TWU Alumni Award ...

Presented for the 2017 TWU Alumni Distinction Awards

This month I was able to travel back to my Home and Native Land for an Alumni Awards Gala at my alma matter. It was an interesting chance to reflect back on who I was as a young student and how my life has changed since. My main takeaway from revisiting the campus was that the trees had all gotten a lot bigger! They also made this nifty little introductory video. If you've ever wanted to catch a glimpse of my workspace or home, this is your chance:

Jonathan Auxier - 2017 Alumni Distinction Award Recipient from TWU Alumni on Vimeo.

Roleplaying for Very Young Children

This weekend, we had an impromptu Last Unicorn party with my daughters and their similarly-unicorn-obsessed friend. We watched the movie, of course, but there was also dress-up and a tabletop RPG session, which I ran for them. My kids are 3 and 5 years old, and it can be challenging to teach certain board game mechanics to kids so young (especially when they can't yet read). Over the last year, I've come up with a few rules that have helped games with young players. We've been using the fantastic Mice and Mystics as our base game. I love it because it looks like Redwall and has pretty child-friendly theming: the scariest monsters they will encounter are giant spiders and centipedes.

Along the way, we've developed a few house rules that keep things moving for young kids. I thought they were worth passing along:

1. Use a Dice Arena -- kids are sloppy with dice, and this keeps things from knocking over board pieces. We use shallow Tupperware container, nothing fancy.
2. Kids Get Unlimited Movement -- Turns out it's hard to explain to a three year old that her character can't get far enough away from a Warrior Rat to stay alive. So now I let them move as far as they want. The monsters that I control have speed determined by dice.
3. No Defense Rolls -- Defense rolls are sort of counterintuitive because they're passive -- all it does is augment the aggressor's damage. The game moves much faster if you just roll and apply damage without worrying about defense. (To simulate armor, just give more HP.)
4. Re-Rolls and Healing -- In Mice & Mystics, each die has a piece of "cheese," which they can spend to use special powers. My kids can't read the special power cards, so I just made a rule that they can always spend cheese to re-roll. This helps the kid with bad rolls to not get too discouraged. I would also let them spend the cheese to heal damage, which was essential because rule #3 meant monsters deal a LOT of damage!
5. Add Candy -- A recent change that was a BIG hit was to replace the little "cheese" tokens with mini-marshmallows, which they have to eat when they spend them. It actually created some serious "marshmallow test" drama wherein they had to decide between eating and saving this valuable resource.
6. Stabilize Between Encounters --  After each skirmish, I make the kids explore the room and always ensure that they discover a cache of marshmallows to heal themselves. This was also a way to make sure the player who was a little more harassed or left out had a chance to have a big win: they were the one who managed to find the hidden stash.
7. Keep it Short -- Tabletop RPGs often skew long, but I've found that a 30-40 minute session works best. Really, this is all about seeding a board game addiction, and the best way to do that is to leave them wanting more.

What to read after Peter Nimble?

I get a fair number of letters from readers wanting to know when the next Peter Nimble adventure will be coming out. I don't have any immediate plans to write another Peter story, so in the meantime, here are some books I *strongly* recommend to people who liked Peter Nimble. All three of these titles are packed with adventure, danger, wordplay, and just the right amount of silliness. Check them out! MAGIC MARKS THE SPOT - by Caroline Carlson

From Goodreads: Pirates! Magic! Treasure! A gargoyle? Caroline Carlson's hilarious novel is perfect for fans of Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events and Trenton Lee Stewart's Mysterious Benedict Society. Hilary Westfield has always dreamed of being a pirate. She can tread water for thirty-seven minutes. She can tie a knot faster than a fleet of sailors, and she already owns a rather pointy sword. There's only one problem: The Very Nearly Honorable Leage of Pirates refuses to let any girl join their ranks of scourges and scallywags. But Hilary is not the kind of girl to take no for answer. To escape a life of petticoats and politeness at her stuffy finishing school, Hilary sets out in search of her own seaworthy adventure, where she gets swept up in a madcap quest involving a map without an X, a magical treasure that likely doesn't exist, a talking gargoyle, a crew of misfit scallywags, and the most treacherous—and unexpected—villain on the High Seas. Written with uproarious wit and an inviting storyteller tone, the first book in Caroline Carlson's quirky seafaring series is a piratical tale like no other

THE GOBLIN'S PUZZLE - by Andrew Chilton

Brimming with dragons, goblins, and logic puzzles, this middle-grade fantasy adventure is perfect for readers who enjoyed The Princess Bride or Rump.

