The Critique & Meet idea is a monthly virtual gathering that’s part social, part critique, and 100% the KSMO SCBWI community coming together to help each other create. It’s like an open-mic night combined with a speed-dating version of critiquing. 

The goal is to provide a forum to meet other creators (perhaps even form outside critique groups), improve existing stories, and bounce story ideas off each other. Even if participants don’t create the specific category for a particular event, all are welcome to attend and participate in the critiques. The underlying philosophy is that we are all in this grand adventure together!

The basic setup for each virtual event gives four creators ten minutes to read and screen share their PB text, the first 500 words of a middle-grade/young adult project, or an illustration. After the presentation, a link is shared to a short critique questionnaire in a poll form for everyone to fill out. The results of each presenter’s critique poll are sent or shared with them upon event completion. 

The virtual session is open to any regional SCBWI members interested in helping others improve their manuscripts or illustrations. At the end of every session, we have a social block where we can hang out and talk kidlit, life, how dirty my office is, etc. Here are the Critique & Meet goals and rules:

The goals are to:

1. Improve our work and learn by helping others.
2. Make connections.
3. Find critique partners and form critique relationships. The connections you make are worth their weight in gold.
4. Discover/Remind yourself that you are not alone.

The Critique & Meet Ground Rules

1. Help not hurt. A critique is not a debate. Respect the creator and respect the people providing their critique thoughts. It’s all about helping each other create the best version of our work. When in doubt, choose nice!
2. Learn from both sides of the table. The creator learns ways to improve their work. The audience learns how to read and listen analytically.  
3. Don’t share the work presented.
4. Make connections. 

We’ve done two of these monthly Critique & Meet events and I’ve been happy with the results. There were around 20 participants for each event and the creators presenting their work report they’ve received good information from the quick critique polls. We’ve even had participants interested in forming a few local critique groups.

The moral of the story is no matter where you are in your creative journey, having fellow creative travelers along with you is a great benefit. If you are interested in creating or hosting something similar to our region’s Critique & Meet or have ideas to help establish/maintain critique relationships, please comment below. 

Adolphe Henri Laissement, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The post The Magic & Power of Critique appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

So this is the new year?

“People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”  – Albert Einstein

So this is the new year?

Huh? I thought it would be more shiny. Maybe even have a few sparkles here and there.

It just looks like any other recent day. It’s eerily similar to any other recent year.

Truth be told, though, that’s not a bad thing at all. 

Time and dates are human constructs. They are our method of drawing lines in the universal sand to give our lives a sense of order. We need our constructs of time so we can work together, show up on time, hit our STEM Tuesday deadlines, etc.

But, as Einstein so famously touted, time is an illusion. 

However, we’ve demarcated this time illusion of ours to give us a new year, a new month, a new week, a new day, a new hour, and so on. These are times to reflect, reload, and plan where we are and where we want to be.

Time is the present moment.

We have this time. We have this moment. 

Now, what are we going to do with it?

It’s a question that strikes the core of being human. Its answers are as varied as individual humans are varied. There are almost infinite opportunities available to us.

What will we do with the moments we are given in 2024 and beyond? 

One Day or Day One?

I heard this snippet a few months back regarding procrastination and goals. I can’t exactly remember the source and it’s driving me bonkers. Nevertheless, it has become my new philosophy for trying new things or starting new projects. It has also become a central theme of my school and library presentations to young creators.

For decades, I lived in a “One Day” world. I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t do the one thing necessary to be one. I didn’t write. Then came my “Day One” when I started a thing. I wrote a word. I wrote another one. I wrote a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter until I wrote an entire story! It was an amazing feeling!

If you find yourself saying, “One day I want to do _____”, then start this new year by saying, “I’m going to start _____ on this day.” and then do it.

The STEM Tuesday New Year’s post theme for 2024 is:

One Day or Day One?

One Day vs Day One. Try it and see how it works!

Create. Inspire. Improve. Share.

The Day One philosophy expanded into four steps for getting to the brass tacks and making stuff.

1. Create – It all starts with an idea, a word, or a mark on a piece of paper. Just do it and see what happens. Make the thing only you can make. Make the thing only your brain can construct. Make the thing and throw it away or take another stab to remake the thing. There is no perfect. The important thing is to get your ideas down. Download the words or images from your brain onto paper and they become real.
2. Inspire – Investigate and discover what makes you excited. What are the stories or the information that ignites a desire to tell others? If you’re struggling for inspiration, pay attention to where your mind goes when it wanders. It might be trying to tell you something.
3. Improve – One gets better at doing a thing by doing the thing over and over intentionally. Intentional practice works! As with the creation, once the words or images are downloaded from your brain, they exist. If something exists, it can be improved. Do the work and then do it again.
4. Share – This step can be the most difficult. It tends to be the most uncomfortable for a creator. Putting creative work out into the world indeed opens one up to criticism and judgment but you can learn so much from showing your work. What works? What doesn’t? What feedback is offered to improve the work? There’s also the inherent reward of developing connections with like-minded creators through the sharing of work. We’re all riding this creativity train together so we might as well make the ride a joy and a celebration. Writing and illustrating help us understand our place in our space. This understanding of our place is enhanced through sharing. 

Technology = Tools 

Although there were amazing STEM advances this past year, like inching closer to a return to the moon or the first FDA-approved gene-editing therapy for sickle-cell anemia, an end-of-year wrapup on one of the news channels called 2023 the “Year of AI”. There has been much talk and even more justifiable concern from the creative community about the use and abuse of artificial intelligence. 

Technology doesn’t create. Creators create. As loyal STEM Tuesday readers, we realize the fact technology is a tool. We know one can use tools positively or negatively. The choice of how we use AI is in our creative hands. If a technology is directly used to create something, that’s stealing. AI is powerful but we must remember AI does what it does by training itself on human creations, often without attribution or compensation. It learns how to write or create by mashing up all the inputs in its database.

Bottom line, 2024 will see an explosion of AI implemented with both good and bad intentions. It’s up to us to decide how we’ll use it and how others use our work.

Happy New Year from the STEM Tuesday Team! Enjoy every “Day One” of your creative journey throughout your entire “stubbornly persistent illusion” that is 2024. 

Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky) via Wikimedia Commons

Mike Hays has worked hard from a young age to be a well-rounded individual. A well-rounded, equal-opportunity sports enthusiast, that is. If they keep a score, he’ll either watch it, play it, or coach it. A molecular microbiologist by day, middle-grade author, sports coach, and general good citizen by night, he blogs about life/sports/training-related topics at:  www.coachhays.com and writer stuff at:  www.mikehaysbooks.com. Two of his science essays, The Science of Jurassic Park and Zombie Microbiology 101, are included in the Putting the Science in Fiction collection from Writer’s Digest Books. He can be found roaming around the X-sphere under the guise of @coachhays64 and on Instagram/Threads at @mikehays64.

The post STEM Tuesday Special New Year’s Edition 2024 appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

Since there were no local sports heroes were being inducted into the Hall of Fame, my usual strategy would have been to stay home and skip the event. But, as my kids were part of the academic festivities that evening, I went with the plan of sliding out the back door right after their names were announced.

For some reason, though, I decided to stay for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony to listen to the inductee’s speeches. In the end, what a great decision that was! 

One of the inductees that year, Dr. Rachel Schmidt-Brown, Clay Center Community High School Class of 1981, gave an acceptance speech that was pure gold. Dr. Schmidt is a professor of Spanish at the University of Calgary and a world-renowned DON QUIXOTE scholar.

She has spent an entire academic career studying and researching one great work of classic literature. Dr. Schmidt spoke about finding and following your passion in life. Good stuff. But, what stuck to my ribs was when she mentioned how she sits down every five years and rereads DON QUIXOTE.

I just about jumped out of my seat. Do you mean a person who spends every day of her illustrious career studying one book, written 400 years ago in Spanish, and reads it for FUN every five years? 

Huh. 

Then came her take-home message; Dr. Schmidt explained she reads DON QUIXOTE every five years to get a fresh perspective of the manuscript from where she currently is in her life.  She knows she has changed over the five years; changes in her family, kids, and career. She explained how the story takes a new life; a new meaning with every successive read. What a beautiful concept!

So that got me thinking. What books or stories do I read over and over again? How does an older and, hopefully, wiser perspective affect me? Below is my list of stories I read over and again with an expanded understanding developing with each read. It’s truly a gift to be able to cultivate a deeper understanding of not only these wonderful stories but of who I am as a person. Reading is indeed a superpower.

Novels

• The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett 
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman.
• How I Became a Ghost by Tim Tingle
• Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
• Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt
• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
• Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

Short Stories

• Platte River by Rick Bass
• To Build a Fire by Jack London
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
• Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemmingway

Inspirational

• Lenten Gospel Rotation (Every Lent, I read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John in a four-year cycle. Always surprised by how my life perspective affects the way I read the Gospels.)

Do you have books or stories you read over and over again? How do time and life influence your reads? Do you pick up a certain detail in a different way? Please leave a comment, I would like to know.

The post The Power of the Reread appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

While doing an interview with Dianne Salerni for her newest release, The Carrefore Curse, she mentioned hitting a career snag after releasing the final book in her fantastic Eighth Day trilogy. I’m a huge fan of her work and really enjoyed the Eighth Day series so my interest was immediately piqued by her doubts about the future of her writing career at that point. I thought it would be interesting to pick Dianne’s brain for a bonus interview about her writing career and how she navigates the ups and downs of this business.

Publication list to date:

• The Carrefour Curse(2023)
• Jadie in Five Dimensions (2021)
• Eleanor, Alice, & the Roosevelt Ghosts (2020)
• THE EIGHTH DAY SERIES
  • The Eighth Day (2014)
  • The Inquisitor’s Mark (2015)
  • The Morrigan’s Curse (2016)
• The Caged Graves (2013)
• Very Superstitious Charity Anthology (2013)
• We Hear the Dead (2010)

History

Can you tell us your writer’s origin story? Can I safely assume there weren’t any radioactive arachnids or harrowing escapes from dying planets involved?

No spiders whatsoever and no dying planet as far as I know! Just parents and grandparents who read to me all the time so I started trying to write my own books at the age of four. (Well, I drew the pictures, anyway.) I still have my first book, The Dragon and the Girl. It looks like I cut the pages from a larger sheet of paper and assembled them with Elmer’s Glue. 

I continued to write stories throughout my childhood, carrying notebooks with me everywhere I went. This went on into high school, during which I submitted short stories to Isaac Asimov Magazine (rejected). Fiction writing tapered off in college, but I returned to the habit as a young teacher, often writing stories for my students that featured them as characters. I produced a couple of YA novels that my husband convinced me to submit to agents (rejected). In 2007, once again encouraged by my husband, I self-published a book about real-life spirit mediums Maggie and Kate Fox with iUniverse. (This was before the days of Amazon self-publishing.) The book, High Spirits, A Ghostly Tale of Rapping and Romance, caught the attention of Sourcebooks just as they were launching their YA imprint, Sourcebooks Fire. They offered for the book, and it was edited and reprinted in 2010 under the title We Hear the Dead.

I quickly realized I was way over my head signing contracts and navigating the world of publishing on my own. The ink on We Hear the Dead was barely dry before I started querying for agents.

The Journey

The reality of a writer’s life is no different from the ebbs and flows of life in general. What are a few of your most significant or valued career experiences with over a decade as a published writer under your belt? 

The most important career experience I learned was the value of a good editor. My first experience with this comes from something that’s not usually part of my bibliography. Before the publication of We Hear the Dead, I published an adult short story with a short-lived anthology series called Visions. After reading my story, titled The Necromancer, the editor said that the ending lacked the right twist and suggested alternatives:  Ending A or Ending B.

I answered that I didn’t like Ending A but thought Ending B was a fantastic idea!

His response: “Great! Now make the reader think you are going for Ending A before pulling the rug out from under them with Ending B.”

MIND. BLOWN.

Hats off to Michael Katz, the editor in question! He was the first, and every editor afterward has taught me something important about writing in general and my books specifically. In particular, I love working with my current Holiday House editor, Sally Morgridge, who always has brilliant insights into how to take my manuscripts to the next level.

If you could travel across dimensions with Jadie Martin to leave a piece of career advice to the 2010 Dianne, what would it be?

