Elizabeth Bird

Fusenews: We Daren't Go A-Hunting, For Fear of Little Men

• This is how much of a children's librarian I am.  When I saw that Cynsations called Through the Tollbooth a "must-read, craft oriented blog for writers," do you know I thought that meant?  I thought it would be a blog for writers about how to do different crafts with kids.  I'm not sure how I justified this one.  Maybe I assumed that writers of picture books would sometimes want to do crafts during their school and bookstore visits with the kiddies . . or . . . erm.  I would still like to read that blog.

• I do not joke even a little when I say that former (sniffle) Central Children's Room co-worker Warren Truitt has the hippest kid in New York.  I mean... wow.  Just . . . wow.

• Using children's books for evil instead of good doesn't get much eviler than using them to smuggle cocaine .  No word on what the titles were.  We'll just assume they were Disney.  It seems apropos.  Thanks to Big A little a for the link.

• I've always wanted to visit the Edward Gorey House.  I don't travel up to Cape Cod much and when I do I'm usually at a wedding or snarfing down oysters or something.  Well Adrienne has, in a sense, taken the trip for me.  Her post on the subject provides many visuals of the place as well.

• You thought your novel was YA.  Everyone who has read it thinks that it's MG.  How can a person hope to tell the difference?  Ask Daphne handles this and many other questions.

• I've been enjoying Sam Riddleburger's (almost) Daily Kidlit Trivia Nugget.  And I was completely stumped by this one recently: "It took two Kidlitters to bring '101 Dalmations' to the screen. Dodie Smith, of course, wrote the book. But which Kidlit author/illustrator wrote the script?"  Better go to Sam's site for the answer.  I never would have guessed.

• Mo Willems has a new batch of fan art up.  I was particularly fond of the wedding of Elephant and Piggie with the Pigeon as flower girl.  Go write that book, Mo!

• Nice little piece out there called How to Avoid Sabotaging Your Writing Career (#1).  I know plenty of would-be writers who would kill to have a career to sabotage!  Thanks to Cynsations for the link.

• There must be a use for this.  There must!  I've just scored a 22 over at the Language Trainers Group's Guess the Accent game.  I'm pretty happy with that result, considering that I kept expecting the Americans to be Canadians and the Scots to be Irish.

• Daily Image:

Sure sure.  New York seems like it's lots of fun.  But where I really wanna be is London.  For example, there's an artist over there by the name of Slinkachu who is publishing a book called Little People in the City.  Essentially it's teeny tiny hand-painted people left on the streets to fend for themselves.  Think, contemporary Borrowers.  Here's the book:

And here's an image or two to give you a sense of it all.

A sense of humor is key to this kind of art.  Best of all Slinkachu is doing an awesome Little People Treasure Hunt on August 30th where you start at the artist's show at the Cosh Gallery and then follow clues to find the tiny people around the city.  In lieu of that, we Yanks will have to be content with looking at all the great photographs available on this blog.  And you can bet that the book (out in America in September) is on my wish list.  Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link.

Posted by Elizabeth Bird on August 22, 2008 | Comments (6)