FutureDude on Venus

Today I'm sharing an interview with Jeffrey Morris, lead author and artist for the new graphic novel Venus: Daedalus One.  Jeffrey has a beautifully illustrated online magazine that celebrates science and exploration, and he's currently running a Kickstarter campaign to help finance the creation of his second planetary graphic novel, Mars: Daedalus Two.

 Jeffrey is a gentle person with a real dedication to kids and the future, and his comics are exciting while still managing to stay free of the sexism and violence that mar so much of this art form.

How do you make a graphic novel? 

We start with a solid story concept with strong visual potential—which in the case of Venus: Daedalus One was a 110-page feature film script. As an illustrator, I also created a dozens of pencil sketches and marker renderings to get a sense of what the world in our story looked like. Many of these were translated into computer generated images that we could fly around and manipulate. All of the aforementioned media served as the basis for a comic artist to begin building the actual panels and pages. I worked hand in hand with him and colorists to bring the full vision of the script to life in comic form.

What's Venus like, and what made you decide to write about it?

I wanted to tell a futuristic story set within our own solar system with a focus on one of the inner planets.  Quite a few books and movies have taken place on Mars, while virtually none have occurred on Venus. I think a primary reason is that Venus is a pretty inhospitable place. Searing heat, crushing pressure and scalding acid are the norm. There is no water and little to no chance of life as we know it. I thought it would be fun to throw a group of conflicted characters into a environment that challenging.

Do you think we'll find life on other planets in our solar system?

Absolutely! It is inevitable and just a matter of time. The key question is whether or not human curiosity can outpace waning public interest, partisan politics, and shrinking science budgets. Eventually, we need human minds, eyes, and hands directly on location throughout the Solar System in order to use our innate instincts and intuition to help us uncover the clues that will lead us to life. However, in the meantime, we should continue to launch a barrage of space probes, like NASA's Curiosity, to every possible destination. They are our emissaries for now.

What are you working on next?

I currently am developing Mars: Daedalus Two and several other realistic science fiction stories. Each is part of an ever-expanding world of hard science-fiction titles. My team and I want to establish a niche for ourselves as the purveyors of visually stunning futuristic media that entertains, educates and never underestimates the intelligence of the audience.

Ten years from now, looking back on your work, what do you hope to see?
I hope to have made a real difference in the average person's perception of tomorrow while energizing a base of individuals to work for a better future. I intend to do this by building several successful hard sci-fi franchises that are able to expand into numerous areas or media and entertainment that can truly withstand the test of time. After all, my stories are envisioning and often predicting the future! 

Lexicon and Tumblehome at the US Science and Engineering Festival

The 2nd USA Science and Engineering Festival enchanted and inspired visitors in Washington, DC last weekend, and I was there, representing both the Lexicon series and Tumblehome Learning.

A corner of the festival during setup, before the crowds

Six members of my family attended, along with 150,000 other visitors over the course of three days. Seven Tumblehome staff and all four of our authors also attended for at least part of the weekend.

Kids try out some activities

In our two combined booths, we set up posters, signs, and activities for Tumblehome Learning, the Land of Lexicon, and Morris Future Comics, the franchise that created our new graphic novel Venus: Daedalus One.  We gave away tattoo stickers and trilobite keychains.  At our main acitivity table, Peter Wong and Kristine ran a cycle of activities including making and painting plaster trilobites, experimenting with static electricity, and completing a flat circuit made of copper tape to make a buzzer sound.
At another table, kids examined fossils, real or fake, with a microscope that projected images onto a screen.  The kids could also examine tiny crystals of industrial diamonds and diamonds incorporated into the surface of silicon and other materials.

Fossils and diamond coatings.

Finally, at the front, kids and parents did Tangram puzzles from the Lexicon Villages event and did a simple experiment about heat transfer and thermal paper.

