Kurtis Scaletta's Blog

My hometown is having a pretty big 24 hours in sports between tonight and tomorrow. First of all there's Monday Night Football tonight. It's always a big deal to host a Monday Night game, but tonight is like the biggest Monday Night Football game EVAR (as the kids on the Internet spell and capitalize it) because of the Now-he's-retired, Now-he's-not future hall-of-famer and living legend quarterback Brett Favre now playing against the Packers, the team he led for something like fifteen...

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Yesterday I went to the Minnesota Educational Media Organization (MEMO) conference in Rochester, Minnesota, joining enough other authors to form a rugby team with reserves. It was a pleasure to meet the members of MEMO and my fellow writers, but the only photographs I have are of geese statues. These guys are all over the place in Rochester.

I said that Rochester had to come up big, bird-wise, and Rochester did.

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I have advanced review copies (aka ARCs) of MAMBA POINT. They are gorgeous. There are cute little snakeys in the margins and the chapter headings. Sarah is going to win book designer awards for this one I bet.

I can spare one copy. One and only one. The rest are spoken for.

And I want snake drawings for my snake gallery.

So here's what I'm going to do… in addition to the regular prizes I'm giving away much later, I am going to send one of these babies off to a randomly selected person in a...

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What author and illustrator created a number of mouse characters to star in his stories, including Alexander, Frederick, Matthew, and Mr. McMouse?

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1. I asked what heroes of YA literature are typified by Dick Hunter, boot black and Luke Walton, news boy. They are the archetypal Horatio Alger heroes. Dick is the star of Alger's first novel for young adults, Ragged Dick, which founded the rags-to-respectability success stories that cemented Alger's name in the American lexicon. Usually Alger's heroes do not become wildly rich, however. They just earn their way into the middle class with hard work, virtue, and luck.

2. I asked what literary ...

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Designed by the Sarah H. at Knopf, who also designed the cover to Mudville (which itself got great reviews), here is the gorgeous cover to Mamba Point.

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I'm as much against banning books as anyone, but to be honest, I get a little bit jealous when I scan those lists of books. They have an air of importance about them. There are books on there like Beloved and Diary of a Young Girl and To Kill a Mockingbird. You get banned, you find yourself in pretty good company.

So I'll have to try harder. By the time Banned Books Week rolls around in ten years, I want one of my books to be prominent on the list as one of the most challenged books of all...

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Two weeks ago I went to the Minnesota Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators conference, and saw a wild turkey on the side of the road. A wild turkey is probably not that peculiar a sight, but not one you expect to see driving from Minneapolis to St Paul.

This weekend I went to the Northwoods Children's Literature Conference in Cable, Wisconsin. I drove through Taylors Falls and saw a whole bunch of eagles swirling around overhead. (If you have never seen an eagle in the wild...

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What kind of hero in young adult literature is typified by

Dick Hunter, bootblack, and Luke Walton, newsboy?

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I've gotten into two discussions recently — one real, one virtual — where people discussed and mostly disparaged the "problem novel."

What's a problem novel? Answer: nobody really agrees. I mean, it's hard to find a novel without a problem, right? But the term was indistinguishable from young adult fiction when I was a teenager. You have to understand that the 70s and 80s, amazingly, didn't have a lot of paranormal/fantasy fiction for teen readers. (Basically because teenagers just read the p...

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