Week of March 4-10

Two rejections, one hold request.

I seem to be over my case of the dumb from yesterday, so that's a relief. Also, there is a good chance that I will finish the items on my to-do list for this week during this week. It's really quite astonishing. I also don't feel like I'm about to collapse into a small and wibbling heap of Mris, so it's not that I've been getting stuff done at the expense of basic Mrisly maintenance. Amazing.

There is nothing to do with my niecelet in this entry, but I have an icon featuring us together now, so I thought I'd use it. One of the things I finally managed to do was to put up some Christmas pictures from our celebration with the Gritter side. I didn't take any Christmas pictures with anybody else this year, so that's me caught up on pictures for the duration.

Zodiac House: Dog Chapter

So with most of my list completed, I went and worked on this next chapter, and I got it done, and so here we are. (For anybody just stopping in, I'm writing a children's book whose chapters are centered around the signs of the Chinese zodiac. I'm musing about children's books centered around each sign as I finish the corresponding chapter.)

The dog page at the CCC says, People born in the Year of the Dog possess the best traits of human nature. They have a deep sense of loyalty, are honest, and inspire other people¡¦s confidence because they know how to keep secrets. But Dog People are somewhat selfish, terribly stubborn, and eccentric. There's more than that, but I'm already caught: children's books focus nearly obsessively on dog virtues. Honesty, loyalty, and being able to keep secrets appropriately: is there anything more scorned in children's books than a tattletale? Maybe a crybaby, but that's about it.

So very many children's books -- even the ones that are not excessively didactic -- focus around lessons of loyalty. Standing by your friends. Is this wish-fulfillment for bookish kids who don't have many friends or who have found the playground particularly fickle? I have to say that loyalty was not a prime virtue of the kids I knew when I was little. What else are children's books implicitly teaching at that level of focus? (Not a rhetorical question -- please discuss.)