Rebecca helps a visitor with a heat transfer experiment

 Meanwhile, out the side of our booth we played a continuous loop of a slideshow and soundtrack for the first song of our upcoming Lexicon musical.  The song in called "Because Girls Can't Do Math."  Although the title is ironic, so many visitors got huffy at the very notion that we changed the title on the spot to "Because Girls Can('t?) Do Math."

A steady stream of visitors flowed through our booth all weekend, looking, playing, listening, signing up for more information, and buying. While kids did the activities, parents talked with our authors, Jeffrey Morris (author of Venus) and Michael Erb (author of Kelvin McCloud and the Seaside Storm).

Michael Erb (left) and Jeffrey Morris sign their books.

 The two activity kits and all four books available sold well, and visitors clamored for the two--Tumblehome Learning's The Furious Case of the Fraudulent Fossil and Scarletta's Ice Castle-- that are coming soon.

Owen checks out Ice Castle

  The festival itself was magnificent.  Where else can kids see a space capsule, climb into an F-16 jet,

take apart an iPad, learn physics and circus tricks together, extract DNA, walk through the Magic Schoolbus,

Visitors line up to enter the Magic School Bus

enter a Rubik's cube contest,

Crowds watching the Rubik's cube challenge

Besides and see the Mythbusters all in one day?  I had very little time to wander, but a did visit a few friends from the informal science world to see volunteers from 4H and the National Girls Collaborative Project running activities for younger kids.

Between manning the booth and visiting friends, I had a couple of author events to attend.  One highlight was participating on an evening author panel about communicating science through books.  Robin Cook of Coma and Outbreak fame, the creator of the medical thriller genre, delivered the keynote.  Other writers included the great kids' nonfiction writer Joy Hakim and rocket boy turned multi-genre author Homer Hickam.

Penny and Homer Hickam after the author panel

After Robin's talk, the six of us then sat on stage answering questions about how we came to write about science and our writing process.

Book signing after the author panel

I also gave a Featured Author talk Sunday morning.  Unfortunately, it was first thing Sunday morning, in a rather hard-to-find but huge room two floors away from the festival main action, so if my family hadn't been ranged in the front when I started, I would have felt pretty lonely.  Luckily, people trickled in as I spoke, and a decent audience gathered in time to see me use my Personal Assistant time machine to summon Roy Chapman Andrews, the paleontologist who served as the model for Indiana Jones.

A visit from Roy Chapman Andrews, aka Barnas Monteith

I also gave a Featured Author talk Sunday morning.  Unfortunately, it was first thing Sunday morning, in a rather hard-to-find but huge room two floors away from the festival main action, so if my family hadn't been ranged in the front when I started, I would have felt pretty lonely.  Luckily, people trickled in as I spoke, and a decent audience gathered in time to see me use my Personal Assistant time machine to summon Roy Chapman Andrews, the paleontologist who served as the model for Indiana Jones. Roy stormed onto the stage in a panic about the Mongolian raiders chasing him in a scene taken more or less straight from Barnas Monteith's Fraudulent Fossil.

Rhianon drops by her mother's book signing station

All this week the Tumblehome team has been recovering and following up from the fair.  We sent copies of the song and coupons for THL products to all who signed up for them.  We've begun entering our books on Amazon. We've established our warehousing and fulfilled new orders, updated our brochure and put the finishing touches on Fraudulent Fossil so it's ready for printing. We're already planning for a second run of Venus.

All in all, the festival was a wonderful place for the launch of a new science book and activity company.  It was also a joyful event, and when (if) it happens again, all of you should bring your favorite children and attend!

Self-discipline or IQ: which matters more in school?

Being smart helps kids do well in school, but working smart matters more.  Self-discipline is the key.

The psychologist who has shown how much self-discipline matters – and by self-discipline she means delayed gratification, self-control, and study habits– is named Angela Lee Duckworth.  Last week I attended a celebration where she was honored for starting a volunteer summer school program called Breakthrough Cambridge twenty years ago.  Over that time period, over 1700 Cambridge middle students have worked hard and had fun all summer, tutored and mentored by dedicated and loving high school and college students. The older students’ devotion has helped to build the younger students’ self-discipline.  Practically all these inner-city kids go on to college, and 96% of them complete.

