A few weeks ago, I got an email from a teacher telling me that his Grade 6 class had just finished reading Wild Ride. They had each written a letter to me about the book and would I mind if he mailed them to me? Being the egotistical writer that I am, I was totally into it.

This post is my letter back to the students in Mr. Sales’ class at Maple Ridge Elementary School. (But you can read too.)

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Hey Maple Ridge Readers!

When Mr. Sales first asked me about reading your letters about Wild Ride I was like:  “Definitely!”

Then I thought, “Wait a minute! He said they wrote about the book. He didn’t say they wrote nice things about the book.”

What if all your letters told me how terrible the book was? What would my inflated ego do then?

With these serious matters weighing on my mind, I checked my mailbox each day until these arrived:

Your letters! And they didn’t just arrive in one day. They came and came and came over three days. Each time I checked my mailbox there was another batch.

Over the next week, I read them all and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The verdict? You liked Wild Ride.

Whew.

And you had questions. Lots of them. Which is fantastic. Asking questions of the author is the most important thing a reader can do.  I won’t be able to answer all the questions here, but I’ll try and tackle the ones you asked the most.

Continue Reading »

Very excited to hear the news that GGA#5  Food Fight was nominated for a 2011 Joe Shuster Award in the Best Comic for Kids category.  The award will be given out in June.  Cool!

Yesterday I spoke about writing comics to a great bunch of folks at CANSCAIP’s annual Packaging Your Imagination conference.  It was a lot fun to hang out with fellow writers, both published and soon-to-be published. My talk, Getting Graphic: Creating Comics When You Can’t Draw, focused on how I got into writing comics for kids and how I put it all together. As promised to those who came out yesterday, here are the slides for the presentation:

Also here is the handout I passed around. [pdf]

Thanks to all who came out. It was great to meet you and good luck with the writing!

As if writing a book called Media Meltdown isn’t enough, I get to have my say on media and kids in the pages of the September 2010 issue of Alive magazine, too. The article focuses on how marketers are increasingly targeting young people in their sales pitches and I’m lucky enough to way in on the subject with my thoughts. The article has some good tips for parents on how they can engage their kids to think critically about the messages they’re receiving from advertisers. I encourage you to check it out.

A few months ago, I was interviewed for teachingbooks.net about Media Meltdown, the fourth book in my Graphic Guide Adventure series. The interview is now online and is featured in Nick’s Picks: Teaching with graphic fiction and non-fiction books along with some other fine graphic novels.

It was a lot of fun to talk with teachingbooks.net about the importance of media literacy in education today. The twenty minute phone chat was edited down to a 2 minute clip, where I talk about how Media Meltdown blends an adventure story kids will love with media literacy and production skills essential to navigating the mediascape that surrounds us them (and us) today.

To listen to the clip, visit teachingbooks.net and visit mediameltdown.net to learn more about the book and media literacy.