THE BOY is a nameless slave on a mission to uncover his true destiny. THE GOBLIN holds all the answers, but he’s too tricky to be trusted. PLAIN ALICE is a bookish peasant girl carried off by a confused dragon. And PRINCESS ALICE is the lucky girl who wasn’t kidnapped.

All four are tangled up in a sinister plot to take over the kingdom, and together they must face kind monsters, a cruel magician, and dozens of deathly boring palace bureaucrats. They’re a ragtag bunch, but with strength, courage, and plenty of deductive reasoning, they just might outwit the villains and crack the goblin’s puzzle.

THE LUCK UGLIES - by Paul Durham

The Luck Uglies is the first in a tween fantasy-adventure trilogy brimming with legends come to life, a charming wit, and a fantastic cast of characters-and is imbued throughout with the magic of storytelling.

Strange things are happening in Village Drowning, and a terrifying encounter has Rye O'Chanter convinced that the monstrous, supposedly extinct Bog Noblins have returned. Now Rye's only hope is an exiled secret society so notorious its name can't be spoken aloud: the Luck Uglies. As Rye dives into Village Drowning's maze of secrets, rules, and lies, she'll discover the truth behind the village's legends of outlaws and beasts...and that it may take a villain to save them from the monsters.

The first in a series, The Luck Uglies is an altogether irresistible cross of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, Stefan Bachmann's The Peculiar, and Chris Healy's The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, overflowing with adventure, secrets, friendship, and magic.

Why Orphans? Revisiting David and Goliath

This week I found myself briefly stranded without a book, and so I to re-read Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath. The book was published in 2013 to largely negative reviews. Reviewers seemed to have tired of his charmingly counterintuitive self-help busines-speak. Many rightly criticized the book for feeling disjointed ... what begins as a motivational talk about entrepreneurs overcoming dyslexia soon migrates to much heavier topics, including child leukemia, civil rights, religious war in Northern Ireland, child abduction/murder, and even the Holocaust. The overall response from readers seemed to be that Gladwell was getting too lofty: better to stick with what you know. Reading the book in 2017, however, I had a different reaction: the weakness of David and Goliath isn't the heavy stuff, it's the fluff at the beginning. (I would include the title among the fluff.) In 2017, the second half of the book is chilling. Nearly every example has profound resonance with the current state of the world. And it seems to go a long way toward explaining why many of the conflicts we find ourselves in are simply unwinnable. It is also a more personal book; Gladwell experienced a sort of personal religious conversion while writing it. Reading it this week, I was struck by how much more human and vulnerable the stories were. The question that rang through the final chapters was, for me, clear: Would you be willing to suffer the way these people have suffered? 

Unlike Gladwell's previous books, David and Goliath is unable to offer up a glib "takaway" that readers can apply at their next board meeting. I suspect a message as bleak as this had no real place in the (comparatively) optimistic world of 2013. But in 2017 the book feels almost therapeutic. It recognizes that there's no easy hack to fixing certain kinds of conflicts. Instead it offers a different kind of message: it asserts that suffering creates people able to truly risk themselves in order to do what is right. In a world full of so much wrong, we need people like that. Those are what history will call heroes.

I have a lot of readers ask my why I write about characters with missing or dead parents. My jokey answer is "because then no one can ground them." But the real answer is much more complicated. It has to do with how extreme loss conditions a person--preparing them to endure extreme pain in the future. My characters suffer over the course of their stories, and to me it seems more cruel to put an unscarred and unprepared person into such dire circumstances.