 

Duckworth’s self-discipline work focused on looking at predictors of success in school among eighth-graders.  She measured self-discipline through teacher, student, and parent questionnaires and by asking students whether they’d prefer to receive a certain amount of money now or a larger amount later. These different ways of measuring self-discipline aligned pretty well.

What Duckworth found was that her composite measure of self-discipline predicted final grades better than IQ did.  Kids in the lowest quintile, or fifth, of self-discipline ended up with worse grades than those in the lowest fifth of the IQ distribution. Kids who were the most self-disciplined ended up doing better than the one-fifth of kids with the highest IQ.

On one level, these results aren’t surprising, and Asian cultures behave as if they know this. Kids are clearly told by teachers and parents that achievement comes with effort.  American kids, on the other hand, are more likely to believe that success comes from some innate ability that isn’t affected much by how hard you try.  Of course, it’s not just trying hard but specific disciplined habits – homework before TV, studying a bit every day instead of just the night before the test, not skipping the hard parts in your problem set – that lead to better learning.

At Tumblehome Learning, we try to foster kids’ interest and success in science, and the importance of effort is one of our underlying themes.  The kid characters in Tumblehome Learning’s Galactic Academy of Science books – Mae, Clinton, Benson, and Anita – experience the rewards of effort in science.  But first they have to believe they can succeed, They have to imagine themselves as scientists.  Kid characters in our books gain that belief by traveling back in time and encountering scientists who offer them gems of advice and encouragement. 

We can’t take the kids who read our books on literal field trips to the past.  Still, we hope the books themselves serve the same purpose.  As readers identify with the kid protagonists, we hope they experience a sense of possibility, adventure, and encouragement. We believe stories can inspire kids to dream big and work hard.

Why Books Are a Crazy Business - part 1. Distributors and Returns

Making books, whether writing or publishing them, is a crazy business. Margins are low, payment takes forever, the market is fickle, and competition is fierce. Everybody in the business knows this at some level. Still, I believe most authors believe they're getting a raw deal while the publishers somehow make out.

A number of bloggers have written about this issue from the author's perspective.  The long silent waits for any response from an agent or editor, the shrinking advance, the inadequate spending on promotion, the fact that even on e-books that cost little to produce the author's share is minuscule... you can find blog posts about all that.  The publisher's perspective is a bit harder to find.

This year a group of friends and I started Tumblehome Learning, a small publisher dedicated to producing science-based fiction and activity kits for kids. The core of our products, we decided, would be engaging novels that relied on and encouraged knowledge of science.

We shopped around for printers, looking at printing in the US or Taiwan.  The trick, of course, is that printing prices are very driven by volume.  The more copies you print of a book, the less you spend per copy.  And yet one sure path to failure is paying to print books that don't sell, and it's very difficult to tell how many books you can sell until you try.

Say you decide, conservatively, to print a thousand books.  This sounds small.  After all, aren't there over 300 million people in the US?  Yes, but there are 30,000 children's books alone published in the US each year (all of them competing with books published the year before and the year before that), and the average lifetime sales of any book published by a commercial publisher in the US is only two thousand.

A paperback middle grade book between 150 and 250 pages, we decided, should sell for around $9.95.  That seemed to fall in the middle of the competition, though some huge publishers like Scholastic seem able to price books of similar length on cheaper paper at about $6.99.

So let's say 1000 copies of your 250 page paperback book with black-and-white illustrations costs $3 a copy to print. You offer the author an advance against royalties of $500 - small, but better than most small publishers who can no longer afford any advances at all.  You spend $800 on interior and cover illustrations, and you spend numerous editorial hours coaching the writer.

