Author: Katie L. Carroll (Page 130 of 142)

The Signed Book Collection of a Bibliophile

January 17, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

I’ve made it onto the web again! You may remember (or probably not) that I’ve blogged about appearing the web before (check out this post and this one). Unlike those other posts, though, this new one is ALL ABOUT ME! Check out a great–if I do say so myself–interview of yours truly on Kimberly Sabatini’s blog.

I mentioned in the interview that one of the reasons I like to go to writing conferences is to meet authors and have them sign books for me. Here’s my shelf of signed books:

I love all my signed books (call me a bibliophile if you must), but here’s a few that hold a special place in my heart:

Lisa Yee is a great writer and a really fun person. I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting her in person once, but we occasionally chat via her blog. It’s cut off in the picture, but she crossed out Stanford Wong and put in Katie!

I remember reading Bruce Coville’s My Teacher is an Alien back in grade school and loving it, so it was a real honor to meet him in person. I saw him speak at the SCBWI LA Conference a few years ago, and it was great.

Sid Fleischman is one of the cutest men I’ve ever met. He was in a humor panel at the LA conference. He was one of the quieter contributors on the panel, but when he did speak, it was definitely worth listening to. I later told him that I enjoyed his subtlety, and he said to me, “I’m sure you have a great deal of subtlety as well.”

As I was looking at my signed books, I realized that I have given away all my signed picture books, but there was some good ones. My favorite is How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mark Teague (it’s signed by Mark Teague), which I gave to my little nephew. When you read it with him, he turns to the title page and says, “It’s signed by Mark (my nephew has a funny little accent like he’s from Boston or something, so Mark sounds like Mak) Teague and he drew a picture of a dinosaur.” Then he recites the whole book for you.And because there can never be enough links in one post, here’s one more for you. Agent Mary Kole is running another contest on her Kidlit blog, so check it out here.

Magnetic Poetry: Poink

January 6, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

Girls’ Christmas (my “sisters” and I get together every year for a girls-and-kids-only Christmas party) was relocated to my house at the last minute, so I requested that my guests create a sentence with the magnetic poetry kit on my refrigerator. Here’s what we came up with (as usual, I put a space in between each magnet to show the creative combinations):

love people like they a r e obedient prostitute s (I would think any obedient prostitute is easy to love, so this could be a new logo for world peace or something!)
experience perfect pleasure through bald chicken rhythm dance ing (I’d like to see bald chicken rhythm dancing…or on second thought, maybe I wouldn’t.)
spark random inspiration speak every thought investigate precious emotion (lather, rinse, repeat)
electric transgress ion s will burn holy fire (That’s what she said!)
the devil s skeleton is suck ing seed y sweet & sour soup (Nice alliteration…who knew the devil’s skeleton liked Chinese food?)

In other word news, my sister, niece, and nephews are trying to get the word “poink” into mainstream vocabulary. This started when my three-year-0ld nephew told my sister he didn’t want to sit in one of the dining-room chairs because it had a “pionk.” My sister asked, “What’s a poink?” So he showed her a broken chair rung that was sticking into his back. They now use the word regularly.

Poink has actually turned out to be very versatile. It can be a noun, as in the original sense: That needle has a sharp poink. It can be a verb, literally: Ouch! That needle just poinked me. It can be a verb, figuratively: Oh, you just got poinked. It can be an adjective: That needle is very poinky.

I checked out the urban dictionary and found some interesting definitions for poink and poinky. I recommend everyone tries to use poink in a sentence today.

(Not) Making New Year’s Resolutions

December 28, 2009 / Katie L. Carroll

I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution in quite a few years. I find them somewhat arbitrary and limiting. Just because it’s January 1st, doesn’t mean that it’s the right time for me to set a certain goal. Maybe I just like to buck tradition, but I kind of enjoy the freedom of not having a resolution. And let’s be honest, most people who make resolutions fail (according to Wikipedia…which is, of course, always right…only 12% succeed).

Many resolutions are fitness and/or diet related. Seeing as I prefer to exercise outside and I live in New England, creating an exercise goal in the middle of winter doesn’t seem like a good idea (really, I’m just setting myself up for failure). As for diet, well I tend to try and be good all year long—admittedly with varying degrees of success—and I always try and be more careful after the usual holiday indiscretions (indigestions?).

A lot of my writing friends make writing resolutions. Right now, I’m working on revising a MG novel, I’m writing a first draft of a YA novel, and I’m considering doing another round of revisions on a YA novel that I had been sending out to editors and agents. I’m attending a writing conference in early April, so I’m planning my writing deadlines around that.

