Tempe Event

By the way, I'll be at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, AZ this Saturday (the 3rd) at 2pm, talking about COLD CEREAL. The book, not the cereal.

Head Games

“You!” he barked as he dismounted.  “Stay there!  Keep those hands where I can see them!”

 The normal-sized man with the tiny wrinkled head raised his arms.  “These hands?” he asked.

 The rider was all in black, with some thick and undoubtedly bullet-proof vest and an oily black gun slung over his shoulders.  He reached back to touch this gun as if drawing some shallow sense of strength and security from it, which of course he was.  He also had a small stone around his neck on a tether, a coldstone, and this was busily giving off purple sparks.  But in the glare of his headlamp the rider hadn’t noticed.

This old man was strangely built, like he hadn’t enough head but had entirely too much neck.  “The park isn’t safe tonight,” the rider told him.  “You should return to your home.”

“Mind turnin’ that off, lad?” the old man asked.

“Sorry,” said the rider, and he reached up to switch off the pink light of the helmet.

“Yeh have somethin’ in your eye,” the old man added.

“I…huh?” 

The rider pulled the goggles up and over his helmet.  And then he winced when he saw that, while the old man was still standing before him, his head had just now disappeared.

(From Cold Cereal)

Cold Cereal Available In Stores

I mean, obviously.  But my new book, Cold Cereal, is also now available.  I'm visiting schools in the midwest at the moment and couldn't make the time to really mark the occasion of its official on sale date earlier today, as I was too busy teaching children about the concept of the Uncanny Valley vis á vis pictures like the one to the right.

But Cold Cereal is available!  Now!  I was super flattered today to see that its audiobook performer, Oliver Wyman, called it the best kid's book he's ever read.  So.

Here are some Mick paper dolls for your amusement.  If there's enough interest I'll put high-res versions up somewhere and people can use 'em for bookmarks.

Appearance at Anderson's

ILLINOIS PEOPLE: I'll be reading and signing at Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville this Wednesday from 7-8 PM. If you'd rather I not come to your state, now's the time to say something.

Outtake

With the publication of Chloe and the Lion approaching, I thought I'd share a video of author Mac Barnett I made for the trailer but which the publisher did not eventually use.  Waste not, want not.

One of My Favorites From COLD CEREAL

WARNING: Mild Spoilers Ahead

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

(Our sponsor being my new novel, Cold Cereal, available in February)

COLD CEREAL EXCERPT

Finally they reached Manhattan, and then the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and then a spot outside some Port Authority restrooms, where Ms. Egami asked if anyone had to go and Scott raised his hand so energetically he heard his back crack.

He rushed into a narrow stall and was punched in the nose by the smell. The toilet showed signs of having been visited by either a very large man or a very small horse, but Scott didn’t feel he had the time to be picky. He spun out enough toilet paper to vandalize a house and carefully cleaned the seat.

Dizzy, he nearly dropped his backpack to the floor, then got a closer look at the floor. Instead he looped it over a hook on the stall door and then a great vinegar wave crashed over him and his knees gave and he gripped the seat and sputtered his breakfast into the bowl.

 A minute later he flushed and turned.

Afterward, he’d realize he didn’t think about it at all—when he saw the hand appear over the top of the door and reach for his bag, Scott lunged forward and seized it at the wrist. The tiny wrist, attached to the tiny hand on an arm like a doll’s. A real ugly doll made from dried fruit and old footballs.

The hand squirmed. Scott looked down beneath the stall door for the thief’s feet. There were no feet. Scott considered his options, and so did the thief.

“Well now, son,” said the thief in a voice that was both high and coarse, like a kazoo. There was something a little foreign about it too. Australian, maybe, or Irish? “It seems you’ve got me. So wha’ d’yeh suppose you’ll do with me?”

