Earlier this week I promised an interview with Lucy Knisley, and here it is!

I included Knisley’s latest book, Something New, in my Stack Overflow column on Monday, and it’s a really terrific book chronicling her adventures in wedding planning. We talked about what it’s like to write a book while planning a wedding and what it’s like to hide a pregnant belly in an autobiographical cartoon.

Something New is in stores now, and I highly recommend it, whether you’ve planned a wedding or been in one or have no plans to have one. I love the way that Knisley is able to capture these scenes from her life and turn them into an engaging story. And the book is published by First Second Books, so it’s just gorgeous.

Note to parents: I think the book is appropriate for teens and up. The book includes some serious grown-up conversations about getting married and decisions about whether to have kids, which younger readers may or may not care about, but there’s nothing you’d really need to hide from the kids.

Thanks to Gerry Tolbert for audio editing!

When I first started up Bounded Enthusiasm, I figured I would use it to talk about all the various topics I cover on GeekDad: books, board games, apps, parenting, and so forth. But so far the podcast has always been book-based, talking to authors and illustrators (though I have talked about games with authors). In today’s episode, I’m branching out and talking to a game designer.

Subalekha Udayasankar designed the card game Bycatch because she had been learning about drone warfare and wanted a way to share some of the things she had discovered. I came across the game at XOXO last fall, where Udayasankar was running demos at the tabletop event, and I was pretty fascinated.

I’ll tell you more about the game here in this post in the form of a tabletop game review; my interview with Udayasankar is at the bottom of this post.

At a glance: Bycatch is a card game for 3 to 5 players, ages 12 and up, and takes about 20 minutes to play. It is available for purchase from the Bycatch website for $14 plus shipping. The age recommendation is about right; the gameplay itself is not too complicated, but the game may prompt tricky conversations about drone warfare that younger children may not be prepared for.

Components:

• 63 Citizen cards
• 9 Intelligence cards

Also required but not included: 1 camera phone (or digital camera) per player.

The Citizen cards are numbered 1 through 9, with 7 copies of each, and each number is represented by a person. The people are very diverse: a wide ranges of ages from young kids to elderly adults, male and female, and several different ethnicities. The Intelligence cards have the same 9 characters, but in black and white and as if seen through a camera viewfinder or, perhaps, a drone’s camera.

Each card has just the image and a number in the top left and bottom right corners, and nothing else. The artwork has sort of a cut-paper style to it (think The Snowy Day) and looks like it could fit in a picture book. The fact that any of these people could be suspects (and thus targets for a drone strike) is intentionally unsettling, because they look like “regular” people–but that’s sort of the point.

How to Play

The rules are available here as a PDF.

The goal of the game is to score the most points by sheltering citizens and suspects in your own nation and eliminating suspects in other nations.

To set up, you shuffle all of the Citizen cards and deal 7 to each player, leaving the rest as a draw deck. Shuffle the Intelligence cards and make a face-down pile of 3 plus the number of players. The rest are returned to the box. Turn the top Intelligence card face-up: this is the current suspect.

During your turn, you must admit a new citizen, and then you may take an action, and then you must control your borders.

Admit a new citizen: Draw a card from the top of the draw deck or the discard pile into your hand. If the card you drew is the current suspect, you may attempt to refuse entry. Show it to the other players, and place it face-down on the table. All other players put a card from their hand on the table. These cards are all shuffled, and each player takes one.

Take an action: You may do one action: shelter, surveil, or strike.

Shelter: If you have at least three cards that form a sequence (like 3-4-5), you may form a shelter by placing these face-up on the table in front of you. These citizens are protected from strikes. If one of these citizens is the current suspect, place the suspect card on top of the shelter, and reveal a new suspect. You may only build one shelter per turn, and may not add to existing shelters.

Surveil: Say “Surveil!” All players must freeze in position. Using your camera phone, you take a photo of somebody’s hand of cards. Players have to have cards splayed out–they may not hide cards behind other cards–and they have to keep their cards at least a hand’s-breadth away from another surface (so there’s room to put your camera there). You have to use the rear camera (not the selfie camera) so that you can’t see the picture as you are taking it.

