bride of the tornado cover dare to know cover order of oddfish cover

The Order of Oddfish

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More Hailey McLaughlin art, plus accidental #twitfic

September 28, 2010

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I’ve been busy! I spoke to the Michigan Library Association on Thursday, then Ogden International School on Friday, then appeared at the first annual Princeton Kidlit Festival in Princeton, Illinois on Saturday. The charming, irascible, Newbery award-winning Richard Peck headlined the event. There’s a newspaper article about it here. I’m looking forward to participating next year too! Tonight I’m appearing at an Illinois Library Association author cocktail hour with NPR’s Peter Seagal and other writers, and tomorrow the amazing Betsy Bird of the School Library Journal’s Fuse #8 blog comes to town. It’s a good kind of busy.

But wait, you say: what this picture above? It’s another great piece of Order of Odd-Fish fan art from Hailey McLaughlin. (Here’s the first thing I ever got from Hailey, which absolutely blew my gourd, and will blow your gourd as well: a triptych of Lily Larouche, Colonel Korsakov, and Commissioner Olvershaw, both old and young versions. Makes me want to write a prequel!)

It’s Sefino and Colonel Korsakov from Odd-Fish rendered in the style of Pulp Fiction! At first the mind resists. And then . . . it totally makes sense!

In that spirit, let me leave you with this. Have you ever heard of #twitfic? Very short fiction written for Twitter. That is, each piece has to be 140 characters or fewer. I’ve seen some masterpieces of compressed narrative under the #twitfic tag, especially by Adam Callaway (twittering as @Sensawunda).

Anyway, there’s a movie theater around the corner from my house. The other day I looked up at the marquee—and the movie titles seemed to make a great piece of accidental #twitfic:

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Kind of takes you on a journey, doesn’t it?