What I would tell 2010 Dianne – and anybody else embarking on the journey of publishing – is this: When an authority in the publishing world gives you devastating news that predicts the end of your writing career, don’t listen to them! I don’t mean that you should ignore the advice of editors and agents. (See the answer I gave to the last question!) I mean, if they tell you that you are a failure, they are wrong.

In 2010, a high-ranking editor at Sourcebooks told me that sales for We Hear the Dead were so bad, she didn’t think B&N would ever stock another book by me.

Also in 2010, a high-powered agent told me that the contract I’d signed for Sourcebooks contained a bottomless option clause that made it impossible for her to take me as a client. “Frankly,” she said, “I doubt any agent will take you.”

As a point of fact, B&N stocked my next 6 books. (Then they stopped stocking all midlist MG books, but that’s a different kind of problem.)

And the next agent who responded to my query offered representation. When I confessed to her about the No-Good Very Bad Option Clause, Sara Crowe – agent extraordinaire – said: “They can’t hold you to that! I can make that go away with a phone call.” And she did.

No matter how important an editor or agent is, no one has the right to imply that you should give up. Their opinion is still only an opinion.

No Writer is an Island

Who is on Team Dianne? 

As you can probably tell from my answers above, my husband is very definitely on my team. Not only is he a one-man cheerleading squad and poker/prodder when I need a little push, he actually reads my manuscripts. Depending on the project, he might read chapter by chapter as I write, or I’ll send him the whole thing when I’m finished. He’s not a writer, but he has a good ear for voice and will highlight lines where “this character wouldn’t say it like that.”

For years I have relied on Marcy Hatch, author of time-traveling western West of Paradise, as a critique partner. I send her chapters while I’m drafting, and she provides feedback and cheerleading. (I do the same for her.)

There have been many people I’ve relied on as beta readers over the years – people I ask to read the entire manuscript after it has gone through a few revisions. But one person I can always count on to accurately pinpoint the problems in a manuscript is writer Maria Mainero. For example, Jadie in Five Dimensions went through many, many drafts (and died on submission twice). For years I insisted on including, in the second half of the book, chapters with adult POVs. Beta readers kept telling me, “You have to cut those because kids don’t like adult POV.” Well, that’s a dumb reason to cut them, and it’s not true. I can think of a few best-sellers with adult POV chapters.

Then Maria came along and said, “These late-appearing adult POV chapters would be better off told by the middle-grade POV characters you’ve already introduced. And here’s why.” It was the why that convinced me. Maria was the only reader who helped me see the opportunity I’d blown for my already established POV characters by introducing new ones. It had nothing to do with them being adults. 

Are there any support groups or individuals you turn to for advice and/or support?

I’m a member of the KidLit Author Club, a group of PB, MG, and YA authors who live in the mid-Atlantic states. We support each other at author events – conferences and festivals – sometimes carpooling or referring each other to events we can’t attend ourselves. The membership is fluid, as people’s lives and goals change, but I’ve been with the group since 2012. When I retired from teaching in 2014, I worried about the fact that I would no longer have contact with “co-workers.” But as I started attending events in Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York, I realized that the KidLit Authors were my new co-workers. In addition to supporting each other at events, we also do some beta reading and book blurbing for each other.

The Horizon

We all know hindsight is, or appears to be, 20/20 so how do you prepare for what comes next using the gift of experience? 

I have learned to accept that gaps in my publishing resume happen, and that’s okay. There’s a 3-year gap between my first and second book and 4 years (almost 5, really) between the last book in The Eighth Day series and Eleanor, Alice, & the Roosevelt Ghosts. Sometimes, it’s an issue of manuscripts that don’t find the right editor. Other times it’s because my productivity is down. Both of those things are okay. It doesn’t mean there won’t be a next book when the time for that next book arrives.

Do you think one book at a time or do you project several future books at a time?

I am definitely a one-book-at-a-time author. The only time I planned multiple books at once was while I was writing The Eighth Day series. Even then, I only started planning the sequels after the first book sold. I was hoping for a series, but I had no big plan ahead of time! My editor, the head of HarperCollins Children’s Books, asked me to plan for 5 books but to make sure the 3rd book had a satisfying conclusion in case they decided not to buy the last two. She assured me, though, that wouldn’t happen. Then she retired. You can guess what happened next, and I chalk that one up to another “gift of experience.”

Navigational Beacons

With the saying, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” in mind, how does your experience affect how you evaluate your future projects and decisions? 

I have a lot of dead manuscripts on my computer. But I have come to believe in the power of resurrection. Jadie in Five Dimensions died on submission in 2015 and then again, after a round of revisions, in 2017. In the fall of 2019, my agent offered it exclusively to Sally Morgridge at Holiday House after she and I finished working on Eleanor, Alice, & the Roosevelt Ghosts. Luckily, Maria Mainero had already convinced me to rewrite those troublesome POV chapters, although I bet if she hadn’t, Sally would have given me the same advice.

My most recent book The Carrefour Curse and my next book The Tontine Caper (2025) were born out of manuscripts that I abandoned after the first draft. In both cases, the manuscripts languished in my “dead” files for 3 years before I opened them again and got back to work.

So, I guess I don’t always evaluate my projects correctly? Last fall, I closed the file on a really, really, really crappy story. But is it really trash? I don’t know. I’ll figure it out in a couple of years.

In the spirit of concerning yourself solely with controlling the things you can control, do you trust in the power of persistence + patience and in keeping to the course as a creator?

Very much so. Jadie in Five Dimensions would never have been published if I hadn’t believed in that story enough to keep revising and revising – and seeking out beta readers until an astute reader told me where I was falling down on the job. Some stories just need patience and time to slumber until I’m ready to look at them under the right lens.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this interview, Mike! Publishing is a bumpy road, and authors are cautioned not to publicly air their woes. (I’m not supposed to tweet: 12 rejections for this manuscript! 3 editors loved the character but not the plot. 4 editors love the plot but not the character. And 5 just don’t like aliens! This was a real thing, by the way, for a manuscript that was never published. Yet.) But those rules are loosening, and I think it’s good for published authors to talk about the bumps and potholes and sinkholes so that other authors, published and pre-published, know their experiences are shared by many.