I'm grateful for this book because the next time someone asks the "Why Orphans?" question, I will have a better answer.

UNRELATED: Those who like Gladwell might enjoy his very excellent podcast series, Revisionist History. I especially enjoyed his episodes about the evolution of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and his exploration of Generous Orthodoxy.

Mightier than the Sword ...

I've just finished reading AS Byatt's The Children's Book, which is not a book for children. It is a sprawling, virtuosic chronicle about idealistic artists at the turn of the 20th century. The "main" character is based on real-life children's author E Nesbit (named Olive Wellwood) and the book primarily concerns itself with Olive and her family. I'm a big Nesbit fan, so this book was fascinating.

*SPOILERS*

The thing that most struck me in the book was the fate of Olive's oldest and most beloved son, Tom. Tom is beautiful and smart and kind and innocent: he is presented as a character from a book caught in a harsh world. The novel shows Tom's tragic decline as the victim of betrayal: abuse, cruelty, deception, parental infidelity, and (implied) addiction. But none of these are what kills Tom. Instead, it is his mother's writing that drives him to suicide at the end of the book. Since he was a small child, Tom's mother has been writing him a special storybook ("Tom Underground") that was written just for him. As Tom grows up and becomes more and more troubled, these stories serve as a sort of life-line for him. But then his mother mines these private childhood stories in order to create a beautiful and successful stage play. Tom only discovers this on opening night, when he's watching from the audience. Shortly after, he drowns himself.

The book has many disturbing elements, but this was the most disturbing by far: that the selfishness of Olive Wellwood in her writing harmed her son more than anything else. This mirrors a real-life tradition of authors publishing private stories originally created for/with children: Christopher Robin, Alice Liddell, the Davies Boys, etc. None of those children fared well in adulthood. I've never quite understood the nature of such trauma. Like many others, I have always assumed that there must be some other explanation for why the children grew up to be bitter and miserable. (There is no shortage of speculation about abuse.) But Byatt argues in The Children's Book that commodifying and publicizing the private worlds of a child's imagination is trauma enough.

Byatt forces readers to ask if the cost is too high. Yes, we have Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, but those masterworks came at the expense of real people's happiness. I consider myself a loving father and husband, and I certainly do no conscious harm to my children. But I have always been unapologetic about using details from real life in my books--it's all fair game if it serves the story. Byatt's novel made me reconsider this long-held stance, which is no small thing.

Writing in a Broken World ...

This has been a painful and frightening week for a lot of people. At a time like this -- when there such immediate need for change in the world -- it feels hard to justify the work of writing children's stories. What could be more frivolous? In many ways, my book Sophie Quire was about this very question. But in the time since I finished Sophie, the question has only plagued me more. What is the point of a children's story? It's a good time to remember GK Chesterton's words:

I might add something to this, which is that it's important to write children's stories so that the next generation can know a monster when they see it.

I'm on TV!

Last week I flew to DC to sit down with Raymond Arroyo on his show The World Over. I met Raymond at the LA Times Festival of Books last spring, and he's a great guy who asks good questions ... a few of which caught me off guard! Check it out! [embed]http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENyy1_X_w4[/embed]

The Collector's Gift

A few years back, I helped write a short film for the very talented Ryan Kravitz, who had traded in a successful career as an art director to take up animation. It's finished and out in the world now (apparently having racked up a ton of accolades), so I thought I'd post the link here.

The Collector's Gift from Ryan Kravetz on Vimeo.

How to Get Signed Books!

Just as note as we approach this holiday season: If you want a signed/personalized copy of one of my books, please call Classic Lines Bookshop. They are right down the road and keep my books in stock -- which makes it pretty easy for me to swing by and sign things. Just give them a ring and let them know you want a signed book shipped to your address. (If you want it personalized, make sure to let them what name you want in the book!)

Introducing ... SOPHIE QUIRE!

