Here a link. There a link.

Everywhere a link, link!

It's Poetry Friday, and while I've missed even posting on the last couple, today I can link ya in to the roundup (at Adventures in Daily Living).

And, if that's not enough, the January Carnival of Children's Literature is up at Lisa Chellman's Under the Covers. Get on over and check it out....

A modest proposal...

Ya know, I think I've got a solution for the economic woes of the country, and I suspect many parents of school age children will say "Well, duh! Of course!" when I tell you my idea.

The government should sell wrapping paper as a fundraiser.

Seriously, if we all bought just a couple rolls... well... not only would our money go straight to the federal coffers, but we'd also all need to buy gifts to put inside the wrapping paper! It's a win-win scenario.

I do see one potential problem, though. We'd probably ask other nations to buy wrapping paper from us, but they might be selling it, too... and we'd feel obligated to buy from them. But these are details I'll leave to others to sort out....

That's a lot of things!

Over at Mother Reader, she's celebrating her third blog-o-versary by reprinting her 100 things about me list. Mighty entertaining and a nice way to celebrate. I, on the other hand, have a 3rd anniversary coming up next month where I have no similar plans. But MR has raised the bar again, so I figure I either have to coast in under the radar or do something to celebrate. Hmmmm.... Hmm............

Once again...

... I was not nominated for an Oscar for best actor. This is consistently the case, of course. Perhaps no surprise.

But I'd note that beyond the Oscars, it's awards/best of season elsewhere, including in the Cybils and the upcoming Newbery. I can safely say that I've got no predictions, but I love tooling around and reading all the "mock" awards on the net where people who have read 10 times what I've read predict with, well, usually with more accuracy than me!

But I'm still stinging over my Oscar overlook, so I'll just have to wait a spell before I go mocking....

Poetry in the spotlight

How nice to have (for the fourth time ever) a poem read at the inauguration. I know you're all clever sorts, and I suspect most everyone who ends up here saw or heard Elizabeth Alexander's poem, but just in case and for the record....

Here it is!


And if there's another poem any time soon read before an audience of millions, I'll probably link that, too.

Inkheart, the movie. Seen with my own eyes, I tell ya!

One of the advantages of living in Los Angeles is that every now and then you get to see a movie first... or at least early. So this morning, I got to see Inkheart, based on Cornelia Funke's book of the same name. I'm not a reviewer nor will this be a review, but I will say that more important than my reactions (which were positive, by the way) is that everyone in the target age range seemed to be loving it.

What was particularly fascinating to me was seeing a movie that's all about books and words and writing. There were certainly things that the writer-me laughed at that flew over the heads of... well... perhaps everyone who isn't a writer. But beyond that, the movie is steeped in book references and images and that alone is worthy of celebration, seems to me.

Inauguration read-alouds?

I'm curious if any of y'all have great read-aloud ideas for the Presidential inauguration? I'm thinking that there aren't any inauguration-specific stories ("If You Take a Mouse to an Inauguration" excepted, of course), but I'm open to being proven wrong. Or just to getting good ideas!

Piles. Big piles.

This week I dismantled big piles of books in my office. You know the piles I'm talking about -- books I'd planned to read. I assume I'll still read them, but I needed to redistribute them to shelves and other places so I could start fresh.

It's not that I don't plan to read them all. I do. And it's not that I never made progress on the piles. Instead, they grow faster than I can read. I think this is a good thing, but if you were waiting for me to have a convo with you on any specific book title, you might want to find someone else to chat with!

I expect build new piles, of course, and can only imagine that it'll include books I recently shelved. But for now, I feel like a huge amount of progress has been made!

The Happy New Year Conundrum

No, that's not the title of a lost Robert Ludlum novel (too many words anyway, I think). Rather, it's the question I'd posed on Facebook but seems worthy of blog discussion as well:

When does one stop saying "Happy New Year!"?

There were many thoughts on this, including Mary Hershey's statement that January 26th was the last acceptable date... but she had no proof! Besides, Mary has been known to go for humor....

Still, I know I said "Happy New Year" a lot today, because it was the first time I'd seen many folks this year.

So, have I gone too far? Is it like wearing white pants after Labor Day? Does anyone know????

Resolutions -- A New Year's Resolutions poem/a broken New Year's resolutions poem

RESOLUTIONS
by
Gregory K.

Every year on New Year’s Day,
I grab myself a pen.
I write my resolutions down to look at now and then.

Two years ago, I’d written twelve.
I broke them all by June.
Last year I broke them faster still (the first of March at noon).

This isn’t great, I must admit,
But now I’ve got it solved.
And so, this year, on New Year’s Day, here’s what I have resolved:

Bug my dad, annoy my sis,
Distract my oldest brother.
Skip a chore, create a mess, and once ignore my mother,

Chew some gum, devour pie,
Eat burgers, fries, and cakes,
Teach my baby brother all the joys of chocolate shakes.

My resolutions could go on.
Instead, I’ll stop right here.
Just once I’d like to keep them all...
And this might be my year.

The first Poetry Friday roundup of the year is here over at A Year of Reading. Go on and check it out!

If you want to get all my new poems (and only the poems) emailed to you for freeee as they hit the blog, enter your email address in the box below then click subscribe!

And Happy New Year!

The Cybils' short lists are up!

