Tag Archive for Bystander

Bloggy Blogness: Around the Horn

A few things:

* My Best Pal in the World Whom I Never Actually Met, Matthew Cordell, gets the “Random Illustrator” Feature over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. They do a first-rate job over there, always.

* The fabulous Brenda Bowen — most recently of Bowen Press — has dusted herself off and started a new blog, called Bunny Eat Bunny. Just a thought: Maybe Brenda should have named it Bunny Dust Bunny. Or not! Anyway, Brenda is in the process of reinventing herself (she’s like Madonna that way) and I know many of us are eager to see what’s next. In the meantime, Brenda’s blog is just a nice way to stay in touch, to see an active, insightful mind at work.

* For bright bursts of optimism, beauty and creativity, is there any place on the web better than Color Me Katie? It’s a visual site, very little reading, and always a pleasure and an inspiration.

* I’d say this spot has been my favorite children’s literature blog of late: consistently excellent.

* The first, early review of Bystander, due out in Fall of ’09 (Feiwel and Friends).

Bystander: Revising Galleys

I’ve been messing with the “second pass” galleys for Bystander (Fall, 2009). These last corrections are minor, twenty pages can go by untouched, and these last changes won’t be reflected in the ARCs (Advanced Reader Copies) that go around to reviewers, etc.

So I warmed up my scanner — a new toy for me — and decided to give a blow-by-blow of a minor revision through four separate stages. Of course, there were many more stages of doubt and second-guessing (I mean: revision!) that happened before I sent the book out. To me, it’s an uncountable process.

Part of me thinks: No one cares, this is all too self-obsessed. But the other part of me loves process, the journey, and thinks that maybe somebody else does too. If  you think this is a worthwhile thing for me to do with this blog, let me know.

FROM THE FIRST DRAFT that went to Feiwel and Friends editor, Liz Szabla:

SECOND DRAFT. You’ll note two changes: 1) I felt that the prairie dog reference, though okay for a kid from South Dakota, was wrong for Eric, wrong for Long Island. I felt that he wouldn’t think to make that comparision. 2) I cleaned up that last sentence, he’s no longer “racing,” because that was the wrong word; there’s now the specific “gap in the fence”; and overall it’s just a little leaner and better, IMO.

FIRST-PASS GALLEYS. Here we see the manuscript set into type. I still disliked the sentence, “. . . those Meercats on TV.” Somewhere in there I changed it from “TV” to “Animal Planet,” went singular rather than plural. But a new concern entered, or more likely I began to listen to an old concern: Was the image too contemporary, ephemeral. Would it date the book? “Meerkat Manor” wasn’t going to last on TV forever. Maybe in five, ten years people won’t be as conscious of meerkats as they seem to be now. And like the prairie dog image, even a meerkat simile seemed too much of a reach. You’ll see below my hasty script, where I’m fooling around with more localized comparisons: “a rabbit in the field, hawks in the sky, snakes in the grass.” Searching for something that might work.

SECOND-PASS GALLEYS. I spoke with Liz on the phone. What you see below is the scribblings I made before I spoke with Liz, and then the result of that conversation. First, I was still hating that sentence: “He was nervous, like a meerkat on Animal Planet.” I tried to come up with some other images, and scribbled below: “and watchful, like a small animal in dangerous woods.” That wasn’t a proposed sentence so much as the kind of image I was grasping for, a frightened chipmunk sort of thing. Not working.

At that point, I solved it the way so many of these things are solved. Because often when a sentence gives you this much trouble, it’s a sign that maybe it should go away completely. I crossed it out and wrote “NO” on the side of the page. On the phone, Liz and I looked at it and agreed. We already saw he was “tensed,” saw that he was watchful. I didn’t need a simile; what I needed was to keep this boy on the run — because the bad guys are coming. We lose the distracting simile, which I never got right, and move on to the next sentence: “Then he took off without a word.” By cutting we didn’t actually lose anything; and we gained pace, forward movement.

FINAL NOTE: You may notice that I flip-flopped on that last line, “was long gone,” or the simpler alternate, “was gone.” Liz and I both thought about it, talked about it, that extra word “long,” and decided to reinstate it.

And that’s one glimpse into a late stage of the revision process.

NOW, ABOUT THE KETCHUP:

This is a reference I’m not sure many will get, but it’s something that I had to put into the book. To me, no discussion of bullying, regardless of how seemingly benign the form, can take place without a recognition of Columbine as an extreme result. It’s always there, that vision of what could happen if good people — the bystanders — don’t act. The two shooters in that massacre, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were originally victims of bullying. This is a common scenario, “the bullied bully,” widely recongized in the literature. So many targets go on to target someone else in a cycle of hurt and intimidation. Anyway, Harris and Klebold were once severely humiliated when they were splattered with ketchup packets. When I came across that while researching Bystander, I knew I wanted to use it  somehow — so my book opens immediately after it happens to another boy, and the book’s protaginst, Eric Hayes, sees him running, running. Because even though my book does not go the extremes of Columbine, it’s a haunting scenario that remains forever present, like a ghost in the room, a reminder and a lesson we dare not forget.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bullying

When I was working on Bystander (Fall, 2009), a book that centers on bullying, I kept running across different quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. He would often express the same idea in subtle variations. In essence, Dr. King issued an indictment against the tyranny of silence, reminding us all of our responsibility to speak up. King believed in the common good. He had an abiding faith in his fellow man. If only we would all stand up and be heard, then justice and democracy and human kindness would surely prevail over cruelty and prejudice.