Hello friends! It's been a while since my last update, and that's because I've been busily finishing my next book! It's a companion to my first novel, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes. Here's the amazing cover, drawn by Gilbert Ford:

The book comes out Spring 2016. It is without question the most monster-filled story I have ever written. Here's the summary from the catalog:

It's been two years since Peter Nimble and Sir Tode rescued the kingdom of HazelPort. In that time, they have traveled far in wide in search of adventure. Now Peter and Sir Tode have been summoned by Professor Cake for a new mission: find a 12-year-old bookmender named Sophie Quire. 

Sophie knows little beyond the four walls of her father's bookshop, where she repairs old books and dreams of escaping the confines of her dull life. But when a strange boy and his talking cat/horse companion show up with a rare and mysterious book, she finds herself pulled into an adventure beyond anything she has ever read.

.

I am so unbelievably excited to share this story with the world. I'll keep you posted with illustrations and updates as we near publication. Tally-ho!

A NIGHT GARDENER Soundtrack ...

Whenever I start a new book, I try to put together a soundtrack that makes me feel the way I want the story to make me feel. It's a valuable tool, because at some point I become sick of my own book, and the songs help remind me what I'm aiming for. Screenwriter John August puts it well: "A good playlist helps you get started. A great playlist helps you finish."  I thought I'd share some of the songs that helped me finish The Night Gardener. According to iTunes, I listened to these and a few other tracks more than 300 times ...

A Children's Book Week Challenge!

As many of you know, last week was "Children's Book Week." Authors were asked to submit 1 min videos talking about books they love. I knew that wasn't enough time, so I instead made my video into a sort of flashcard challenge:

I got a number of emails from people wanting to know all the book titles, so here's the master list:

The Little Prince - Alice in Wonderland - The Golden Compass - A Little Princess - Darth Paper - Pinocchio - Rutabaga Stories - Mary Poppins - Bud, not Buddy - The Chocolate War - The White Mountains - The Witch of Blackbird Pond - The One and Only Ivan - Matilda - The High king - Holes - The Higher Power of Lucky - The Last of the Really Great Wangdoodles - Five Children and It - The Mysterious Journey of Edward Tulane - Book of the Dun Cow - Howl's Moving Castle - Peter and Wendy - The Twenty-One Balloons - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - A Wrinkle in Time - Little Women - The Princess Academy - The Graveyard Book - Charlotte's Web - Dominic - Diary of a Wimpy Kid - The Phantom Tollbooth - My Father's Dragon - The Neddiad - Anne of Green Gables - Redwall - The Man in the Ceiling - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Winnie the Pooh - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 

Creative Mornings: Childhood as Source Material

A few weeks ago, I did a Creative Mornings talk at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum on the topic of "Childhood." This was my attempt to connect children's literature to a broader audience--specifically talking about what it means to work in an industry where the audience (children) are separate from the buyer (grownups). Of special interest might be the anecdote I tell about Tom Angleberger at minute 15 ... an event he has since claimed didn't occur (it totally did). Also, of course, I finish things off with a yo-yo show! 

Enjoy: 

Creative Mornings is a fantastic organization. Find out about the next event in your own city and check it out! 

First Day of Advent ...

Having no star or angel, Max decided to crown himself King of the Christmas Tree!

Give Irony a Chance

A recent NYT or-ed piece by Christy Wampole entitled "How to Live Without Irony" has been making the rounds online.[1. You know it's popular when my father emails it to me.]  The piece is a lament for the millennial generation's fixation on irony:

The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. [...] He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.

I feel like a piece like this crops up every year or so, and the consistent factor in all these articles is that the author feels left out of a culture that he/she does not belong to.  This article feels about as accurate as those that came out of 9/11 declaring that irony was "dead."  If anything, the hipsters I have known have been excessively earnest people ... the only way you might think otherwise is if you were extrapolating their entire person from their clothes, facial hair, and twitter feeds.  Lady Gaga may wear a meat dress, but she also gives speeches about bullying.  Those same smirking "harlequins" were the ones who started the Occupy movement.

