If you've come here through my KidLit Central profile, I'd like to redirect you to my current blog over at I've got Blisters on my Fingers! , or to my website at www.saralatta.com.

Hi everyone. I bet you thought my blog was dead. It was merely hibernating--between the holidays, and deadlines, and moving to Switzerland, I thought it best to let this bear sleep.

Now it's raised its little head just long enough to let you know that I'll be blogging about life in Switzerland, writing and running at: www.saralatta.com (click on the "blog" link.)

And now "the view from the ferris wheel" is going back to sleep, if you don't mind. Au revoir!

Those of you who read my blog (yeah, all three of you!) may have noticed that I've been pretty quiet lately. That's because I'm up to my ears in work and preparing to leave for Switzerland in January. I doubt that I'll blog much in the next couple of months--perhaps I'll check in occasionally if I have an announcement to make (and I think that soon I will have certain agent-related news soon). In the meantime, I am arranging and doing interviews with scientists for my two Extreme Science Careers books (Polar Scientists and Volcano Scientists) for Enslow.

So I probably won't be doing much reading of blogs, either. Congratulations/encouragement/sympathies in advance for everyone who posts news that I miss out on!

I know that I'll have to do some of the interviews from Switzerland. Does anybody have experience using Skype? I downloaded the software, and it seems to work quite well. The only hitch is when I try to record the conversation with the recorder software, which records and saves the conversation as a QuickTime file. (I record all of my phone and in-person interviews in the interest of accuracy; currently I use a cassette recorder that plugs into the phone line.) My guinea pig interviewee said that I started skipping out, so we switched to a regular phone line + cassette recorder after a couple of minutes. My husband suggested my laptop may not have enough processing capability. Also, I imagine that an hour-long interview would make for a pretty hefty QT file! So I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the international interviews yet.

Right now I'm in Amherst, (Hadley, actually. I love Holiday Inn because they always have free internet access, usually wireless.) accompanying my daughter on college visits to Smith and Hampshire. Well, I'm hanging out for a few days while she visits friends at both colleges and has a couple of interviews while I try to get work done. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is on the Hampshire campus, so I plan on spending a couple of hours there tomorrow. And of course there are the bookstores...I'm trying to limit myself to sale books.

Oh, and the other nice thing is that a very nice woman on the SCBWI-Illinois listserv, Kathi Baron, put me in touch with a friend and fellow Vermont grad who lives in Switzerland. Her name is Angela Morrison, and she seems delightful; I look forward to meeting her. SCBWI is truly a wonderful organization!

I just couldn't help it. I still haven't received my copies of The Good, the Bad, the Slimy: The Secret Life of Microbes. But at least now Amazon has a picture of the cover!

I voted yesterday. So did a lot of other people. I think I'm beginning the see the light at the end of what's been a long, dark tunnel. And, look! It's Barak Obama!

I haven't blogged--or read many blogs--for ages, and I have two good reasons. I think I mentioned in an earlier entry something about book contracts. Well, now that I've actually received, signed, and sent them back I can explain. I'll be writing two books for Enslow's new series on "Extreme Science Careers." One book will be about Antarctic Scientists, and the other one will be about Volcano Scientists. It's meant a lot of research and locating scientists who would be cool to profile. I'm trying to line up and conduct as many interviews as possible before we move to Switzerland in January because even with an international calling plan the phone interviews won't be cheap. So far, I've interviewed a planetary geologist who searches for meteorites in Antarctica, and I have interviews lined up with a paleontologist who has found two complete dinosaur fossils in Antarctica, an astrophysicist looking for signs of the Big Bang, and a soil ecologist.

Science writing is fun. Unfortunately, my novel is sulking because I'm not paying it much attention.

Somehow, this doesn't surprise me.

You scored as A classic novel. Almost everyone showers praise upon you for your depth and enduring relevance. According to your acolytes, everything you say is timeless, erudite and meaingful. Of course, none of them actually listen to you. Nobody listens to you at all, but it's fashionable to claim you as a friend. Fond of obscure words, antiquated notions and libraries, you never have a problem finding someone to hang out with. The fact that they end up using you to balance their kitchen tables is an unfortunate side effect, but you're used to being used for others' benefit. Oh the burden of being Great.

Your Literary Personality
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I just posted a photo from Muddy Buddy here. I've been meaning to get a Flickr account for a while now, and this was a good excuse. I figure it will be an especially good way to share my photos from Switzerland!

About the picture, T said I didn't look like I was having much fun. But I'm smiling, I said. Looks more like a grimace to me, he said. You decide.

What is it about this book? (Not a YA novel, although I could easily see an interested teenager loving it.) I read some terrific review of it--probably this one from the NYT, I'm not really sure. But I KNEW I had to read it. I bought it in hardcover--even though I usually wait for the paperback version--and then it sat on my shelf for far too long. Maybe I thought it would be...difficult?

