Now on Kickstarter: Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2026
I’m honored to be part of a new book that funding on Kickstarter: Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2026. This is an established series with veteran authors, and this is my first time joining in the fun. My story is a science fiction detective tale with Golden Age influences.
The Kickstarter just began this past weekend and is about half funded! Please contribute. $15 will get you an ebook of this book, and the tiers go up from there. There is one spot at the $100 level that’ll get a male name tuckerized in my story! (If you don’t know what that means, Wikipedia has a full write-up on this phenomena.)
The campaign wraps up December 14th, but some of the rewards (like my tuckerization) have only one spot available.
Middle grade readers need extra love
I unabashedly love middle grade books, and I love that my beloved story “Red Dust and Dancing Horses” is going to be in the 2016 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide. This is an anthology of science fiction stories for readers 8 and up, and it’s all about strength and diversity. Nancy Kress says it very well on the promotional video:
The Kickstarter campaign has just started. It’s very affordable to get DRM-free copies of the 2015 book and the new 2016 one, and the print books are included starting at $20. Do you have a middle grade reader in your house? Know one? Want to help out a library? Please check out the campaign and consider a contribution!
The fundraiser ends on September 26th. I’ll be sure to post on the progress!
Read MoreMy Reading Rainbow Story
Check out the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter. It ends July 2nd.
Reading Rainbow didn’t make me a reader, but it told me that I was not alone in my love of books. These days, we have social media and places like Goodreads and LibraryThing and thousands of book blogs. Back in the ’80s, as a kid? I had the B. Dalton at the mall and the Hanford Library. My mom loved to read her Louis L’Amours and Harlequins (the latter, to my mortification). My brother had his Sky and Telescope magazines and read a variety of fiction and nonfiction.
As for me, I read every single horse book I could find.
When I watched Reading Rainbow, I loved connecting with people outside of my family who loved to read. Nothing delighted me more than recognizing books I had read, or finding a new one that we just had to seek out at our next trip to the library.
The episode that I always think as my ‘the first Reading Rainbow’ is the one where James Earl Jones reads Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema.
I mean, holy cow, Darth Vader is reading gorgeous poetry, along with vivid illustrations. It still gives me chills.
A few of my other favorite episodes include Conan the Librarian using might and magic to create library cards (no video on YouTube, alas!), Gregory the Terrible Eater, and probably my favorite episode of all time: on the subject of teamwork, where the featured book was A Chair for Mama. Yes, I remember this off the top of my head. Because I LOVED this episode. I would get this song stuck in my head for weeks. NOW TO INFLICT IT UPON YOU.
At school, I cheered when a teacher would roll in that big black stand with the TV and VCR and put on Reading Rainbow. I’d unabashedly sing along with that theme song.
When I was a kid, we were too poor to support the PBS pledge drives. When I saw this Kickstarter, it hit me in a profound way. The effort’s about the love of books, but for me, it’s also about saying “thank you” for a show that had such a major role in my childhood and made me who I am today.
“Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high…”
The Clockwork Dagger, out September 16th, 2014 from Harper Voyager.
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