Project Alpha has written another book, this time a sequel to his “Bat and Ghost” book, “Bat and Cat”. He’s already plotting book three in the series, which will be titled “Bat and Rat”. Clearly he has already discovered the benefits of formulaic sequels, even at age 6.
Tag Archives: Books
Bat and Ghost
D, my little author, has written a new book. Unlike his past opus, which was fanfiction, this is all original work. He talked about it for a few days, and today he sat down and wrote the entire thing, asking me for spelling help on a few of the longer words. This time I talked him into letting me scan it (for Nana to read it) before we stapled the pages together into a book.
C came up while page 5 was being written and informed his brother that he needed to put “the end” at the end of the story. So D wrote it on the back of the the page.
As you see, it’s a Halloween story about a bat and ghost who are friends. The “playing outside” includes a crescent moon, and the tv has antennae – which I still think is hilarious (they always draw tvs with antennae) because we haven’t had rabbit ears on our tv in over a year now, I think.
I emailed the story to my mom and That Man (who is out of town again). D read the book to me about five times, then went and proudly put it on his bookshelf.
The Gronckle Book
Twin B wrote his first book. It is, of course, a fanfiction, based on the popular-among-little-boys-everywhere “How To Train Your Dragon” fandom. He illustrated it, told me the story, and I wrote it down for him. He wrote the title on the cover himself.
"The Gronckle Book"
Page 1
Page 2
And here is the text:
Fishlegs was having fun with the Gronckle on Dragon Island. The Gronckle was not having fun. He wanted to bonk Fishlegs in the head.
So he flew and flew and flew, and knocked Fishlegs’ helmet off. And then he bonked him in the head.
The End.
(Fishlegs is one of the Viking teens in HTTYD.) We have seen this movie three times now, and it hasn’t even come to DVD yet, and they have several of the books and all the McDonald’s dragons (thanks to my mother, I didn’t even have to buy two dozen HappyMeals to get them: she found a McD’s that had all the dragons, bought up the 8 or so the boys were missing – times two, of course, one of each for each of them – and mailed them to us. The boys were ecstatic, and the dragons remain their favorite and most-played-with toys), so it isn’t surprising he should be writing about them.
I’m very proud of him, of course, and That Man and I are pretty delighted parents that Twin B wrote this little story. He’s very creative. The illustrations show he clearly had this story in mind when he was drawing it – he was very definite about the order the pages went in before I stapled them together into a “book”, and – in typical writer fashion – he had a few pages that didn’t make the cut. At first I thought he was just drawing a half dozen pictures of Gronckles, but there really is a story there. You can see Fishlegs has his horned Viking helmet on in the first scene, and his hair is showing in the second as the Gronckle knocks him in the head with its stubby tail.
Reading list
I need a new author to add to my beloved list. Someone prolific, cause I read fast. I’m in the process of re-reading the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, because Finger-Lickin’ Fifteen comes out next week (yay!). I’m getting back up to speed in Stephanie’s life. I sent the first book to my mom a few weeks ago, and now she’s also in love with these books. She says she lays in bed reading, laughing hysterically. Is it our Jersey background or does Stephanie just rock? Who knows. My mom’s a Jersey girl herself so she really loves the books.
I read everything Terry Pratchett writes. I love him. He’s incredibly brilliant. I’ve read all the Discworld books until I have them memorized. I like the Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin, but it seems unlikely that he’s ever going to finish it, and that annoys me. I do think he’s cool because I sent him an email a few years ago, before Feast for Crows came out, because he’s my mom’s age and is from her hometown in NJ, and he actually emailed me back personally and said he didn’t know her, but was pretty sure he knew my aunt Susan. Funny.
So, since it won’t take me long to read the new Stephanie Plum, and the new Disworld won’t be out until October, and the new ASOIAF may never be out, I need someone new to read. Sigh. I tried Charlaine Harris and didn’t care for her. I hear the latest Anita Blake only pretended for a minute to have a plot, then went back to hundreds of pages of how great Anita is and all the random sex she has, which is extremely disappointing. I enjoyed those books up until Obsidian Butterfly, and quit reading after Anita turned into the ultimate Mary Sue. I like MaryJanice Davidson’s books, even though she’s the queen of the Sassy Sue and the “good concept, bad execution” mode, but I was pretty underwhelmed by the last Betsy Taylor book.
I’m really not into vampires. I don’t know why suddenly everyone else is. Vamporn bores the hell out of me. Twilight made me want to vomit, I couldn’t even finish the first book. Awful. I’ve read better Dramiones than that, and we all know how I feel about Dramiones. So I need something new. With funny bits. I don’t mind sex, heck I love romance, but I need a plot too. What the hell am I going to read next?
A twin quote
Disciplining twins can be unexpectedly problematic even for experienced parents. Many have been disconcerted to find how ineffective are the forms of control they had successfully used with older children. Why is this? It is probably due to the support provided by the twin-partner. A child responds to discipline largely because he wants the love and respect of the person on whom he most depends. For most children that is a parent. But in the case of a twin the person whose respect and cooperation he most wants is by his side egging him on to worse and worse misdemeanors or demonstrating quite new ones. It is not therefore surprising that a parent needs to exert much more disciplinary pressure to have any effect. It has been found that parents have to use more overt verbal control and more reprimands to twins than to single children.
The pranks of twins can, moreover, be much more hair-raising than those of single children. With children of different ages one of them will be either sensible enough to foresee danger or physically incapable of performing the reckless act. Twins tend to push each other way beyond the limits that a single child of the same age would risk.
-Elizabeth Bryan, from “Twins, Triplets, and More”
It’s all so very true.