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Clemency Pogue event at Books of Wonder NYC

2007-06-20T21:25:00.000-04:00

I'll be signing copies of "The Scrivener Bees" this Saturday, June 23rd from 12-2pm at Books of Wonder in New York City. This is the third in the series of Clemency Pogue books, chronicling Clem and Chaphe's adventures with giant squid, a fugitive changeling, and the eponymous tattooing bees.

Books of Wonder is at 18 West 18th Street, in Manhattan, just west of 5th Avenue. It has an amazing selection of children's books and some of the best cupcakes in the city.

I've been silent on this blog for the last little while, and am sorry to report that the silence will become only more profound over the next few months. I'm in New Mexico until September, shooting a western, and well enough occupied to keep me away from posting. But I'll be back online in the fall, and full of stories about cowboys, indians, and huevos rancheros.

Rockaway Literary Arts Festival

2007-04-18T14:50:00.000-04:00

This Sunday, April 22nd, I'm going to be speaking and signing books at the Rockaway Literary Arts Festival, an event so hip they don't even have a website. It's being held at the Rockaway Center for the Arts, in Fort Tilden, Queens, and doors open at 10am.

I'll be there all day, and my panel starts at 3:30. I'll be speaking with fellow authors Julie Mares, Amalia Hoffman, Stephen S. Yaeger, and Bonnie Timmermann. Should be a great time.

Nothing like the Sun

2007-03-27T12:15:00.000-04:00

I've been making a point of re-reading books recently. Whenever I do videogame work, we're always talking about "replay value," how to make the same experience entertaining the second or third time around. My instincts are the same with books. When I was a kid, I'd read a book I liked four or five times at least, partly because they were fun, and partly because there was always a niggling sensation that I was still missing something, there was a little more juice to squeeze out of it.

I always think about that writing, and try to hide extra layers in the story, jokes under the jokes, puns you can read differently if you know what's coming. With that in mind, I'm rereading Anthony Burgess' "Nothing Like the Sun," which is great fun. It's brimful with lines like, "he deems himself to be above the supererogatory fripperosities of poetlings." That could be a grad student exercising his tuition, or Roald Dahl's BFG describing the occupants of a bellyflopper. I love it.

It also drew my attention to this line from Edmond Spenser's Epithalamion:

"Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not,
Fray us with things that be not:"

If the man wasn't four hundred years dead he could probably sue me for stealing material for the Clemency Pogue books.

But this rereading is taking its toll on my old books. This picture is the back corner of my copy of "Nothing Like the Sun." Sad to see a book falling apart, but I gotta say I kind of love how much it looks like erosion revealing the strata of ancient eras in a canyon

The Scrivener Bees

2007-03-26T12:09:00.000-04:00

I just returned from the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, which was great fun. Sarah and I met some great people, including Avery Chenoweth (who must be eponymous for something) and whose books are well worth checking out.

The next Clemency Pogue book, "The Scrivener Bees" has sneaked onto Amazon, available for pre-order. I recently received the galleys (pictured) with artwork from David Michael Friend. Very exciting.

And to the emails I'm getting about how woefully outdated this website is-- I'm working on it.

Hobby Horse Design

2006-12-29T11:29:00.000-05:00

Google continues to contribute to worldwide knowiness, now letting you search a database of patents, including gorgeous design specs.

This is an improvement on the hobbyhorse that my grandfather, John Bell, patented in 1955.

Interweb, may you live to be a thousand thousand years old.

New Heights of Maturity

2006-12-02T17:45:00.000-05:00

I made an illustration for my favorite etymology, using some early concept art David Michael Friend did for the Jim Henson film adaptation of Clemency Pogue.

From the Wikipedia entry for Pumpernickel Bread:

"Philologist Johann Christoph Adelung states about the Germanic origin of the word, in the vernacular, Pumpen was a New High German synonym for being flatulent, a word similar in meaning to the English "fart", and "Nickel" was a form of the name Nicholas, an appellation commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g., "Old Nick", a familiar name for Satan). Hence, pumpernickel is described as the "devil's fart.” The American Heritage Dictionary adds "so named from being hard to digest."

Giants, Nature, Back Spasms

2006-11-30T17:08:00.000-05:00

If you're in New York, you need to head to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which has some amazing exhibits running, including Ron Mueck, Walton Ford, and Annie Leibovitz.

It was the Mueck that drew me to the museum. Sarah and I rode our bikes over after we'd both finished our morning writing. The Mueck stuff is amazing. He's an ex-Jim Henson creature builder who makes incredibly realistic naked people, at curious scale. They wouldn't let me take any pictures, but I stole this from somebody else' blog:

The woman looks completely realistic, at the closest inspection, no matter the fact that she would stand sixty feet tall. You can see the veins under her wrists where the skin is thin. The most curious thing about the exhibit for me was how it made me reconsider how realistic my fellow art patrons were. I ended up scrutinizing them for faults in design. I'd say a little more than half of my fellow Brooklynites are not such convincing constructions.