Strike: Order a drone strike on a nation. Take three adjacent cards from a player’s hand and reveal them, and then place them face-down in front of you. If any of these cards match the suspect, the strike was successful–take the suspect card and place it on top of the cards, and then reveal another suspect. If none of them match, then the strike failed, and all you have is collateral damage.

Control Borders: At the end of your turn, you draw up to 5 cards or discard down to 7 cards, whichever is applicable. You may not discard the current suspect this way.

If the deck runs out, reshuffle the discard pile (if any) and form a new draw deck. The game end is triggered when either there are no more cards to form a new draw deck or when the Intelligence deck is depleted. Each player gets one more turn to shelter or strike (or pass), and then the game ends.

Scoring is as follows:

• Shelters are worth 20 points for the first 3 cards, and then 20 points for each additional card after that. If a shelter had a suspect in it, the score is doubled.
• Eliminated suspects are worth 100 points each.
• Collateral damage–any non-suspect that was killed in a strike (even successful ones)–are worth negative 10 points each.

Highest score wins.

The Verdict

Bycatch is a game that will make most people uncomfortable to some extent as soon as they think about the theme and the implications. You can play it just as a card game, ignoring the theme and just playing for points, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the suspects that you’re targeting with drone strikes include little kids and an old man with a walker. Even the scoring is thought-provoking: why do innocent civilians only cost you 10 points as collateral damage? At 100 points for a suspect, it’s often worth calling a strike if you know a suspect is in a player’s hand–even if you fail, you’re only losing 30 points. It raises questions about how our nation places relative values on eliminating suspects versus preventing civilian casualties: what is the real-world “scoring” table, and who created it?

The game itself does have a big element of chance in it–if you happen to draw a lot of sequences, you can build shelters, racking up points without any risk of collateral damage, and if your shelters include suspects, then you double the points. Since you can draw from the top of the discard pile, you can mitigate the luck a little–but only if there are cards in the discard pile, which happens when somebody has more than 7 cards at the end of a turn. In my experience, between the shelters and strikes, it doesn’t happen often.

Surveillance isn’t always a great move–for one, you’re quite likely to get a photo that doesn’t provide any useful information. At XOXO, we had low lighting conditions, and so players had a choice between using a flash and getting a totally washed-out photo, or turning off the flash and getting something really dark and grainy. And, of course, that’s assuming you even got the cards within the frame–quite often you get photos of thumbs or half of one card.

But, as they say, the faultiness of surveillance is a feature, not a bug. All you need is a portion of a card to identify a suspect, and you can call a strike on your next turn. (Of course, even then you’re not guaranteed to hit the suspect.) I think it’s an accurate reflection of real drone strikes, because it’s an action taken based on imperfect or incomplete information. At least in the case of the game, it could be outdated information: by the time you strike, the player could have rearranged the cards in their hand (and they should, if they’re harboring suspects and a drone just flew over).

The other interesting thing about surveillance, though, is that as new suspects are revealed, you may discover that your old photos already caught somebody hiding in a player’s hand. So there is value in early surveillance, as long as you pay attention to whether that card has been sheltered or eliminated in the meantime.

I don’t think Bycatch is necessarily a game I’ll play repeatedly with the same group of players, but it is one that I think is very valuable as an example of how a game could educate and provoke discussion on a difficult subject. It’s one that I do like to introduce to new players who haven’t seen a game like this before. What was interesting to me is that the game isn’t preachy–the message is embedded in the mechanics, not explicitly stated anywhere in the rules.

It reminds me a little of the game Train by Brenda Romero, which I read about a few years ago. (Trigger warning: it’s about the Holocaust.) It’s a game intended to be played once–because then you realize the horrors of what you’re doing as you play the game. Bycatch is perhaps not quite as shocking and I think can be played multiple times, but it is still unsettling.

For the podcast, I spoke to Udayasankar about her motivations for creating Bycatch and what sorts of reactions she has gotten to the game. You can download the MP3 here, or listen in the embedded player below.

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Two things Udayasankar referred to in the podcast are this Guardian article about drones and this interactive infographic from Pitch Interactive.

Thanks to Gerry Tolbert for audio wrangling!