Thank you, Dianne, for being our guest once again and sharing your experiences and insights from over a decade in the publishing business. Best of luck and keep your words, especially those middle-grade words, flowing! 

If interested in more information and updates from Dianne, visit her online at https://diannesalerni.com/. Thanks for reading! 

The post Author Interview with Dianne Salerni, Part II appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Addams Family meets The Westing Game in this exhilarating mystery about a modern magical dynasty trapped in the ruins of their once-grand, now-crumbling ancestral home.

Twelve-year-old Garnet regrets that she doesn’t know her family. Her mother has done her best to keep it that way, living far from the rest of the magical Carrefour clan and their dark, dangerous mansion known as Crossroad House.

But when Garnet finally gets summoned to the estate, it isn’t quite what she hoped for. Her relatives are strange and quarrelsome, each room in Crossroad House is more dilapidated than the last, and she can’t keep straight which dusty hallways and cobwebbed corners are forbidden. 

Then Garnet learns the family secret: their dying patriarch fights to retain his life by stealing power from others. Every accident that isn’t an accident, every unexpected illness and unexplained disappearance grants Jasper Carrefour a little more time. While the Carrefours squabbles over who will inherit his role when (if) he dies, Garnet encounters evidence of an even deeper curse. Was she brought to Crossroad House as part of the curse . . . or is she meant to break it?

Written with loads of creepy atmosphere and an edge-of-your-seat magical mystery, this thrilling story reads like The Haunting of Hill House for preteens. Perfect for late-night reading under the covers.

Introduction

Today, we have the pleasure of hosting a favorite author of mine, Dianne K. Salerni, to talk about her latest release from Holiday House Books called, The Carrefour Curse. Here’s her official introduction:

Dianne K. Salerni has written many books for children, including Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts and Jadie in Five Dimensions. After teaching elementary school for twenty-five years, Dianne now spends her time hanging around creepy cemeteries and climbing 2,000-year-old pyramids for book research. Visit her online at https://diannesalerni.com/

Dianne can also be found online at: 

• https://www.facebook.com/DianneKSalerni
• https://twitter.com/diannesalerni
• https://www.pinterest.com/dksalerni/

The Interview

MH: One of my favorite things as a reader and a creator is the author’s story of their story. The journey and brain science behind how a story grew from bits and pieces of an idea to a book on the shelf is fascinating to me. What is the origin story of your latest middle-grade release, The Carrefour Curse?

Dianne: There were two main inspirations for The Carrefour Curse: Dark Shadows, the supernatural soap opera, and The Spook House, a vignette written by Ambrose Bierce. My mother was a fan of Dark Shadows, and I used to watch the show as a young child even though I wasn’t allowed to. I hid behind the sofa and became a lifelong fan of all things gothic. As for the Bierce story, the image of a locked room filled with dead people haunted me for a long time, and I tried for years to build a plot around it. When I got the idea to combine Dark Shadows and The Spook House, the result was The Carrefour Curse.

I wrote the first draft in 2017, and when it was finished, I proclaimed it “a terrible mess,” closed the document, and forgot about it. Fast forward to early 2020, when I devoured the Netflix series, Locke & Key. I loved that show so much, I made a list of all the elements that called to me and thought, I’d like to write a story with these elements. Then I remembered I already had!  For the first time in three years, I opened the document named Crossroad House, read it, and discovered that, although it was messy, it wasn’t terrible. Revising this manuscript soon became my pandemic project.

MH: I’ve always been drawn to your ability to create real and believable fictional worlds within a recognizable “normal” story world. From the magical extra day of The Eighth Day series to the extra dimension worlds of Jadie in Five Dimensions, you build logical worlds that allow the reader to seamlessly move in and out of. I realize my begging at your feet and screaming,  “How do you do this?” is too broad and too unfair of a question to ask, but can you share a few steps of how you create such effective world shifts in your books? 

Dianne: Well, it certainly doesn’t happen in the first draft, that’s for sure! The world-building usually starts with an idea. Like: There’s a secret day hidden between Wednesday and Thursday. Or: Our 3-dimensional universe exists inside a larger 4-dimensional universe. In my first draft, world-building is thin, disjointed, and often contradictory as I try to nail down the plot. After the story is complete, I work on a list of “rules” for my alternate world, with my priority being that the rules have to allow all my events to happen and still make sense. In successive drafts, I work on the inconsistencies and the logic and make sure that the world elements saturate the story, instead of feeling tacked on. In the final drafts, I make a list of the chapters and chart what elements appear in each one. Has it been several chapters since my main character felt like Crossroad House was watching her or influencing events? I’ll work a mention in.

MH: Can you describe your creative process of how an idea becomes a fully-formed story in your hands? 

Dianne: Every book starts with a premise, like the secret day or the nesting universes, or an inspirational source, like Dark Shadows and The Spook House. Next, come the characters. Who are they and what happens to them? What is the main conflict? In rare cases, before I start writing, I’ll outline the entire story on Scrivener. I did that with Eleanor, Alice, & the Roosevelt Ghosts and also with the second and third books in the Eighth Day series. But most of the time, I outline the first third or half and then jump into writing because I don’t know how it all works out until it happens on the page. Sometimes there are surprises. In The Carrefour Curse, a rather important character invented herself in Chapter 23 and inserted herself into the climax, forcing me—in later drafts—to weave her very existence into the first half of the book. Sometimes, the surprise is that the book is a dud. There are many, many unfinished manuscripts on my computer.

MH: Are you a multiple-irons in-the-fire creator or a one-story-at-a-time creator?

Dianne: Usually, I’ll work on only one story at a time. If I’m struggling with it, I might put it aside to revise and polish an old manuscript. (The Carrefour Curse is not the only one of my books to come out of a resurrected manuscript.) Once in a while, publication deadlines require that I work on more than one thing at a time. While I was under contract for the Eighth Day series, I once found myself proofreading the galley of Book 1, making editorial revisions on Book 2, and drafting Book 3. I got so confused about what Jax knew and when he knew it that I had to rearrange my schedule to work on one at a time: first the proofreading, then the revisions, and finally back to drafting.

MH: Can you describe your experience with Holiday House in bringing The Carrefour Curse to its publication date? 

