KRAD's Inaccurate Guide to Life

Sarah Jessica Parker born (1965)

US FLORAL EMBLEM

"...we hold the rose dear as the symbol of life and love and devotion, of beautiy and eternity. For she love of man and woman, for the love of mankind and God, for the love of country..."

With these words, President Ronald Reagan, on November 20, 1986, proclaimed the rose America's National Floral Emblem. Reagan said that "Americans who would speak the language of the heart do so with a rose."


There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Sent to a mailing list I'm on, an entertaining glossary of book publishing terms. Every one of them is absolutely 100% true. Really.

(My favorite is this one: "UNIVERSITY PRESS: A business predicated on obtaining materials from scholars without compensating them in order to sell the same materials at high prices to scholars.")

The nominees for the 2009 Scribe Award for excellence in tie-in fiction have been announced by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. For reasons passing understanding, this year they have decided to lower the standards of the place by electing me a Grandmaster, joining the much-more-deserving Donald Bain and Alan Dean Foster in that exalted status.

The awards will be presented at Comic-Con International in July.

I am, to say the least, gobsmacked. Also: shocked, honored, touched, amazed, and any number of other verbs.

Tempering this are the fact that a) neither of the two novels I submitted for consideration (CSI: NY: Four Walls for Best General Fiction Original and Supernatural: Bone Key for Best Speculative Fiction Original) were nominated at all, and b) in the initial announcement, IAMTW's Lee Goldberg identified me as "Kevin R.A. DeCandido." *laughs*

Still, however, I am greatly honored by this award, and hope to some day actually live up to it....

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Congrats to all the nominees!

The trailer for Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is now up!

I am very very much looking forward to this. This was one of my favorite books as a kid, and one of my prize possessions is a WtWTA poster signed by Sendak many many moons ago. And they got the Jim Henson Creature Shop to do the wild things and Forest Whitaker's the voice of the head WT. Me am happy kid-at-heart!

(True story: Sendak's day job was to work at FAO Schwarz, the New York City toy store. My paternal grandfather also worked at Schwarz, as a bookkeeper, and knew him. When Nonno saw that I had a book by Sendak, he laughed, and said, "Murray wrote a book? Wow!")