If you only do the easy and useless jobs....

Finding Wonderland has a great post from a. fortis about "all the memorable words and ideas and history and everything else that I encountered for the first time in kids' books and teen books."

Here's one excerpt:

"As a kid, without those kids' books I wouldn't have learned about dodecahedrons or tesseracts. Those books taught me what a veruca was, and what makes somebody a twit."

Then she asks: "What have you learned from children's books?"

The first thing that came to mind for me was infinity and the concept of time. I vividly remember coming face to face with both of these in The Phantom Tollbooth. To this day, I can't hear the word "infinity" and not think of that chapter where Milo takes the "shortcut" to the Land of Infinity and winds up climbing the same set of stairs over and over. Later, he encounters the Terrible Trivium, who gives him impossible, time-wasting tasks to do, like moving a towering pile of sand, one grain at a time, with a pair of tweezers. As this demon says: "If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones, which are so difficult. You just won't have time."

I need to hear those last words of wisdom every single day.

Go on over to Finding Wonderland and tell a. fortis what you learned (the good way) from children's books.

Donna Jo Napoli: What great writers eat for dinner

I've been a big fan of Donna Jo Napoli ever since I heard her speak at the SCBWI L.A. conference several years ago and she said this on making time to write:

(paraphrasing here) I used to let every child, even my toddler, have a turn at planning and making dinner. If the toddler put a cup of yogurt at each place, then that's what we ate.

BookPage has an interview with her. (Thanks to cynsations for the link.) Go, read, and eat yogurt for dinner tonight in her honor. Doesn't her new book, Hush, look good?