David Lubar's Blog, page 38

Flights of fancy

I'm departing soon for my last pair of flghts for the year. Loyal readers of this blog might remember my winter charity challenge. Well, there's no snow today. Just a 45-minute connection in Atlanta for the only plane all day that can take me home. What could go wrong? Have fun speculating.

Three things I'm happy about

1. I just had dinner with the Goddess of YA Literature.

2. It was Tex/Mex.

3. She drove.

An awesome state for books

I love Texas. Yeah, me, a Jersey boy. The thing is, the librarians in Texas work really hard to get kids into reading. I'm visiting five middle schools in Sugar Land (near Houston) this week. In most of the schools, I'm only speaking to one grade. Why? Because many of the middle schools bring in a different author for each grade. Imagine that -- three author visits to coordinate each year. And the libraries have great displays of the Lone Star Book lists. It's just really good in man...

The tarmac less taken

I flew about a dozen times last winter and spring. I'm down to two flights left for this year. I'm heading off to Chicago this afternoon, and I'm going to Houston on Sunday. Then I don't have to fly again until March. So there won't be another winter travel challenge. (I'm too lazy to look for a link to it.) That's a good thing. Flying is not much fun anymore. Winter flying is dreadful. Though you can get a seasonal flu shot ot O'Hare.

Speaking of which, I'm not worried about the sw...

DST failure

It appears that Daylight Savings Time doesn't brighten the morning if you get up too early.

Ship wrecked

My best laid plans have crashed and burned. I'd kept today free to dive into the new Jak and Daxter game. Bad move. Let me explain. The book-publishing world has a dizzying variety of dates: release date, ship date, lay-down (Sally?) date, on-sale date, etc. On top of that, winter seems to include spring, and all of the seasonal boundaries are unclear in my mind. Things in the game industry are simpler, but where there is even a remote chance to misunderstand any aspect of the real worl...

We can all be number 1

My Rotten Life is the current hardcover horror best seller at Eerie Books in Wylie TX, ahead of Mr. Gamin and Mr. Hill. Doing well at an independent store is especially nice since it suggests someone was hand selling the book. But that's a topic for a different post. Right now, I want to talk about how all of us are amazing. That's the nice thing about the Internet. You can always find some place where you're in the lead. For example, Amazon has so many sub categories that one of my bo...

Hi, Jak

If your PS2 has been sitting idle for a while, and you haven't paid much attention to gaming sites for the last five or six months, I have great news for you. (Why do I feel that I have now sieved my readers down to one or two?) Tuesday, Jak and Daxter, the Lost Frontier comes out for PS2 and PSP. Jak II was one of my favorite PS2 games. To find out a major title is coming out for an older system this late in the system's life cycle is really wonderful. (Much more wonderful than the stru...

Award of the state

Ah, the sweet smell of success. Literally. I drove to Hershey yesterday to receive the Keystone to Reading Award from the Keystone State Reading Association for my chapter book, Punished. The young adult award went to Pam Muñoz Ryan, who is such a trooper that she flew here from San Diego just to attent the luncheon. I had a chance to chat with her for a while, which was nice.

I'm enjoying a small lull before the last travel marathon of the fall. Starting in the middle of next week, I'll ...

Yet another virus to fear

Apparently, the H1-N1 has already mutated, producing a second strain. This new virus, the H1-Nron causes a particulary nasty sickness characterized by the delusion that one has lots of energy.