In Which Mrs. Richards Hobnobs with Authors

Well, my little blog has seen some action this week.  Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may have seen that my last post crossed paths with the eyeballs of Mr. Neil Gaiman.  I follow him on Twitter so I know that sometimes he retweets bloggers who mention him or his work in a review or as an inspiration for creative work.  So I thought, what the heck, I'll use his Twitter handle in my tweet about my new blog post and see what happens.  Nothing to lose.  Well, to my utter surprise, less than a half hour later, he retweeted my tweet with a comment:

He said my post was funny!  Which means he read it!  He read my post, thought it was funny and worthy of a retweet!  Then I got all excited and school girly and started screen capturing and humble bragging.  And I forgot to thank him, which I did the next day.  So, Neil Gaiman has more that 1.7 million followers. Even if just a small fraction of those followers click the link and read my blog, that amounts to a lot of people.  Here is screen cap of my Gaiman Bump:

Of the 2,960 hits I've gotten this month, 2,640 are from the Mr. Wednesday Learns to Knit post.  I guess that's my 15 minutes of Internet fame.  

Anyway, back to books.  This one specifically:

You may remember last year I wrote about The Search for WondLa.  Tony DiTerlizzi has written a sequel called A Hero for WondLa with the same glorious, fantastical illustrations as the first book, which I didn't really see because I listened to the audiobook.  I saw Mr. DiTerlizzi at Hicklebee's Bookstore this afternoon. Here's a picture so you know it happened:

Mr. DiTerlizzi said he is a "product of daydreams and boredom."  What he meant is that when he was a kid, he used to doodle a lot while daydreaming in class and one summer, he had nothing to do but stay in his room and draw.  So he filled a note book with drawings that would become the inspiration for the Spiderwick Chronicles.  

He went on to explain how he was inspired to create Eva 9 because he had read books like The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carol and Peter Pan, by Sir James Barrie as a kid.  He liked the clever and strong female characters who all had the same goal - to find their way home. He also confessed that he didn't always like to read books without pictures until his 5th grade teacher told him he could draw pictures to go with his book reports. He said that teacher changed his life.  He said from that moment on, reading books was like reading instructions and he was finally able to imagine for himself what a scene might look like, rather than depend on the illustrations of other artists.

I realize there is only one week left of library this school year so I'm going to do my best to get A Hero for WondLa shelf ready as quickly as I can.  Come and be the first to check it out!