Mike Jung's Blog, page 19
November 2, 2014
"Where's the bathroom?"
A couple of weeks ago I was looking at a shelf full of miscellaneous Halloween stuff at a store, weighing my desire to decorate the apartment against my desire to avoid filling up the apartment with even more crap, when a man, white-haired, bespectacled, looked to be in maybe his late sixties or early seventies, approached me.
"Where’s the bathroom?" he asked without preamble, looking at me expectantly.
"I have no idea," I said.
"Oh! I’m…I thought you worked here."
"No," I sa...
October 31, 2014
weneeddiversebooks:
You are all made out of awesome for showing...
You are all made out of awesome for showing that you #SupporWNDB. This is mikejung's thank you for bringing us across the $50K threshold!
October 30, 2014
Why We Need Diverse Books
A few weeks ago we had some friends over for dinner when my middle child announced that she wanted me to get her a book. Now this is kind of a big deal because she is not a reader. So when she asks for a book, I get very excited. When I asked her what kind of book, she said, “I want a book about…
October 29, 2014
4.00
In recent weeks I’ve been struck by my son’s speech development, which appears to be in one of those periods of warp-engine overdrive. He’s expressing opinions, making jokes, displaying stubbornness, asking the big, meaning-of-life questions, and generally blowing my mind with the startling beauty of his unique and constantly changing persona. He’s so beautiful, you know? I don’t say that in the easy, obvious way, with regard to physical appearance - when I talk...
Aisha Saeed Gives Us the Inside Track on the We Need Diverse Books IndieGogo Campaign
By Cindy Pon
Last Thursday, We Need Diverse Books™ kicked off their IndieGogo campaign to raise $100,000 to fund their advocacy efforts. Aisha Saeed, WNDB’s Vice President of Strategy, dropped by DiYA to fill us in on the campaign and WNDB’s future goals.
Full disclosure: DiYA is not…
October 26, 2014
Ellen Oh and daughter - Doing the silly celebration dance
We went over $25,000 in less than 2 days on our Indiegogo Campaign! To celebrate, Ellen Oh is showing off her smooth moves!
In case you missed it here’s a video Thank you!WNDB president elloellenoh appreciates your #SupportWNDB! We all do!
Go Ellen, go Ellen, go Ellen…
October 25, 2014
Stunned. Overwhelmed. So, so proud. #SupportWNDB
It’s Day 2 of the#SupportWNDBIndieGogo campaign, and we’re about to hit 25% of our funding goal. It’s the SECOND DAY. Four $1,000 donations have been made to fund the Walter Dean Myers Award and Grants. Three hundred and twelve funders have driven a stake into the ground and run up the#WeNeedDiverseBooksflag. For an extraordinary hour this morning, a fabulous agent who we all know as Literaticat matched every single donation that was made. Mr. Camp Half-Blood himself,...
October 23, 2014
Percy Jackson and the New Yorker Problem
And here we thought we’d seen it all: essay after essay about the horror of adults reading YA, the alleged death of adulthood/death of patriarchy & the YA lit-ification of America, why we need to put down Harry Potter for Henry James because we’re grown-ups, for chrissakes, etc. etc. etc., ad…
October 20, 2014
"Catfishing" the Catfish: Writing, Stalking, and Wanting to be Heard
By now we’ve all read the article that momentarily distracted Twitter from tweeting about John Grisham, The Guardian piece, subtitled “An Author Confronts Her Number One Online Critic” could more accurately be called “An Author Stalks a Blogger, Makes the Internet Angry and Sad.”
Setting aside…
October 16, 2014
On John Grisham, Victimized Pedophiles, and the Children's Book Industry
As you may have heard, John Grisham gave an interview with The Telegraph in which he lambasted the US judicial system for excessive incarceration—including that of “Sixty-year-old white men in prison” whose only crimes were consuming child pornography.
“…But they got online one night and…
