David Lubar's Blog, page 48

Dragon my butt

So, I was pretty sure the rest of the graduation ceremony, beyond the five seconds involving my daughter, would be pure torture for me. I'm not a good audience member. But as the first person started talking, and I watched the Jumbo-tron, the close-captioning struck me as a bit odd. Then, when the phrase "promising writers" was displayed as "promising roiters," I knew the day was saved. They had to be using text-to-speech software. From that point on, the cermeony was a hoot. First, I need

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life. My wife a...

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life. My wife and I watched our daughter get her Master's Degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her great aunt came from California for the ceremony, and another family friend came from Belgium. (Hi, Hilda.) We followed the graduation with a meal at Monk's Cafe in Philly, a restaurant so small that I hesitate to mention it and add to the crowd. All in all, just an amazing day with an awesome young lady.

Lego my stories

A kid turned one of my short stories into a Lego animation. It's kid of cute. (It's also a copyright violation, but I'm not going to be a meany and tell someone he just squandered 800 hours moving tiny pieces of plastic fractions of an inch.)

Speaking of stories, I just heard that The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies is going into third printing. Somebody likes my weenies.

Chilling out

I'm in the middle of my last hotel stay of the season. I've noticed something this year, and I wonder whether anyone else has encountered this. In every single hotel I've been to, the swimming pool is uncomfortable cool. I suspect this is a cost saving measure driven by the economy. The other explanation is that I'm slowly turning into some sort of Bond villain who can never get warm. (I already have a cat, so I can make that whole evil thing work for me.) Anyone else finding cool water on

The incredible pulp

A year or so ago (though it could be longer, since all of the past gets coated with haze) I contributed a couple stories to iPulp, a site that ran a monthly pulp-style short story. The site is a labor of love from Keith Shaw. He recently moved to a new domain, iPulpFiction.com, and totally revamped the site. The whole idea is to keep the thrill of pulp fiction alive for young readers. Some of the stories are free. Others cost anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar. If you know any young reade

Best honor of all

I was asked by School Library Journal contributing editor Rocco Staino to send in something for a Mother's Day piece he was doing on writers who had librarian mothers. The simple exercise of looking for a good memory to share led me in an interesting direction. It felt nice to tell people one of the many wonderful things about my mom. Here's the piece. Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there.

Final flight

So, I headed home from Vermont on a 6:00 flight out of Manchester, NH. When I got to Philly, I found my connecting 9:00 flight to Allentown was cancelled. I managed to get on the 11:00. This wouldn't have been a big deal normally, since an extra two-hour airport wait is an eyeblink compared to some of my experiences, but I had to get up early this morning to go to a young-author's conference. So I'm a bit sleep deprived. But I'm finished with flights for the school year. That merits some f

Whose house?

I was being given a mini-tour of Dartmouth (hey -- thesis and the mini-tour) when I saw a building witt a funny name. I asked what it was. When I learned it was the student health center, I had to laugh. The name of the building? Dick's House. Really.

Here comes the rain

I'm in Vermont. It's my first time. The flight was fine. The weather was beautiful when I landed. It's raining this morning, just as it has for every school I've visited this spring. Good grief -- the previous sentences read like a fifth-grade essay. Or New Yorker fiction from the 1980s.

Pepper upper

When I'm signing books at schools, I often check to see if a book has gone into a new printing. Much to my surprise, last week I discovered that The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies had already gone into a second printing, less than two months after release. Tonight, I discovered a great review from Children's Literature. The line that pleased me the most was, "Young readers may well start pouncing on promising story ideas of their own, glad that the short story form is hereby proven to