 Still holding the tiny wrist, Scott unlatched the door and opened it just enough to poke his head around. It was a tiny man, this man who was trying to take Scott’s bag. He couldn’t have been more than two feet tall, with a miniature red tracksuit and his arm hooked over the top of the stall door. His tiny old-man face was pug nosed and underbitten like some overbred kind of dog, and it seemed puckered with sadness. Not to mention oddly familiar. If it wasn’t for this familiarity, and for the feel of the man’s arm in his hand, Scott would have mistaken him for another aura. 

“Yeh don’ happen to have somethin’ to eat, do yeh, lad?” the little man asked. “I’d be in your debt. ’Tis always a blessing to have one o’ the Good Folk in your debt.”

Scott glanced around the restroom. Men and boys were coming and going, but none were paying any attention to what he considered to be a fairly unusual tiny-man-hanging-on-a-toilet-door situation. That’s New Yorkers for you, he supposed.

“Except when it’s not a blessing, yeh know,” the thief continued. “Speakin’ fair, the blessings o’ the Good Folk can be worse than the curses.”

“You could have just asked in the first place,” Scott muttered. “You didn’t have to try and steal my bag.”

“Asking is begging. Pitiful. Want to punch myself in the eye for even tryin’ it. Stealin’ is good, honest work,” said the thief, puffing out his chest.

“Well, not honest, strictly speaking,” he admitted, after a moment. “Or actually good.”

They were interrupted by Denton Peters, who barged through the men’s room door, shouting Scott’s name like it was a swear word.

“I’m right here,” said Scott.

“Ms. Egami wants to know what’s taking so long,” said Denton. “You got the squirts? Should I tell her you have a bad case of the squirts?”

“No! I’m just . . . this guy was trying to steal my backpack.”

“Yeah? And you’re scared he’s gonna come back?”

Scott gaped at Denton.

“Need yeh to let me go now, son,” the thief said to Scott.

“Are you telling me you can’t see the . . . little . . . guy hanging here?” Scott asked Denton.

Denton frowned in the little man’s general direction, and then Scott thought he saw a flash of recognition on the boy’s face. He’d seen something. Denton Peters squinted, titled his head, crossed his eyes like he was trying to cope with an optical illusion.

“I can . . . sorta see,” he whispered.

“Just sorta?”

“He’s like a mirage.”

What Denton Peters saw next was a sort of prismatic blur, and then Scott jerked back his arm, yelping with pain. Scott pushed past him and scowled into the distance.

Denton followed his gaze to the men’s room door.

“Uh . . . what just happened?”

Scott unhooked his backpack. “Your mirage bit my hand.”

Oh Huck! seemed like kind of a lousy musical, but Scott supposed he might have been in the wrong mood. 

His migraine vanished shortly after leaving the bus terminal, but on the way to the theater Denton staunchly denied having seen anything unusual in the men’s room apart from the new kid hiding from imaginary elves. Denton had by this time already forgotten Scott’s name, however, and most of the other kids didn’t know who he was talking about, and Scott had hidden behind Carla Owens until it all blew over.

Scott was quiet as they returned to the bus terminal through the toy store dazzle of Times Square.

“I just don’t think they should have made the raft a separate character,” said Emily.

“Riff-Raft?” said Erno. “But she’s the narrator. She told you what was going on.”

“Mark Twain didn’t need a talking raft in the book. Or a rapping scarecrow.”

“Scott, tell my sister that everything doesn’t have to be exactly like the precious book.”

Scott started. “What?”

“You’re still upset,” Emily told him. “About Denton teasing you.”

“No. No, I’m fine.”

“Forget about it,” said Erno. “Everyone else has.”

The thing is, they probably had. Scott was nothing if not forgettable.

Back at the Port Authority there was some sort of situation. Two flashing police cruisers were up on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, grille to grille. A crowd had formed, and three uniformed officers attempted to push back these people with outstretched arms and patently false claims that there was nothing to see. Another officer, on horseback, paced the street. And in the center of it all, two more policemen squared off against each other like big dogs.

