SCBWI New England’s New Media Day, 19 Oct.

On Saturday, 19 October, I’ll be at SCBWI New England’s New Media Day, a series of presentations and panels designed for published authors and illustrators of children’s books. This event will take place at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art from 9:30 to 3:30.

The morning sessions feature technology analyst James McQuivey on “Digital Disruption” in publishing and literary agent Rubin Pfeffer on “Books and Beyond.”

After lunch comes a panel that I’ll moderate, titled “OP to E: Bringing Books Back to Life.” The panelists are three SCBWI members who converted their out-of-print titles into digital books:

• Mary Jane Begin, author-illustrator of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, now available through iTunes.
• Gail Gauthier, author of the middle-grade novel Saving the Planet & Stuff, now available for Nook and other readers.
• Emilie Boon, author-illustrator of Peterkin Meets a Star, also available through iTunes.

Finally, event organizer and nonfiction author Melissa Stewart will interview author-illustrator Ruth Sanderson on “Surviving and Thriving in Children’s Publishing” over thirty years.

The registration date for this event has passed, but I hope to come home with some keen insights into the new world of publishing.

Where It All Started

And speaking of folks who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, tireless children's book blogger Jen Robinson describes herself as "a native of Lexington, MA (where the first battle of the Revolutionary War was fought)."

But the fictional Alvin Ho would differ with that. He says that the "American Revolutionary War" started in Concord, which happens to be where he lives. Partisans of the two towns have been debating that point for nearly two centuries.

What's more, Thérèse, the narrator of Gail Gauthier's The Hero of Ticonderoga, tells us the Americans didn't win at either Lexington or Concord. As a native of Vermont, she counts the first American victory of the war as the Green Mountain Boys' takeover of Fort Ticonderoga across Lake Champlain in New York. Though, to be fair, the provincial militiamen certainly didn't lose on 19 Apr 1775.

My take on the start of the Revolutionary War? December 1774 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And I'm not even from New Hampshire.

Avoiding the Dreaded Prologue

A while back, Alison Morris at Shelftalker quoted this passage from E. Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers. It comes to us in one of the finest narrative voices that any writer has ever conceived, the self-effacing chronicler Oswald Bastable:

I shall not tell you anything about us except what I should like to know about if I was reading the story and you were writing it. Albert’s uncle says I ought to have put this in the preface, but I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.

Coincidentally, that very morning I'd noticed how Gail Gauthier's The Hero of Ticonderoga starts with eight pages about heroine Thérèse's first stab at an oral report about Ethan Allen, and then moves on to...chapter 1.

I looked back at the first page of the story. There's no label saying "Preface" or "Prologue" or "Please, please, please read this even if you never read any introductory material." Since not every book design includes chapter numbers, a reader like Oswald Bastable could easily be fooled into thinking that was chapter 1, and read it unawares. Clever.

A New Use for Single Quote Marks?

My final posting for this Oz and Ends PUNCTUATION WEEK concerns a use of quotation marks in fiction that's not standard, as far as I can tell, but might become so.

In a few books, when the text quotes words that no character is saying in the present scene--words that a character has said before, or often says, or that another character imagines being said--that dialogue appears in single quote marks instead of the regular (American) double quote marks.

I first noticed this usage in Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, published in 1987. Since then, I've kept my eyes open for other books using the same style, and the earliest book in which I've spotted it is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door (1973), the first sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. (It may not be coincidence that both those titles came from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

Here are a couple of passages from A Wind in the Door, chapter three, showing this style in action:

The children were all fond of Dr. Louise, and trusted her completely as a physician, but they were not quite sure that she had their parents’ capacity to accept the extraordinary. Almost sure, but not quite. Dr. Colubra had a good deal in common with their parents; she, too, had given up work which paid extremely well in both money and prestige, to come live in this small rural village. (‘Too many of my colleagues have forgotten they are supposed to practice the art of healing. If I don’t have the gift of healing in my hands, then all my expensive training isn’t worth very much.’) She, too, had turned her back on the glitter of worldly success.

And a page later:

“You haven’t proven them to me,” Dr. Louise said. “Yet!” She looked slightly ruffled, like a little grey bird. Her short, curly hair was grey; her eyes were grey above a small beak of a nose; she wore a grey flannel suit. “The main reason I think you may be right is that you go to that idiot machine--” she pointed at the micro-electron microscope--“the way my husband used to go to his violin. It was always a lovers’ meeting.“

Mrs. Murry turned away from her ‘idiot machine.’ “I think I wish I’d never heard of farandolae, much less come to the conclusions--” She stopped abruptly, then said, “By the way, kids, I was rather surprised, just before you all barged into the lab, to have Mr. Jenkins call to suggest that we give Charles Wallace lessons in self-defense.”

I wouldn't have used single quote marks in those passages. (And I wouldn't have included the sixth comma in the first passage, or punctuated the clause about the micro-electron microscope within Dr. Louise’s dialogue like that, either.)

I’ve looked in style guides to see if any state this usage is standard, or even a common option, and haven’t found one that recommends treating some quotations differently from others this way. The closest guideline is a Chicago Manual of Style stipulation that in philosophical and linguistic texts certain terms might be enclosed in single quote marks (14th edition, 6.67 and 6.74).

To prepare for this posting, I kept watch for an example of standard use of quote marks in the same situation, and found one in Gail Gauthier's The Hero of Ticonderoga (2001):

Mom sighed one of her “I’m trying to keep from killing you” sighs. “No, it does not.”

The dialogue that start “I’m trying...” would be within single quote marks in the system L'Engle and Turow used. That might even be clearer about what's spoken aloud in that scene and what the narrator is recalling from earlier moments. But until that system becomes standard, and readers know how to interpret it on the fly, I think it risks being confusing instead of clarifying.

Has anyone else come across this quirk of punctuation? Has it gotten into any style guides? Does anyone use it all the time?