I just don’t get the whole Joe Paterno thing.

On one hand, if he is in any way complicit to sheltering a monster (see The Sandusky Child Abuse scandal) then why in the world would the university allow him to be on the sidelines this Saturday… and for the rest of the football season?

And if he is not liable – legally or morally – in any manner, then why resign?

One thing which seems clear is that Joe Pa appears to be tone deaf to the severity of this atrocity. I mean why even head to football practice the other day when the news broke? Why not say something like, “Ya know what, I am 100% innocent of any and all allegations but still, since I recognize how heinous this crime is, I am going to show my compassion and understanding by putting football on the back-burner while more serious matters take precedence and sort themselves out a bit.”

After all, the abuse did happen under the umbrella of your football program, Joe – and no one in the history of college football has ever owned a bigger NCAA football umbrella than you, Mr. “Pa” – so take a moment, think about the victims and at least sit out a practice – or even a game or two – simply out of a sense of “doing the right thing”, huh?

That’s what I don’t get. If you are innocent of any and all charges and you sit out for a little bit, then all you did was the right thing while matters sorted themselves out. (And considering the type of crime we are talking about here, it’s hardly something one could consider an “exceptional, undue sacrifice” at all.)

And if things sort out in a way that doesn’t favor you – and goodness knows, we all hope they do not – then you do not deserve to be on the practice field for even one more snap.

But going on with “business as usual”? Especially when it seems that the number one concern by the athletic department was to protect the reputation of the athletic department.

You are an educator, Mr. Paterno. All college coaches are. And what is the lesson being taught by you right now? (Really, I just don’t understand how your actions translate in a positive ways for those sodomized young boys.) I mean look at this paragraph as taken from a news release written after you just had a chance to meet with your team.

Paterno met with his coaching staff and players for about 10-15 minutes in an auditorium of the football facility. Standing at a podium, he told them he was leaving and broke down in tears.

Players gave him a standing ovation when he walked out.

Junior quarterback Stephon Morris said some players also were nearly in tears as Paterno spoke.

“I still can’t believe it,” Morris said. “I’ve never seen Coach Paterno like that in my life.”

Asked what was the main message of Paterno’s talk, Morris said: “Beat Nebraska.”

“Beat Nebraska” is the main message these young men should take from this discussion? I’m dumbfounded.

And is there another “educator” in the land that would have the luxury of being able to return to work with such questions hanging over their head. There’s not a 7th grade social studies teacher in the country who’d be back teaching a lesson on the Bill of Rights if the school district where they worked was bathed in a similar stench. Is this a case of “above the law”? Certainly, by returning for the rest of the season, you are acting like it.

And Penn State, by allowing him to return, you are worse. Where’s your own moral compass in this whole thing. Don’t let Joe retire; let him clear his name and then invite him to coach until he’s 125 years old. But until his actions are scrutinized and cleared, why in the world are you allowing him back to “represent your university and lead your program”?

I just don’t get this whole Joe Paterno thing. As a parent, I am freaked. As an educator, I am freaked. As a citizen of this country, I am freaked. As a fan of college football, Joe Paterno, and sports in general, yep… I am freaked. Can someone please explain to me what is going on right now?

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.)

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 have a new book launching tomorrow and it might very well prove to be my most controversial title yet. (And coming from the guy that wrote HOMEBOYZ that’s saying something.) But really, I don’t think it’s all that controversial at all.

In fact, I like to think of my new book THE DOWNSIDE OF BEING UP as Judy Blume for boys.

Simply put, it’s a coming of age novel and the truth is, what could be more coming of age than going through puberty?

Let’s be honest, in the novel I am tackling a fairly taboo subject… or at least a subject that’s usually only mentioned in hushed tones as if it’s some kind of shameful little secret. However, here’s a newsflash for ya – Quick, cover your eyes! – adolescent boys get erections. There, I said it. Did the world just end? I doubt it.

See, all boys get erections. This is not a red state/blue state issue. Tall, short, brown-eyed or blue, two parents in the home or child of divorce, religious denomination, academic aptitude, physical height… none of it matters. Boys get boners and they pop up for all of us at the most inauspicious of times in our young adult lives. And when this first starts happening to us, WE FREAK OUT.

Yet, it’s just Mother Nature. There’s nothing “wrong” with us. We’re not deviants, monsters, bad people or pervs.

We’re male. This is the way God made us. And let me tell you, I really wish there was a book like this around when I was a kid if only for the simple sake of someone letting me know that I was normal. In a way, and I am entirely serious about this (remember, I was California’s Teacher of the Year) this text is bibliotherapy and young adolescent males are going to find more than just penis humor in this novel; they are going to find identification.

My book is both funny and tragic at the same time but the thing is, THIS IS NOT A BOOK ABOUT SEX. In fact, there is no sex in the book at all. This is a tale of a boy going through a very significant and very disconcerting right of passage on the journey to adulthood and if there is any sort of moral to the story it’s that “You can’t stop Mother Nature.”

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.

It’s strange how I am of two minds these days about the world of publishing – especially about self-publishing.

On one hand, I do love the idea that the traditional gatekeeping system has been removed for authors who wish to publish their books directly in a way quite unlike any other time in history. Let the market decide if the book has a market/merit. Authors get a shot this way and the truth is, I will always be a fan of “power to the people”.

However, I can’t even begin to rave on about how much positive benefit I derive from being professionally edited by professional editors. Traditional publishing houses vet for content, continuity, punctuation, sensibility and on and on and on. And the way that more and more and more books are flooding the ebook market without have been “refined and shaped through the eyes of editorial experts” has me wincing at the flood of genuine crap being dumped into our literary ocean. Not that I have a problem with the idea of anyone writing a book; it’s the fact of having to wade through a host of self-proclaimed .99 cents thrilling, funny, exceptional insightful, John LeCarre meets Amy Tan with a touch of Voltaire love child novels that has been shaking my head.

Some of the tragically gap-filled books arriving each and every day via twitter announcements which go straight from an author’s keyboard to available NOW! for purchase are muddying what was already some very muddy waters.

I want everyone to have access. But I would prefer if the material was curated. One thing we can all rest assured of right now is that if one of the Big Six Publishing Houses publishes a book, it may certainly be junk… but the level of junkiness will never be as low as some of the things we are starting to see become available for less than a buck.

Welcome to the new world where Borders no longer exists.

I’ve always been drawn to a well-turned phrase. Especially one marked by wit. And when I look back at some of the most keen in history, a few great ones perpetually pop up.

But who was the wittiest? Well, Shakespeare might be impossible to beat but putting the Bard aside for the time being, let’s take a look at a few of the contenders.

So far, I have entered Will Rogers, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill into the conversation. Today, Mark Twain.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

I think Twain’s sense of humor might be in the top three of all American’s ever to set ink to paper. The guy just let ‘em fly in a way that still gets us laughing more than 100 years after he hit us over the head with his words.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

And his advice on living life, well… who could argue?

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

And of course, one of my all-time favorites quotes EVER!

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

And the thing is, there are more which could be added. One of the best ever… no doubt.

The Nerd Girls Launch Party was a ton of fun. If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are six thousand… they tell the story in a way I am not sure I could.

Me with some nerds.

Me speaking to the crowd, saying thanks (and cracking jokes).

Refreshments for the guests.

A book table.

Me and my nerd peeps, sharing the love.

One of the many posters decorating the walls of Meltdown Comics.

Can you believe that I am actually making a career out of this?