Newsletter

“Tree Library,” watercolor by Li Lingfei, 10 (Shanghai, China). The cover of our July/August 2019 issue. A note from William Have you read our summer book review issue? Please subscribe. We offer print-and-digital combinations or digital only. Stone Soup is published monthly between September and June with a combined July/August issue, making 11 issues per year. This week’s newsletter illustration is also the lovely cover illustration for the combined summer 2019 special book review issue, “Tree Library.” The illustration is by Li Lingfei. Stone Soup fans will have noticed a few of her works appearing over the past couple of years. Editor Emma Wood has saved this one for a while—after all, what better cover could we have for an issue filled with reviews by our young writers? I had planned on writing about the age-old link between reading and writing and between being a writer and also a critical reader, but Emma beat me to it. Also a first in this summer 2019 issue, Emma has written a powerful essay about critical reading. I include here the opening of that essay. To read the full work, please follow the link to the current issue posted to our Stone Soup website. Emma writes: “In addition to being editor of Stone Soup, I am also a university instructor. When I teach creative writing, I like to tell my students that the most important part of the class is not writing but reading because reading will you teach you how to be a writer.“As you sit there, eagerly turning the page to find out what will happen next, you are also taking in sentence structures, vocabulary, pacing, and the many other features that make up a poem, a story, or a book. On top of this, you are learning about what kinds of books have already been written. If you want to be a writer, it is crucial to learn about the history of the genre in which you want to write. All writers build on the work of other writers . . .” Read the rest of the essay here. Many of you, like my own daughter, are beginning to move beyond books written for kids and young adults. I am so excited and pleased that Emma selected a review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for this issue. As many of you will know, Frankenstein is a morality tale about science and technology getting out of hand—about the unexpected consequences of revolutionary breakthroughs. The whole mess the world is in with Facebook, YouTube, the Internet in general, and “fake news” can be described as “a Frankenstein’s monster.” Something technological and scientific got out of hand, as with the storyline of Frankenstein, which Valentine Wulf reviews: the creator, Victor, runs away from what he has created, which makes everything so much worse. In many ways, the many creators of the Internet and the social networks that have become such a destabilizing force globally, like Victor, ran away from their creation, letting a monster develop from what had been good. Frankenstein was published 201 years ago! Like all great literature, it is great because it has something to say to every generation. This profoundly wise book, one of the most famous books of all time, was written by a young woman. Mary Shelley was 19 when she wrote this book and 20 when it was published. We have many Stone Soup writers who are exceedingly proficient at age 12 and 13. Read Valentine’s review, and read the book. If Frankenstein isn’t right for you this year, then check in with it next year. It was written by a teenager. If you ever run into anyone who tells you you need to be older to be a serious writer, just remember Mary Shelley and what she accomplished with her teenage imagination. William’s Weekend Project The project for today is simple. Go to the current issue. You can read four free articles in a month, or you can subscribe. So, please read Emma’s essay on critical reading and then at least three of the book reviews (or two book reviews and the one movie review or a poetry review–you get the idea, read three!). If you are a subscriber, then read the entire issue if you haven’t already. Then, predictably, I’d like you to write a review of your current favorite book or movie or poem. We normally publish reviews as part of the Stone Soupblogs. We are happy for one-off reviews and even happier when one of you commits to being a regular reviewer. Start with this one review—you will have good models to inspire you—and when it’s done, send it Stone Soup. Until next week, Contest and partnership news We’re in the final weeks for our current contest: finish writing that book! Keep working on your entries for our summer contest: book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. The extended deadline for entries is Aug. 21, so you have more than two weeks left to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our contest page and Submittable entry page for full details. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Do you read for that transported sensation, where it seems you are in the book? Twelve-year-old Nina Vigil’s book review suggests that Dry, by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman, evokes this type of feeling. Told from different perspectives and grappling with a (sadly) relatable problem, Dry gets heartily praised by Nina. Read her review here. From Stone Soup July/August 2019 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Reviewed by Valentine Wulf, 13 (Seattle, WA) Before I begin this review, I want you to think of everything you think you know about Frankenstein. What comes to mind even when I think of Frankenstein is the classic depiction from the old horror movies. The insane doctor with a German accent screaming, “It’s alive!” as lightning lights up the sky and

