When I was a kid, my friends and I had guns, and we went shooting. We lived in a place where we could just go outside and shoot, and all the boys had guns.
I wasn't a boy who killed things, though, but I did have friends who liked to kill things just to kill them. I think a lot of boys are like that... and I'm just being honest, as bad as that may sound. Sure, I went hunting and fishing with my father, and I always felt bad about killing things, but I never felt bad when I was eating them.
We had a pet squirrel. I know that's a weird thing to admit to, but our squirrel was wild. It used to come out of the trees every afternoon and it would eat out of our hands. One time, it got a couple ticks on it, and it actually allowed my father to pull them out with tweezers. Somewhere, we still have pictures of that dumb squirrel back when I was probably seven years old( that was when we lived in the haunted house).
Then, my brothers and I sadly found out that an owl killed the squirrel. My oldest brother knew where the owl lived and so he went out and shot that owl. I don't know if I felt worse for the owl, the squirrel, or my brother, but that's how things were then.
So, I've been thinking about boys and school, and why things aren't working out for them. And... remember that stat I gave last time about how men currently only receive 42% of the Bachelor's Degrees in America? In applying laws of statistics, if the current achievement gap persists, it may likely be the case that women will be the only gender graduating from college in about 20 years.
Watch out, boys... In the world of the Amazons, you will be the slaves. You better get used to cooking and doing laundry. Oh... and changing diapers. Kind of like what women had to do in the 40s and 50s.
Please. I am not a misogynist. I'm just trying to prepare our kids for what's coming down the road.
I'm going to talk about "Boy School" coming up... what schools should look like to save our boys from Amazonian enslavement (not that it mightn't be kind of cool), and how to stop our boys from being "dumbed down," but I wanted to share some really nice news from the book world.
My editor just found out that Ghost Medicine has officially been nominated as a "Best Book for Young Adults" for 2009 by ALA/YALSA... and for the California Book Award, too.
Wow. That is really an honor for me, and I sincerely thank whatever person or people actually took the time to submit that nomination. When I look at the list of other authors and titles nominated, it's like... just wow.
And I saw my book on iTunes, too. That is incredibly cool. Sorry... it just is.
This Saturday, I will be at the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Expo in Los Angeles, signing copies of Ghost Medicine. Again, lots of awesome, incredible authors will be there. I will try to not act like such a dork groupie around them... but I am, after all, pretty much a dork.
And, next weekend, I have another very special couple of events coming up, too, but I'll post that up later.
BoNoBloMo
