CBTNW: A Teeny-Tiny History of Nearly Everything

I recently finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Initially, I accidentally ordered A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. I asked Bede, "What's next, a board book series?" and started to think about a post for Children's Books That Never Were. Here is the letter from hapless editor Garrulous MacKenzie recommending some edits:


Dear Bill Bryson,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript for a board book entitled A Teeny-Tiny History of Nearly Everything as a companion piece to A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Really Short History of Nearly Everything. The concept of two-page spreads that illustrate contrasting items is standard of the board book genre, and you execute it brilliantly with the atom and the galaxy:



I enjoyed browsing through some of the other subjects, too. The chemical elements with the smallest and largest number of atoms (hydrogen and lawrencium!),and the oldest and newest sets of hominid skeletons were standouts. However, there are two major problems which need to be addressed before we can conceive of publishing your board book.

First, despite the catchy title, in no way is your board book teeny-tiny, or even “brief.” The ideal length of a board book is 10 pages long, which includes both sides of the boards. Your manuscript is 10 ² pages long, which is exponentially more than a single board book can accommodate. It’s possible that we could split the manuscript up into 10 equal parts and feature it as a box set, but in the meantime, I suggest that you work on trimming some of the sections. For example, you could eliminate the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as “The Great Dying,” as it might make people concerned about climate change. Science is supposed to be fun, after all!

Second, you say that this manuscript is a “history” of nearly everything, but the subject matter is natural science, not history. Studies have shown that the general public does not take kindly to being misled. Remember the controversy over A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, where everyone thought it was a travel cookbook? There was a similar outcry over A Room With a View, by E. M. Forster, as 99 percent of the story took place outside of the room in question. Children are even more discriminating than adults when it comes to deception. For the sake of clarity and truth, I recommend a title change along the lines of A Practically Microscopic Scientific Examination of a Whole Lot of Stuff.


Sincerely,
Garrulous MacKenzie
Sharper & Crow Publishers
***

Disclaimer: This post is a work of fiction mean to be for fun. As far as I know, Bill Bryson is not actually working on a board-book series.

Saturn Slide Show

Take a look at these photos of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft, hosted on the New York Times website:

Saturn Up Close

Photo number 13 shows sunlight reflected off a lake of Titan.

My Mom Had Worms: A Story for Earth Day

For the purposes of Earth Day (which really should be every day), I am going to exploit some family history:

My mom was a fan of compost long before compost cones made the whole setup easier. The little compost container by the side of the sink was a regular fixture in each of our successive homes. A homemade structure out in the back yard would contain all of our leftover fruit and vegetable peels. However, when I was in graduate school, my mom ordered a worm bin and put it in the basement.

The first day that the worm bin resided in the basement, my mom called the worm bin hotline to ask why the worms were looking so peaked and tired out. "They have jet lag," the customer service representative explained.

My mom asked, "Do they have personalities?"

The representative paused, and then said, "They have a collective personality."

Soon after, the worms staged their first jailbreak. Mom got them back into the bin, but after that, my brothers and I refused to go near it. My mom tried to convince my brothers and me that the worms were actually good tenants. We said NOTHING DOING, and told her that we would continue to put fruit and veggie scraps into the compost container upstairs, but when it came to feeding the worms, she was on her own. Every time the worms broke free, mom would yell, "Worm alert! Worm alert!" and try to get us to help her round them up. We were stubbornly uncooperative. Years later, when the worms finally died, my mother wept over their carcasses.*

These days, vermiculture is quite fashionable. My daughter does not care for most animals, but is a fan of insects and earthworms. I might be persuaded to host a "wormery" for her sake, but not until all of the other household projects on our list have been completed. That's a pretty safe statement to write.

Happy Earth Day!

*Yes, okay, that is an exaggeration. Many thanks to my mom for letting me take creative license with this story.

Felt Board Tutorial

Kristy of Textiles4you has a tutorial on how to make a travel felt story board. She's quite crafty and is passionate about upcycling.

WIP: Two Goats on a Bridge

I started out simply telling stories as I learned them. When I took up guitar, I began to look for ways to incorporate music into the stories. These days, I rarely tell stories without music intertwined somehow. It's a matter of adapting to attention spans. Some people are master storytellers and can keep a toddler's attention for 30 minutes without the use of melody. However, those tellers still use rhythm and rhyme, so I would argue that they are employing the use of percussion.