That’s partly why I named the book, Bystander. Not bully. Not victim. I wanted the focus to be on the overwhelming majority of us who stand by as mute witness; and how we are, therefore, complicit in acts of cruelty, our silence a form of tacit agreement. For responsibility is nothing if not an “ability” to “respond.” That’s where we find hope for real change. In our voices.

Here’s a few relevant quotes from Dr. King:

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.”

This brief, one-minute clip is from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech. He knew what was coming, he knew.

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Sneaky Preview

Click here to read the first four paragraphs of my new book, Bystander, in Wordle form — available in stores only eight months from now!

Books for Boys?!

School Library Journal recently ran a review for Along Came Spider. Written by Elizabeth Swistock, you can read it in full by clicking wildly right here and scrolling insanely downwards.

I think Ms. Swistock gives an accurate, sympathetic review, while noting that “several of the traits that Preller describes could be associated with autism spectrum disorder, but Trey’s condition is never stated outright.”

Not naming Trey’s condition was a conscious choice. Maybe that was a mistake on my part, I don’t know. But for the record, I saw Trey as a boy with high-functioning Asperger Syndrome. What I felt at the time, correctly or not, was that most kids wouldn’t perceive things that way — they’d be dealing with the near reality of a quirky boy, not an abstract label, so I tried to hug close to that perspective. In today’s inclusive classrooms, these are daily encounters for most children.

By the way, here’s one of the many great books I found on the subject, Perfect Targets: Asperger Syndrome and Bullying, by Rebekah Heinrichs.

For the purposes of Along Came Spider, I didn’t see the behaviors exhibited in the book as “bullying” per say, since I hate to see every incident of like or dislike — or even one-time acts of physical violence — thrown under the notorious bullying umbrella. Vast topic, too big for this entry. I’ll have a lot more to say on that later, when we get closer to the publication of Bystander (Feiwel & Friends, Fall, 2009), a dramatic novel that takes a closer look at bullying in a middle school environment

The interesting part of the review comes at the end (doesn’t it always?). Ms. Swistock concludes:

The fact that Trey and Ava are extremely self-aware and kindhearted is a redeeming quality, but the book could prove too uneventful for its intended audience. That’s too bad because Trey is a sweet character and Preller’s message is a good one.

I want to repeat the key phrase there: too uneventful for its intended audience.

Let’s be clear: I have no argument with the reviewer. She very well may be correct. It’s not been a huge seller. Though it is a book about boys — that also features strong female characters — it might not fit into the category of The Type of Books That Boys Like. There’s not a lot of action. It’s a friendship story. Maybe it would be boring for typical boys, whomever or whatever that might be. I loved the observation made by Karen Terlecky at Literate Lives in the very first review of Spider:

I’ve read a lot of books recently about girls trying to make sense of friendships and themselves, so it was a delightful surprise to find and read an advance review copy of a book that deals with boys trying to find where they belong . . . .

I wonder: Did I accidentally write a girlie book about boys? And is such a thing possible? Or unwelcome? Or needed? Can it be that a He-Man such as myself is, deep down, just a wuss?

I am genuinely interested in this topic and invite your comments. It’s something I’ve been puzzling over for a while now. I haven’t reached any wise conclusions. But maybe that’s what blogging should be: that it’s okay, maybe even preferable, to open things up for discussion, rather than attempt to neatly wrap things up, tie down all the loose ends.

On a diagnostic level, we can all agree that boys don’t read as much as girls. We can see the divides in our educational system. But it becomes far trickier when we encounter it on a prescriptive level, when we read that we need more . . . books for boys.

Because, of course, what IS a book for boys? Following the standard clichés, we’ll see well-intentioned publishers roll out a bunch of sports titles and a series of picture books about trucks and dinosaurs. Boys love that stuff! Oh yeah, and gross stuff, too — boys love disgusting things. Farts and vomit! Bodily functions! Smashing things! Underwear! And on and on.

And you can see where that kind of reductionistic thinking leads us. Exactly nowhere. Where Boy becomes Caricature, effectively ignoring the vast number of outliers, the sensitive ones, the insecure boys, ignoring the notion that boys may be All That and So Much More.

What is a book for a boy? What do boys like? To answer that, we have to address the idea of what is a boy? I guess what worries me is when those answers get too restrictive, too limited, when publishing for boys does a disservice to what boyness is all about, in all its sprawling, messy glory.

“Oh, here comes a boy. Do I have a book for you!