More importantly, I disagree with the premise that earnestness is inherently superior to irony.  Since when has the ability to laugh -- especially at oneself -- been a bad thing?[3. Re-reading Something Wicked This Way Comes this October (something I do every year), I was struck anew by the simple idea that evil is powerless in the face of smile.]  The author points to 4 year-old children and animals as exemplars of earnest behavior.  From where I stand, those are not necessarily things for adults to aspire to.  To celebrate humanity is to celebrate the ways we are different from animals -- irony is one of the ways we can do that.

Sure, there's a possible danger to too much detachment.  And, as I've discussed before, it can be used to hurt people.  But none of these things are unique to one generation.

---

Won't You Be my Neighbor?

Please pass the word to any-and-all librarians you know that the historic CC Mellor Library in Pittsburgh is looking for a new children's librarian!  This library is two blocks from my house and it is a truly lovely building in the middle of a charming, safe, historic neighborhood. 

If you don't live in Pittsburgh, you should know that it is an incredibly livable city -- some people (ahem, Forbes Magazine, The Economist) would even say it is the most livable in the United States. Also, it is home to Mr. Rodgers.  Try and tell me you don't want to come to work in a place that looks like this:

Just to sweeten the pot: I'll take whoever gets the job to D's Six Pack and Dogs for dinner -- you have not lived until you've eaten a salad with french fries on top.

You can find all the info about the position here.  Tell your friends!

The Upshot of Cancellation

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately are the differences between cable and network television.  This is not a new topic. Much hay has been made of the way pay-channels like HBO and Showtime don't have to worry about commercial breaks ... but why is it that even the shows on "free" cable channels like FX and AMC still feel better than network shows?[1. "Free" is, of course, a euphamism for hundreds of dollars a year] 

For me, one essential factor is the difference in season lengths.  Cable TV shows generally only run for 11-13 episodes per season, while network shows nearly double that number.  Obviously, a writer needing to produce twice as much content in the same year might end up sacrificing quality for speed ... but what if there were another reason?  What if a shorter season was actually linked to better storytelling in some essential way?

This week I've been enjoying reading the AV Club's series of interviews with "Freaks & Geeks" creator Paul Feig, in which he talks through the writing and shooting of every episode in the short-lived series.  In the interview, Feig discusses how he and co-creator Judd Apatow discovered early on they were being cancelled at the end of the season:

We all just went into scramble mode and started saying, “Okay, we’ve got to play out these storylines we wanted to do [in future seasons], so that when we get canceled, we won’t go bummed out.”

This comment was sort of an "Aha!" moment for me.  Suddenly, Feig and co-creator Judd Apatow had to cram all the best story parts into the final six episodes.  And maybe that's why "Freaks & Geeks" was such a brilliant show -- every episode felt like it was truly an event.  I can't help but wonder if the show would have been quite as strong without the axe hanging over the creators' heads?[2. British TV seems to have internalized this idea without the need of a network axe. Consider the abbreviated runs of "The Office" or "Fawlty Towers," both of which ended because their respective creators would rather have no new episodes than bad new episodes]

Going back to the question of cable shows, I can't help but think of how Feig's experience applies to season premieres and finales.  Premieres and finales are where a series delvers its biggest dramatic punch -- rules are changed, people are killed, stakes are raised.  A little basic math informs me that a cable show (whose seasons end after just 13 episodes) will have those moments twice as often as a network show.  No matter how you cut it, that gives the cable show a huge storytelling advantage because it disallows filler.[3. If you're in the mood for more TV thoughts, you should check out screenwriter Matt Bird's current blog series "How to Create a TV Show"]

How does this apply to writing in general?  I suspect it connects somehow to series books, but I haven't worked that part out.  In the meantime, it's simply a powerful parable about the importance of not holding anything back.  I'm currently in the middle of a second book, and I'm constantly getting exciting story ideas that I think I should save for a story in the distant future.  That's ridiculous.  I should be putting everything into the book I'm writing now.  I should be treating this book like the last one I may ever get to write.

