Month: September 2008

Getting my son to read

By / September 3, 2008 / 31 Comments

Link has a mental block about reading and writing. He does just fine once he gets started, but he always views the project with dislike. I was therefore, delighted to discover that Link will devour some manga. Give him Kingdom Hearts, Full Metal Alchemist, Naruto, or Pokemon and he’ll sit on the couch reading all afternoon. I responded to this discovery by giving him more manga because I figured that even though there were far more pictures than words, Link was still reading.

This decision of mine was supported by an article in a recent scouting magazine that talked about why boys don’t like to read as much as girls do. According to the article this is because boys are less interested in relationships, feelings, and dilemmas than girls are. Boys are far MORE interested in farts, adventure, fights, and physical humor. Boys also tend to be more visual. There are genres which cater to both interests. Girls can find Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prarie, Magic Tree House, Harry Potter, and a plethora of princess or fairy themed books. Boys can find animorphs, manga, comic strips, comic books, and pulp-style adventure stories. Take a look at those two lists. Which list is most likely to be recommended by librarians and teachers? Over and over again boys are told that the kinds of things that they like are not worthwhile. The comic books are snatched from their hands and replaced with Magic Tree House books. Don’t get me wrong. We love Magic Tree House here. Kiki went through them all. So did Gleek. Even Link read a bunch of them, but he did not love them. For Link they were tolerable, even enjoyable, but he would never give up a video game to read Magic Tree House. He regularly does when he has a new manga to read.

So I patted myself on the back for being an enlightened parent and I kept supplying manga. All would be well and good, except that today Link’s teacher confiscated the manga and told Link that in 5th grade he needed to be reading books that were not comics. I’m not upset with the teacher. The teacher is very nice and earnest in his desire to help Link. I love what the teacher has got planned to help Link learn to love reading. But the event has me re-thinking my attitude. There is nothing wrong with Link reading manga. I will continue to supply it, but I also need to help him branch out a little. There is a world of wonderful books out there and most of them do not have pictures. Link doesn’t have to choose to read them, but I do not want him to be intimidated by a page full of nothing but words. The only way I can see for him to overcome that intimidation is through practice. So, I’m going to have to quest to see if I can find some books with no pictures that Link can love. I want to find the book that Link will give up video game time to read. I don’t know if it exists.

Pre-order day

By / September 2, 2008 / 2 Comments

You would think that the day we open pre-orders for a new book would be a celebratory day. After all, this is finally the day when we get paid for all the work that Howard did creating the Schlock strips and the layout work on the book. It turns out that the day AFTER the first Pre-order day is usually the celebratory one. By the second day, the print run is paid for and we’re feeling relaxed. pre-order day is stressful. We keep clicking to see how many orders have come in. Then we do impromptu analysis of how that stacks up to this-time-last-pre-order, which is an imprecise science at best. I spend much of my day fielding customer emails. Most of the emails are problems I can solve quickly and easily. Unfortunately some of the emails must be answered with “I’m sorry shipping costs so much, there’s nothing I can do about international shipping costs.” Then I spend an hour poking around in the store and rethinking my shipping decisions to make sure that there really is nothing I can do. Sometimes I have to update product pages to make wording more clear. Other times I have to help sort out payment problems. I don’t mind helping customers, but it is depressing if they have a problem that I really can’t solve. (This time it is just the cost of shipping, but last time our store was really hostile to one customer for no apparent reason.)

Tomorrow I get to start printing invoices and do a preliminary sort to send out any packages that don’t contain The Teraport Wars. I also get to do the accounting for the money that has come in. Later, after more of the orders have arrived, I’ll do counts to figure out the quantities of shipping supplies I’ll need to buy.

But more important, I need to make sure that those business tasks only occupy me completely during the mornings when the kids are all at school. I need to be available for them in the afternoon. Today I was distracted all day. My plan for family outings needs to be in addition to regular daily attention rather than in place of it.

News and links

By / September 2, 2008 / 2 Comments

Hold on to Your Horses is featured as a prize for a contest over at WantNot.net. I’m very grateful to Mir for being willing to feature my book, thus letting many people know about it.

Pre-orders for The Teraport Wars are now open. You can order the regular edition or the Customer Choice Numbered Sketch Edition. The books are the same, but the sketched editions also have a hand drawn and individually numbered picture drawn on the final page of the book. The sketch editions are only available until 8 am mountain time on Friday, so get one before they’re gone.

Re-thinking the family vacation

By / September 1, 2008 / 2 Comments

On Friday I threw some clothes into suitcases then we all piled into the car to spend two days in Pocatello Idaho. The event was a family reunion and it was based partly out of a hotel and partly out of my brother’s house. Family vacations always have stressful moments, but this was remarkably lacking in pre-trip I’ve-got-to-work-extra-hard-to-get-ready stress and post-trip I’ve-got-to-catch-up-on-work stress. We had a family trip that had almost no impact on the business side of our lives. This was astonishing to realize. I’ve been plotting and planning, trying to figure out how to carve out space for us to take a real family vacation. This trip showed me that instead of struggling to create space for a week long event, I should be planning smaller events more frequently. We should be “getting away” at least once per month to go to local things like the pool, or the zoo, or a museum, or a park. Then every three months or so we should be planning a weekend trip where we drive for a few hours, stay at a hotel (or campground), and do some fun stuff. In fact we’re probably better off with more frequent family time than with a big effort to make a big trip. I’m already making plans for what we’ll do.

Once per week, Family Home Evening where we spend about an hour playing a game, talking, etc.
Once per month, a family outing to something local like a swimming pool.
Every 3-6 months, a weekend get away to see something new.