Sid Fleischman in person!

Again, I'm overwhelmed by the amazing response to my previous posting, both what's been posted here and what people wrote to me privately. I have so much to think about, especially creating an official SHM logo. I think it should be a dragonfly, for reasons I believe I mentioned in a previous posting:

1. Homeschoolers are like dragonflies. Once we open our wings, we can never be the same again.

2. We'd have a logo that's a cute, harmless looking animal -- appropriate for mugs, canvas totes, bumper stickers, and T-shirts. Said logo can stand alone and be all lovely and symbolic even if it doesn't mention the words Secular Homeschooling. This is nice for those readers living in the Bible Belt who'd like to be able to buy SHM products and have them recognized by other SHM readers, but don't especially feel like having rocks thrown at them as they go about their merry way.

3. Anyone who sees any historical connection between secular homeschoolers going around with a little drawing of an animal that's only significant and recognizable to other members of the club, raise your irony hand.

But before I do any more work on the publicity front, I have something more urgent coming up.

I live in the same southern California town as Sid Fleischman, the famous children's writer.

If you don't recognize the name, you may remember his books: the stories about McBroom and his amazing farm, The Whipping Boy, the children's biography of Houdini, and many others.

Fleischman just came out with a young readers' biography of Mark Twain. I love Twain.

I think I mentioned Fleischman lives in the same town I do.

I got in touch with him, and he agreed to an interview for the magazine.

We have an appointment for this Friday. I'll bring the brownies, the questions, and the child who has sworn to be all things sweet and helpful.

The Y-chromosomes are out shopping for a voice recorder as we speak (or a microphone for the dinky one I have already), although I'll take notes as well.

I've done what feels like about a skillion email interviews with homeschoolers all over the world for the upcoming International Homeschooling issues (note the plural; more about that later). However, all of those were with nice not-famous people who had time to think about my questions and leisurely type their replies, which I then had time to read and think about before I leisurely typed any additional questions back.

This is my first in-person, famous person interview.

Any tips?

Like -- oh, I don't know -- what the heck I should ASK him?

Okay, I'm not quite that badly off. One thing I definitely want to do is get a bit from him for our Home Scholars section. I want to ask him a question inspired by something Jane Austen wrote to her niece -- that she wished she'd read more and written less as a child.

What does he think of that? Does he have any similar feelings? Does he disagree completely? If he were going to give a piece of advice to young people in general and hoping-to-be-writers in particular, would he give the edge to one or the other, reading or writing? Or are they both important in different ways, and both valuable?

But I'm feeling jittery about the main interview for the grownup part of the magazine, especially since I don't know how long Mr. Fleischman expects me to stay.

I do have some stuff in mind. For instance, I think it's very interesting that he chose to write biographies of Twain and Houdini. Twain is famous now for his writing, Houdini for his escape art -- but during their lives, both were equally well known for their skepticism, and both seemed to do everything they could to debunk hooey in general and frauds within their own professional realms in particular.

I guess I'd like to talk about children and skeptical thought, and why it isn't encouraged more. Why, when I was a kid, I read every book in both the school and the public library about UFOs and astrology -- and didn't find one title that was even remotely skeptical.

I think this must be a subject Fleischman would be interested in. As a friend of mine pointed out when I mentioned the upcoming interview to her, Fleischman was once a magician himself, and must have a strong interest in "the reality behind the appearance of things." And anyone who garnered a fair amount of fame with delightful tall tales might perhaps be hoping that the children reading them would begin to think about exactly what's impossible in these stories -- and maybe take that questioning thought process to other realms.

Any thoughts? Ideas? Things you'd dearly love to ask the guy yourself, but you live too far away to get the job done right?

The Giveaway Giveaway

First off:  Many congratulations to Holly in Alaska for correctly guessing that the Angerman poem mentioned in my previous rant was in fact from the novel (not the movie) Logan's Run. A copy of the infamous issue #3 is winging its way to her as we speak. (Okay, it's Sunday. These are symbolic wings.)