In order to get the book into bookstores, you need a distributor.  Here's where the pinch really comes.  Most distributors buy the book from the publisher for 45-50% of its cover price.  They then sell to retailers for 70% of the cover price, and out of the 20% or so remaining for them, you'd think they would cover warehousing and shipping.  But instead they slap on another fee of 20-25% of the part coming to the publisher.  So, of our original $9.95 price (let's call it $10 to make the math easy), the distributor pays the publisher about $5 minus another 25% of $5, which makes a total payment to the publisher of $3.75 on a book that cost $3 to print.

Okay, you say, that's still a 75 cent profit.  But you're forgetting the author's (measly) 8% royalty, which is 80 cents.  Now you're at minus 5 cents profit.

Oops.  Clearly you have to negotiate a better price with the distributor.  That's hard to do when you're new, but say you're lucky and persistent and manage to get the distributor's take down to 58%.  Now your per-book profit is 40 cents.

But that's before returns.

Bookstores and even book wholesalers work on a different model from virtually any other retail business. Almost all their sales are on consignment.  That is, the bookstore orders five books, the wholesaler ships them, and if after a while the books haven't sold, the bookstore posts the books back at the wholesaler's expense and gets a full refund.  If the returned books are damaged and can't be sold, that's the publisher's tough luck.  Distributors and wholesalers routinely hold back 25% of any money they owe to publishers "against returns."  In fact, a 70% "sell-through rate" -- 70% of books sent out to bookstores actually selling -- is considered very good.

That means that 300 of that first printing of one thousand books may be returned, and perhaps half of those can never be sold.  Suddenly, the 40 cents a book you made on your first 850 books sold are consumed by the $3 per book you spent to print the 150 ruined books.  In fact, at the end of the day, you're down by $110. You have nothing with which to pay your editors, sales staff, clerical staff. And now you have do decide how many books to print for your second printing. If only somehow you could find a book that would be guaranteed to sell 500,000 copies!

That's the economics of why publishers are looking for blockbusters.  But what about selling without distributors, directly through Amazon? What about e-book sales?  More on that next time.

Lucky Seven Meme and Previews

I just learned that a writer friend, Ardyth DeBruyn, mentioned me in a blog post called "Lucky Seven Meme." Ardyth writes adventure and fantasy with strong female characters and a wicked sense of humor.

The rules of Lucky Seven are this:  I'm supposed to go to my current Work in Progress, find the
7th chapter,
7th page,
7th line,
and copy down the following seven lines or sentences.

Now, this might work for Ardyth, a prolific writer who likes to work on several books at once.  For all I know, she could go to her seventh work in progress to start this off.  Alas, I have only one Work in Progress at the moment, and I'm only on chapter 4.  However, I have two books currently in press.

I turned to The Ice Castle, due out in August from Scarletta Press, only to find that the seventh chapter is the shortest chapter in the book.  It has only eight lines (four sentences) on the last page.  Still, I guess I'll give you the four sentences.

Varoq's huge feet raised clouds of snow that billowed around them as they whooshed across the plain.

 A long time later, Ezengi spoke, and the sled creaked to a halt at the edge of a snowy field bounded by a low stone wall.  Just ahead, the roofs of a town rose through the mist.  Stomping toward them through the snow came a husky young man with a scanty mustache and a dark green bandana looped around his throat.

Hmm.  Does this give you a sense of the book?  I don't know.

 Let me try The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip, which is coming out from Tumblehome Learning at the end of this month.  Here goes.

"Do you know Fairchild now has more people than the town I grew up in?  I'd love to start small and brand new again."  He fell silent, staring out the windown down at the valley, which was dotted with orchards, fields, and clusters of building.

 "Why can't we go in the fab?" asked Clinton.

"The fab has to stay unbelievably clean. Even a hair or a flake of skin falling in the wrong place can ruin a batch of chips."  He turned to Selectra.

The "he" in this passage is my father, Robert Noyce.  Two time-traveling kids from our current day are visiting him, trying to learn enough about integrated circuits to solve a mystery in their present about a missing diamond semiconductor.  Yes, science, mystery, time travel, and history, all in one slim volume! My father is gazing out the window of his small plane (he liked to fly) and wondering whether he should leave Fairchild to start the new company that became Intel.

