Parental Craziness

Oh, the potential today! Do you want to know how crazy my parents were or how I've driven my own kids crazy?

Yikes!!! Well, let's see if I can do this without too much pain, angst, or autobiographical detail.

I was raised by two loving parents who did all the normal things: they loved me oodles and bunches and showed it by setting protective limits I didn't appreciate and holding me accountable when I screwed up. They tried to shield me from their divorce, made me cringe with post-divorce dating, remarriage, more divorce...Like I said, they were normal.

Basically it was such a normal childhood, I wished for my real parents to come claim me. When they didn't show, I looked around for a circus or local wolf pack to run off with. And I lost plenty of sleep waiting for my superpowers to kick in so I could join Professor Xavier's school.

Which probably explains why my imagination is so over-developed and my young adult stories (heck, even my novels) have a healthy dose of adventure, not too much meddling from parental units and involve unique, magical transportation to new places.

As for the craziest thing I've ever done as a parent:

I'm an author. I make stuff up all day long and I've even told my kids it's a respectable profession. Parenting doesn't get much crazier than that!

Real life's full of crazy parents and other people - make your escape with a good story!
Regan

Regan is the author of the young adult Hobbitville Saga: The Pixie Chicks, Hot Spots, The Shadow Stone, and Snow Covered Resolutions. All available now on Kindle, or at Echelon Press!

Ebooks Catching On With Kids

Ebooks catch on with children, according to a Los Angeles Times article,

After he's finished his homework and his chores for the day, 8-year-old Skye Vaughn-Perling likes to read Dr. Seuss. He's a particular fan of the hijinks that ensue when the elephant Horton hears strange voices emanating from a dust speck in "Horton Hears a Who."

He doesn't read from a dog-eared copy of the children's classic, though. Skye, who lives in Agoura Hills, often reads on his computer, pressing the arrow button when he wants to turn a page. Sometimes the characters move around on the screen like animated cartoons on TV. If he wants, Skye can have the computer read a book to him while he's curled up in bed.

"It's a whole new level of exploring the books," said his mother, Victoria Vaughn-Perling.

Readers and publishers alike are embracing a digital future. Electronic-book sales increased 73% in October compared with the same month last year, according to the Assn. of American Publishers, while sales of adult paperbacks decreased 23% and children's paperbacks declined 14.8%. Sales of higher-education books, including textbooks, fell 443%.

And, according to the article, the children's book market is especially ripe for the wonders of the digital world. And, even large publishers such as Harcourt, Harper Collins and Random House are getting in line.

Although I find it somewhat foreign to read an e-book (I’m rapidly getting used to it!) children and young adults today consider iPods and Kindles second nature and are eagerly embracing e-books.

Today's kids, after all, have grown up around technology and don't think twice about learning from computers and sleeping with their iPods. In some cases, watching a book on a computer might even make them enjoy reading more, publishers say.

How about you? Your kids? Are they reading e-books?

Save a tree! Read an e-book! Quake's got 'em!

Mary Cunningham - Cynthia's Attic 'Tween series

Fictionwise

What's In Your Locker?

by Pam Ripling


Do you have lockers at your school? Not talking gym lockers. These are hallway lockers, with steel hinged doors and combination locks acting as temporary storage units for your books, snacks, quick face fixes and whatever else you bring to school but don’t want to lug around.

When I wrote LOCKER SHOCK!, a story about a middle school kid who finds something really terrible in his school locker, our local schools still had hundreds of these storage units on campus. But not long after the book came out, the lockers were removed. Yeah, just ripped out and thrown away! Students were issued a set of “home” textbooks, matching the ones that stayed in the classroom, so that they wouldn’t have to load up their back-breaking backpacks every day.

If you still have them at your school, you might be wondering why our district took them away. Well, it seems that it was costing a lot of money, because a lot of the lockers were damaged every year. Beaten, kicked, scratched, gummed up and soiled. They were infested with cockroaches, too, when kids left behind apple cores, Twinkies and near-empty soda cans.

Also, the school was spending money on “drug-sniffing dogs”—can you imagine? And worst of all… some districts actually found that lockers had become depositories for weapons. The cost of dealing with all these problems far outweighed the cost of the second set of textbooks for each student.

I loved having a locker. My dad built me a little shelf for mine, so I’d have two levels of storage. I had my mirror, and some stickers that actually made me smile when I stopped in between classes. I could stash notebooks, workbooks and my lunch there. Today, kids must drag all that stuff around with them.

What do you think about the locker issue? Should schools keep them, and find other ways to keep lockers safer and cleaner?

Pam Ripling is the author of middle-grade mystery, LOCKER SHOCK! Buy it at Quake, Fictionwise or Amazon today! E-book version now available for your Kindle! Visit Pam at www.BeaconStreetBooks.com.