Well, stupid, stupid, stupid me. This book is so entertaining, so thought-provoking and erudite, so laugh-out-loud funny, it may make the list of my top 25 favorite books for our family list of our top 100 books. (How do I link from my October 8 post?)

Our heroine, Jennet Stearne, is the daughter of a professional witchfinder, living in 17th century England. But when her beloved Aunt Isobel is burnt at the stake for witchcraft, Jennet makes it her life's mission to overturn the Parlimentary Witchcraft Act. The overlying theme of this book is about the battle between scientific reason and the irrational zealotry of some religious fanatics (whew--thank god we don't have to deal with that anymore, right-ha), but it's also an adventure. Jennet travels from England to the colonies, where she is eventually adopted by a Native American tribe, returned to "civilization", falls in love with Ben Franklin, is shipwrecked on a Caribbean island, returns to the Colonies...well you get my drift. Along the way she meets Robert Hooke, masquerading as Isaac Newton, and later, Newton himself.

The really inventive thing about the book is that it is narrated by another book: Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which speaks from a modern POV. Our adventure begins: "May I speak candidly, fleshling, one rational creatue to another, myself a book and you a reader?" Books, we are to understand, are imbued with thoughts and personalities, souls and desires. (This, I think, is what bibliophiles like me have always believed, more or less).

Our story switches from third-person accounts of Jennet's travails to Principia's first person, often witty commentaries with a hourglass-shaped typographical conceit. Here's a transition I especially like (I can't duplicate the hourglass shape, you'll just have to imagine it converging to and expanding from the ellipses):

"Contemporary physicists speak of a GUT, a Grand Unified Theory. They seek TOE, a Theory of Everything. And I suspect that one day, through some felicitous convergence of experiment and serendipity, quarreling and collaboration, they'll get one. And then they do, I hop they'll remember that the quest began not with Einstein or Heisenberg, not with Max Planck or Enrico Fermi, not with Niels Bohr or John Wheeler or Stephen Hawking, but with the great Sir Isaac...Newton...did not precisely resemble the engraving that graced the English-language edition of the Principia Mathematica: such was Jennet's impression when, thirty-five years after her failed mission to Trinity College, she finally stood before the octogenarian geometer in his carriage-house, where she was supervising a servant's frantic efforts to hitch two horses to a coach. (p. 297)

Man, I loved this book. Smart, funny, inventive. Elements of history, adventure, romance, science. What's not to like? I only wish I'd written it myself.

I went to the Chicago marathon on Sunday to cheer for my friend Patty and her daughter Becca. Chicago is a great marathon for runners--flat and fast, although it can be awfully crowded for the first few miles--but not so much for spectators. For one thing, it's a challenge to get from point a to point b. Nevertheless, I managed to get a parking spot not too far from mile 15. As I was walking along the route, there was a lone spectator singing, loudly, "Solidarity Forever."

I've always though marathon runners should unionize.

The 4:00 hour pace group ran by. Perfect; Patty and Becca were aiming for 4:30 to 5:00 hour marathons. So I waited...and cheered...and clapped...and waited. In the meantime, I saw a man juggling sandbags as he ran; I saw Thing 1 and Thing 2; I saw a number of Superheroes; I saw old, fat Elvis. The 5:45 pace group came and went, and still no Patty and Becca. I call Patty on her cell phone. "I'm at mile 20," she says.

Rats. I had missed them.

OK, so I get in my car and drive to the Loop, where I park my car for $20 (!) and run to mile 26--a great place, because the weary runners perk up as they round the corner and see the finish line, just 0.2 mile ahead. I wait...and I see Becca! Looking great! I call Patty on her cell phone. "I'm almost there!" she says. So I wait...and I wait... I see running buddies holding hands; I see people hobbling painfully; I see a guy stopping to pick something up another runner dropped and hand it to her. Everybody is smiling, or trying to smile, and there are hordes of people...and I call Patty.

"Where are you?"

"I got a PR!" [personal record] she shouts. "So did Becca! I'll see you at the meeting place!"

Foiled again. But I was happy for them.

So I see Patty and Becca, finally, by Buckingham Fountain, and no, I'm not a bit sorry I came to cheer my friends on. Sometimes, it's just knowing that your friends are there for you--even if you don't see them.

OK, so it's official now. We (T, E, and I) and going to Geneva, Switzerland next semester. Tony will be on sabbatical, working on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), E. will be going to an international school (where, they say, Americans are the largest minority), and I will be...writing. (Some things never change.) Eli and I will return to Illinois in the summer because we didn't want him to miss the first semester of high school back home, but Tony will remain for the fall semester...leaving me to be a single parent for a time. I'm sure we will be fine.