The last step in the Lucky Seven game is to tag seven other authors.  Here they are:

Marva Dasef , whose third Witches of Galdorheim book comes out this month,

Anne Ipsen, who primarily writes historical fiction,

Ardyth DeBruyn (cheating, obviously, since she tagged me),

Randy Susan Meyers, author of a harrowing novel of sorrow and survival called The Murderer's Daughters,

Denise Jaden, a Canadian author of contemporary YA fiction,

Mark Peter Hughes, author of Lemonade Mouth and other contemporary middle grade and science fiction that appeals to boys, and

Elle Strauss, writing YA and middle grade fiction.  Give them a look!

Typo Gremlins

I'm convinced that typos creep into manuscripts every time you touch them, whether you're revising, adding page numbers, or even just carrying your laptop from the study to the kitchen. Typo gremlins are like the sock gremlins that live in the dryer, stealing one sock from every load of wash. They're like the car key gremlins pictured in a Far Side cartoon a friend once gave me. It showed the gremlins gleefully lifting car keys out of the pocket of a coat hanging by the door.

Like all of us, I've had my struggles with sock gremlins and car key gremlins, but lately the typo gremlins have been getting completely out of hand. With Lost in Lexicon, a copy editor went through the manuscript twice, and both I and my editor combed through galleys a few more times, finding errors on each read. After all that, the published first edition still had a couple of typos. Now I can't bear to read the second edition to see if more errors somehow snuck in.

In Tumblehome Learning, we all do everything. I'm chairperson and one of the authors. I solicit manuscripts; I read early drafts and give feedback to authors before turning them over to Ian, our pro editor; I'm art director; and I volunteered to copy edit one of our new books - Kelvin McCloud and the Seaside Storm, a weather-based mystery by Michael Erb. As with every kind of editing, this was an education, sending me frequently to the Chicago Manual of Style. Should times of day be written in words or numerals? How do you handle quotation marks around an an interruption, set off by dashes, in the midst of one person's speech? Which compound words are hyphenated, which join together as one word, and which stay separate? Where should one insist on the past perfect versus the simple past?

As I edited, I carefully fixed typos such as missing letters, extra spaces, en-dashes which should be em-dashes, etcetera. Then I read carefully through the whole manuscript once again, finding a few more errors. Then I passed the manuscript over to my son Damian and offered him a dollar a typo. Well, apparently the gremlins were rooting for him, because he found four typos, two misplaced commas, one badly handled set of dashes within conversation, and one dash that wasn't long enough. He also asked some questions that sent me back to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Damian was great. I'm impressed that he notices so much about commas. But despite his hawk-like eyes, I'm willing to bet that we'll find a few more typos before we're done. Hey, there are probably typos in this blog post. There usually are.

Winding down in Taipei

Since the end of the Taiwan book fair Monday, I've been able to be more of a tourist. One highlight was riding the Maokong gondola at the zoo, up over three mountains in the rain and fog. Through the clear floor of our "crystal" gondola, we could look down on the tropical foliage and tea plantations. Later we plunged down the steep slope in darkness toward the city lights.

Another day the Tumblehome team took the fast train to the industrial city of Hsinchu, where we visited the national space agency and Ritek, a manufacturer of industrial diamonds for use in the semiconductor industry and elsewhere,as mentioned in my upcoming book, The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip. Dr. James Sung, the brilliant Ritek founder, gave us a seminar on diamonds and graphene, their properties and their links to the origins of life. All fascinating stuff that I may write about more once I finish reading his book.