Now, on to bigger and badder issues.

I've had more than one business consultant-type person approach me with offers of help regarding publicity for SHM. The problem is that if I could afford a publicity consultant, I probably wouldn't need one.

I love my job, I love my love mail, I even love the kind of hate mail that makes it clear I pricked someone who needed pricking; but in terms of filthy moolah, I've made no secret of the fact that I'm doing just a little better than paying expenses. I doubt I could pay what a consultant would ask, even if I were willing to go from a little profit to none at all.

A few very good publicity suggestions have been made to me:

More Internet presence, including either MySpace or Facebook pages (sorry, they all sound alike to me) for both me and the magazine.

A Secular Homeschooling Magazine-award contest for best secular homeschooling sites -- blogs, products, that kind of thing.

More presence at homeschooling conferences.

I'll be taking the woman who mentioned that first one up on her very kind offer of helping me, the techno-doofus. I'm also puzzling out the logistics of those last two. Travel is almost impossible for me for both health and money reasons, but there must be other ways of doing it.

I'm soliciting other ideas for publicity, including giveaway ideas that are somewhat less lame (and less contingent on readers being exactly the kind of nerd I am) than my recent one.

Giveaways for subscriptions would be good; giveaways for back issues, either individual ones or the "special" #1 - #4 bundle (still going pretty strong, thanks everybody) would be even better, since I'd love for my living room to someday look like a room where people, rather than boxes, live.

Just to help you out a bit with ideas: I have more merchandise up my sleeve than I've let on.

Because of the response to "The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List," I wrote up what isn't exactly a shortened version, but is very like it in tone, content, and point. It's called "Ten Things You Should Know About Homeschoolers," and it's printed up on a business card.

I don't know how much mass appeal it's going to have, since Thing #1 is "We're not all religious," and Thing #7 is "We're normal people" (followed immediately by Thing #8, "Kind of").

I like this card, because I'm easily pleased. But I'm not sure what to do with it.

I'd like to sell it, but how many for how much?

I'd also like to do some kind of publicity thing with it, because it does have the magazine's web site address printed on the back.

I was thinking of some kind of challenge where people could get a few free cards mailed to them, but they have to send me their stories (or even pictures) of what they did with them. Handed one to some idiot who started in on the whole "but what about socialiZAtion?" thing. Left a few in a waiting room, at the library, or on a shelf at a grocery store, and then lurked around pretending to have an appointment/look for books/wonder which detergent really makes those whites whiter, all the while watching for reactions from passing strangers. Handed them out randomly to the customers at a favorite coffee shop. Had the entire text of the card tattooed on your back. Something.

Let me know what you think, either here or (if you're feeling secretive) directly to me:

deborah @ 2ds dot org

If I use your idea, I'd love to give you something for your time and trouble. Although money is probably not the kind of printed matter I'll be moving in your direction, just let me know what I've got that you'd like to see.

It's entirely possible that the giver of the very very best idea could find a package of my insanely divine three-chocolate brownies in her or his mailbox, as long as this cold weather holds out.

Man, I hate myself sometimes; or, A Lame (But Nerdarific!) Giveaway

Seriously. I'm a moron.

So I got some more orders of the special we're having -- the one where you can buy the first four issues of SHM and only get charged for three of them. It's doing pretty well.

I have a lot of back issues because I ordered a bunch a while back for a conference I wasn't able to make it to. I was able to wangle the postage with the help of some lovely flat-rate envelopes, so this sale actually still makes some money while offering a bargain.

I fulfilled a few of these special orders a few weeks ago, and noticed with shock that I was down to the bottom of the box with copies of issue #3.

Now, I have a soft spot for #3. The cover photo is one I took myself. It's a picture of a dragonfly, and I took it with one of those cameras where you don't hold it up to your face, you hold it out and look at the lovely screen to see what the picture will look like once you push the dang'd button.