Today’s episode of Bounded Enthusiasm is a celebration of the tenth anniversary of First Second Books. If you’ve been following my book reviews over the past few years, you know that I love comics, and First Second has published some of my favorite books. I love the wide range of subject matter, and the fact that their books are just so darn pretty.

I spoke with some of the artists and authors of First Second books: Maris Wicks, Jim Ottaviani, Faith Erin Hicks, Box Brown, Lucy Knisley, and Ben Hatke. I asked them all the same set of questions:

1. What’s the first book you published with First Second Books?
2. Why did you decide to work with First Second Books–what do you like about them as a publisher?
3. What’s one of your favorite First Second Books (aside from your own)?
4. Are you currently working on anything else for First Second Books?

It was a lot of fun to get to chat with some of my favorite comics creators, and it’s clear that they’re just as enthusiastic about First Second as I am. You can download the MP3 of the podcast here, or listen in the player below:

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That third question was particularly tough–most of them had more than one favorite, but This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki came up over and over again. (It’s no wonder it won the Caldecott last year!) Other favorites included:

• Glorkian Warrior series by James Kochalka
• Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang
• The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
• Human Body Theater by Maris Wicks
• Delilah Dirk & the King’s Shilling by Tony Cliff
• Relish by Lucy Knisley
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick
• Gus & His Gang by Chris Blain
• Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol
• Alan’s War by Emmanuel Guibert

I also asked Gina Gagliano, who handles marketing and publicity, whether there have been any major shifts in focus over the past ten years:

[First Second was] really founded as a company that would publish graphic novels that would simultaneously reach the comics market, the books market, and the school and library market, and reach readers in all of those places. I think we’re pretty much still doing that! We’ve started doing some new things — with picture book comics, and with young 7 x 9 titles, and with projects like Science Comics, but I feel like they’re pretty in line with our initial mission!

Finally, Gina Gagliano picked a few highlights for me from the ten years of First Second–no easy task!

Since many of these have been reviewed or mentioned on GeekDad, I’ve included links to the reviews here:

• American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006)
• Robot Dreams by Sara Varon (2007)
• Laika by Nick Abadzis (2007)
• The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frederic Lemercier (2009)
• Adventures in Cartooning by Alexis Frederick-Frost and Andrew Arnold (2009)
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick (2011)
• Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke (2011)
• Friends With Boys by Faith Erin Hicks (2012)
• Battling Boy by Paul Pope (2013)
• Relish by Lucy Knisley (2013)
• This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (2014)
• The Sculptor by Scott McCloud (2015)
• Tetris by Box Brown (coming in 2016!)

Happy anniversary, First Second! Here’s to another decade of awesome comics!

Thanks to First Second for arranging the interviews, and to fellow GeekDad Gerry Tolbert for audio wrangling!

It’s been a little while since my last Bounded Enthusiasm episode–it turns out that doing a weekly Stack Overflow column means that I’m less likely to do a regular podcast. Still, that just makes each episode more special, right? (Just nod and smile.)

For this episode, I interviewed Gene Luen Yang, one of my favorite graphic novelists. I’ve reviewed several of his comics here on GeekDad in the past: Level Up, Boxers & Saints, Prime Baby, Secret Coders, and The Shadow Hero. He writes and illustrates comics, and has also written books illustrated by other artists. He’s currently writing Superman for DC Comics and Avatar: The Last Airbender for Dark Horse Comics.

Last week, Yang was appointed the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a position sponsored by the Children’s Book Council, Every Child a Reader, and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Its goal is to raise awareness of the importance of literature for kids, encouraging a lifelong love of reading.

I spoke with Yang after his inauguration ceremony on Thursday about what it means to be an ambassador and about his particular platform, “Reading Without Walls.” His hope is to encourage kids to read something outside of their usual fare, whether that’s in subject matter or format. Only read fiction? Try some non-fiction! Only read graphic novels? Try a prose novel! Yang provides a few of his favorite titles for kids who may be hesitant to move outside their comfort zones.

You can download the MP3 of the episode or listen to it in the embedded player below.

