Newsletter: September 20, 2024
I had my first close encounter with a middle grade MAMLA reader recently. As I said last week, my wife and I were out of town seeing family and my book had been gifted to a 12-year-old family member I’d briefly met a year ago—let’s call him Max—and I could tell at the picnic that he wanted me to see him reading my book. Earlier I had watched him solving a Rubik’s Cube at warp speed and knew he was a pretty darn smart 12-year-old. I found my way over to Max and asked him if he had gotten to the section about the Circle Room yet.
“You mean the big room with all the mini-games?” asked Max.
I should have called them mini-games! That’s straight out of Mario Party. Thanks to our Gen-Z daughter, I’d played plenty of mini-games on her Game Cube.
“Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “Which one was your favorite?”
“The one with the ball pit,” he answered immediately, “and then that maypole where you run around it and swing in a circle.”
“I love that one, too” I agreed, sounding a bit like a 12-year-old myself.
Max and I agreed that Tornado Alley was a bit haunting. Creepy, I think he called it. Then he described how the people inside ran away and the tornado wiped out their town. Max totally understood why Ryan didn’t take the gold coin and said he wouldn’t have taken one either. It felt wrong.
Nailed it, I thought. He completely got it.
When we talked about Eveningwhere I showed him how the dog on the book cover just happened to match the photo of Angel on my phone. He thought that was really amazing.
Currently Max was reading about how Maria and her mother were visiting the Cloud King, just having met the Cloud Carver.
“Here’s something fun to know,” I told him. “I needed a name for the Cloud Carver and I thought of one of my favorite short story writers, Raymond Carver, so I gave him the name Raymond.” Max thought that was really cool.
Later, Max gave me a detailed demonstration of how to solve the Rubik’s Cube, having me hold the puzzle and patiently explaining how to determine what I was looking for and telling me what row or column to rotate and why. It’d probably take me the rest of my life to master that puzzle but he never made me feel dumb. What a gift!
I felt like I could confide in Max about my plans to develop The Most Amazing Museum of Chicago, and he had several great suggestions based on his love of STEM in school. He quickly embraced my suggestion to adapt STEM to STEAM by including the arts and we were off and running with even more ideas for MAMCHI. (Get out your score cards, because I’m officially adding that word to my lexicon of new contributions to the English language.)
Who knew talking about my book would be so much fun?
By the way, I’m in discussions with a school librarian in Crawfordsville to schedule a reading and discuss my writing process. My chat with Max was an excellent warm-up!
TTFN!
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The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles
Eric Margerum 