As for the space agency, with a small budget it has created a leading-edge system of six weather satellites circling the globe, measuring heat and density in the atmosphere to assist in the prediction of typhoons and other phenomena. In partnership with the US, Taiwan is now building twelve new, even more sophisticated satellites. In our informal visit we saw where the components are tested for stability in a vacuum and while undergoing rapid and violent temperature changes.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at Intel Taiwan, where I showed slides and told stories about my father, some of the other Intel founders, and my memories of Intel's earliest days. Actually I think the most popular part of the lecture was when I told them I had eaten the local specialty, stinky tofu. I also gave out a number of copies of Lost in Lexicon's first edition and Advance Reader Copies of Tumblehome Learning books left over from the book fair. The audience was warm and enthusiastic, with questions ranging from what we talked about over dinner in my childhood home to how to raise children to be adventurous yet safe. At the end, Rachel Liu from corporate relations presented me with a cute blue Intel robot-like figure in a bunny suit.

After Intel, Barnas took me to the Long Shan (Dragon Mountain) temple, quite an eclectic temple in the heart of the city. It has a fantastic curved roof, carved ceilings, a waterfall, and lantern figures around the edges of the courtyards. I didn't buy incense or pray to any of the deities, which may be why I got the following fortune when I drew a stick from a pot: "You have failed. Change your boss or change your ways." Since I'm my own boss, I think the message is pretty clear about where the problem lies.

From there we went on to a couple of night markets, ending up at a very authentic, drippy (it's still raining) local one in Houshanpi. There I ate more tso doufu (stinky tofu) and a kind of oyster omelet. However, I avoided chicken rump, large intestines, bin lanh (betel nut), turtle, frog, or snake. Maybe next time.

Update from the Taiwan Book Fair

Five hundred thousand people attend the Taiwan Book Fair. Although not all of them make it up the alleyway between Australia and Germany to Tumblehome Learning's booth at A-907, we've been busy enough that we haven't yet had time to wander the rest of Hall 1 (general and international books), much less Hall 2 (comics) or Hall 3 (children's books).

Visitors include publishers, authors, rights agents, teachers, librarians, and members of the general public who pay for the opportunity to come in and browse for bargains. Publishers with a registered business in Taiwan can sell directly to the public: that will be us by next year. With every purchase here in Taiwan, whether it's books, toothpaste, or a restaurant meal, the purchaser's receipt is also a lottery ticket. You could win 10 million NTD, which is $300,000. That would be a great boost to a young publishing company, so we assiduously save our receipts!

At the start of this fair, the Tumblehome team set ourselves a goal of obtaining twenty-five good leads from potential partners like foreign publishers, educators, e-book publishers, or Taiwan distributors. We've already exceeded those numbers, and we've met book people from Malaysia, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, and mainland China, along with many dedicated and entrepreneurial people from Taiwan. We've also set in motion the procedures for establishing our Taiwan branch business, and we've received valuable feedback and generous advice on our products and how best to place them.

As for life outside of work, there hasn't been much. People here work very hard, though they laugh a lot while doing so. Thursday night we met an educator in his office at 7 pm, and he gave us cake while explaining his business model and providing free advice for two hours. Last night we networked until 10 pm, and Saturday and Sunday will be the same.

The weather has been drizzly and cool, mostly in the high fifties. People huddle under umbrellas for rain so light it barely dampens the hair, and they keep apologizing for the cold. I tell them this is a welcome and warm vacation from wintry Boston. This week marks a festival where people will gather in the park and release lanterns into the sky. Already, huge colored lanterns of dragons and cartoon characters stand lit at night and waiting for release. I'll post pictures soon.

First day of the Taiwan Book Fair

I am sitting in the Tumblehome Learning booth at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, listening to the sound of unpacking all around me - ripping out of staples, wrenching off of tape, exclamations, the crackle of books in plastic wrappers being rearranged on shelves.

This place has undergone a facelift since yesterday. Overnight the bare floor, which yesterday was littered with packing tape and chewed betel, has been carpeted in immaculate blue-gray. Chinese letters cut out in foam core stand proudly over the booths. The shelves bear books of every color and kind. Cartoon figures grin down from corners.

I've set up the information about the Lexicon series and the Museum of Science books we're displaying. Now here come my colleagues with our own Tumblehome Learning posters, advance book copies, and stand-up foam core characters of our characters Benson and Selectra Volt. We will set up and prepare as waltz music plays in the background.