“Let’s not do this here, man,” one of these officers was saying in soothing tones. “We can talk about it at the station.”

The other man took a step back, took a step forward, his boyish face tangled with fear and anger. “We’ll go back to the station when you admit I’ve apprehended a suspect!” he said, pointing to the backseat of one of the cop cars. “This is not cool, guys! I know I’m the rookie and all, but—”

“Not in front of the juveniles,” said the first officer, glancing at Scott’s class.

“We’re not juveniles,” Erno muttered.

“It just means kids,” said Emily. “Nothing bad.”

An electronic red news crawl on an adjoining building declared the dow down and reggie dwight punches queen and then police disruption at port authority bus terminal. It flashed like a marquee for the weird bit of drama playing out in front of them.

Scott craned his neck to look at the rookie’s car. There was someone in the backseat, but the suspect was very small. Smaller than a toddler. He wondered. . . . 

If Scott Doe had a talent, it was his ability to walk about unnoticed. When not actually calling attention to himself in bus station bathrooms or by defending his indefensible given name, he was one of those kids who could practically disappear in a crowded room. Inconspicuous. Unremarkable. It had always been that way.

So now when Scott shuffled away from his class and approached the police car, Ms. Egami did not notice. Even Erno and Emily didn’t notice, transfixed as they were by the police and the strobing lights. Scott stepped up to the cruiser on the street side, away from the cops, and looked in the rear window.

It was the little man again. He was slumped in the backseat, his round fists ringed by silver handcuffs like tiny planets. He could have just slipped them free if he wanted to. Apparently he didn’t want to.

“Look, Pete . . . ,” the cop was telling the rookie. “We need to get you some help. There is no one in back of your squad car. There is nothing but a pair of empty cuffs.”

“Fight!” Denton Peters suggested from the sideline, and Ms. Egami tried to shush him. “Shoot something!”

The window was open a crack. The little man sniffed and looked up at Scott.

“Oh. ’S you. Come to gloat?”

“I can see you,” Scott said quietly into the gap, “and that policeman can see you, but nobody else can.”

“You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, yeh are. Quick now an’ offer your services to those coppers! They could use a brilliant mind like yours.”

“Why can I see you? Am I crazy?” Scott asked, worried suddenly that his headaches were the sign of something else, something festering in his brain.

The little man studied him for a second. “Set me free, and I’ll explain everythin’.”

Scott looked again at the handcuffs, so large against the man’s wrists that they looked like a practical joke. “Why can’t you—”

“It’s complicated.”

“Were you stealing again? Is that what happened?”

“What else am I to do? Work for a livin’? Make shoes?”

Scott breathed, and tested the door. He expected a police car to be locked, but it wasn’t.

“Hey,” one of the police officers said just then. “Hey, your door is open.”

Scott ducked down, and the little man scootched to the edge of the car seat, rattling his handcuffs.

“Quickly!”

Scott pulled them off, easy as anything. And that’s when the little man leaped up onto his shoulder, ran down the length of his back, and was away.

“Hey!” said Scott. “Come back!”

The small red tracksuit slipped into the street, dodging traffic. Then the clop of hooves, and the mounted policeman was towering over Scott, her horse snorting thick, furious clouds.

 The officer was shouting. Scott cowered. It might have gone badly for him had the horse not chosen just then to turn into a unicorn, and throw its rider, and turn back into a horse again.

The policewoman landed on the pavement, hard. Scott ducked and dashed back to meet his class as the other officers rushed to her aid.

“There you are,” said Erno when Scott turned up beside him, panting. “Did you see that horse rear back like that?”

Scott goggled—at the flashing squad cars, the Keystone cops, the plain brown horse mincing about. Just a horse.

“I’m having kind of a weird day,” said Scott.

AH ha ha ha! Now I have ALL THE GIRAFFES!

