All Children Need Books. Period.

I'm working on a presentation for the Tennessee Association of School Librarians Conference.

Here are some 2016 statistics regarding public school children statewide in Tennessee:

48.9% receive free or reduced-price school lunch

32.3% live in families that receive SNAP (food stamps)

24.1% live in poverty

11% live in extreme poverty

5% live in foster care

48.4% of 3rd-5th graders are reading at proficient level

Of 4th-graders eligible for free lunch, 22% are reading at proficient level.

This means that 88% of 4th-grades NOT eligible for free lunch are reading at proficient level.

This is the difference poverty makes. If you aren't poor enough for free lunch, you've got nearly a 9/10 chance of reading proficiently in fourth grade. If you are, it drops to 1/5.

I could throw more statistics at you--I've been working on this for two days--but the upshot is, poor kids need books.

Poor kids need books. Get them some. It's the way out.

On Tour: Where I'm Gonna Be

Okay, everyone! My official book tour for The War I Finally Won starts Friday!

Below is a listing of the events I believe to be open to the public:

Friday, September 29th: SCBWI Children's and YA Booksigning Party, Franklin, TN
***through special permission I will be signing TWIFW ahead of its Tuesday release date***
7:30-9:30 pm, Embassy Suites in Franklin. Open to all, and lots of writers will be there!

Monday, October 2nd
Moore High School, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
6:00-7:30

Tuesday, October 3rd:  Release Date of The War I Finally Won!
Encyclomedia Conference, Oklahoma City
Signings from 9:45-10:30, 1:00-1:45, and 2:00-2:30
Sequoyah Book  Award Author Panel with Victoria Jamieson and Lois Ruby, 11:15-12:00

Wednesday, October 11th: Chevy Chase Library, Washington, DC
afternoon event, time tk

Thursday October 12th: A Likely Story Bookstore, Sykesville MD
Educators' Night Wine & Cheese
7:00 pm

Saturday, October 14th, Southern Festival of Books, Nashville, TN
3:00-4:00 Presentation with Alan Gratz, author of Refugee
4:00-4:30 booksigning

Come visit! I'd love to meet you!

Happy Birthday, Beautiful!

It's only 10:45 am and already it's been a weird day.

For starters, my dog collapsed this morning, in the middle of a joyful romp up our hill. It appears she now has heart problems. She's at the vet getting sorted, and the people at the vet were all kind and reassuring, but it's odd writing without her snoring in my office and it wasn't a good start to my day.

After I got back from the vet's I made myself a second pot of coffee, because circumstances called for it.

My writing so far this morning is lousy. I do not blame the excess caffeine. I blame my procrastination 3 months ago which has caused this deadline jam which means I can not just walk away from my desk today but must sit churning out lousy words.

Oh well. First draft. (Brace yourself, Jessica!) (That's my editor. My long-suffering editor.)

The good news is that today is the third birthday of my penultimate nephew, Fred. All my nephews are brilliant and funny and I love them individually and as a pack. I rejoice in my nephews. When I facetimed Fred and his older brother this morning they shrieked with joy and ran around showing me their new house and Fred's presents, a scooter and a microphone and a balloon that somehow sings "Happy Birthday" in Mickey Mouse's voice when you smack it. No kidding.

A few months ago when I was visiting my sister, I picked Fred up, just at one point in the day. He was chattering away, but suddenly he looked down at my face, cradled it in his two chubby hands, and said, in a tone of delighted wonder, "Oh--you're beautiful!"

I have no idea what made him say that, but I have a feeling that I'll remember it all my days.

Happy Birthday, Fred. You're beautiful, too.

Serendipity in Siricusa

So, this just happened. Really, it did. I’m typing this sitting on the floor near the front doors of Catania airport, in Sicily, because they won’t let us check our luggage until two hours before the scheduled flight time (the flight is already an hour late). And I’m so excited I got out my laptop. When I get wifi I’ll post this, and then I’ll really start writing.

I’m in Sicily, which is more or less insane. We scheduled this trip—which is actually a golf trip organized by the association for which my husband rates golf courses—way before I knew I’d have a book tour starting September 28^th or that my Egypt manuscript due September 27^th. Even knowing how full my September would be, my progress on the new book this summer was slow. I love summer and my girl was home, and I wanted to have fun. Also it was the first time in five years I was writing from a point-of-view other than my beloved Ada’s, and that was difficult. Also everything was a hot mess, as is usual with first drafts. Sometimes it’s hard to keep going when you know what you’ve written so far is shite.