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During the podcast, Yang mentioned several books. Here are a few comics he’d recommend for kids who haven’t tried comics before:

• Space Dumplins by Craig Thompson
• Smile, Drama, and Sisters by Raina Telgemeier
• El Deafo by Cece Bell
• Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatkins
• Meanwhile by Jason Shiga
• Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi

And some comics for the younger set:

• Long-Tail Kitty by Lark Pien
• Luke on the Loose by Harry Bliss
• The Shark King by R. Kikuo Johnson
• anything else by Toon Books

For kids who have been reading comics but not a lot of prose, there are a few hybrid novels that combine comics and prose:

• Flora & Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
• Chasing Shadows by Swati Avasthi & Craig Phillips

And then a couple of prose-only novels:

• Better Nate Than Ever by Tim Federle
• Bone Gap by Laura Ruby (for young adults)
• Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate

And, finally, some non-fiction that Yang’s own son enjoys:

• Bomb by Steve Sheinkin
• The Port Chicago 50 by Steve Sheinkin

Jane McGonigal is well-known for her book Reality Is Broken and her TED talks about gaming, about how gaming and game design can be used to better the world. Her latest book is SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient. I interviewed McGonigal recently and talked to her about how the skills we learned from gaming can make us better.

You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player here, or download the MP3.

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Several years ago, McGonigal got a concussion and her recovery was going poorly. She decided to use her skills as a game designer to create a heroic persona–Jane the Concussion Slayer–and then turned her recovery into a game, which she called SuperBetter. She wrote about the game on her site, and other people tried to do the same thing for their own challenges: a cancer diagnosis, loss of a spouse, unemployment.

Now, over 400,000 people have played the game and McGonigal’s new book explains the science behind the game and how to use it and other skills often found in videogames to improve our lives.

There’s a lot to digest, but even from the first chapter, McGonigal introduces “Quests,” or little exercises meant to teach you small things that you can do to start building up physical, mental, emotional, and social resilience. They start off simple: standing up, or looking out a window, or shaking somebody’s hand. With each one, you get an explanation of the science behind the quest: what it does for you and why it works.

A lot of us here at GeekDad (and, I imagine, a lot of you readers) play videogames, whether that’s on a computer or a console or your smartphone–and your kids do, too. The good news that McGonigal shares is that all that gaming can actually make you better, and not just in the games that you’re playing. There are skills that you and your kids can carry into work and school, relationships with family and friends, and more. However, it’s crucial how you approach games and whether you treat them as simple escapism or as a tool–your mindset has a huge impact on whether games will help you solve problems or create them.

And for those of you who aren’t gamers, this book is still a valuable resource. For many of the skills, McGonigal explains how you might have learned the skill from a videogame, but also gives examples of other non-gaming activities that may encourage the same type of growth. The quests in the book generally aren’t videogames, but things that you can put to use in a variety of situations.

While the initial intent of the SuperBetter game was to help McGonigal heal from a concussion, she explains that it isn’t just for those who have suffered trauma. The “post-traumatic growth” that some people experience can also be had by those who haven’t gone through a severe trauma. Researchers call it “post-ecstatic growth,” and it’s usually achieved by taking on a big challenge voluntarily. I’ve been encouraging my wife to use some of the exercises in the book to help with a knee injury, but I’ve also been thinking about what sort of major challenge I might attempt myself so I can put the book to use in my own life.

SuperBetter reminds me a little of NurtureShock, one of my favorite books about parenting–they’re both built on a solid foundation of research studies and statistics, but are written in a way that is entertaining and engaging. McGonigal explains the science and also includes anecdotes from her own life or from people who have shared their own experiences with the SuperBetter game.

The book itself is broken up into three parts. The first just explains a bit about the psychology of games and what we can learn from them. The second part explains the pieces of the SuperBetter game, teaching you how to approach life with a “gameful” attitude. The final part includes three “Adventures” each intended to build up your resilience in different ways. That section is intended to take six weeks, with one quest a day. I haven’t gotten to that portion yet, but I’m hoping to give it a shot to see how it works.

