I love Duotrope. Their search engine helped me find great short story markets like Penumbra and Cast of Wonders. Duotrope switched to a subscription model in January – a choice that I don’t begrudge them.
If you are looking for a free alternative to Duotrope, though, you should check out The Submission Grinder. You can search for markets based on genre, word count, and pay scale. It offers many of the same features as Duotrope and promises to always be free.
I’m concerned with a condition like Asperger’s being minimized to a gimmick or a trend in YA literature, so I was a bit reluctant to read Colin Fischer at first. I’m glad that I did read it, though, because I would have missed out on a great story if I hadn’t.
Colin Fischer trudges through the daily life of a high school student, but has a unique perspective on life as someone with Asperger’s. I’ve enjoyed stories like Mockingbird by Erskine whose narrator gives us insight into their condition (what good story doesn’t do that, really?). What I especially liked in Colin Fischer was any time that an emotion was written. It was in a different font to represent Colin referencing a face chart to understand body language. The semi-subtle feature continued to draw me back into Colin’s mind. Characterization of duplicitous people, characters who said one thing but meant another, was enhanced by misleading faces. Colin has to sift through the information to get to the truth.
Colin Fischer is a detective in the same style as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. He’s in good company and borrows their techniques while applying them to a high school mystery. A gun has gone off in the school cafeteria and Colin will determine who fired the gun – simply for the love of truth.
Miller and Stentz do a good job of balancing out the seriousness of the situation with some fun pop culture references. On second thought, make that a ton of references. Almost every page has a footnote explaining some kind of allusion, whether to the Kuleshov Effect or Die Hard. It makes sense that the authors would have a finger on the pulse of entertainment. They’re the screenwriters from X-Men: First Class.
This has the potential to be a popular book and rightfully so. It’s stellar realistic fiction and I would love to see the mystery genre jump off. Browsing the aisles of Barnes and Noble and seeing the majority of stories revolving around a girl rebelling against a corrupt government [cough] Hunger Games [/cough], Colin Fischer stands out. I hope that others will take a look at it, too.
I’ll give you more details in a bit, but I wanted to share this really cool cover art.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan asked teachers on Twitter about what was the biggest challenge the first year of teaching. Click here for some of the responses. I see two trends in the responses:
The first year is full of surprises. What’s interesting is that most of those surprises are common among teachers from across the United States. If that’s the trend, then why do most first year teachers feel at one time or another that their struggles are an isolated exception? Why do new teachers feel that they are on their own? These are the questions to be asked by those that want to strengthen the teaching profession.
Thanks, Cheryl Redfield, for the link.
Wearable technology has been a fascination of mine since I first saw a Scientific American story about Steve Mann‘s attempt to be a cyborg.
Now Google Glass is looking to make some of that technology available to consumers and they need people to test out the devices. You can find out more details about the application by clicking here.
Here’s the catch:
Explorers will each need to pre-order a Glass Explorer Edition for $1500 plus tax and attend a special pick-up experience, in person, in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles.
Yowza.
Alaska was invaded.
I had heard rumors, but Ghosts in the Fog details the facts. During World War II, Japan had decimated a sizable portion of the United States fleet by striking at Pearl Harbor in 1941. In 1942, Japan kept the momentum going by launching a series of invasions on islands throughout the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea.
The Aleutian Islands (the tail part of Alaska) were one destination for invasion.
Ghosts in the Fog starts with U.S. code crackers catching a message about a possible invasion in one of two locations. The diligent cryppies at Station HYPO cracked part of the code and gave what they knew to Admiral Nimitz and Naval intelligence, who then decided where to send the remnants of the fleet that were still operational. The book then details key points in the Japanese invasion leading up to the eventual retreat of the Japanese fleet and a turning point in the war in the Pacific.
Where Seiple excels is in maintaining the human element of the events. This is a war story about more than boats and bombs. She did her research and draws quotes from both sides of the conflict.
Where the sequencing struggles a bit is when events were happening simultaneously. To Seiple’s credit, one event builds into another, so the events need to be included, but it caught me off guard a couple of times to read that the starting events of a chapter happened two months before what was just mentioned. Seiple labeled the sections well, but it still broke me out of my flow of reading.
This is definitely a purchase that librarians need to make if they want engaging nonfiction. Yes, there are a bunch of books about World War II, but because this one focuses on Alaska instead of other operational theaters, it stands out as something fresh. I was glad that Seiple was able to record these heroic stories before they faded into second- and third-hand accounts. This is magnified by the fact that, until recently, a good portion of this information was still classified and hidden from the general public.