Off to Taiwan for the TIBE

The Taiwan International Book Exhibition is the largest book fair in Asia, with 500,000 visitors over the course of five days. Visitors include not just publishers, agents, and booksellers, but also teachers, parents, and kids who wander through the exhibition halls looking for fun and educational products.

Tumblehome Learning plans to operate on two continents from the start, with offices in Taiwan and the US. We're hoping to get a lot of cross-cultural enrichment, learning and sharing practices across both countries. Introducing ourselves at the TIBE is our way of starting that process.

I'll be leaving in the early hours of tomorrow morning for the 29-hour journey to Taipei, for a late Monday night arrival. (Taipei is thirteen hours ahead of Boston.) There I'll meet up with Tumblehome Learning's Taiwan staff, which currently includes our president, Barnas Monteith, and Yu-yi Ling, our Asian business manager.

We'll be there in Booth A907 in Hall 1, showing off the ARCs, Chinese and English, of our first books. We'll also display some engineering books from the Boston Museum of Science along with Lost in Lexicon and a teaser for The Ice Castle, which will be coming out in August.

We'll attend tea parties hosted by countries and publishers, and we'll meet with agents and publishing companies from other Asian countries to see if they have any interest in acquiring our products. We'll also talk to teachers and parents to get feedback on the idea of paired books and science activity kits as well as how the covers look, what font size to use in the final books, and other details.

In the second week I'll give a talk about a child's memories of the early days of Intel to Intel Taiwan employees, and Barnas and I will meet with education officials, science museum officials, printers, and leaders of technology. I'm really hoping to begin to understand the drive for excellence in science and technology that is so important in Taiwan. Maybe there are some things our own country can learn.

I'll post pictures and let you know how it goes!

Keep your kids interested in science and engineering

Some elementary teachers love science and get their students involved in fantastic investigations of rocks, frogs, weather -- you name it. But some teachers are swamped by the demands of tested subjects like math and reading; others lack materials; still others are a little afraid of science and all they don't know. The truth is no kid can count on having a great science class every year. So how can parents keep those young minds fired up about the beauty and possibility of science?

Here's a blog post with ten suggestions. On the Tumblehome Learning website, we'll keep posting news, ideas, and opinions about inspiring kids in science and engineering.

Tumblehome Learning Board Meeting

Tumblehome Learning is now six months old. Friday we held our first official board meeting, with partners from Minneapolis and Taipei as well as Boston gathering here on the east coast. To kick off the meeting Thursday evening, our science kit guru Peter Wong organized us into three groups to compete in a series of scientific cooking challenges. These ranged from identifying different brands of cheese to designing foil devices that allowed us to pour black-and-tans while keeping the layers as separate as possible to estimating time to cook shrimp and beef with various cooking methods.

We laughed a lot, and I'm proud to say that the red team (my team) tied for first place in the salad dressing competition. Peter is quite a chef, and he used to teach a one-unit cooking course in the engineering department at Tufts. I think it was called "Heat Transfer in the Kitchen," or something like that.

Friday we spent working on vision. We are a company that inspires kids to imagine themselves as scientists and engineers through hands-on activities supported by books and online materials. We intend to put the kids'experience of science at the center, rather than defining ourselves as a publisher with ancillary materials. Two of our kits are already designed, which meant we spent some time looking at package design. Four of our first seven books are already written and two more are mostly written. We debated product mix for 2013, when we hope to have up to twelve new books. The big news on the book front is that we will officially begin accepting submissions on January 15, a week from today.

The rest of the meeting was about financial projections and job plans. I won't bore you with those. But I will encourage any of you who happen to be in Taiwan the first week in February to stop in and visit our booth at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, Booth A907 in Hall 1. You'll recognize us by the big posters of Selectra Volt, Dudette from the Future, and the boy hero of The Furious Case of the Fraudulent Fossil standing on a T. Rex skull.