I’m pretty excited about SuperBetter. I think a lot of it clicks with my own approach to problems, but it gives me concrete steps I can take to incrementally improve my skills. As I read the book, I kept finding things to bookmark that I wanted to share with my wife or my kids, little tricks that could help them deal with anxiety or physical pain, or help them focus. Whether you’re going through a difficulty of some sort now or you just want to get better at something, I highly recommend reading SuperBetter and giving it a try.

SuperBetter was released today. You can play the SuperBetter game online, or download the app for iOS or Android.

Thanks to fellow GeekDad Gerry Tolbert for audio editing assistance!

Author photo by Kiyash Monsef, used with permission.

Andy Weir was a software engineer for over two decades, writing short stories and Sherlock Holmes fan fiction in his spare time. And then he wrote The Martian. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

The story was initially something he wrote and posted to his website, but Weir said it took him a while–longer even than the story itself takes. He self-published it on Amazon, and then it was published in hardcover last year by Crown Publishing, hitting the bestseller lists immediately. It was also optioned for film by Twentieth Century Fox, and the movie is due out this October, starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott.

In case you’re not familiar with the book already, you can read Jim Kelly’s review of it from last year. In short, though, astronaut (and botanist) Mark Watney gets left behind on Mars during a manned mission, presumed dead. Unfortunately, he survived–and now has to figure out how to survive long enough to get rescued.

Weir has since quit his software engineering job to write full-time. I interviewed him for the Bounded Enthusiasm podcast and we talked about the book, the upcoming movie, and board games (because I spotted a shelf of games in the background while we were on Skype). For what it’s worth, oh powers that be at Twentieth Century Fox, if you decide to publish a board game based on The Martian, you should get Weir’s input. Really.

You can download the MP3 of the episode, or listen to it in the embedded player below.

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The Martian will be in theaters on October 2, and the movie tie-in version and the mass market paperback of the novel will be in stores August 18.

Thanks to fellow GeekDad Gerry Tolbert for audio editing assistance!

It’s time for another episode of Bounded Enthusiasm, my irregularly scheduled interview podcast. For today’s episode, I interviewed Tony DiTerlizzi, one of my favorite author-illustrators and a frequent guest on the podcast. After wrapping up his WondLa series, DiTerlizzi was planning to take a breather–so he’s published a Star Wars picture book featuring art by Ralph McQuarrie, a retrospective of his roleplaying game art, and (this fall) a chapter book written by Mo Willems.

And if you’re a longtime fan of DiTerlizzi’s RPG art, be sure to take a look at Dark Sword Miniatures’ Kickstarter campaign (it ends tomorrow!). It’s a new line of pewter miniatures called the Tony DiTerlizzi Masterworks, with figurines all based on his illustrations and character designs. The pledge level is $100, with a whole lot of optional add-ons that have been unlocked through stretch goals.

Ok, on to the podcast! You can download the MP3 file here, or use the embedded player below.

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Thanks to Gerry Tolbert for audio editing assistance!

I mentioned in my recent Stack Overflow columns that I’ve been reading the Jumper series by Steven Gould (here are my mentions of Jumper, Reflex, Impulse), and today’s Bounded Enthusiasm podcast is an interview with Gould. We talked about the Jumper series, what it’s like to be a supporting character, and the recent controversy surrounding the Hugo Awards.

I had a really great time talking with Gould, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work soon. [Note: the Hugo Awards aren’t from the SFWA, but I felt that it does involve the science fiction community as a whole, and wanted to get his take on the situation.] You can download the MP3 of the podcast here, or use the player below.

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Gould is best known for his Jumper series, but he has several other books as well (which are now on my to-read list). He’s also currently president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Right now he is still working on some more books in the Jumper series, and he’s also been working with James Cameron on the next three Avatar films, along with novelizations of all four movies.

I did end up re-reading Impulse in the correct order, and I enjoyed it the second time around, too. This time around I noticed a few more things that alluded to events in the first two books and was able to piece together a little more, but I’m still impressed by how well it works on its own, too. Exo, the fourth book in the series, feels very much like a sequel to Impulse. It takes place only a couple years later (as opposed to the decade-long gaps between the first three books), and Cent is still the main character.

