Three things came together this past week. We had a couple of late bloomers signing up for the first SCBWI conference in the Netherlands. Yay! D-Day is this coming Saturday and I am very, very excited about the illustrious illustrator and writer Doug Cushman who will open the conference. The title of his keynote? In the Beginning Was Space Cat. Who doesn’t remember the cosmic adventures of the space hero who effortlessly rivals Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and many other great space age heroes? Space Cat was the onset of Doug’s stellar career, as it still is the onset of the reading careers of so many kids. The other thing that came to me was the Literary Death Match. These killing matches, as co-creator…
Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing
Posts from the “Thrillers” Category
Of course there was also fun stuff in LA, not just scary stuff. Jon Scieszka was there to whip up spirits and he did that with his usual fervor. Scieszka writes because he loves to make kids laugh, he says. His inspiration comes from all the weird stuff that happened when he was growing up with his five brothers. You can read all about his adventures growing up a Scieszka in his autobiography Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka. He’s also very serious about his job as a children’s book writer. He advocates reading and literacy as fervently as he loves making the world laugh. In 2008 he was appointed the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and he has…
The 40th Summer Conference of the SCBWI is over. I’m at the airport lounge looking out over the airport, seeing friends leave the hazy city that shimmers in the background. It makes me sad that I have to leave, knowing that it will take quite a while before I will see most of my friends and my mentors again. While writers work in solitude and –usually– love the quietness, just like I do, there is nothing more energizing than being around kindred spirits. We’ve shared a lot these past week: break-throughs, new publications, leaps-forward, staggering discoveries, stirring workshops, riveting keynotes and above all continuing friendships and the making of new ones. Being at the conference as the Regional Advisor of the Netherlands chapter was…
Tagged: Books, Bruce Coville, Lin Oliver, Mina Witteman, SCBWI, Steve Mooser
There is a lot of buzz going on about boys not reading. Authors, publishers, librarians, booksellers, they all rack their brains to find ways to get them to read. Particularly young adult boys seem to have fallen in a deep and dark literature-less pit. I’m an inveterate optimist if it comes to reading, even when it concerns boys. They do read. But there are some preconditions. First of all the book needs to be good. It needs to be a stories about stuff they’re interested in. Young adult boys have a vast range of topics that appeal to them: girls, scooters or cars, experimenting, hanging about… Not necessarily in that order. Just kidding. There are way more issues that grab them. The young adult…
Recently Google announced and launched its social network platform: Google+. It’s a cross-over between Facebook and Twitter and lots of people put in a word or two about it. Some like it, some don’t, some love it, some hate it. But whatever you feel, it’s there and you can’t evade it. For me the important question was: do I genuinely need another social network to add to my visibility? That seems an easy question. Right? You could argue that, in order to get as much buzz around The Writer Known As Mina Witteman as possible, I should jump at Google+. Eventually, Google+ will lure in public from Facebook, just like the Zuckerberg trap lured in public from MySpace and Hyves. It will, no doubt,…
Tagged: Facebook, Google+, Mina Witteman, platform presence, Twitter, Zuckerberg
Sicily. An island with a rich history, not in the least because of that one mountain that dominates it: Etna. The Arabs named it the Mountain of Fire and word goes that Zeus trapped the deadly monster Typhon underneath it. It’s easy to imagine the father of all monsters lurking below the surface of the Etna, you only have to stick your hand in one of those fuming crevices and you know he’s there, the last son of Gaia who set out to destroy Zeus. He almost got the job done, ripping out Zeus’ sinews in their first battle. But Zeus struck back, like a true ruler of the Gods should, and threw Mount Etna on him, trapping him to all eternity. Or not……
Tagged: Dark Fiber, Etna, Mina Witteman, Sicily, Typhon, volcano, Zeus
It’s nearing, they say, the end of the world. I have no idea who ‘they’ are, but they’re quite convinced that it/us will end tomorrow, May 21. I beg to differ. I think we have a future ahead of us and even a bright one, we just have to look for it and make it work. Last Wednesday Lydia Davis was in Amsterdam. Wim Brands interviewed her and had her tell us where to look. It’s right there, she said. And she told us about the observations she makes at home or traveling; observations that form the source of her ultra short stories. When she looks out of the window and across the street from her home she sees green hilly pastures, a red barn…
Tagged: Amsterdam, Cows, Lydia Davis, SLAA, the end of the world, Wim Brands
Mina Witteman 