Dianne: Holiday House has been wonderful to work with. My last three books have been published through Holiday House, and I think my editor, Sally Morgridge, is brilliant. I love the covers they’ve commissioned for all three books – they’re all very different but each one perfect in its own way. The publicity department is enthusiastic and very communicative. In the past, I have worked with bigger publishers where I never had any contact with my “official publicist,” so this is a refreshing change!

MH: What’s next?

Dianne: I have a book on submission. Because it’s not recommended that we talk about works on submission, I’ll say only that it’s a comedy-mystery and somewhat different from my other books. While I wait for word on that, I’m drafting a middle grade horror story. We’ll see how that goes because I’m approaching the end of the “index cards” on my Scrivener corkboard and wading into the un-outlined part of the story. For me, this is the scariest part of my horror story!

MH: What are some of your favorite activities, outside of the butt-in-chair life of an author, to recharge your creative battery?

Twice a week, I volunteer at our local animal shelter. I walk dogs and service the cat room – feeding and cleaning up after the cats and assorted critters. (Currently, we have more rabbits than cats in the so-called cat room.) I have three hydroponic gardens in my home. I typically grow lettuce, tomatoes, and baby bok choy, but I’ve also experimented with sweet peas (too much vine and not enough peas), dwarf eggplants (they do better outside), and Swiss chard (nobody at my house would eat it). I also enjoy skiing and scuba diving, and my husband and I LOVE to make homemade pasta.

Conclusion

Thank you, Dianne, for a fantastic insight into your writer’s life and The Carrefour Curse. How can one not want to read a book with a tagline like, The Addams Family meets The Westing Game? The entire MUF family wishes much success for the book and for you. Personally, I can’t wait to read the next one.

For more information on The Carrefour Curse and Holiday House Books, check out the following links.

The Carrefour Curse Book Page @ Holiday House Books

Holiday House Books Socials

• https://www.facebook.com/HolidayHouseBks/
• https://twitter.com/HolidayHouseBks
• https://www.pinterest.es/holidayhousebks/
• https://www.instagram.com/holidayhousebks/ 

The post Author Interview: Dianne Salerni and her latest release, The Carrefour Curse appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

As much as I’d love it to be a post about zombies; this is not a post about zombies. 

It’s about creating.

Although it’s not about creating brain-eating reanimated beings shambling endlessly in search of the living, I hope to shed some light on how we creators shamble endlessly in search of creating something unique and satisfying. And it all starts in our heads. In our brains to be exact. 

My mother was known to use the phrase, “You put crap in. You get crap out” when addressing her five, often rock-headed teenage sons. My lone sister, a voracious reader of all things, never seemed to receive this nugget of wisdom from mom. It appears the boys were singled out because of the music, horror movies, comedians with “poor language choices”, etc. that we consumed. Nevertheless, “Crap in. Crap out.” has stuck with me. (Thanks, Mom!)

I recently bought Scientific American’s Secrets of the Mind from their awesome catalog of eBooks. These books from Scientific American are compilations of their articles about a particular topic which I highly recommend. Secrets of the Mind has not disappointed me so far. In fact, it hits the ground running with the Introduction, “Mind from Matter” by Andrea Gawrylewski, and breaks into a sprint from the very first article, “How Matter Becomes Mind” by Max Bertolero and Danielle S. Bassett.  

Bertolero and Bassett’s article is about the network architecture currently being defined and refined in their and others’ recent brain cognition research. I was fascinated, to say the least. We’ve possessed accurate maps of the human brain for quite some time with the brain regions defined by their functions, i.e. vision, motor, emotions, etc. However, these accurate and defined maps of the brain do very little to explain how the brain really works. 

The next wave of research is examining just how these regions fit into the network of the brain to allow us to be walking, talking, thinking, and creating humans. And you know what? It turns out Mom was right again! Crap in certainly leads to crap out in the brain.  

An experiment by US radio engineer Archie Frederick Collins in 1902 tried to use a human brain as a radio wave detector. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The nitty-gritty of a brain network:

The brain network, like most networks, consists of basic building blocks named nodes and edges. Nodes are the units of the network, which, in the brain’s case, are the individual neurons. Edges are the connections between the nodes. The brain’s edges are how neurons are intertwined with the other neurons. 

The brain has modularity, it has a localized network where the nodes show stronger connections to each other. Such modules have specific functions. Sensory and motor cognitive processes involve adjoining modules that are mainly confined to a specific lobe of the brain. The brain needs to put together or process information from multiple, confined modules to make sense of cognitive tasks.

Imagine reading a book without being able to incorporate the emotional modules. The reader experience would be greatly diminished. Since our brain can’t let that happen (You have to take that emotional hit in Bridge to Terabithia to experience the total impact of the story, right?) it’s evolved hubs.

Hubs are nodes where the brain’s different modules meet. They control and mesh activity from multiple modules. Some of these key hub modules, like the frontoparietal control module and the default mode module, make important global connections between brain lobes. 

As we can see, a network in our brain is built upon a structural framework of nodes, edges, modules, and hubs. A rigid, standard architecture, right? Yes and no. If the parts and processes are similar in all of our brains, why don’t we all think, act, and react similarly? Why aren’t we all like a shambling species of zombies thinking and responding the same to the same series of inputs?

It’s because we all have slight variations in the way the circuits in our brains are wired. New methods of mapping and analyzing brain activity show we all have distinct “fingerprints” inside our heads. Plus, if a brain network has strong hubs with many connections among modules, its modules are segregated from one another allowing for more efficient storage and processing. 

Stronger functional connections show a stronger functional capacity. 

This specific organization allows the brain to function as an integrated network of thoughts, feelings, quirks, flaws, and mental strengths. It allows us to establish our unique identity and maintain it. Our brain network makes us who we are today and tomorrow.

In Austin Kleon’s classic, Steal Like an Artist, he says,

“A wonderful flaw about human beings is that were incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.

So: Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify and transform into your own work.

In the end, merely imitating your heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into something of your own is how you flatter them. Adding something to the worlds that only you can add.”

It all fits in. It all makes sense in the grand scheme of how our creative brains work.

Science shows it.

Artists show it.

Mom knew it all along.

We are the sum of all we take in. Our wonderful and unique brains take all the data we feed them and then process it into something only each of us can produce. When we allow ourselves the courage to create from what’s between our ears, we create something brand new and unique. The more we stock our brains with quality input data, the more we have in the creative well to draw from.

