2008 Year-End Prize Giveaway Bonanza!

To celebrate the turning of the calendar page to my book publication year, I am giving away, to one randomly selected person, a bunch of stuff! The prize includes, but is not limited to, the following excellent and curious items*:

1. An issue of the January/February 2009 Cicada magazine featuring my story, “Swingtown.”
2. An issue of the Winter 2008 New Directions in Student Services Special Issue: Using Emerging Technologies to Enhance Student Engagement, featuring the article, “Blogging in the Academy,” co-authored by me and my esteemed colleague Shane Nackerud.
3. A handful of Mudville bookmarks.
4. Original hand-drawn and hand-lettered instructions on “How to Draw a Snake,” by the author, who has very little actual artistic talent or know-how.
5. Wallet-sized picture of the author when he was a boy, and somewhat cuter than he is now.

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Charlotte

Sometimes you know you aren’t going to get through a day without adopting a cat. For example, if your wife shows up from shopping with a new litter box, collar, and pet bowl and asks you if you want to go down to the animal shelter where she volunteers sometimes, she’s got somebody she wants [...]

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The Christmas Monkey

We were late putting up the Christmas Monkey this year, but better late than never! We have a monkey instead of a tree because, honestly, with four cats a tree is out of the question. I can just see Pippi climbing the boughs while Lucy bats off the ornaments and Torii chomps on the cord [...]

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Swingtown

I had a nice surprise when I came home… a bundle of Cicada magazines with my story “Swingtown” in them. The story is about a 14-year-old harmonica prodigy who inexplicably finds herself dragged to Milwaukee for a Battle of the Steve Miller Band Cover Bands contest. The story started as a joke between me and [...]

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'Twas Four Nights Before Christmas

And a creature was stirring, all right… and it was, indeed, a mouse. You might think four cats, two of them proven mousers, would take care of it without much fuss. Indeed, it’s happened before. We’ve taken mice from the maws of cats, and found others, um, too late. But this time, me and my [...]

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Guys Who Read

A recent article in the New Yorker’s “Book Bench” blog features a panel discussion of a young adult novel, while repeating some common (but wrong) assumptions about the form and also taking time to say that teen boys “apparently” don’t read at all, and explicitly discounting those who do: All the boys in my life [...]

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A Christmas Carol Carol

I’d like you to imagine a dark economic time — tough to do, I know, but bear with me. An ambitious but struggling author needs some quick cash. He’s got a debt to pay off. He drops by an editor’s office and asks if there’s anything he can do with a quick turn-around time for [...]

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I'm Published!

This time in the academic sense. This article on blogging in higher education is the results of (a) a research paper I wrote in 2006 to complete my Master’s in Learning Technologies, and (b) running into the University of Minnesota Blogging Czar at the right time. It turns out Shane was trying to fill some [...]

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And Now My Surprise Event…

My worlds will collide in January when I intend to apply what I know from my day job to my writing life. I’ll be leading a small workshop through the Children’s Literature Network on “Web 2.0 for Authors.” The CLN website says this: In this workshop, participants will learn a ten-step process for envisioning a [...]

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Voices

Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had any inate talent. You know, like the ability to sing in perfect pitch, pitch a ball 100 mph, or convince people you should be in charge of anything. If I could have any such inborn knack for something, I would want to have [...]

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