Middle Grade Ninja: Cover Reveal: ROB WORM’S BIRD ADVENTURE by Rob Kent

  A tale so thrilling you’ll wriggle on the edge of your tail! After an early spring rain, Rob Worm’s bunch burrows to the surface to enjoy the mud. At nine-and-a-half months old (ten years in human time), Rob has been deep underground over half his life. He yearns for adventure and can’t wait to […]

Middle Grade Ninja: Thoughts on the Indiana SCBWI Conference

Greetings and salutations, Esteemed Reader. I am back from a weekend at the Indiana Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference. It was a fine event and one I recommend you attend if you get the chance. Really, if you’ve never attended a writer’s conference, you should find one and attend it. I know they’re expensive, […]

Middle Grade Ninja: Book Review: The Usual Suspects by Maurice Broaddus

First Paragraph(s): Life is all about timing. Once the homeroom bell rings at 8:15 a.m., there’ll be a five-minute lag before students are marched to the auditorium to gather for morning assembly. Nehemiah Caldwell and I get there before any administration types do. We slide under the curtain beneath the stage and crawl over to the […]

Middle Grade Ninja: Book Review: ZORA AND ME: THE CURSED GROUND by T. R. Simon

First Paragraph(s): There are two kinds of memory. One is the ordinary kind, rooted in things that happened, people you knew, and places you went. I remember my father this way: laughing, picking me up, singing lullabies in his gentle bass. I see him swinging my mother in a half circle, the hem of her blue […]

Middle Grade Ninja: Book Review: WRITING CHILDREN’S BOOKS FOR DUMMIES by Lisa Rojany Buccieri and Peter Economy

First Paragraph: For many, dreams of writing or illustrating a children’s book remain just that—dreams—because they soon find out that writing a really good children’s book is hard. Not only that, but actually getting a children’s book published is even harder. If you don’t know the conventions and styles, if you don’t speak the lingo, […]