We’re in our second semester of our Bring Your Own Device initiative and I’ve already seen a positive aspect of having students being able to use their own device for projects instead of relying just on the one or two that the library can provide. One example is with video projects. We’ve been more efficient with our class time because each group has at least one video camera through the use of a cell phone. Students get the footage they need and don’t have dead air time waiting for another group to finish.
And yes, we do understand that having a video camera in the hands of each group can also have some negative aspects, too. That’s why we’re teaching digital citizenship, the ethical use of technology. Education Week has a great article that goes into more detail about digital citizenship. I would be curious to hear people’s thoughts about the color-coding system used by George C. Marshall High School.
What do Bill Gates, The Beatles, and Andrew Carnegie have in common? They’re outliers, statistical anomalies that stray from average society into the land of superstar success.
But is that all that they share? What led to their success?
That’s what Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is about. Gladwell looks at factors that successful people have no control over, things like access to resources and the year/location of their birth. Sure, we know that The Beatles had their big debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and started Beatlemania, but did you know that they were playing for eight hours a day in Hamburg, Germany (after starting out in Liverpool, England) years before Ed Sullivan? They had enough time to weed out the average (and, by some accounts, downright bad) songs and instead lock into the sound that made them famous.
Another case in point: Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. If we only looked at the surface, then the secret to success in the computer industry is to go to an Ivy League school and then drop out, right? What doesn’t get mentioned much is that when he was 13, the parents organization at his elite prep school bought a terminal to access a computer owned by General Electric. This was at a time when you got charged to log into a computer because they were so rare and could only handle one process – let alone one user – at a time. (Think about how many processes are running just on your cell phone as it’s checking for signal strength, synching the time, managing the battery, checking for messages and/or email, and running any additional apps.)
On top of that, even before setting foot on Harvard’s campus, Gates had exploited a bug (keep in mind that he was still a teenager) to get additional time on Computer Center Corporation’s system after the donation from the Lakeside parents organization ran out with General Electric. When he got caught, instead of getting severely punished, he was hired to check for bugs in their system. Just like the Beatles, he put in a ton of time before trying to launch Microsoft. Those hours and hours of work cannot be ignored.
At first these look like rare stories of success, but Gladwell takes it one step further and suggests that we can create these opportunities as a society – opportunities that give people a chance to show off their talent – if we really want to. His thoughts on education are intriguing and the whole point of why he wrote the book. It’s one giant case zeroing in on the last five pages where he makes suggestions on how to improve schooling to capitalize on the talent of our students.
It’s definitely an entertaining read, which is funny given how much data is presented. Instead of coming off as a textbook lecture, Gladwell presents the information in a clear, concise, and witty manner.
Weird Al’s Off the Deep End album was the first CD that I ever bought. I had heard some of his songs on the radio, but for the most part I knew them from kids singing them at school.
That was twenty years ago and now I feel old.
It’s great that Weird Al is still going strong and releasing platinum albums. His creativity and musical talent are unquestionable (okay, so maybe you can question it, but if you’re a student of music, you get some of the subtle things that he does while making it look easy). Weird Al: The Book captures that creativity and humor in a light read.
The closest thing that came to controversy in Al’s life was his one-sided feud with Coolio over “Amish Paradise”, but that settled itself pretty quickly. Lacking controversy, the biography instead delves into the journey that Al had to go through to get noticed – and to stay noticed – as a parody artist. The photos and commentary are great, especially for those of us who can remember him as the guy with the giant poof of hair and thick glasses. (Little known fact: part of why Al changed his look was so that he could slide into characters easier. The moustache and glasses were too distinguishable.)
Rabin is a writer for The Onion and he delivers on the expected sarcasm. What will be interesting is watching students use it for a biography project. There are die-hard fans in the next generation, which is so fun, and some have asked for this book. I’m just waiting for some student to quote the sarcasm in their paper. Hopefully they catch its intended purpose.
This is a great book for a great artist. When Lady Gaga finally allowed Al to parody “Born this Way” (it was her manager that actually had said no without running it by Gaga), Lady Gaga said that she was excited because it was her rite of passage as an artist. That says something, that Weird Al is still so much part of our pop culture experience.
It’s Wimpy Kid; you don’t need me to tell you the format. What I will tell you is that it follows in the other six books’ footsteps in taking a joke, building it up throughout the novel, and then looping back around 200 pages later for the punchline. There’s some skill to that, to be sure. Add to it the realistic characters – and the fact that they’re getting older as the series goes on – and it’s an enjoyable read.
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