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She noticed my tears and said softly, “Look at the sky” Illustrator Hoang-Mai Davis,12, for The Snowflake Lady by Katie Woodward,12. Published January/February 2006. A note from William Rubel What a year! What year for Stone Soup and what a year for the world! I can say that team at Stone Soup is looking forward to 2018 with real optimism. We have turned the corner on the print to digital conversion and are looking forward to a creative 2018 in which delve deeper into music and multi-media art forms and begin to develop creative projects that merge writing, art, music, and theater in ways that may not have been done before. But, more on that later in the post (and later in the new year). I’d like to start by thanking all of you who stuck with us through the transition, and all of our new subscribers. We were doing a lot of improvising this year to keep Stone Soup going. We at Stone Soup are looking forward to a calmer 2018! The 2018 print annual has already sold about 100 copies. We have also redesigned Stone Soup (to be revealed next week, with our January issue) so that your 2018 issues and Annual will have a beautiful new look. Past, present and future I had asked you all to think about family food traditions during this holiday season and send us one. Sarah Cymrot, one of our fabulous Stone Soup bloggers, posted an entry on her family’s tradition of making Monkey Bread. She talks about a recent death in her family, and how important it was for them to follow through on the Monkey Bread tradition, as usual. Traditions are anchoring. We can see how important they are through the comments you’ve left responding to Sarah’s piece. Thank you.I’d also like to welcome a new blogger to our growing roster of bloggers (if you are interested in blogging let us know). Dylan Gibson gives a short introduction to animationusing an iPhone app called Framecast. I don’t personally know this program. If you have an iOS device — and iPhone or iPad — I’d check it out. Welcome, Dylan! And thank you. I would like to see Stone Soup publish an animated story in 2018. The fact is that animated stories are hard to make. It takes real dedication. If you get the bug, master the technique and then use it to tell a meaningful story. But first, you have to learn how to make the dog walk (and draw a dog as cute as Dylan’s)! What I want to talk about today as the main portion of the newsletter is based on an article in today’s New York Times. It is an article about the opera singer, Maria Callas. Whether or not you are interested in opera I would urge all of you to click on the link I just gave you and look at the article. Within the article there are ten links to excerpts of Maria Callas singing. Now, remember that this is a NEWSPAPER. That is news-paper. But, obviously, you cannot make an actual article printed on paper sing. Please begin thinking in 2018 about Stone Soup as a place for you to experiment with new ways of being creative. Never before in history has it been possible to combine music with words outside of movies or the theater. I want you to begin sending us stories that incorporate music, animation, drama — let your own imagination roam. Keep the New York Times article on Maria Callas in mind. As a creative writer you are no longer limited to pure writing. Thank you all again for your loyalty to Stone Soup. We are trying our best to support creativity. When you support us through subscribing and through buying the Annual you help us realize our mission. On behalf of Emma Wood, Jane Levi, Sarah Ainsworth, Emma Birches, and myself, our best wishes for the New Year. Until next week, William Your subscriptions are what makes this project happen Sales are reviving. But, to be frank, more would be better. We are selling digital subscriptions for roughly $2.00 per month. This gives subscribers access to over 5,000 pages of creative work by kids, in addition to the current issues as print-ready PDFs. We are running Stone Soup right now as a bare bones operation — I am not receiving a salary. Every subscription helps get us back on our feet. The best deal is the digital/print combination which gives you access to the website, and pre-orders the 2018 Annual (published next December). Please help us by spreading the word and encouraging your friends, neighbours, schools and friends to join us! The dog grabbed the boy’s arm in his mouth and dragged him out of the water From Stone Soup, January/February 2001 The Ultimate Challenge: To Come Home Alive By Tara Stroll, 13 Illustrated by Jane Westrick, 13 Peter Bradbury stepped outside into the ten-degrees-below-zero Canadian air. The winter would get much colder. The bundled-up, seventeen-year-old boy was not cold. He had grown up in this weather. He was tall, lean, dirty, unshaven, strong, and tough. He had been born in the woods. With much difficulty, he trudged through the three-foot-deep snow over to a rack that his snowshoes were on. The frame was made from wood and the webbing was made from animal skin. They had to be kept outside the whole winter. The temperature change of bringing them in the house was not good for them. Wearing the snowshoes, he walked on top of the snow with ease over to a small doghouse. Curled up inside was a young malamute. He was a grayish brown with black ears and patches of white on his face. “Come on, Chocolate. We’re going to check the trapline.” The dog got up. Peter was wearing many layers to stay warm. He had a pack on his back. Chocolate had a thick coat of hair; he was always dressed for the weather. Peter put another pack on Chocolate’s back. “We’re ready to go.” The dog followed Peter into the woods. Peter Bradbury’s trapline was fifteen miles long. At the other

