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Date
Fri, 05/15/2009

John Nez, author of Cromwell Dixon's Sky Cycle, our guest blogger for the week of 5/18:

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John Abbott Nez is our guest blogger during the week of May 18th. If you have any questions for John Abbott Nez, add a comment to any of his posts.

View the video on the book page.

Here is more information on Cromwell Dixon's Sky Cycle:

In the years and decades following the Wright Brothers' famous first flight, an obsession with aviation gripped the nation. Thousands caught the bug. In an era of innovation and invention, scores of people pursued their own personal dreams of building a flying machine, and many did so right in their own backyards.

Few stories, though, are as remarkable as that of Cromwell Dixon, a fourteen-year-old boy who successfully designed, built and flew what he dubbed his "Sky-Cycle"-literally a flying bicycle, that he could fully steer, and that he flew thousands of feet in the air.


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Fri, 05/15/2009

Redux, by Tanya Egan Gibson:

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Long after I'd made the last major revisions to How To Buy a Love of Reading-the Advance Readers Copies already printed, the copyedits completed-I began creating the "books" on the virtual bookshelf of my web site. By providing interested readers with additional material, (photo albums, a journal, excerpts from fictional books mentioned in the novel), I wanted to extend the world of the novel past its covers. I thought it would be a fun project, and I knew the site's wonderful designer, eat.tv, inc, would make the "books" look terrific. I loved the fictional "world" of the book I had written about for so long. I thought of it like going back to visit a place where I'd "lived" for so long.

But here's the thing: forgive the cliché (which would make at least one of my characters cringe), but you can't go home again. Or at least, as I discovered, not without a lot of cognitive dissonance.


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Fri, 05/15/2009

Top Ten High School Myths (#7-10), by Susane Colasanti:

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Myth #7.  Karma exists here.

What goes around doesn't really come around in high school.  It's like this alternate dimension where the rules of the natural world get all warped and twisted.  Even in the real world, it's true that bad things happen to good people.  Life is unfair.  That is a harsh reality.  But for the most part, karma applies out here in Reality Land. 

Mean people suck.  From my experiences, I have come to the conclusion that people are their meanest in high school (middle school is also horrendous, but everyone knows this).  We hope these mean people grow out of their evil ways, like tormenting anyone who's even the slightest bit different because they think it's fun or something.  Mean people tend to be golden kids (the ones who are beautiful and rich and know how to either throw or kick a ball around) who feel entitled to treat everyone else like crap.*  They're getting away with a lot of evil stuff now, which totally sucks.  All of it will have consequences at some point.

*Note that while mean people are usually golden kids, not all golden kids are mean people.  If you are golden with an actual heart of gold, thank you.

Myth #8.  Teachers gossip about students.

Oh, wait.  That one is true.

Myth #9.  No one understands you.

False.  You are not alone.  There are people who get you.  They may not be your friends.  You may not even know who they are yet.  But they exist.


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