So. Challenged by my friend Dan Gutman to make an audacious goal and achieve it, I joined the September Squad, with the goal of either 50,000 words or a finished draft by the end of the month (If I’ve got 50,000 words and I’m still not finished, the book is much more complex than I thought). I was plugging along happily until I hit this trip. I brought my laptop and my manuscript, but then I’d think—I could write today, or I could explore the Sicilian countryside on horseback, and I picked horseback, and learned what olive groves look like, young and old, and about wild fennel and wild thyme and the exact shade of the Mediterranean Sea, and then I bought a bikini and it’s not like I’m not taking the book seriously, it’s just that I’m not sure I’ll ever be in Sicily again. I’d be a shame to not pay attention.

Meanwhile, I’d hit a place in the Egypt book where I was really really pleased with a particular scene, and with its implications for the rest of the novel, but I was aware that I was lacking a crucial piece of background—that what I had happening needed an antecedent I couldn’t yet identify. So, that’s what first drafts are for. I kept on.

Mostly the itinerary for this trip is pre-arranged, but yesterday my husband and I looked hard at today’s proposed schedule, and thought it lacking, so we hared off on our own. Our hotel concierge suggested we would enjoy Siricusa, an ancient harbor. We arranged for a driver to take us there and then become our tour guide and show us the highlights. Unfortunately the driver we got didn’t speak any English and had never been to Siricusa at all. He got comprehensively lost in the ancient town, driving in circles the wrong way on streets designated pedestrian-only. He stopped several times to ask other Italians for directions. Finally he just stopped the van, threw us out, and told us he’d come back in four hours. By that time we whole-heartedly agreed. His meandering had shown us a basic layout of the town, and we immediately walked to the ancient piazza fronting the 7^th century Byzantine cathedral which was a modification of a 5^th-century-BC temple to Athena.

So that was cool. We looked at some other stuff. Then I saw a poster advertising a museum exhibit of Egyptian coffins dug up from Deir El-Bahari, which is to say the dig near Hatshepsut’s temple. So we paid five euros and went in. Turned out it was a traveling exhibition from a museum in Brussels.

Turned out it contained EXACTLY the information I needed. Two specific items. I’ve solved the plot issue and I’ve gotten a translation of an ancient source I was searching for, and it was brilliant, absolutely amazingly brilliant, and I have no idea on earth how I came to find this information about 20^th dynasty papyri and ushabti in the middle of Siracusa where I hadn’t planned on visiting until yesterday. It’s all amazing. It’s beyond amazing.

So I’m ignoring the rest of my tour group to sit on the airport floor, laptop on my lap, and type this, and the others are sort of guessing that maybe I’m a writer after all. And it’s the icing on the cake, baby. The icing on the Italian cake.

Oh, Boy! We're Going to Call Him Red

So quite often on this blog I tell the truth but not the whole truth. Some things aren't public consumption. A few weeks ago, when I wrote about going to my sister's to help with her little boys while she worked 18-hour days the week of the PGA championship, I deliberately failed to mention that she was 8 months pregnant at the time. It just felt wrong. My sister is a warrior, and she was part of a good team, but it was still a potentially stressful situation and I decided to keep it private.

My sister and her husband had let everyone know that they were expecting a third boy, but they steadfastly refused to divulge his name. That's understandable, of course, but also of course I tried my best to find out early. When we got to Charlotte, my daughter and I cuddled up 2-year-old Fred, and said, "so, what's your new brother's name?"

"Filmore!" Said Fred. That's a character from her current favorite movie, Cars 3.

"Yeah," cut in four-year-old Louie, "but we're going to call him Red."

Baby Filmore was born this morning, healthy and beautiful, as is his momma. My siblings and I are seven for seven: seven pregnancies, seven children. Could anything be more blessed?

I'm off to meet him tomorrow, darling baby Red.

Totality

It's eclipse day, but before that I need to do laundry. Also buy new tires, ride my horse, return my overdue library books, buy feed, and--oh yeah--write my novel.

My husband is an eye surgeon. He wishes the eclipse were not happening. He has been fielding what he considers Stupid Eclipse Questions for the past few weeks, and here's his answer, put concisely:

Don't look at it.
He says, watch it on TV, which I find ludicrous. Thing is, I've hung out in a partial eclipse before, and it was really interesting. The light got thinner. It wasn't like sunset at all. And if I recall, it was about a 70% eclipse, whereas today, on my farm, it will be 96%.

