September 24th begins Banned Books Week—an annual celebration of the freedom to read organized by the American Library Association (ALA). In this month’s column, TeachingBooks.net presents multimedia resources on the 10 most frequently challenged books of the past year.Nick’s Picks: Considering the First Amendment & banned books
September 24th begins Banned Books Week—an annual celebration of the freedom to read organized by the American Library Association (ALA). In this month’s column, TeachingBooks.net presents multimedia resources on the 10 most frequently challenged books of the past year.
It has been both fun and challenging to tell the Spaceheadz story across media. Print is a controlled, linear form of storytelling. As the author, I control the pace of the story by its position on the page. In contrast, digital storytelling is a whole different form; different parts of the story can be accessed at different times and in different ways.
So I’ve been asked to talk about an element of writing my book, The Emerald Atlas, that I struggled with, and honestly, it’s hard to pick just one thing. I could talk about the number of times I pulled my hair out for imagining that I could write a mind-twisty time travel story. Or I could talk about the difficulty of working in a genre as well-established as children’s fantasy, a genre in which I would be using characters and tropes that readers had seen a thousand times before and it was my job to figure out how I was going to breath new life into those dusty conventions.