Without giving too many spoilers, Exo is about getting to space. Cent learned to tweak her velocity while jumping, and Impulse played around with that idea a lot. In Exo, she’s experimenting even more, trying to see if she can keep jumping until she gets to space–but of course there are a whole host of issues that need to be addressed: oxygen, protection from radiation, temperature, and so on. Parts of the book read like a how-to guide for building your own space station, though of course it’s only possible if you have somebody who can jump. Space geeks will definitely get a kick out of it; if you’re only in it for the bad guys and action sequences, then you’re probably in the wrong series anyway.

There are still bad guys after Cent’s family, though, but in this latest book it didn’t always seem as pressing. So there are sections of the book that are a little less suspenseful than previous books in the series, but I liked it because it allowed Gould to really play around in space.

As with the other books, there are lots of issues that make their way into the book, like the proliferation of space junk, for instance. Another prominent issue is women in science. Cent is fairly vocal about having her project be female-driven, and I liked the way that her character really takes the lead. Gould has two more books in the series under contract, so I’m looking forward to where he takes Cent and her family next.

Thanks to Gerry Tolbert for audio wrangling!

I’ll admit right up front–it was hard to keep my enthusiasm bounded when the advance copy of Roller Girl by Victoria Jamieson arrived on my doorstep. My two older daughters and my wife have all gotten involved in roller derby over the past two years, and when we first heard that a local skater had written a kids’ graphic novel about the sport, we couldn’t wait for it to be released. Well, it’s finally here!

Roller Girl is about a 12-year-old girl named Astrid who is introduced to roller derby and immediately falls in love with it: the crazy names, the spectacular outfits, and the fierce women on wheels. But it’s also about her changing relationship with her best friend Nicole, who prefers ballet slippers to roller skates. The story does a good job of integrating these–playing roller derby helps Astrid to think about who she is and who she wants to be. I’m not sure which is harder, playing roller derby or navigating middle school social circles.

Victoria Jamieson has illustrated picture books before, but Roller Girl is her first graphic novel. She writes from her own experience as a roller derby skater–she skated on the Break Neck Betties home team of the Rose City Rollers, as well as the Axles of Annihilation travel team, before taking a break for her “nine-month injury” (known in the non-derby world as pregnancy). Now she’s back on her skates again and sharing her love of roller derby through this fantastic comic book.

I interviewed Jamieson for the podcast, and we talked about how she picked her derby name (“Winnie the Pow”), what it’s like switching to a graphic novel from picture books, and why Astrid goes to “Burgertown” instead of Burgerville. You can download the MP3 here, or use the audio player here:

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Dial Books sent me an advance copy in January (I mentioned it in this Stack Overflow column) and the book hasn’t been shelved yet–all of us took turns reading it, including my toddler, who’s a huge fan of roller derby herself. (She’s learned to put her fists together for the Rose City Rollers logo.)

It’s been particularly fun because the book is set here in Portland, and features some real locations and people mixed in with the fictional. For my kids, that personal connection to the subject matter quickly made Roller Girl one of their favorite books. And it doesn’t hurt that the full-color artwork is charming and there’s a compelling story that draws you in. Will Astrid get to jam in her first bout? What will she pick for her derby name? Will she and Nicole still be friends? What happens when her mom finds out she hasn’t been telling the truth? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Roller Girl reminds me a bit of Raina Telgemeier’s comics (like Smile and Sisters), also favorites in my household. The drawings are wonderful, the plot is fun, and the characters are realistic. In the case of Roller Girl, it’s not entirely autobiographical, but some of it was inspired by Jamieson’s own life.

One of the things I love most about roller derby is the way that my girls are becoming more confident. Both in the juniors program and in the adult leagues, roller derby really empowers the skaters–there are people with all different body types and sizes, and there’s no one “right” shape to be. The friendships that my kids and my wife have developed with their fellow skaters are invaluable. Plus, you should see some of the amazing stuff they can do on wheels.

Roller Girl captures that excitement and energy in a very user-friendly package. It’s a book I want to share with everyone, both because it’s a fun read for kids but also because, hey, maybe it’ll bring more kids into roller derby!