It's Like Looking In a Dead Pottery Mirror

Tucson artist Vicki Lazaro made a raku ware calavera mask of me in exchange for a visit to her son's school.  I do not, to be clear, usually make out this well on school visits.

An Open Letter to the Mother Who Thinks One of My Monster Poems is Inappropriate for Children

(I received an email from the mother in question a few days ago.  She was kind enough to tell me she and her 8-year-old liked my book Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, but that the whole family was shocked and disappointed by the opening line from the mummy poem.  The opening lines are: "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance./ But when King Tut died, he wore bandages for pants."  What follows is my response to her email.)

Letters like yours are always distressing.  It's never been my intention to offend parents or introduce children to any material I believe is inappropriate to their age.  Of course there will always be spirited disagreement about just what is appropriate for children and what is not, and so here we are.

Why did I include the bit about the naked ladies in my poem?  It was my intent with the mummy poem to craft something that would be understood to be read to a particular tune, in much the same way as the Phantom poems are in the same volume.  When we take a cartoonish view of ancient Egypt we often think of a song that's familiar to nearly all Americans, even if most of us are unfamiliar with its actual title and history: "The Streets of Cairo, or The Poor Little Country Maid."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Streets_of_Cairo,_or_the_Poor_Little_Country_Maid

Of course, children everywhere have been singing this song to one another for decades with the schoolyard lyrics, "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance, there's a hole in the wall where the boys can see it all," etc.  I can't know if your son was familiar with this, of course.  Maybe you weren't either, though I certainly knew it thirty years ago, when I was eight.  My wife tells me that she sang it as a little girl as well.

Regardless, my early drafts of the mummy poem didn't contain that line about the naked ladies.  But I discovered that readers were not intuitively realizing that they should be reading it to the "Streets of Cairo" tune, so I rewrote it with that first line from the playground standard.

I respectfully disagree that the line is inappropriate for school-aged kids, but I don't expect to change your mind.  I take no pleasure, anyway, from learning that it bothered your son.  But I hope you understand that I had an editor on this book, and that editor had a boss, and that boss had a boss.  Likewise the publisher had a sales and marketing team that shared the book with hundreds of teachers and librarians before its publication.  The poem was published as is because none of these people voiced any objections.  Indeed, the book has been available for over five years, and this is the first objection to it I've received.

None of this means you're wrong, of course.  You're certainly not wrong about the care and raising of your own son.  But I want you to understand that there was nothing careless or cavalier about the years-long process of writing and producing Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich.  I hope you'll continue to enjoy it with your son, and to paperclip together the pages of the mummy poem until you return it to your library.

Best Wishes,

Adam

J.Lo, Painted

Recent painting of that recent drawing of J.Lo I posted earlier.

The Review I've Been Waiting For

I mean, Kirkus gave Cold Cereal a star and everything, but Your Neighborhood Librarian at the blog Pink Me gets me:

http://pinkme.typepad.com/pink-me/2012/01/cold-cereal-by-adam-rex-review.html

Oh Yeah, I Have a Blog.

So here's a recent drawing of J.Lo from The True Meaning of Smekday.

Perfectum Muralis

Finished.

Previous work in progress post here.

Horn Book Review of Cold Cereal

Another nice review of my forthcoming novel Cold Cereal came to my inbox today. From the Horn Book:

 "Rex takes his time mounting his preposterous edifice of a plot, but reader interest and suspension of disbelief never flag in this humorous, consistently entertaining, well-spun yarn." 

 Preposterous edifice of a plot. That sounds about right.

 Here's another illustration from CC. Regular visitors to my blog will be able to discern all the important plot points from these images, and will have no need to read the book.

Star for Cold Cereal

I craved little gold stars when I was a kid, and apparently not much has changed. Kirkus reviews recently gave a starred review to my next novel, Cold Cereal (coming Feb. 7th), and if they saw fit to send me an actual star in the mail I'd stick it right on my Trapper Keeper.