It was a glaringly bright day, and when I spotted a dragonfly settling for a landing among some sharp-leafed plants, I couldn't keep sight of it for long. I couldn’t see it on the camera’s screen. So I held out the camera where I calculated the dragonfly ought to be, and just started clicking away, hoping I'd get one good shot.

My husband, who is much more visually oriented than I am, saw the resulting pictures and confirmed with an unflattering note of surprise in his voice that one of them would indeed be suitable for the magazine.

I was really happy, because I've wanted to have a dragonfly on a SHM cover from the beginning. I think they're the perfect analogy for homeschooling.

I'm taking my information from Insects Do The Strangest Things, a book I haven't read since I was ten, so please excuse any factual errors. But dragonflies, like so many insects, go through a metamorphosis from icky baby grub thing to soaring beauty. After they emerge from their change, they spread their wings to dry. And -- this is the concept that struck me so vividly years ago -- once they spread their wings, they can never close them again.

Homeschooling, right? I don't mean that you can't quit homeschooling once you start, or alter course, or change curricula or teaching style or anything. I just mean that once you've learned that your child's education is in your hands, you can never be the same again -- even if your child goes to school.

I'm partial to issue #3 for other reasons. It's the home of "The Overachieving Homeschooler's Quiz," which I'm conceited enough to laugh at even now, even though I wrote it.

It also has the article "So, How's He Doing?" I got a letter from someone saying that she read it on the magazine's site and was so relieved to see she wasn't the only homeschooler to feel insecure sometimes, she subscribed on the strength of that essay.

In the print version, that article is accompanied by a photo of my son in a nice big climbing tree. See? We go outside sometimes!

And the issue has the first part of a children's adventure story I was able to continue in the current issue and will be going on with for many issues more, though I'm much more nervous about writing for a young audience than I've ever been about the work I throw at their parents.

It's a good issue. It's the one I send to friends and relatives when they want to know what the heck I'm up to these days.

So when I saw that we were low on it, I thought I'd better go ahead and order more. The special is doing well, and I'd like to keep offering it; and this is an issue I'd like to have around, just for my own sake.

So I went ahead and stopped by the printers and ordered a very frugal few copies of it. I figured I'd just keep placing tiny orders as needed, since one of the nice things about my printer is they don't have any minimum order and they don't charge me more per copy no matter how small my order is.

This was Friday. My husband was planning to go out to our storage facility on Sunday, and I told him that while he was out there, he might as well take a look in the boxes of issues #1 and #2 I'd put into storage. There might be a couple of copies of #3 floating around.

I hate myself; and I'm pretty sure I hate you, too, for being able to tell me without reading the rest of this paragraph exactly what happened next. On Sunday, my husband called to report that there was one box full of issue #2, and one full of -- hey! -- issue #3.

"Wait, no!" I screamed. "I put 1 and 2 away! I KNOW it was #1!"

Of course it wasn't. So instead of being wonderfully thrifty and frugal, I'd just spent money I didn't have to (and really needed for other stuff) at the printers'.

Bad word bad word bad word.

"It's not a whole box of them," my husband said. "I mean, it's mostly full, but not completely. I should be able to get it up the stairs alone just fine."

"Stop trying to make me feel better," I said.

So I've just been fuming and muttering to myself about this for the past few days. I tend to remember odd bits of poetry (never a whole poem; that might actually be worth something), and a few fragmented lines popped into my head during one of these seething moments:
 
"Angerman was filled with fury,
He the judge and he the jury..."
 
Which kind of suited the moment, other than the fact that I'm a girl; but it's also kind of sad that not only can't I ever remember a whole poem, I don't always even remember real poems. Because that's not even from a poem. It's a made-up poem from a novel.

(Note to the snark brigade: I KNOW all poems are made up. And you know what I mean, so just cut it out.)

I'll be happy to send a copy of the now-infamous (at least in my house) issue #3 to someone who can tell me where that's from.

Don't post your answer here, please. If you're going to post anything here, please share stupid things you've done, so I can feel a little better about myself.

Send your answer to me at:

deborah @ 2ds dot org