We'd been wringing our hands about funding, but it looks as though everything will work out. Hooray! This should be quite an adventure. Since it's kind of a last minute thing, we have lots of things to work out, but we're getting there.

So...I'm trying to learn French. Trying not to be an ugly American, even though I'm pretty sure that Geneva, which is a very international community, will be fairly easy for an English speaker to navigate. Which leads me to earworms.

"Billy, don't be a hero, don't be a fool for your li-i-ife..."
"Brandy, you're a fine girl, what good wife you would be..."
"Don't worry, be happy..."

OK, so having both dated myself AND made you all murderously angry with me for implanting some of the most egregious earworms into your head, I offer to you a friendly earworm, one that actually works for the good of humankind. At least, I hope so.

It's a musical language trainer called "Earworms." Has anybody else used it? Here's an excerpt from the booklet: "The idea is as simple as it is old. Before the age of writing, ancient historical events were recorded in verse and song form for easy memorization. In his book "Songlines" Bruce Chatwin describes how the Australian aborigines were able to navigate their way across hundreds of miles of desert to their ancestral hunting grounds without maps. And how? The extensive lyrics of their traditional songs were exact descriptions of the routes!"

So, the earworms approach uses rhythm and words to reinforce language learning. I have to say...I can't say yet whether it works, although I do now recite the the numbers from 1-20 with a pronounced cadence. (I'm also taking an introductory French course at our excellent community college, Parkland.)

Has anybody else had experience with the Earworms thingy? I find myself constructing complex scenarios around the relationship between English-speaking man and the French-speaking woman.

Oh...book proposals. It's late. I'll talk about that some other time. But the news is good.

I know, because this website told me so!

Sometimes I forget just how fortunate I am to have a family who loves to read. Every one of us. (My husband-to-be met the first cut when I saw the books on his bookshelves. I wanted to stick around at least long enough to read some his more interesting titles.) And now my two 18 year old daughters, my 13 year old son, my husband, and I are all readers.

We (13 YO son, 18 YO daughter) were talking about those ubiquitous book lists at dinner, and someone came up with the idea that we should have a list of the top 100 favorite books of the Latta/Liss household (other 18 YO daughter and husband/dad were gone at the time, so they just got roped in to the project). After some discussion, we came up with our definition: not "best" (too much pressure on choosing quality literature), not "most influential," not even "desert island." Just favorite. Which books did you enjoy the most? Fiction, nonfiction, picture books, short story collections, poetry--it all counts. Any time period.

So here's the deal: we can each choose 20 books. I asked for an algorithm--which my physicist husband obligingly provided--that would allow us to weigh our individual choices, because I assumed that there would be some overlap in the lists. (Which also means that our list will probably be shorter than 100. Details.) Here's what my genius came up with:

"Each person gets 260 points to distribute among their 20 books. The only rule is that the point ordering must be the same as the book ordering. Why 260? Because if your #1 book is 20 points and #2 19 points and so on, that adds up to 210, so 260 gives you 50 extra points to spread around. But you have to spread more on your top picks than your lower or it screws up the ordering. If you feel exceptionally crazy about your #1 book, you can give it 70 points and leave the rest at 19,18,17... Then we add up the points for each book (assuming several will be listed more than once) and order them according to point totals."

I think you can see where we're going. Yes, we're totally weird geeks. But this will be a helluva lot of fun, don't you think?, and will probably provoke some, ahem, lively discussions.

The lists must be completed by Christmas break. (Hey, this is serious business! You can't rush it.)

So the real wake-up call for me on this is when I described the project to my personal trainer, and she said, "Your 13 YO has read 20 books?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I mean he IS 13, and this is over the course of a lifetime," and I realized that that's what she meant. Oh.

So...I'll post the results when they're in. It should be interesting...In the meantime, anybody who wants to do the same (or a variation), please let me know. This could be fun!

That, dear readers, is reportedly the title of Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens (of recent accidental overdose fame) new children's book. According to the article on MSN's Fox Sports, this groundbreaking book is about a young boy who learns the value of sharing. "I tried to play outside alone and throw it by myself, but football isn't football unless you play with someone else," Little T tells his mother in the book.

Please tell me I'm being bamboozled.

"Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?"--Ernest Gaines.

wesley_1701 wrote
We would like to know who really believes in gay rights on LiveJournal. There is no bribe of a miracle or anything like that. If you truly believe in gay rights, then repost this and title the post as "Gay Rights". If you don't believe in gay rights, then just ignore this. Thanks.

OK, doing my part. And Ernest Gaines rocks.

Colleen Mondor just posted a wonderful review of Stella Brite and the Dark Matter Mystery on the online magazine Eclectica. Here's an excerpt from the review:

"So here's the deal--I'm 37 years old, I own a telescope and I love the idea of astronomy. But until I read Stella Brite and the Dark Matter Mystery I had no idea, at all, why dark matter was or why I should even care about it. It's very easy for me to recommend this title because it really impressed the heck out of me. Latta has really found her calling with this character and plot. She should write a whole series as far as I'm concerned; I know I would be up front buying each one. My son is going to love Stella in a year or two, and I'm going to love introducing them."

