Kurtis Scaletta's Blog

It's been nearly a fortnight since my last non-trivial post, and a lot has happened since then. For example, I've been to Michigan and got horribly sick. I'm not implying those are similar or connected, mind you. But in Michigan I watched an endless, gut-wrenching tie-breaker baseball game between the Twins and Tigers on TV (in a bar full of stinkin' Tigers fans) (they actually smelled OK), and saw the Twins win their hard-earned right to get swept by the Yankees in the first round of the...

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It's been nearly a fortnight since my last non-trivial post, and a lot has happened since then. For example, I've been to Michigan and got horribly sick. I'm not implying those are similar or connected, mind you. But in Michigan I watched an endless, gut-wrenching tie-breaker baseball game between the Twins and Tigers on TV (in a bar full of stinkin' Tigers fans) (they actually smelled OK), and saw the Twins win their hard-earned right to get swept by the Yankees in the first round of the...

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What children's book has surprised booksellers by outselling Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol since it was released?

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The author/illustrator who created several mouse characters such as Alexander, Matthew, Frederick and Mr. McMouse is the fabulous Leo Leonni.

I will now be posting trivia every other week instead of weekly. So take your thinking caps off and have a great week.

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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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