One of my favorite parts of being a children's book writer is going into schools to talk about what I do. Not only is it an opportunity for me to get to get away from the computer and hang out with real people, it's also a chance to unleash my Inner Hambone. My school presentations are usually exceedingly silly, with costumes and props and puppets and goofy jokes and group poetry-writing and as ...
It's a grim time in publishing -- every day I seem to hear about another threat to the very existence of books, magazines, newspapers and writers. And as if the news weren’t awful enough, on Sunday, I read an article in the New York Times business section about how e-readers are leading to the proliferation of book piracy, which, in case you haven’t thought it through, means we writers don't ...
This week in my environmental blog, I've started blogging about all the ordinary things I run across as an environmental reporter that turn out to be bad for you, or bad for the planet. Like, salad. How can salad be bad? Well, like just about everything, it depends on where it comes from. As I reported last spring in Sierra magazine, the big salad and spinach packagers have imposed some ...