Austin Kleon gives the advice, “Write the book you want to read.”

How do you do this? By using your unique fingerprint of nodes, edges, modules, and hubs to do the work of turning the things you input into outputs only you can create.

Creative braining wins!

Read. Write. Repeat.

The post Creative Braining appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

Writing is tough. At any level. From learning to put one word after another (and in order!) to construct one meaningful sentence to the classic high school essay to writing award-winning books, it isn’t easy. It’s a rewarding kind of tough, though. Challenging but rewarding as most creative ventures tend to be.

The blank page can be a fearsome opponent. The nothingness intimidates. One of the magical rewards of writing is overcoming the mountain of blank space with a word or an idea. The breakthrough lets the creative gears fall in place and allows the river to flow. 

Perhaps as daunting as the blank page is a second barrier to writing. Its roots lie in the way we are taught to write from day one in elementary school. It’s constrained, tightly-focused writing. The expectation a well-written sentence has to come out of the gate and hit the center target with great precision using a minimum of words. Don’t get me wrong, focus is an absolute in teaching beginning writers. What would written communication be like if we all wrote exactly like your favorite five-year-old breathlessly telling the story of how the clown at the birthday party tripped and popped the balloon elephant he was making which scared the magician’s rabbit who escaped and pooped while hopping across the birthday cake? 

So, out of necessity, we are taught to write tight from the beginning. We are taught we must not take a false step off the path or else, like in Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, we crush a butterfly and scramble the entire space-time continuum. But what happens when we’re ready to take a step and can’t see even a hint of a path? Like with the blank page, we can get stuck. Paralysis by analysis. 

See? Writing is tough.

So, what’s the remedy?

Well, we first need to loosen the thumbscrews of the deeply ingrained idea of user-focused writing. We need a distraction to help us step back and attack the blank page and/or the paralysis of a constrictive focus. Pull back and give yourself some space. That’s what drafting is. It’s finding your way but on a wide and sometimes rambling path.

(Psst, come closer. I don’t want the writing police or your high school English teacher to hear this.) There are also rabbit holes! Yes! The dreaded rabbit hole can help your writing in more ways than you think if you use them with discipline and measure. 

John Tenniel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The rabbit hole of research is one of my personal favorite places to hang out as a writer. It’s part of what brings me joy as an ever-curious 58-year-old writer. I used to feel guilty about this research rabbit hole obsession until I discovered that, while the rabbit hole can be a distraction if entered unchecked, it was creating path after path after path for my writing. Paths forward, new paths, paths that veered away from dead ends on discarded writing projects. What has always been considered a waste of time and focus became a great creative tool for me. 

The rabbit hole has become a way to fight through blank page syndrome and break the shackles of tight, and often restrictive, focus that is still ingrained in my brain from elementary school. It’s an idea generator, a brainstorming tool, and a source of necessary or (often at the time) obscure facts which may worm their way into future stories. Out of chaos comes order.

Chaos into order.

The tricks to making the rabbit hole work for you as a writer are simple but can be difficult in execution. The first trick is to stay the master of the rabbit hole, whether it’s the internet, the library, a stack of articles, or books. You can’t turn yourself over completely to it and tumble endlessly from researching what kids might have eaten on the banks of the Nile in the Old Kingdom period to find yourself 45 minutes later checking out the latest Beyonce videos and fashions. 

The second trick is a very useful skill. The beauty of a skill is it can be learned, practiced, and mastered. It’s the ability to look at the chaos, organize it into a fashion that makes sense to you, and store the organized pieces for later. It’s like being a sculptor. Take a block of stone, wood, or clay and remove the pieces that don’t belong in the composition. The skill is the ability to manage information. The skill to find the gold hidden deep within the rabbit hole and then establish order from chaos.

As you can see, rabbit holes can be a writer’s friend and a valuable tool in the writer’s toolbox. Writing is tough. Any tools we acquire to help us over the hills and humps that stand in our way are more valuable than gold. Because, in the end, the most important thing in writing is writing that next word and building our stories one word at a time, brick by brick.

The moral of the story.

Find what works for you. 

Find what brings you joy in doing creative things. 

Do those things. 

Repeat.

The post Hop Down the Rabbit Hole appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

• What techniques and skills do the author incorporate into their work?
• What kept me turning pages?
• Why did I forget to do my chores when reading this book?

And any additional questions as to why a book takes over my brain.

Today, I’m sharing Sisters of the Neverseas by Cynthia Leitich Smith, a book that has taken over my brain.

I’ll spare you my version of a summary of the book because it’ll sound a lot like my almost 4-year-old grandson describing the fireworks display on the Fourth of July. All over the place and delivered with terrific, over-the-top, and breathless enthusiasm. Instead, I’ll sum up my take on Sisters of the Neversea in three words.  

READ THIS BOOK!

As a fan of Cynthia Leitich Smith’s work, I admit I had high expectations for Sisters of the Neversea. It was on my reader radar for quite a while before its release. When I finally got my hands on a copy and read it, it did not disappoint. If fact, I’m currently listening to the audiobook immediately following a listen of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. 

One of the many things that blew my socks off with Sisters of the Neversea is in the Author’s Note at the end of the book. Being a middle-grade writer with an interest in how authors put together their books, I’ll often read the author’s notes or acknowledgments before I read the book. This time I was so stoked to start reading, that the thought to read anything but the book itself never crossed my mind. When I finished and read the Author’s Note, here’s that bit that caught my eye and hooked my storyteller radar.

“One of the most interesting and powerful things about Story is that it invites future storytellers to build on it, to reinvent, and to talk back. Like any other kind of magic, stories can harm or offer hope, even healing.”  

                                             – Cynthia Leitich Smith, Sisters of the Neversea Author’s Note

That’s money. Bulletin board material to post above the writing desk. I’m still bouncing it around in my brain.

Sisters of the Neversea is a masterclass on reinventing a classic story, especially a classic wrought with questionable representation. Cynthia Leitich Smith tells a better story than the traditional Peter Pan story. She expands the story world, and its characters, adding depth to both. The setting of Neverland itself becomes a player in the tale. Best of all, she “talks back” to the original work in a way that’s believable and imaginative.