One note to parents of younger kids: there’s a mean girl named Rachel who has a  foul-mouthed nickname for Astrid. It surprised me the first time I read it because most kids’ books I’m used to don’t include any swearing at all, but it’s relatively minor, and only appears a few times.

Roller Girl releases today, and is available from Amazon, directly from Dial/Penguin, or check your local bookseller. For more about Victoria Jamieson, visit her website, where you can also download a free ebook about the making of Roller Girl.

If you happen to be in the Portland, Oregon, area, there is a book launch party tonight at 7pm at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, and another this coming Saturday (March 14) at Green Bean Books at 2pm–and my kids will be there (along with some other members from Rose City Rollers) to do a sock derby demo!

Finally, Jamieson will also be at the Hands On Children’s Museum in Olympia Washington on April 11 for a Hands on Comics event during spring break.

Bounded Enthusiasm is a production of the GeekDad Podcast Network. Thanks also to Gerry Tolbert for podcast editing assistance!

Today’s episode of Bounded Enthusiasm is an interview with Jennifer Holm about her latest book, The Fourteenth Goldfish. Holm has written several books for kids, both novels and comics, and has won three Newbery Honors and an Eisner Award. Before reading The Fourteenth Goldfish to my kids, I knew about Holm primarily for Babymouse and Squish, two comics series she writes that are illustrated by her brother Matthew Holm.

In the podcast, we talk about Holm’s inspiration for The Fourteenth Goldfish, what it’s like being a parent and a writer, and why Jonas Salk was so cool. Download the MP3 here, or use the audio player here:

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The Fourteenth Goldfish is about 11-year-old Ellie, who has just started middle school and is starting to experience some of the tricky emotions and situations that arise. Her best friend seems to be drifting away and she’s trying to figure out where she belongs. But then one day her mom comes home with a grouchy thirteen-year-old boy … who turns out to be her grandfather. Melvin is a scientist who has been working on reversing aging, and it seems he’s finally had a breakthrough–but he’s also stuck being a teenager for a while, having gotten kicked out of his own lab.

Much of the book deals with the family dynamics: what happens when the parent and child switch places? What’s it like going through life again when you’ve already had a lifetime of experience?

But there’s also a lot of real science in the book, too: Melvin talks to Ellie about his heroes: Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine; Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project building the atomic bomb; Marie Curie, who a pioneer in radioactivity. Ellie discovers her own aptitude and love of science, but also starts to learn that there are sometimes unintended consequences, too. Eternal youth is a scientific breakthrough–but could it also be a mistake?

Holm tackles some very sticky issues in a way that kids can relate to, and both of my daughters really enjoyed the book. My oldest just started middle school herself this year, so I think it particularly struck a chord with her (and with me). It’s a fantastic read for kids who are still finding their footing in middle school, and it’s an excellent way to include some science in your kids’ literary diet.

As a dad of three daughters, I’m always excited about books that feature fun girl characters, and the fact that Ellie is a budding scientist was icing on the cake. Regardless of whether my daughter pursues science later in life, characters like Ellie help demystify science and paint it as something worth studying.

The Fourteenth Goldfish was published this fall. For more about Holm, follow @jenniholm on Twitter, or visit her website jenniferholm.com.

Disclosure: GeekDad received a digital proof of The Fourteenth Goldfish for review.

In today’s episode of Bounded Enthusiasm, I interview Elissa Brent Weissman, author of several middle-grade books about smart kids. Her latest is Nerd Camp 2.0, a sequel to Nerd Camp, which I reviewed in 2011. Listen in as we talk about her inspiration for the books and parenting little nerds-in-training.

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The Nerd Camp books were inspired by Weissman’s experiences as a camp counselor for Johns Hopkins’s Center for Talented Youth. In the first book, we meet Gabe, a nerdy kid who’s excited about going to the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment for sleepaway camp. But he also wants to impress his new stepbrother, Zack, who is decidedly not a nerd. The first book explores the tension between the things Gabe loves about camp and the things he thinks won’t appear cool to an outsider. For young geeky readers, I think Nerd Camp is a great story about being yourself and celebrating your smarts rather than being embarrassed by them.