“Welcome home, sweetie” Illustrator Claire Schultz, 13, for “Welcome Home” by Sarah Bryden, 12. Published January/February 2017. A note from William Book Contest Deadline Extended to August 21 A few of you have asked if we can extend the contest deadline because of busy summers. We can give you all a one week extension, to August 21.  If you have already submitted your work and want to keep working on it, then you may re-submit anytime prior to the deadline. The deadline will not be extended again, so keep going and do submit your work as soon as it is ready! Besides working for Stone Soup I am also a writer. Within the next two weeks I have two articles for magazines and one book chapter due. Like those of you finishing up your book for our contest, I am also working hard to meet deadlines right now. I’d like to share with you how I bring the final polish to my pieces. I am a firm believer that the best way to polish prose is to hear yourself read the text. After I consider a work “finished” I let it  sit for a couple days and then I read it aloud to myself from a paper copy. As I’m reading I make notes on the pages wherever the reading sounds rough to me. I either work on the rough passage right then or I come back to it when I have finished reading the entire piece. If you haven’t already turned in your submission (whether for the book contest or as a regular submission) here is what I suggest you do.  Aim to have your manuscript finished at least one week before the deadline. By finished I mean something that you think is good enough to turn in. Then, let that draft sit for a couple days. Don’t read it. Don’t think about it. Let your mind rest. Then, when you are ready for the final push for perfection, print out your work and go sit somewhere comfortable where you can read it out loud to yourself and note revisions. At this stage you are tweaking your work. All the big editing should already be complete. As you are reading listen to how the prose flows. You are going for perfection here. Does the dialogue all sound natural? Do you stumble over a long sentence, which suggests that it either needs breaking up or that you need more or different punctuation? Listen for sentences that when you hear them aloud just don’t strike you as quite right. You are the author. You will know what you need to do. While this is not the time to re-write whole sections of your work, this can be the time to make slight changes in word choice. This is the stage when I sometimes find myself deciding that a different word will better express what I want to say, or better conjure the image I have in my head. This final revision is very important. It can provide that final gloss that makes the difference between very good and brilliant. Update from Kenya Jane and I returned from Kenya last weekend. We gave the science books several of you sent us to Bonifiace, the headmaster of the Remot primary school in the West Gate Conservancy, near the Samburu National Reserve. To say he was excited to receive the books is an understatement. He spent an hour looking through them with us and has told us that his teachers can’t believe what you gave the school. Boniface told us that the science is the same, of course, but that the way ideas are presented in the books we brought are much more clearly laid out than in their books and will thus be a big help to their teachers and their students. Thank you all again for your help with this. Overall, it was a trip that had unexpected aspects, some of which were not positive. But, as it turned out, the “every cloud has a silver lining” expression was true for us. While what we had gone to Kenya to do did not work out, we had some very positive travel experiences and, remarkably, we found a wonderful computer programmer named Silvia Nyawira who we interviewed at the lodge where we were staying and who we hired for Stone Soup! Silvia just graduated from University in computer science. She is familiar with the programs our website uses and what she doesn’t know she will learn.  Welcome to Sylvia! We have a big list of website projects to get her started on. When she has worked through them we will then begin asking you for your website ideas. William’s weekend project Today’s project. If you are working on a book for our Book Contest, then work on that. But, if you aren’t, then I’d like to suggest something very simple for today. At some point, go outside with a writing book and pencil or pen. Find someplace to sit, and then open your writing book and start describing what you see. This is the first of two texts I’d like you to write today. Keep it short–between 50 and 250 words. Think of this text as “pure description.” What do your eyes see?  This piece should be in the styhle of science writing or journalistic writing in which the narrator does not reveal him or herself. You might think of yourself as almost mechanically recording what you might see through a camera lens. For contrast, in the second piece I want you to show us what you are seeing through the point of view of a character–it can be you writing from the first person, the “I” voice, or a character you make up, which can be an animal. In this second piece the narrator may have a point of view, and may be part of the scene being described. For example, while in the first piece you might simply say, “there is a