The Stone Soup Annual 2017 cover artist, Kathleen Werth, with her copy of the Annual (with thanks to her mom for the photo) A note from William Rubel The 2017 Stone Soup Annual has arrived at many of your homes. You see here in the photograph Kathleen Werth, the young artist who painted our beautiful cover, reading her copy. Note the bookmarks at all of the stories she wants to get back to! At 370 pages the Annual provides hours of reading. If you don’t have your copy yet we will be able to ship it to you after Christmas. And, the 2018 Annual can be pre-ordered now as a stand-alone volume or as part of a digital print bundle. For those of you who prefer reading the issues as issues we have just put up a page under the main menu bar containing all the issue PDFs for 2017. This page is only available to subscribers. Subscribers can go to the page and download the same PDFs used to print Stone Soup issues and which make up the print Annual. I think the best way to read PDFs is on your iPad or other tablet. So, if you have a tablet, look at this page from your tablet. I have an iPad. I read my Stone Soup issues in iBooks. Tastes of Christmas If you haven’t already read and cooked your way through the December Food Issue, why not spend some time eating with Stone Soup over the holidays? There is a whole range of fantastic recipes for you to try, including some specifically for Christmas. From our December issue you can try Catherine Gruen’s spicy and soothing Ponche Navideño (Christmas Punch) and Ella Martinez Nocito’s crumbling Christmas Cookies, while the latest post from our young blogger Sarah Cymrot conjures up the warmth of Christmas baking and family traditions in Traditions and Monkey Bread. What are your favorite foods from this time of year? Post a comment on our website to let us know about the tastes and smells that evoke the holidays for you – and if you try out any of the Stone Soup recipes, post a picture and tell us how it turned out!     Creativity in the Holidays Stone Soup is about creativity. You kids are used to being “asked” in school to write a story, write an essay, write a poem, draw a picture, etc. And, of course your parents, grandparents, and other adults you encounter in your life, including your teachers, when they were kids they were creative, too. They had to be because their grades, like yours, depended upon it. Stone Soup is about moving the motivation to use the arts outside of the school room to record, interpret, and deepen your real-life experiences. While we hope that you kids who read Stone Soup will be inspired to be creative yourselves — “hey, I can write as well as that” or “hey, I’m a better writer than that” — we also hope to inspire the adults in your lives to be brave and sit down and write or draw or use their phone to take a photograph that is thoughtful — an image intended as creative expression, not just a snap, just like you do. So. The December issue was our first food issue. Everyone gets four free articles a month at stonesoup.com, so I hope that all of you have at least looked at your four free articles, and homed in on the food. Nearly 600 of you have received copies of the Stone Soup 2017 Annual. Look at the food issue in December. Now, as food food food is the theme of this school holiday, what I’d like to be able to write about next week is the great work that you kids AND your parents, aunts, uncles, close family friends and grandparents have done to make this 2017 Christmas week a creative one. I’d like you to send me photographs, drawings, paintings, and recipes that are about the holiday. As food is central to most of our holiday and Christmas celebrations I’d expect a lot of the work you do to be centered around food. I think that recipes are a good kind of a project for joint family efforts. Adults and kids can work on recipes that include a headnote — the story that precedes the recipe — illustrations for the recipe in the form of photographs, drawings, or paintings, and the recipe itself. When you send me recipes please be sure to note if it is a family project. If you are on a family vacation, then share with us something about that. Again, I’d like you kids to try to get parents and grandparents involved, too. In this case, remember that what is easy for you might be hard for them. As an incentive to the adults in your life — I would like to be able to feature at least one family- or friendship group-produced creative project in next week’s newsletter. OK. The “where to send” details. If you think you have something you’d like to see in an issue at stonesoup.com and then in the 2018 Print Annual, you should submit it to Stone Soup the standard way. I will look at the submissions this week, too. But if you made something that you simply want me to consider as a one-off to share with the Newsletter audience, then send it to me at newsletter@stonesoup.com. Until next week, William   From Stone Soup November/December 2007 A Calf for Christmas By William Gwaltney, 12 Illustrated by the author It was Christmas Eve, and everything was ready. Presents had been purchased with great care months before. Yesterday they had been wrapped in dozens of pretty papers and decorated with beautiful bows. Now they sat like sparkling jewels in a pirate’s treasure chest, under the fragrant boughs of a giant spruce. The farmhouse was filled with tinsel and holly and light. The dining room table was covered with a white tablecloth, and red and green candles stood in