---

Hello Again ...

The last five weeks have been an insane grind for Team Auxier.   I was planning to do several posts announcing various things as they came up, but time got away from me.  Instead, I'm just going down the list ...

BOOK TOUR

I've been touring schools and bookstores all over California -- about thirty events in the last month.  (Click here to see pictures from a recent event ... and video of me doing a favorite YO-YO trick!)  I also managed to sneak out to Wordstock in Portland and the Miami Book Fair International.[1. Where I had a fantastic time hanging out with the likes of Tom Angleberger, Dan Santat, Grace Lin, Gene Yang, and Matt Phelan! Even better, I got Dan to promise to put me into his next picture book!]

I OPTIONED A MOVIE

To real producers!  With real money!  The story is one I've been working on for a while -- a period ghost tale in the tradition of Washington Irving about a haunted tree.  The one problem was that selling the movie meant I had to completely  re-write the last half while on book tour.  I finished last night! 

WE MOVED!

This month, Mary and I packed up all our dishes and made the 3000 mile trek to Pittsburgh, PA![1. Actually Mary packed our house; I was too busy hanging out at schools and bookstores.]  The 'Burgh is a wonderful city that has topped virtually every "most livable" list for the last decade.  Also, we met there. 

WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

One great thing about Pittsburgh is an abundance of amazing old homes.  Coming from the West Coast, I thrill at the idea of living in something not covered in stucco.  As of last night, Mary and I are the owners of this hundred year-old gem on a tree-lined street in Regent Square.  How's that for a black Friday purchase?

AND THE LAST THING ...

You might be asking yourself why a young couple might leave sunny Los Angeles for snowy Pittsburgh?  Well, Mary grew up here, and we want to be near family when we have our baby in May.  Did I mention we're having a baby?  Because we so totally are.

---

Irony vs. Sarcasm

What's the difference between irony and sarcasm? Most thesauri list them as synonyms, but anyone who's been on the receiving end of either type of humor can tell you the difference at once: ironic statements make you laugh, and sarcastic statements make you cry. 

Many a protective parent has assured his or her teased child that sarcasm is the lowest form of humor.  And the word sarcasm literally translates to mean "to tear the flesh."  But what exactly is it it about a sarcastic statement that makes it a low form of humor?  And what makes it "tear the flesh?"  I've been mulling over this question for a while now, and I think I've landed on an answer:

Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.

That is to say that an ironic person includes himself among the mocked, whereas a sarcastic person stands outside the situation in judgement.  See how it might play out in the below scene involving a bunch of nerds camping outside of a movie theater:

In this instance, the guy making fun of the people is including himself in the joke -- after all, he's in the line, too!  But consider what happens when the speaker is not in line with the others:

Sarcasm is the one kind of joke that can be made by someone who does not actually find something funny -- it is humor for the humorless.  In life, I have a problem with sarcasm because I don't believe that any person has the right to laugh at others unless he can first laugh at himself.

And what about sarcasm in storytelling?

To be clear, I'm all for sarcastic characters (I enjoy Holden Caulfield as much as the next guy!).  But sarcastic authors are a different thing altogether.  Sarcastic authors attempt to point out absurdities in the world, but they try to do it from a safe distance -- never letting themselves become a part of the joke.  The only way to do this is by creating straw men for the express purpose of knocking them down. Ironically(!),  this ends up undercutting the author's initial goal, because now instead of critiquing the world, he is critiquing some flimsy characters who bear little resemblance to the world. 

The end result is a thing neither funny nor true.

Barrie vs. Auxier: Narrator Showdown!