Also, Walton Ford! He does Albertus Seba-style drawings of animals in "nature." They make me deeply uncomfortable in the way only really good art does. Look at this picture of birds in a flock acting as one creature. Good inspiration for "Acorn: Giant Killer."

But about halfway through the Ford exhibit, I somehow turned funny and threw out my back. It felt like somebody had pushed a knitting needle into my left lung. I was left lurching around, desperately trying to find a bench I could lie on. I was in no shape to ride my bicycle back home, and needed at least half an hour face down on a flat surface. But everywhere I went, guards would prod me and tell me I would have to sit upright or they would call security.

I did eventually figure it out, and went back upstairs to the Mueck exhibit, took off all of my clothes, and lay face-down in the corner of the room. Except for the occasional irritating comment (such as "a little excessive with the hair" or "he made some very curious decisions with scale in this one") it turned out pretty well. I'm back home safe, sitting on what I dearly hope is a hot water bottle.

Langostino de la Muerte

2006-11-29T09:36:00.000-05:00

Blogger seems to be cooperating again, so here's another attempt at posting Matthew Bernier's excellent picture of squat lobster mortality-

And yes, that's exactly what a lobster's skeleton looks like.

Giant Killer

2006-11-21T05:49:00.000-05:00

I'm writing another graphic novel for FirstSecond, this one an epic apocalypse of giants called "Acorn: Giant Killer." It's going to break your heart and slap your momma, thanks in large to Matthew Bernier, who's going to be creating the artwork for the book.

Here's a scrap from his sketchbook:

Doesn't that murder you with charm? It murders me with charm. Check out his gallery on Deviant Art, there's a lot of fantastic stuff there, and you'll get to glimpse sneak peaks of "Acorn" as the book develops.

Barnes and Noble Reading / Signing

2006-11-14T16:23:00.000-05:00

I'll be reading from The Squampkin Patch, signing books, and bribing children with Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies on Wednesday, November 15th at the Brooklyn Heights Barnes & Noble from 6:30-7:30pm.

The Address is 106 Court Street, between Schermerhorn and State Street. Come hungry, bring the kids, fear the Squampkins.

Great Commercial

2006-11-14T16:19:00.000-05:00

Further proof that somebody needs to hire me to make a filmed adaptation of the greatest game* ever made.

* about glorious lumps.

Space Experiments!

2006-11-09T11:11:00.000-05:00

Go watch zero-gravity experiments with water and antacid tablets! It takes forever to load (it's only NASA, go easy on them) but is well worth the wait.

A Halloween Treat

2006-10-31T20:23:00.000-05:00

My new favorite video game, "Bounce the Alien," from Louis Trondheim's brilliant "A.L.I.E.E.E.N."

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Fessenden

2006-10-30T13:34:00.000-05:00

The festival / book signing in Clinton, NJ was great fun. I met a lot of good folks, including Ghost Road Blues author James Maberry.

Here I am with James, wearing the costume sure to haunt the dreams of Clinton for decades, the terrible Wendigo:

Note the horrible, gnashy teeth, that clearly indicates this is not simply a reindeer costume.

Squampkin Flip Book!

2006-10-26T09:50:00.000-04:00

There's a permanant link to this on the intro page to PettyOfficial.com, but it bears repeating:

You can now download, print, cut, and assemble your own "Life Cycle of the Squampkin" Flip Book! This is the animation created for the book by puppet mastermind David Friend. No matter how many computer-made, million-orc armies march across multiplex screens, hand-drawn animation still makes the most endearing, honestly magical moving pictures I see.

Super-secret non-Halloween animation link!

Pumpkin Festival of Clinton, NJ

2006-10-26T08:23:00.000-04:00

This Friday, October 27th, I'm going to be taking part in the festivities at the Pumpkin Festival down in Clinton, NJ. There will be a pumpkin carving contest, a haunted mill, a re-animation of the dead followed by some light screaming, and readings and signings from all sorts of spooky authors at the Clinton Book Shop, at 33 Main Street.

To promote "The Squampkin Patch," I will be handing out pumpkin chocolate chip cookies (which were recently blurbed by Bunnicula author James Howe: "WOW! Seriously good cookies"), ultra-spooky Squampkin flip-books, and the souls of deceased, unrepentant sinners (recently blurbed by Aleister Crowley: "CRIPES! Those are some seriously unrepentant sinners!")

And I will be in the most terrifying costume of all time. If anybody mistakes it for Bullwinkle, they're getting keel-hauled.