Obviously the woman is a genius. (insert smiley face)

To read the rest of this review and her "Semi-annual look at new picture books," click here. She also writes fiction, reviews for Booklist, Bookslut, and the Voices of New Orleans, and has a wonderful blog. I suspect she doesn't sleep.

My browser is set to open to Refdesk.com. Today's refdesk thought of the day comes from George Orwell: "War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength."

Of course Orwell's 1984 is a frequently challenged/banned book, so it's an especially appropriate quote to post during Banned Books Week.

New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin has written a book for young people, The North Pole was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World which has not yet been banned or challenged but may very well be if Senator James "Global Warming-Schmobel Warming" Inhofe has anything to say about it.

Senator Inhofe recently gave a floor speech attacking the media for climate alarmism. He singled out Revkin's book, saying that because he writes that it might be possible later this century to sail a boat to the North Pole, Revkin is scaring children.

Well, yeah, the truth sucks, don't it?

Now, anybody who knows anything about environmental reporting knows that Revkin is not an alarmist. He is well-respected by climate scientists (part of the "reality-based" community) who know what they're talking about. And Inhofe, and others who deny that global warming is a serious problem, simply don't.

I'm going to buy Revkin's book. I urge you to read it.

Oh, and the "crappy mood" kitty is simply there because I have that cold that seems to be circulating. Ah-choo! Hack, hack, hack. Otherwise I have some very good news which I will share very soon.

Three of my SCBWI-Illinois peeps have launched a new blog: Three Silly Chicks. Andrea Beaty, Julia Durango, and Carolyn Crimi are seriously silly, so beware! Herewith, in their own words:

"What do we do?
• We look for picture books and mid-grade novels that crack us up.
• We hunt down new books that aren’t super-smash hits yet.
• We interview some of the funniest writers in kids’ books today.
• We make up silly contests when we get bored.
• We sometimes eat cake for breakfast and pancakes for supper. But we always leave lunch where it belongs. Moving lunch would just be wrong."

And, as an added incentive to visit their blog (as if you needed one), there's a contest involved. Need I say more? Go ahead, cross the road.

This is brilliant: Off-Duty Disney Princesses (the play). Required reading for you, gaiaturtle. (And you thought you were done with reading assignments!)

Yes, I killed my darling, my baby, my lead scene which I continue to believe is clever and funny and grips you by the short hairs. (Boy Abducted by Two Weirdos in a Haunted House!) But, in the end, it did not serve my story. Maybe it is meant for another story, but not for this one. It was hard...but oh how good it felt to let it go.

Many writers say that they begin with a "what if?" situation, and then run from there. In my case, though, I began with the kidnapping scene, and then tried to work it in with an entirely different idea. Big mistake, I think.

Peering through my blood-splattered screen...

Well, as usual, here I am weighing in on a YA book that I just recently discovered even though everybody else read it ages ago. Well, last year. I'm talking about Scott Westerfield's Peeps. It hadn't even been on my radar screen until somewhere, somehow, I came up on a review of the recently released The Last Days, a sequel to Peeps.

I knew I had to read it. Peeps is a vampire story. But it's a vampire story for science geeks. You see, vampirism is actually a disease, caused by a parasite. Westerfield gives a scientifically plausible explanation for why vampires hate the sunlight and crosses. There's horror (anybody who knows ANYTHING about parasites knows there's got to be horror involved!), romance (of course!), and natural selection. Every other chapter describes real parasites that cause real diseases: toxoplasma, lice, screwflies, wolbachia (my favorite), plasmodium, guinea worms, etc. All in service to the story, that is, to demonstrate how vampirism is much like any other disease caused by a parasite.

Did I mention how entertaining the science writing chapter are? Here's the opening to the chapter titled "Toxoplasma," narrated by Cal, the main character:

"Flip a coin.
Tails? Relax.
Heads? You've got parasites in your brain.
That's right. Half of us carry the Toxoplasma gondii parasite. But don't reach for the power drill just yet.
Toxoplasma is microscopic. Human immune systems usually kick its ass, so if you've got it, you'll probably never even know. In fact, toxoplasma doesn't even want to be in your head. Trapped inside your thick skull, under assault by your immune defenses, it can't lay eggs, which is a big evolutionary Game Over."

Oh, and did I mention that maybe the book is not for the squeamish? But, as Westerfield writes later on, "parasites R us. Get over it."

Brilliant. Just what I'd like to do in my WIP--a seamless, entertaining blend of fiction and science.

And now I have go find The Last Days. Before everybody else reads it.