I prefer not to limit myself to one time of year for making resolutions. I see each and every day as a new opportunity to work on being a better person. That also means if a day goes by and I didn’t exactly meet my goal, there’s always tomorrow. Just in the last few weeks, I realized I haven’t been stretching myself as a human being much lately, so I came up with a kind of crazy idea (which I’ll be blogging about in the near future) to amp up my own level of introspection.

For those of you who do like to make resolutions, I’d love to hear what they are so I can help cheer you on along the way.

Carrying on the Tradition of Christmas Cookies

December 14, 2009 / Katie L. Carroll

Holiday traditions come in all shapes in sizes. As a kid, one of my favorite Christmas traditions was when Santa would leave our filled stockings for us at the end of our beds. It was so exciting to wake up on Christmas morning and not even have to get out of bed to find our first presents.

All five of us (my two older sisters, me, my younger sister, and my younger brother) used to gather together on one bed and open up all out stocking gifts. As my older sisters got older, us younger kids used to open up our stockings first, then we’d go wake up my older sisters and watch them open up their stockings. This was a nice tradition for my parents too because it meant they got to sleep in a little later.

Oh, and we always got oranges in our stockings, which seems like it would be lame, but I remember it as a nice treat. The orange-in-the-stocking tradition is one that carried over into my adult life (it seems Santa remembers about such things even as we get older). Many of the traditions I had as a kid have faded away, but many new ones have taken their places.

Making Christmas cookies with my niece and nephew is one of those new, but at the same time old, traditions. I used to make Christmas cookies with my Nana (my great grandmother). Then she stopped coming up north for the holidays because it was just too cold for her. She passed away at the ripe old age of 96, but I feel a little like I’m carrying on her tradition in a new way with my sister’s kids.

Unlike last year, we didn’t have any lady-licking incidences this year, but I paid homage to that by making a snowman and gingerbread lady the centerpiece of my cookies.

(These are the cookies I decorated…notice the snowman and his gingerbread wife.)

(My ten-year-old nephew decorated these cookies. He and his friend also made a really cool gingerbread house of Hagrid’s hut, but I forgot to take a picture of it.)

(My four-year-old niece decorated these. She was very meticulous and seemed to have a grand plan for each one.)

(These ones were decorated by my three-year-old nephew…he did most of the decorating by himself, but my sister did give him some help with the big gingerbread lady!)

(And because I didn’t want my sister to feel left out, here’s her cookies, including the big gingerbread lady.)

It was definitely a fun afternoon. What are your favorite holiday traditions?

Full Moon Ruminations

December 2, 2009 / Katie L. Carroll

As I drove home from work yesterday, it was already pretty dark (it’s such a bummer how early it gets dark this time of year) and my eyes were drawn to the sky. Against the slate-colored December sky was the brilliant light of an almost full moon. This was not the first time I had the pleasure of such a sight.

Later in the evening, I walked into my bedroom to find the bed blanketed in the silver moonlight. And last night, my hubby thought he was going to have to run in the dark, but the moon lit the way for him. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to do anything by the light of the silvery (and full) moon tonight; it’s raining.

I was playing with settings on my camera when I took this picture and somehow the moon came out with a weird double image. The detail on the leaves is pretty cool, though. This full moon occurred in October 2008. That full moon brought out the weirder side of people. I haven’t noticed much oddness yet today, but there’s more than an hour left in the day…plenty of time for erratic behavior.

Since it’s only the second day of the month, I started to wonder if there was going to be another full moon this month, also known as a blue moon (which is also a popular beer!). Turns out the second full moon this month just happens to fall on the 31st, which means we’ll all be bringing in the New Year with a blue moon (too bad we won’t be bringing in the New Year with a New Moon).

I also learned an interesting tidbit about blue moons: there’s actually two different kinds of blue moons (and neither of them have to do with painting your butt). There’s the one that is occurring this month, which is two full moons in a single month, the second of which is called a blue moon. This is actually fairly rare—hence the term “once in a blue moon”—and the next one doesn’t occur until August 2012.

There’s also the Farmer’s Almanac definition of a blue moon, which is technically a true blue moon. This occurs when there are four, instead of the more common three, full moons in a single season. Instead of calling the final full moon of the season the blue moon, the third full moon is the blue moon. This is also fairly rare. There will be this kind of blue moon in November 2010 and then again in August 2013.

Okay, how many times can I write the word “moon” in a single post? Everything in excess I always say. Happy full moon!