I wouldn't have to go far to experience totality--the other side of Knoxville, or down to Greenville, SC--about 2 1/2 hours driving, so five hours round trip. I've been balancing the idea of five hours solo in a car with 4% more eclipse--staying home won. I'll sit on my porch and enjoy the eclipse without looking at the sun, which is the important part--not to look at the sun. I didn't buy eclipse glasses and given my husband's attitude probably wouldn't risk them anyhow. And no, I have it on very good authority that regular sunglasses are not the same.

Meanwhile I've got to go fetch my truck, which is getting 6 new tires, hitch my trailer to it, and take the trailer in for 4 new tires. That's a lot of tires, and the old ones still have plenty of tread. However, they also have dry rot. The truck is 16 years old, the trailer 15, and this will be the third set of tires for both.

Also my novel. It's such a hot mess, and the first draft is due September 27th. I spent the last few days doing needed research--I usually write, figure out what I need to research, research, rewrite, on an infinite loop--and taking notes on 3 x 5 index cards. I just arranged those cards chronologically so that now I have a plan, more or less, for the entire scope of the book. But some of the cards are less useful than others. One says, "October." That's it. October. I have no idea what I was thinking there.

In the paper this morning there was a letter to the editor saying that the eclipse was a warning from God. The writer pointed out that in a few years, the next eclipse will run across the country diagonally the other direction, thus marking the United States with a great big X for God to aim at. It would be a more interesting idea if the eclipses hadn't been able to be predicted long in advance, so that everyone knows when they're happening. It's a lot like calling the vernal equinox or even the sunset a warning from God: might be, but then, so might sunshine or rain or dry rot on my tires. I have always believed that religion and science comfortably co-exist.

My first index card for the Egypt book, the one on the top of my story pile, reads, "What is art but freedom of expression?" That's not from any book I read. It's from my trip to Egypt, when one of our tour guides was showing us a small statue from a long-opened tomb. It showed a baker, kneading bread, with a thoroughly exasperated look on his face. The statues of the pharaohs (except Ankhenatun, the heretic) and those of the ancient Egyptian gods all conform to certain ritual forms and proportions, but the statue of the baker was fully intransigently human. It was perhaps my favorite thing in all of Egypt: what is art but the freedom to tell the truth?

After Charlottesville: What White People Can Do

So, wow, that mess in Charlottesville this weekend, where white supremacists from around the nation converged on a fairly liberal Southern town, ostensibly to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from public land to a museum. Many of them came armed with assault rifles, dressed as militia. Many of them carried Nazi flags or wore swastikas on their clothing. They were nearly all men--it goes without saying that they were all white. One of them rammed a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters with his car. A woman died and 5 are critically injured.

I'm white. I've been thinking hard about what I can do to fight against racism. I would welcome anyone's thoughts and comments. Here's what I've come up with so far.

Step one: acknowledging racism and white privilege. Realizing that all humans have natural inclination toward bias, that these biases damage our society, and that we must be award of them and take action against them.

If you don't believe in white privilege, google "charlottesville militia." Take a look at some of the videos. Note the police response (or lack thereof). Now imagine what the police response would be if the marchers, equally armed, were all black.

Plenty of other things are also white privilege, but that's a start.

Step two: educate yourself. The way to do this is not by pestering those friends you have who are black. Your education is not someone else's responsibility, unless you are still a child (more on that later). Books are my go-to; I recommend Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, and The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander. You can also learn a lot from the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org).

Step three: educate children. Those men screaming hate slogans in Charlottesville were not born that way. Again, books are my go-to, but I've got backup here--there's a growing body of evidence that says reading books increases children's empathy, their ability to relate to others. So--Jacqueline Woodson (from kindergarten with Each Kindness up to YA), Ashley Bryan, Kadir Nelson, Carole Boston Weatherford, Jason Reynolds, Shannon Draper, Marilyn Nelson. Angela Thomas is rocking the world with The Hate U Give, which everyone older than 14 should read. If you're an educator, Southern Poverty Law has a whole lot of downloadable classroom plans.

Step four: go further. What's your comfort zone? Step outside it. Can you make your own world more diverse? What books do you chose? Restaurants? Churches? Where can you expand your own horizons? I recently signed up for an Ally Backpack from Safety Pin Box. I'll report back on what I learn from that.

I know I've got an awful lot to learn. I'm going to do the work. I hope you'll join me.