I'm sure regular Scop readers are getting sick of all my recent publicity-style announcements about Peter Nimble. In that spirit, I am going to restrain my gushing about last week's book launch party to the footnote at the end of this sentence.[1. Holy crap, it was AMAZING! We had about 90 people show up ... which is a lot more than they had chairs for! I got a chance to meet so many wonderful readers, and reconnect with old friends. We gave away Peter Nimble t-shirts to everyone who asked questions. There was also a birthday cake, which was delicious! (I even forced the people to sing "happy Birthday" to me!) The biggest treat of all was that my father, who had just had emergency surgery in DC, checked himself out of the hospital that morning so he could show up and surprise me -- I may or may not have cried upon seeing him. For those interested in seeing some pics, you can go here, here, or here. Also, Adam Silva did a great rundown of the event here.] Instead, I want to focus on one question that came up during the Q & A from blogger/teacher Monica Edinger.

Monica wanted me to discuss how I had patterned my narrator after the narrator in JM Barrie's Peter Pan.[2. I have a well-documented love for Peter Pan. Betsy Bird outlines a few Barrie connections in her School Library Journal review. Also, I talk about the relationship between one of my main characters and Wendy Darling in this interview with Bookpage Magazine.] Though flattered by the comparison, I didn't agree with her point. I wasn't able to sufficiently respond to her at the event, but I did follow up with an email, which I've excerpted below.

My Three Reasons that the Narrator in Peter Nimble Is Different than the Narrator of Peter Pan:

Barrie's Narrator plays God. While my Narrator does occasionally press the "pause" button to explain something directly to the reader, Peter Nimble essentially reads like a retelling of historical events that the Narrator has no control over. Barrie's Narrator, on the other hand, holds all the cards. Consider how he suspends the children's approach to Neverland so he might explain how the place works. Doing so creates a sense in the reader that Barrie's Narrator is making up the story as he goes -- and should he need to invent a murder scene to show Hook's ruthlessness, then he will do so at his leisure!

Barrie gives his Narrator a special vocabulary. If the digressions of Peter Pan indicate that the Narrator is spinning his tale, his language enforces it. More than once, Barrie uses opaque terms that have no grounding in the real world. A perfect example of this would be Mrs. Darling's "kiss," which never really gets explained. That's because there is no explanation beyond its offhand use. Unlike the teacherly essayists of the 18th century (and, I would argue, Peter Nimble's Narrator), Barrie's Narrator isn't interested in sharing/defining this special vocabulary with his readers.

Barrie's Narrator sentimentalizes childhood. While Barrie isn't afraid to let his child characters get a little bloody, he still maintains an infatuation with their innate innocence reminiscent of the Romantics. Even in calling Peter Pan "heartless," there is a sense of longing in the Narrator's voice ... children are to him pure in a way adults will never be. I would argue that in the Narrator of Peter Nimble, we may find affection toward our young hero, but never adoration of the level that Barrie uses for Peter Pan... the Narrator of Peter Nimble, for example, would never suggest that Peter or Peg contains something special that adults like Professor Cake do not.

Monica was kind enough to respond. While she agreed with my above points, she also thought I was ignoring one major similarity in our writing -- specifically how both our narrators are able to move between character perspectives. I've reprinted Monica's excellent response below (with some minor edits).

Monica's One Gigantic Reason That I'm Wrong:

When reading Peter Nimble I noticed the omniscient narrator as a character, breaking through here and there to explain things ... I became extremely aware of this sort of narration due to Philip Pullman.[1. Yes, she is on a first-name basis with the man! For those who are interested in the subject of the "sprite" narrator, I'd advise you to check out Monica's very-excellent post on the subject here.] Philip speaks of his narrator as a sprite, a character who can flit all over the place. I did think you did that as did Barrie ... isn't your narrator in that tradition of being able to be in different places, inside the minds of different characters, etc.? This is what Philip finds so fascinating about the omniscient narrator and me, too.

And just like that, I'm forced to completely reverse my opinion on the subject! Going through the book, I realize that a narrator that shifts perspectives is a pretty rare thing, and other than Barrie, I can't think of another early author that does it. Well played, Ms. Edinger.

And she's not alone! This very same topic came up last week in an interview with author Kate Milford ... and my response was similarly dense.

What's the moral of this story?

Never trust a writer to talk about his own book. He's an idiot.

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