Right now, I'm working on an all-musical version of "Two Goats on a Bridge," a Russian folktale you can find in Margaret Read MacDonald's Peace Tales: World Folktales to Talk About and Three Minute Tales. It's got a jaunty tune that has one minor chord for spice. Once I'm reasonably satisfied with it enough to use it in performance, I'll test it out on my Third Place Books Friday morning crowd. There's a preschool that often comes when I perform, and they help keep me from getting mired in a performance rut.

It would be great to be able to do a felt-board play along with the song, but I would need a third hand to make it work. There are times when I wish I had a storytelling partner like Adrienne has with Jason. I also wish I had a writing partner, but that's a discussion for another time.

(Regarding the title of this post: WIP stands for Work in Progress.)

A Vacation: to there and back again

Last Friday, I was fortunate enough to be able to accompany my aunt on a three day trip to Vancouver Washington and Portland, Oregon. Bede took care of Lucia on Friday, and on Saturday, a friend of mine with three children had Lucia play at her house for a few hours. I had a wonderful, relaxing mini-holiday. Powell's Books was a significant part of my travels, as was Multnomah Falls. Early Sunday morning, I woke up and wrote for an hour, then fell back asleep. Later on, it occurred to me that I would be far more creative on a regular basis if I got more rest.

Here's what's coming up: more visitors, a gig at the Children's Museum on Thursday, and more visitors after that. I'm also planting two raspberry canes in a raised bed. This may not sound exciting now, but if one takes the long-range view, it may very well be something over which to kvell. Gardening is one big game of, "Maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe this time it will grow."

Crafty Thursday: Spectrum

One of the most challenging things about my doll-making business is taking accurate photos. Photos have improved since I invested in a photo light tent last autumn (the two homemade version I tried didn't work). Still, there are some felt shades that simply don't show up accurately and require Photoshop skills I do not have. When I presented to the NaturalKids Team my challenge regarding a recent doll I made, Daria of LaLa! Shoes revealed that she had extensive Photoshop skills and offered to help. She said that the human eye can register more color shades than a camera, and that it's even harder to reproduce those colors in prints. Daria is working on a tutorial for me so that I can learn to do the work myself, but in the meantime, she changed my lavender doll from this:


The doll is dressed in a pleasing shade of mauve; however the felt itself is not actually this color.

To this:

This orchid color is the true shade of the felt.

It is an odd construct that one has to edit a photo to make it an honest representation. Photography is both art and science.

Adrienne, Amish Guitar, Handwork, and Odd-Fish

Here are a few items that I have gathered into one blog post. If I were clever all the time, I would have made them four separate blog-posts, but I am only clever on Tuesdays and alternate weekends.

1.
The wonderful Adrienne of What Adrienne Thinks About That came to visit me in Seattle after the Public Library Association conference in Portland, Oregon. She drove up with a friend on my birthday and we got to hang out for a day and a half before she had to fly back to New York. That visit was a wonderful birthday present. This was the first time my husband and daughter got to meet Adrienne, and my daughter was besotted. She would occasionally burst out with, "Adrienne? I loooooove you." I felt the same, but was less demonstrative.

2.
At PLA, Adrienne met up with Amish Guitar who gave her a handy Emergency Guitar Kit to deliver to me. This kit came in a zip-lock bag with a number of smaller zip-lock bags that included:
a. Emergency Guitar Strap with lock-clip (string with a bread-tie)
b. Emergency Capo (toothpick with rubber band)
c. Emergency Chord Charts (need a magnifying glass to read them)
d. An I.O.U. for an Emergency "Bad Gig" candy bar

Not included: Emergency Guitar Tuner


Emergency Guitar Kit

3.
Angela Mobley of The Artist the Mom wrote a guest post on The Magic Onions about handwork in the Waldorf curriculum. Here's the post: Discovering Waldorf- Handwork in a Waldorf School.

4.
A couple of months ago, James Kennedy, the author of The Order of the Odd-Fish, sent me an email to let me know about fan art inspired by his book. I was intrigued, but when I went to my library system's online catalog, the only copy of Odd-Fish was in electronic format. After the rigmarole of downloading the program required to read it, downloading the book, and attempting to open the file, I remembered why I had deleted the program the last time I tried to read an electronic book, and gave up in a short burst of temper. However, James Kennedy had the publishing house send me a copy of Odd-Fish newly released in paperback. Thank you, James Kennedy!