New TV shows focuses on folks who are black and missing

NPR says, “African-Americans are only 13 percent of the country's population. But according to the National Crime Information Center, they're about 40 percent of persons considered missing or disappeared.”  Media attention is often focused disproportionately on missing white women and girls. A new TV show, called Black and Missing, hopes to shift the focus somewhat.

Read more about Black and Missing.

Doesn't this 12-year-old have an amazing voice?

Emanuelle Lo is a girl who was born blind - and with amazing musical ability. When she was 11, she wrote this song, and then last Christmas friends and family helped produce a video for it.

I'm proud to say that she is also reading Girl, Stolen.  I was contacted by her librarian, and then asked her family if it would be okay if I posted her video.

Why sit when you can stand?

Every few weeks I read a study, like this one, that basically says that sitting at your job leads to premature death and disease.

So I got this stand up rolling desk. I use it every day. It's not perfect, because my laptop is below eye level, but I think it's still better for me. And it was cheap and I could push it back into a hiding place when I'm done with it.



And it's worked out better than FitDesk Fitness Space Saving Semi Recumbent X Bike for Laptops, which, sadly was not easy to write on at all.

In a perfect world, I would have a treadmill desk. But we live in a teeny tiny house and there really isn't any place I could put one. Plus I was kind of bummed when I figured out you needed a way to mount your screen at eye level.

Taking my own advice

I'm holed up, writing, and wanted to make an on-screen to-do list.  I probably haven't used my laptop's Stickies application (they look like virtual yellow Post-It notes) for a couple of years.  When I opened it up, a sticky I used to keep hanging on the edge of my screen opened up too.

Here's my writing advice to myself:
- Slow it down
- Show!
- Emotion, emotion, emotion
- Be dialog happy
- Take the second right answer
- Surprise me now

I think I'm going to leave this open again...

Girl, Stolen chosen for One Book, One Community

One Book, One Community is a community-wide reading program developed by the American Library Association and adopted by cities across America. And each year Olney, Illinois choses a book for adults to read alongside students.

In 2012 it will be Girl, Stolen!

I am so excited. The only times I’ve been to Illinois have been changing planes in O’Hare, which usually seems to involve running madly from one terminal to another.  Hundreds of copies of the book will be distributed to adults as well as students at Richland Middle School. The theme of the program this year is "One Theme, One Community. Overcoming Adversity."

And in a very strange twist of fate, my great-grandparents, Fred Meeker and Myrl Chapman, were married in 1904 a few miles from Olney.

Ashes - you MUST read this book

I had slogged through several so-so books last week, and then on Friday night, I picked up Ashes, intending to read for maybe an hour.

Four hours later, I was still reading. And on Saturday, instead of writing, I just gave in and finished the book.  And now I feel sad and empty, because the next one (it’s a trilogy) isn’t due out until September of 2012.

Ashes begins when an electromagnetic pulse wipes out all electronics, killing most adults in the process. Only a few people under the age of 25 and over the age of 65 are left, and most of the younger ones have been turned into flesh-eating monsters (like zombies only the bite of another zombie doesn't create a new zombie). The main character is 17-year-old Alex who was hiking when the pulse hit. She had just met an eight year old named Ellie and her grandfather, who drops dead during the pulse. Later they meet Tom, a young solider on leave, and the three of them are left to figure out if it’s possible to stay alive in this new world.

One of the best things the author does is fantastic cliff-hanger chapter endings, ie:

- No, she thought. No, please, Go, I’m not seeing this.


- Much later, she would think all that talk of food was to blame for what happened next.  


- Something slammed against her back as a bright orange flash erupted out of the dark, and a shotgun boomed.


- Alex and Tom both looked at Ellie and then at each other, and burst into laughter.  
That was the last good time.


- “Promise me that if I change,” Tom said, “you’ll kill me.”  


- The woman was sallow and pinched with a frizz of gray hair. Maybe in another life and before this nightmare, she’d baked chocolate chip cookies for the grandkids, but not now.
She sighted her rifle on Alex’s chest. “Don’t.”  

You can see why I couldn’t stop reading!

You can read more about the author and the book here.

Raise the stakes - I'm begging you!

I just put down a big YA bestseller with only 100 pages to go.  Why?  Because I realized I no longer cared.

Oddly enough, the reason I no longer cared is that none of the characters I loved were in danger.

You would think that such a situation would be ideal.  After all, I don’t enjoy it when characters are hurt or killed.  I actually cried when one of the characters in The Hunger Games died.  (Full on tears.)

And this book had plenty of scrapes.  The main character is kidnapped. She’s forced to fight in a ring.  (And if you lose three times, you are thrown to the crowd which rips you to pieces.) She falls into a river and nearly goes over a waterfall that would mean her certain death.  She and her friends fight off giant clawed worms.  (Those of you who have read this book will have guessed what it is by now.)

But you know what?  Not one important character had died at the point I stopped reading.  (Her father dies at the beginning, in the inciting incident, but you haven’t gotten to know him yet.)  Not even an important animal.  No character is even badly damaged. I started having a hard time paying attention to the latest adventure, because I knew they would find a way out a page or two later.

Life is precious because we know it is short.  If we could all live forever, would we care about life as much?  I think the very best books are willing to show us that it could all be on the line, and that sometimes the good guys lose (at least one battle, if not the war).