Writing and publishing in the new year

In 2010, I self-published Lost in Lexicon. In 2011, Scarletta Press published a second edition of Lost in Lexicon and Harvard Education Press published a book I pulled together and co-edited, New Frontiers in Formative Assessment. So that means I should publish 3 books in 2012, right?

Yes. Coming by autumn 2012 will be my science-based mystery for upper elementary kids, The Desperate Case of the Diamond Chip. Around the same time, I'll publish a kids' biography of my father called Do Something Wonderful. Meantime, in September, Scarletta Press will come out with The Ice Castle, which is a Lexicon sequel.

The Ice Castle is written, edited, copy-edited, etcetera. All that remains are illustrations and proofing, Advance Reader Copies, reviews, endorsements, and all that other time-consuming stuff. The Diamond Chip is written and edited, with illustrations underway. Go Off and Do Something Wonderful is about two-thirds written, though we'll be presenting a selection of chapters in English and Mandarin at the Taiwan International Book Fair. Science experiments to do at home will accompany the latter two books. Peter Wong, one of the Tumblehome Learning founding partners, has already designed the first set of experiments and will be working on the second soon.

What else? Well, I have a YA coming-of-age novel called The Beechwood Flute that needs a final draft before it can find a good home. I could spend a couple of months on that somewhere. And this year I also have to write the third Lexicon book. I can tell you the title - The Floating Islands - but not much more.

On the Lexicon front, 2012 will also see the completion of the Lost in Lexicon musical, which is going to be really exciting. I hope I'll be able to play one or two songs from the musical-under-construction at the the US Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair in DC at the end of April.

So you can see that this is going to be a very busy year of writing, publishing, and promotion for me. Not only that, but Tumblehome Learning is really taking off. Besides my own two books, we'll be publishing four to five others in 2012. We're working to establish a Taiwan office, and we're reaching out to potential partners in Korea, France, and Germany. This week we'll have our first face-to-face board meeting since our founding last July.

And for all you out there who love science and writing for young people, Tumblehome Learning will begin accepting manuscripts in mid-January. Take a look at our guidelines and give us a thought.

Tumblehome Learning Announces its Presence

Tumblehome Learning has announced its presence to the publishing world. This week, Publishers Weekly online and Children's Bookshelf (scroll down) presented articles about publisher Ian Leask leaving his beloved Scarletta Press to devote more time to our startup, Tumblehome Learning. The announcement made us scramble to get our new website up several weeks ahead of schedule.

In the bold words of our president, Barnas Monteith,

Make no mistake -- Tumblehome Learning is not a publisher. It is a science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) education revolution. THL's product suite offers a continuous learning program from elementary through high school grades. Our reading materials feature exciting adventures and leading-edge "real world" science & engineering content along with self-paced hands-on activity lessons. A wide variety of different subject materials assure that there's something of interest for everyone.

Our goal is not just to make kids more successful in school, but to offer them an alternative pathway to opportunity and fulfillment throughout life--a pathway of genuine interest in subjects they learn to love and subsequently love to learn about. THL's innovative books, kits and other products inspire kids of all backgrounds and ages to become fascinated by the pursuit of scientific truth. At Tumblehome Learning, we believe that as fun proceeds, knowledge exceeds!

Tumblehome Learning began nine months ago with four friends talking about kids, science, books and experiments, and the idea of science playdates. Almost six months ago we incorporated. Since then we've been writing, searching for books, designing activities, editing, finding partners, working with suppliers and distributors, and generally having the time of our lives. We are operating out of Boston, Minneapolis, and Taipei, and our team has grown to ten. We plan to make a big splash in 2012 with the release of our first seven books.

Tumblehome Learning will showcase our products-in-process at our Asian launch at the Taipei International Book Exhibition in February and again at the USA Science and Engineering Festival Book Fair in Washington, DC, April 28-29. We will have our first books, including a graphic novel, plus plenty of activities for families to try. Not only that, I'm a featured author, speaking Sunday at 10 am. Come join us!

And for all you authors out there, in mid-January we will begin looking at book proposals and queries. Check under Submissions on our website.