She doesn’t hide, bury, or run from the questionable representation of the original. She addressed it and attacks it head-on. Her answer to the “redskins” and “injuns” and to the role of girls and women in Barrie’s creation, is to create fully-fleshed Native characters from different Nations and backgrounds and strong female characters throughout. 

She seamlessly weaves the reinvented narrative into the existing framework of Barrie’s work. It has this amazing way of feeling like Barrie’s original Peter Pan yet tells its own unique and contemporary story.  

One of the parts of Sisters of the Neversea I particularly enjoyed was the family dynamic. The weight and burden of the blended Roberts-Darling family’s problems seem insurmountable to Lily and Wendy. This leads to a lot of anger between them and a growing rift. Their home in Oklahoma, their parent’s marriage, and their future as sisters are all on the line. 

However, when they get separated and enter Neverland, Lily and Wendy begin to see each other and their family’s problems in a new light. By taking a step back from the day-to-day struggles at home, the step-sisters realize their problems, no matter how large, can be dealt with as a family. Talk about story magic bringing hope and healing!

Good literature makes the world a little brighter. Great literature transforms it. With Sisters of the Neversea, Cynthia Leitich Smith completely transforms the world we’ve come to associate with Peter Pan and Neverland with luminosity and truth. Under her skilled hand, the Neverland story becomes something entirely different. Something better. Much, much better.

I hope the Sister of the Neversea finds its way into the hands of young readers. I also hope it sparks them to read Barrie’s original and realize the attitudes and mindsets of yesteryear don’t have to be the attitudes and mindsets of today. Things can, and should, change as knowledge changes.

Finally, I can’t wind up this look at Sisters of the Neversea without admitting there’s a wide smile on my face. No, it’s not the amazing cover art by the late Floyd Cooper.* The smile is because I ran across a recent social media post from Cynthia about how she’s drafting a new middle-grade novel. This makes me happy for young readers. The potential for a new, transformative Cynthia Leitich Smith book has this reader on Cloud Nine.

*Judge a book by its cover, please! Floyd Cooper’s artwork captures the characters and the story in perfect fashion. No need for Peter Pan here! Lily, Wendy, and Michael beckon you to the adventure. Come on in for the ride, my friends! We are going to miss Floyd Cooper.

Note: In case you can’t tell,  I am a fan of Cynthia Leitich Smith. In the work she does on the page. In the work she does with and for the Native writing community. In the work she does for the We Need Diverse Books community and leading the Heartdrum Imprint at Harper Collins. She is a force in the kidlit industry while being one of the nicest people in the business. (Perhaps the most remarkable example of how skilled she is as a writer is the fact she had me riveted to her Tantalize YA vampire series back before I was even aware of her other work. Me! Reading YA vampire fantasy! Now that’s writing talent!)

The post Under the Mike-roscope: Sisters of the Neversea by Cynthia Leitich Smith appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

Creating something from nothing is 100% magic. One simply has to employ the fruits of the innate gift handed down from the creativity gods. Simply grab a pen and paper, find an inspirational environment, hit the creativity switch, and wait for the muse to arrive. Simple.

WRONG!

Creative work is a doing thing. It’s work. Sometimes hard, hard, hard work but most of the time it’s rewarding work. We are wired to create. The reality, however, is it’s not magic. It’s work. Three steps that are often listed as the way to becoming a better creative are study, practice, and feedback.

Wait! 

Did someone say, “Practice?”

The memory of NBA superstar Allen Iverson’s 2002 press conference popped into my head when I thought of the word “practice”. AI’s rant on practice is a favorite and often repeated saying at the Hays House. 

And since creative work is a doing thing, transformation only comes from doing the thing. Whether you’re seven working on your first creation or seventy and writing a family history, doing the work to do better work is important. Sorry AI, but practice is at the core of elevating the skills.

Despite what AI might have thought back in the day, practice matters.

It’s early March 2022. Spring training time for us writers and creators (and hopefully, soon for the Major League Baseball players and coaches.) Time to take a critical look at how we treat our craft and produce our creative work. Time to evaluate how we practice and then tweak or adjust the routine as needed to take our work to another level.

It’s time to analyze how to improve and get better. Creative work is a constant move forward. Here are a few tips for better practice that I’m going to incorporate into my 2022.

Practice with a Purpose

There’s so much awesome in this video excerpt from sketchnote expert Eva Lotta Lamm’s Pragmatic Sketching Masterclass. 

Video Link: Eva Lotta Lamm: How to Practice Effectively 

The value of a regular and deliberate practice is transformative. Keep in mind the performance and enter into the practice with expectations. 

Focus on:

• The doing.
• What’s going on.
• Notice what’s happening instead of judging what’s happening.

Practice widely

I’m a former strength and conditioning coach. I’m also a fan of a power training guru named Marty Gallagher. I first became aware of Mr. Gallagher after reading his essay with its nod to The Band, Fitness From the Big Pink. What I’ve liked about his training philosophy is it’s a simple, multi-faceted approach to physical and mental transformation. 

According to Coach Gallagher, “Your fitness efforts fail because you are one dimensional in a four-dimensional universe.”

This is also true for creative efforts. One-dimensional creative practice often results in the creator hitting a rut and losing enthusiasm. Trying a variety of activities can unlock creative growth and transformation in the desired skill or in a completely different direction. Try something new when you feel your practice hitting a rut. Transform.

Creative practice is eerily similar to physical training. A multi-faceted, well-balanced approach to any form of training is a great plan of attack for improving skills. Marty Gallagher’s balanced approach for transformational training includes progressive resistance training, cardiovascular training, nutrition, and brain-train. Creative training might include drawing, poetry, meditation, music, or free-writing. The sky’s the limit here. 

Try new things. Perform them badly. Fail. Practice. Try again. Transform.

As Marty Gallagher said, “With practice, tangible gains generate enthusiasm and enthusiasm causes the trainee to redouble their effort.”

Blank Page

People often freak out about the blank page. It is intimidating. This intimidation ingrained in us since most of us were kids stems from the idea of the blank page will be eventually graded AND should strive for perfection. We should be thinking instead of a blank page as an invitation to make something instead of an assignment.

