, first recorded in 1916.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote an open letter to American teachers the other day. And after toiling to construct a reply of my own, I saw this reply as written by Anthony Cody (in Education Week) and I realized he said it way better than I ever could.

So my blog today is a strong suggestion to read Anthony’s comments. Sharp and true, true, true.