“Something white fluttered through the trees” Illustrator Gabby Heller, 12, for “The Scream in the Night” by Shyla DeLand, 13 Published September/October 2015. A note from Sarah Ainsworth I want to talk about one of my favorite genres: mystery. I’ve always found something irresistible in the way that mysteries are so often structured around a question. In the most basic stories, this question may be: who did it? But it can get much more complicated than that. In From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the question could be framed as: is the beautiful new sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art really a Leonardo da Vinci original? (Nina just reviewed the book for our July/August issue). Another example is The Westing Game, reviewed on the blog last year by Ananda, which can be boiled down to: what happened to Samuel Westing? The best mystery stories require a considerable amount of planning. Ananda described reading The Westing Game as “watching two grandmasters play chess.” The book’s careful plot development is no coincidence. Like writing any story, a mystery could greatly benefit from some brainstorming before putting your pen to paper. Here are some questions to consider: What will the central question be? Who will be the main characters? Who will be the suspects? What will the answer to the question be? Or, in simpler terms, who did it? What kind of clues will you leave readers throughout the story? Once you have the plot all nailed down, you can get into the specifics of tone, setting, and any other details you’d like to include. There have been lots of great mystery stories published in Stone Soup over the years. Check out “The Haunted Mansion” by Lyla Lawless, “Mystery at the Marsh” by Marie Chapman. Have fun! If you write something, please feel free to submit it! P.S. If you’re lacking inspiration for a story, sometimes it helps to think of a title first to guide you. When I was in sixth grade, I thought of the title “Murder Burger” and ended up writing a whole novel based on that. Unfortunately, I did not submit it to Stone Soup! Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Another dramatic season of basketball has come and gone. Plenty of us watch the games on the edge of our seats without truly understanding the process of exactly how and why our teams advance (or don’t advance) to the playoffs. This week on the blog, 11-year-old Himank Chhaya breaks down how the NBA season works.  Contest and partnership news Contest: write a book! How are your books coming along? You still have more than a month to polish up your work to enter into our contest for book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. (We have extended our usual age limit for this contest.) The deadline for entries is August 15, so you have five-and-a-half weeks left to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our Submittable entry page for full details. I nodded and stared up at the owl, my mystery solved From Stone Soup September/October 2015 The Scream in the Night By Shyla DeLand, 13 Illustrated by Gabby Heller, 12   It was a hot summer night when I first heard the scream. I sat up fast, the blankets tangled around my feet in a sweaty mass of itchy acrylic. My heart was pounding so hard that for a moment I wondered if it had only been a nightmare. But the sound lingered in my ears, steadily ringing, and I decided that it had been a real scream. I turned to my window and leaned towards it, so close that the screen was brushing my nose. The moon was bright, glowing yellow in the sky, leaving traces of thin light on the trees. I squinted into the darkness, one hand fumbling for my glasses. Something white uttered through the trees, dancing along just far enough away that I couldn’t tell what it was. My hand closed over my glasses and I slipped them on. The white thing disappeared; I caught a glimpse of it one last time before the green and black trees hid it away. I lay down again but didn’t take my glasses off or try at all to go back to sleep. Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to recreate the image in my mind. I kept picturing that whiteness, fluttering like a flag in the wind. But it didn’t make any sense. No animals that I could think of were white and none fluttered. I shook my head, puzzled, and tried to turn my thoughts to another subject. . . ./more Stone Soup’s advisors: Abby Austin, Mike Axelrod, Annabelle Baird, Jem Burch, Evelyn Chen, Juliet Fraser, Zoe Hall, Montanna Harling, Alicia & Joe Havilland, Lara Katz, Rebecca Kilroy, Christine Leishman, Julie Minnis, Jessica Opolko, Tara Prakash, Denise Prata, Logan Roberts, Emily Tarco, Rebecca Ramos Velasquez, Susan Wilky.