Books of Wonder

2006-10-19T16:22:00.000-04:00

This Sunday, October 22nd, I'm going to be appearing at Books of Wonder from 2-4pm. There will be a whole bevy of creative types there, including "Bunnicula" author James Howe and "Series of Unfortunate Events" illustrator Brett Helquist. Only one of those creative types will be handing out pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Books of Wonder is at 18 West 18th Street, in New York City between 5th and 6th Avenues.

What I learned in Europe

2006-10-19T15:57:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in two weeks as I was in Naples, then Pompeii, then Northern Italy for a weddings, then Barcelona, then the Mediteranean town of Sitges for a film festival, then Boston for a funeral, and now finally back to beautiful Brooklyn, NY. And the most amazing thing I saw in all of that travel was this:

That's right. It's a vending machine that sells GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICHES. Truly, Italy is the country that created civilization. I call on all of my fellow Americans to rally around the cause and help me overcome the Italians in the sandwich race. We've been behind for centuries, (they were making panini before we had even thought of the tiny plastic sword) spending our energies on warfare, computing, and ice cream portability. (The Ice Cream Sandwich may be our only sandwich technology leap on Europe, but really, that's more about ice cream than it is about sandwiches.) If we beat the Russians to the moon, we can do this, right?

Moonfishing

2006-09-27T11:44:00.000-04:00

My friend David Michael Friend, who illustrated the cover and made the super great flipbook animation for The Squampkin Patch is going to be holding a preview screening of his movie Moonfishing tonight.

Here's the info:

Wednesday, September 27th
8:00pm
Dixon Place
258 Bowery
Tickets: $10-15 (all proceeds benefit the theater)

What I've seen of Moonfishing is gorgeous. If you want a sneak peak, check out moonfishing.com for a teaser.

Did you know?

2006-09-20T12:32:00.000-04:00

I'm back in Brooklyn after two weeks' hurly burly in Toronto and Pennsylvania.

I had a movie playing in the Toronto Film Festival this year, and was up for pretty much the whole run of it. I had the pleasure of meeting somebody who said to me "Did you know that there's a JT Petty who writes children's books?" The other nicest thing I heard came from somebody who came up to me after a screening and said "I loved it, and I'm amazed you haven't been lynched."

The best movie I saw at TIFF, by far, was Pan's Labyrinth, from Guillermot Del Toro. Not a movie for kids, but incredibly scary, moving, and (scariest of all) relevant to state of the world.

From there it was straight to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, to promote the Squampkin Patch at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association conference at the Valley Forge Convention Center. The Valley Forge Convention Center is at least as big as Deleware. The book conference was in the basement, below a gun show, which was below an elaborate Indian wedding. In love with America, I tried to snap some pictures.

"Pictures ain't allowed," said a large man with an assault rifle.
"Are you sure?" I asked.

He said nothing, and motioned significantly with his rifle. The picture below was the closest I got.

The Keeper book launch party

2006-09-04T10:51:00.000-04:00

For my grown-up readers, Sarah Langan's THE KEEPER is out in stores, and a must-read for horror fans, the literati, and all sentient mammals. Go buy a copy. Now!

And if you're in New York, she'll be reading this Wednesday, September 7th at 7pm, at the Partners & Crime Mystery Book Sellers, at 44 Greenwich Avenue, in Manhattan. There will be wine! There will be cheese!

Says Peter Straub about The Keeper:

"Sarah Langan combines a genuinely poetic sensibility with a taste for horror's most bravura excesses, which gives her book a distinct and juicy flavor all its own. THE KEEPER begins what should be a very fruitful career."

Pied Piper of Park Slope.

2006-09-04T10:45:00.000-04:00

The reading at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble was great fun. As you can see from the picture, the kids were absolutely riveted, hanging like piped mice on my every word. (I'm the one with the beard.)

FREE COOKIES (and reading)

2006-08-31T01:20:00.000-04:00

This Saturday, September 2nd, at 3pm, I'm going to be reading from The Squampkin Patch at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble in the beautiful borough of Brooklyn. The address is 267 7th Avenue. Hop the F train to 7th Avenue and come watch children quake with fear and enjoy pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies.

The picture attached to this entry, though awesome, bears no relation to my book.

Sentence of the Week

2006-08-28T10:09:00.000-04:00

From the New York Times:

"It’s a breezy frippery that welcomes molecular gastronomy into the mainstream."

Sci-Fi Wonderland

2006-08-27T09:42:00.000-04:00

Your faithful dispatcher checking in from the town of Saint Michaels, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It's a remote fishing village turned B&B tourist klatch, by which I mean, it's a science fiction wonderland.

Take for example:

That's an eel fork. That's right. For forking eels.

Or behold the wonder of:

That thing. Shiny shiny, pretty pretty.