Practice is an invitation to transform the empty space in front of us with the contents of our creative brain. Instead of a place to make mistakes, we should treat the blank space as a place to make things happen. 

No right. No wrong. Just a formerly blank page that is now alive with ideas.

Just Do It!

The most important thing about practicing and training your creative self is that you do it. That’s the process. One word, one mark, or one idea at a time moving forward towards transformation.

As a sign from the creative universe that this was the right topic for my post, this was in the weekly newsletter for an online drawing class I’m taking. 

“You will find that, without exception, practice will reward you, so be brave, be committed, keep putting your pencil to paper and you will be pleasantly surprised.”  – Drawing Nature, Science and Culture: Natural History Illustration 101 weekly course newsletter (3/2/2022).

Happy Spring Training!

Be brave. Be committed. Keep putting your pencil to paper.

Do the work. Enjoy the ride.

You will be pleasantly surprised.

The post Spring Training 2022! appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.

STEM Tuesday’s New Year’s Celebration 2021

2021 is in the books. It was a strange kind of year. I heard it described best a few weeks back when my wife, who is a first-grade teacher, came home on a Friday night and said that the week in her classroom had been the slowest fast week in recent history. She said looking back, the previous weekend seemed like it just happened but the day-to-day timeline at school seemed to drag on and on and on. I get that. 

100%. 

That’s 2021 to the core. 

It seems like the STEM Tuesday team was just posting the 2020 year-end celebration posts, yet the month-to-month, week-to-week, day-to-day progression of 2021 seemed like crossing an ocean pedaling a paddleboat.

There were great things in the STEM world throughout 2021. Vaccines and their logistical rollout, fantastical feats on Mars, the James Webb telescope (fingers crossed for continued success!), giant leaps in making routine space travel a thing, and the advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence were noteworthy, if not a little scary.

All in all, 2021 was a good STEM year. 

I look for STEM 2022 to be just as awesome.

STEM Tuesday Theme for 2022

Start by knowing nothing and then ask the right questions.

I’m one of the luckiest people alive. I know this and appreciate it every day. One of the things I’m most grateful for is getting to see my grandkids almost every day. The past year has been particularly awesome as my oldest grandson turned three years old. We hang out a lot which means I get to experience the world in a whole new light through his fresh eyes. 

He’s noticing the world around him more and more. Shining a flashlight under a leaf while playing outside in the dark, gathering and counting cicada molts from the front porch, planting marigolds and vegetables in the garden, eating raspberries off the bush, and figuring out what projectiles can be successfully launched from grandma’s leaf blower. He’s also blessed with a curious mind so we get a lot of questions. 

Wonder and curiosity make a magical combination. I’ve been reminded of this throughout 2021. I think the magic of wonder and curiosity might be the number one thing the human race has lost as we wade into the digital age.

Wonder and curiosity. 

Gifts from the gods.

That’s where our 2022 STEM Tuesday theme is rooted. Wonder and curiosity. Start by knowing nothing and then ask the right questions.

Museum of Trinity College Dublin, Illustration in History of the University of Dublin (1819), William B. Sarsfield Taylor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Knowing nothing

In elementary school, they grouped our class into three divisions by levels. Group 1, 2, and 3. Although it was never outrightly expressed, every one of us knew these divisions were grouped according to level. I, for better or worse, was placed in Group 1. It was probably a coin flip of whether to put me into this group over the second group. I struggled to read. I was a left-hander in a right-handed world of parochial school. I was, without a doubt, the dumbest kid in the smart group. Right or wrong, the system was what it was in the 1970s.  The system and closed classroom environment had their consequences but at that moment, being the dumbest kid in the smart class did one thing to me. It made me feel dumb.

I had to scramble to keep up. While my classmates appeared to be leisurely strolling through the lush academic park, I was sprinting blindfolded through a dense academic forest constantly running headfirst into tree trunks. I don’t really know if this was a reality or just a version of reality that existed inside my head. It doesn’t matter because it permanently imprinted on my psyche even to this day. The default inside my head always starts with, “You know nothing, idiot.”

What may seem a curse (and at times, i.e. report card time, it was) being a default idiot inside my own head has turned into a blessing. First of all, I don’t like being an idiot. I didn’t like being the dumbest in the smart group. Not wanting to be an idiot, though, I had one choice, be curious and then do the work to satisfy that curiosity. 

So I learned to ask the right questions but, being an introvert, I mostly asked them inside my own head.

All the Right Questions

• Are we there yet?
• Is dinner ready?
• Where’s the restroom?

No, just kidding. Although these questions are vital in my own mind, they aren’t really the three important Right Questions. Those are:

• Why?
• How?
• What if?

Three good questions. Three questions that, as we start a new year, can help define the future us. We can use the Right Question to tell the story we want to tell. We can use the Right Questions to define the story of who we are and what we want to be. 

Tell the story

Being a scientist (molecular microbiologist) by trade, we incorporate the Right Questions all the time.

• We make an observation and ask why it happened.
• We attempt to define how it happened.
• We investigate what happens to the observation if a variable in the original observation was changed. 

Science moves forward when we start by knowing nothing and then asking the right questions. Why? How? What if? The stories we want to tell also start in the same place with the same questions. They form the foundation of the story, give it color and life, and then point the way to what happens next.

One final thought. Recently, as the holidays approached, my grandson awarded everyone in the family a revered spot on The Nice List. I don’t know if this was because he was struck with holiday spirit or if he was normalizing his sometimes onerous behavior to keep himself permanently established within the parameters of The Nice List. Either way, I’m grateful for the opportunity to be a part of such a prestigious and rewarding company. 

He would like to extend an invitation to each one of you to hop aboard The Nice List. It’s a pretty cool place to be.

But, like all things worth having, The Nice List is a responsibility that requires work and effort.

Accept the challenge and do everything you can to live up to the honor.

Happy New Year! The STEM Tuesday team and the entire From the Mixed-Up Files…of Middle-Grade Authors family wish you and yours the very best in 2022. We appreciate your support more than you can ever imagine.

Have a safe and productive 2022!

Start by knowing nothing and then ask the right questions.

Illustration from Scenes of wonder and curiosity in California by James Mason Hutchings, 1870.

The post STEM Tuesday’s New Year’s Celebration 2021 appeared first on From The Mixed Up Files.