The meteorite kept hurtling towards Earth, and Cam watched as her vision darkened Illustrator Charlotte Myers Martin, 13, for Falling into Earth by Ethan Levin, 13. Published November/December 2011. A note from William Rubel A little business for our adult readers and then into the meat of today’s newsletter. Kids, skip these business paragraphs if you like. First, logging in. To be honest, we have had to commission an all new system for managing online access to Stonesoup.com. Our fulfillment house, ICN, has done a terrific job — but there are still a few rough edges. Our apologies. We have just posted login instructions. Basically, click on the login button in the menu bar and, if you can’t remember or make a mistake with your details choose “password reset” when the login screen appears. The rest is just a matter of following instructions. If you need help, call ICN: their phone number is on the login page. Their office hours are 7:30 am to 10:00 pm Monday – Friday Eastern Time (USA). Christmas orders. The last day to guarantee receipt of the 2017 Annual by Christmas (in the United States) is Tuesday, the 19th. We are shipping all orders priority mail. Orders have been going out every day since the beginning of the week. There are 105 books left. More are on order. I underestimated demand for our Stone Soup story book anthologies. We have sold out of all titles. If you ordered a title that is sold out you will be given one or more substitute titles that will arrive for Christmas. The back-ordered tittles will be shipped later this month when we get them from the printer. My apologies. Again. Everything is being shipped priority mail, and all packages will arrive by Christmas. Now, to the Saturday Newsletter! My daughter, as most of you know, is in sixth grade. This week, in her English class they are studying the “Immortal Jellyfish.” This is a tiny jellyfish that has the amazing ability to respond to stress by getting younger! In fact, it can go from adulthood back to being a baby. Many scientists are interested in this jellyfish because it seems to promise the possibility of immortality. Unless, of course (if one is a jellyfish), one gets eaten first! Stella’s teacher is asking his students to think about whether they think immortality would be a good thing for us humans. He is asking his students to make a list of pros and cons: would making humans immortal be a good or a bad idea?One obvious problem with immortality is that if nobody dies then we would definitely run out of food, clean water, and the resources we need to live. In fact, if humans never died and babies keep getting born and, in fact, if the immortal humans kept having children it’s pretty clear that we’d have a planet-wide disaster on our hands. Death is required for life. Science fiction writers are the people who start with the inspiration of something amazing like the immortal jellyfish and then try to imagine various “what-might-happens”. One solution to the problem of immortality would be for millions of immortals to rocket away from earth to explore the solar system and the galaxies. Another way would be for the immortals to kill one non-immortal every time an immortal was created. Horrible, Awful. Terrible! But it would work to keep the population of immortal humans from destroying the world. Science fiction is a fiction of possibilities and ideas. In the best science fiction, the author takes an idea from science, and then thinks, “well, if such and such came true, then what?”  The consequences of the “what-ifs” are often what science fiction books are about. Up to this point, Stone Soup has not published a lot of science fiction. We’d like that to change. I would like you all to start thinking about big issues and asking big questions and then make the shift to writing inquisitive fiction, which is what science fiction is. Over the holidays, choose a scientific ideas that interests you and play around with what-if scenarios. If you end up with a story you think Emma would be interested in for Stone Soup, then please submit it to the magazine. Until next week, William From Stone Soup September/October 2002 Characteristic Property By Rachel Marris Reeves, 12 Illustrated by Martin Taylor, 12   The space pods zoomed above Cassiopeia Jaiden Starwing as she stood on the moving sidewalk on her way home from Academy. Cassie ignored the zooming noise as everyone else did, but her mind did not focus on the obvious. Cassie always acted mellow—she was the youngest of seven children, and the only girl, and she was used to lying low while her brothers got into trouble. But today Cassie was bubbling inside. Tomorrow was her thirteenth birthday, but, like everyone on the planet Earth, she celebrated a day before with her family members. Today was her special day—her day to shine. Cassie grinned as the sidewalk approached her home. It was common knowledge throughout the galaxy that the people on Earth had some of the richest homes anywhere—Earth was a base station to the other planets and jobs there were well paying and important. Cassie’s home was no exception—it was a huge house, with floor upon floor of circular living space. Cassie’s father owned the fastest growing rocket ship company in the galaxy, and was always busy. Cassie’s mother used to work for the Intergalactal Peace Council and retired soon after her second son, Forrest, was born. Now Oriana Starwing was one of the most admired economics teachers on Earth, and was known as far away as Neptune. Cassie entered her home, expecting to be greeted by her family at the door, the way her brothers’ celebrations began, but things were not as she suspected. In fact, they were the opposite…/more