The short lists (aka, the finalists) for the Cybils are up right here. Like with all such lists, it's fun to check 'em out and learn of new books or argue about what's missing. So jump on in and see what's what. As per usual, I'm facing what's sure to be a tough choice in the poetry catagory, with a couple books I was expecting to be on the list not even making it. Good times. Good times indeed.

Looking back, looking forward, just looking...

This year is almost gone (gone I tell ya, gone!), and frankly, I am okay with that. Not that it would matter much if I weren't, of course, as I understand that this changeover is inevitable. This year is ending with a flurry of travel, family, friends, and even of snow (though the latter was not right here in LA), though not a flurry of blog posts. I've also taken four full days off from checking my email, surfing the web, or any such net-based things until re-appearing here today. And guess what? I've lived to tell the tale! I think that's a valuable piece of news for me to carry into next year... though not one I plan to put to the test very often....

Happy, Happy, Merry, Merry

Yes, well, indeed -- it's Happy and Merry time of year, and I'm clearly blogging like I've been out hitting the eggnog every night. Or something like that. And it's gonna continue like that through the end of the week, at least, if not the whole darn year!

I wish all of you and yours a wonderful, peaceful holiday time, whatever holiday you celebrate (or not!). It's been a pleasure hanging out with y'all this year, and I look forward to the next year, as well.

The last Carnival o' the year... and it's a big'un

Yes, the December Carnival of Children's Literature is up over at Jen Robinson's Book Page. It's a doozy, full of everyone's hand-picked "favorite" post of the year on a raft of children's literature topics. Great stuff.

Not only that, but it's Jen's 3rd Blogoversary, so go on over and say "hi!" if nothing else!

Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

One of the great perks of being a volunteer librarian is that I get to pick whatever I want to read-aloud (well, more or less). This holiday time I've forgone the Grinch and gone with The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, a Christmas Story by Lemony Snickett with illustrations by Lisa Brown. The big advantage, as far as I'm concerned of this as a read-aloud is that it allows me to scream "Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" many times. If one knows that a committee meeting is going on in the room right next to the library, it allows one to scream with extra gusto.

I was hoarse for days, but the looks I got later that day were well worthwhile.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Why I Love the Holidays in My Family -- A Christmas poem/A Hanukkah poem/A Chrismukkah poem

WHY I LOVE THE HOLIDAYS IN OUR FAMILY
by
Gregory K.


My dad lights the menorah.
My mom hangs Christmas lights.
And so the way I do the math,
It’s presents 20 nights!



The Poetry Friday links are collected here at the Wild Rose Reader. Go on now... go check 'em out.

If you want to get all my new poems (and only the poems) emailed to you for freeee as they hit the blog, enter your email address in the box below then click subscribe!

Internet friends....

While I have poetically made the claim of being Pretty Well Connected, today via those very connections (and more specifically via Laurel Snyder), I heard a wonderful song that treads some similar terrain: All My Internet Friends.

Now, what makes this even more poetic to my mind... the singer/songwriter is Amanda French, and she was an early Fibber right here on GottaBook! All that lovely connected-poetry aside, you'd still like the song if you heard it. So go hear it!

Shaking, I tell ya.

We've been having sporadic internet outages, and it's remarkable to me how frustrated I can be when I'm unable to pop online and check my mail or, honestly, research. And so I started to remember back before I was ever online. And then I realized how I never woulda known most of y'all.

That just doesn't work for me.

So, with a few minutes of up time, I stopped reminiscing and simply decided to blog about how clearly addicted I am to being online... and how totally okay with that I am!

Aglay, I tell ya. Plans went aglay.

As they gang aft, do my plans (in this case, to return to daily blogging) went aglay, indeed. I suppose this makes three posts this week (and this a post about posting!), but that wasn't my intent.

For me, this week brings to the end 3 1/2 years of coordinating/co-coordinating a monthly SCBWI Schmooze here in the L.A. area. I have to say that I've learned so much from the monthly conversations on sooooo many topics related to children's literature, both from doing preparation work and from the wonderful fellow schmoozers. One thing that is certainly true about folks who write (and illustrate and edit and art design and publish and sell books) for children is that they are passionate, giving, and mighty smart, too. I know I'll even see a few of you GottaBook readers at the Schmooze this week (and next year, too), but in general, consider this a public shout out to everyone who's been part o' the Schmoozing, and particularly to Sara Wilson Etienne, the talented writer (and gifted baker!) who has co-coordinated (and done the bulk of the hard work!) with me the last 2 1/2 years.

Yep. Y'all rock. Now stop reading blogs and get back to work :-)

The poetry questions, part two

Again, looking towards the future here at GottaBook, I'm trying to figure out what to do with the ream of poetry that already covers the place... and will continue to grow next year, I'd suspect. I get lots of email requests to use my poetry in all sorts of wonderful places, and along with those, I get requests for links to my poetry books. This is problematic, of course, as I don't have any. I have been asked and thought about compiling the blogged poems and offering them for sale as an ebook or a printed book, but one thing (of many!) that holds me back is that it becomes a business, the whole self-publishing thang. Also, I have a book I've been focusing all my writing energy on and takes priority both time and career-wise.

But I do think about all this, and would love to hear the thoughts of others who have suggestions, experience, or anything to add. Again, comments or email all work. And thanks to those who've come up with design ideas as mused about in my last post!