Kirkus said that

The author tucks in portrait illustrations and hilariously odd TV-commercial storyboards, along with a hooded Secret Society, figures from Arthurian legend, magical spells and potions, a certain amount of violence, many wonderful throwaway lines (“Yeh may have a tarnished glamour about yeh, sure. Like a celebrity’s daughter.”) and tests of character with often surprising outcomes.

I think their classification of the pictures in Cold Cereal as "portrait illustrations" may have something to do with the character of those few images that were actually on display in the Advance Reader Edition. I'm afraid most of the illustrations were missing then. But I got the picture above done in time to include it. From the book:

He steered toward the local park, down the storm drain shortcut he’d discovered yesterday, dodging broken glass and a man with a rabbit head, up the embankment, toward the gap in the fence and was that a man with a rabbit head? Scott braked hard, grinding a black snaking skid behind him. The rabbit-man stopped, too, and looked back. Its tweed pants and white dress shirt were creased and dirty. Its necktie was askew. Its rabbit head was a rabbit head.

And, by way of signing off, here's a picture of two men dressed as a unicorn.

Mural!

Last weekend I started on a mural overlooking our pool, based on an illustration from BILLY TWITTERS AND HIS BLUE WHALE PROBLEM. An illustration that is available as a t-shirt design in the Zazzle sidebar on this blog. (cough)

Here's the wall "before." The pool didn't actually have to be green to get this process started, but I found the brackish smell and the heady vapors of a hundred dollars worth of algaecide put me in the seafaring mood.

My wife, seen here, had an idea that may seem like old hat to regular mural-painters, but which I found ingenious: tape the design up in sixty or so pieces, then take one piece down at a time and reproduce it in paint underneath. That way I can look at the enlarged design on paper in my hand, and the surrounding paper pieces will guide my lines and ensure everything connects. Like those grid-drawings everyone did when they were younger.

This is as far as I got in one afternoon. Should take another to finish up–I'll post the whole wall when it's done.

The Fraternal Order of Fingerhats

Shared by Heather Alexander of Dial Books.

Halloween Costume WIP

More Brixton Brother Art

This one was tricky. The original sketch for it looked terrible, 'cause I hadn't any photo reference for it. If I can find it I'll post it later. The photo reference is fun in and of itself–me in a fluffy bathrobe lying prone of a chaise in the backyard.



Anyway, the question of why Steve Brixton is in a bathrobe atop a moving train is best answered by reading the book, WHICH IS AVAILABLE NOW.

UPDATE: Due to popular demand (2 comments), here's my first attempt at a sketch, with no reference at all. I think this got approved, but I'd always promised to fix the dodgy drawing after shooting some photo reference.



Lacking a train and a 12-year-old boy, I put on my wife's robe (it actually has "Dr. Rex" stitched on the front–very hot) and lounged on a chaise.

Additional Fingerhat Update

From Brooke Boynton Hughes:

New Brixton Bros. Releases Tomorrow

October 4th is the official release date for Mac Barnett's Brixton Brothers #3: It Happened on a Train. So here's another look at one of my interior illustrations–a masked goon and potential car thief.

The sketch:



And the finished illustration:

IMPORTANT FINGERHAT UPDATE

My agent apparently couldn't resist yesterday's little cut-paper activity, and can be seen here attempting to open negotiations with the leader of the Cat Planet.

If anyone else sends me fingerhat pictures they're going right up here.

FINGERHATS!

Previously I posted an illustration of Abraham Lincoln fighting an octopus on the moon that ran in an installment of the syndicated newspaper feature, THE GOODS. (Follow that link and scroll down to read one commenter's critique of President Lincoln and tacit approval of slavery as "peaceful." It's a stitch!)

Anyhoo, here's a more recent issue of THE GOODS showcasing, among other things, fine finger haberdashery. And also Lincoln again. Because I only have five or six separate ideas in my head.