Nerd Camp 2.0 picks up almost a year later–Gabe and Zack have become good friends, each learning a little more about the other’s interests. This year, they’ll both get a chance to go to camp: Gabe’s returning to SCGE, and Zack is going to a more traditional summer camp at nearby Camp Seneca. But when a recent wildfire forces the two groups to share a single campsite, it leads to a lot of tension.

The story this time is told from two points of view: the chapters alternate between following Gabe and Zack, and we get a little more insight into the two stepbrothers. While the book could have devolved into a middle-grade Revenge of the Nerds, I think Weissman does a good job of keeping things from getting too mean-spirited. While the book is still primarily aimed at nerdy kids, it has lessons about getting along with people who aren’t like you that would be appropriate for any kid. Zack and Gabe, despite being on opposite sides of the camp conflict, find ways to look at things from a different perspective.

Nerd Camp 2.0 was published this past spring. For more about Weissman, visit her website EBWeissman.com.

Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of this book.

Today’s episode of Bounded Enthusiasm is an interview with Tony DiTerlizzi. He’s an author and illustrator of many books for kids, including one of my family’s favorites, the WondLa series, and I’ve actually interviewed him a couple of times before. For once, though, he has written a book that he did not illustrate himself.

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Star Wars: The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight features the amazing paintings of Ralph McQuarrie, who worked closely with George Lucas to help create the look of Star Wars. Besides doing concept designs of characters, he made many paintings of scenes and sweeping vistas, literally setting the scene for the Star Wars universe. McQuarrie passed away in 2012 but his legacy lives on, both in the movies and in the many books that feature his artwork. (A Kickstarter project from this summer collected over 400 pages of his non-Star Wars artwork in a hardcover volume.)

DiTerlizzi was tasked by Lucasfilm Press (an imprint of Disney Book Group) to write and design a book that showcased McQuarrie’s concept artwork from the original Star Wars trilogy. He was given access to around 200 paintings, some of which have never been released, and had the enormous challenge of putting that into a picture book format. The end result is a 64-page, hardcover picture book that focuses on Luke Skywalker’s journey from moisture-farm boy to Jedi Knight.

The book itself is a beauty. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you’ll love the large format: it looks like a coffee table book, though not as thick as most art books, and it’s a great showcase for McQuarrie’s images. DiTerlizzi’s text condenses the plot of the movies into one continuous story, written in language that captures many of the memorable lines and sound effects. Of course, there are a lot of details that get trimmed to make it fit 64 pages, but I think it does capture the essence of Luke’s story. Star Wars aficionados will find that their own minds will fill in the rest.

One of the things I like most about this book, as with other “art of” books, is seeing images that didn’t make it to the screen. C3PO looks more like the robot from Metropolis; X-Wings have a different engine configuration; the Slave One is a lot rounder. Images from the later movies do tend to look more like the films, because by then Darth Vader’s costume had been defined and the actors had been cast, but it’s fun to see the way Lucas and McQuarrie were feeling out designs and concepts as they went. I’d love to see a more comprehensive Ralph McQuarrie “Art of Star Wars” book eventually; if there are that many paintings that have never been published, they would make a heck of a book on their own, too.

In the interview, DiTerlizzi talks about the process of writing the text for existing illustrations–in fact, for an existing story–as well as designing the book to let McQuarrie’s art shine. He’ll be traveling to a few events this fall, so visit his website for tour dates. He also mentioned yet another upcoming project: Realms, a book of his roleplaying game artwork which is due out next spring.

Star Wars: The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight will be released tomorrow (October 7), in time to pick up a copy for Star Wars Reads Day this Saturday. (Need some more suggestions? Check out Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader & Son or Jedi Academy series, or Tom Angleberger’s Origami Yoda series.)

Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of the book.

Today’s episode is an interview with Paul Pope about his latest comic book series, Battling Boy. Paul Pope is a prolific cartoonist and illustrator, perhaps best known for Batman: Year 100, for which he won two Eisner awards. (If you haven’t read it yet, you should look it up!) While talking to Pope, I could tell that he’s interested in using comics to tell deeper stories: although it may appear to be just about a monster-fighting super-kid on the surface, Pope draws from classical hero stories and mythology.

Battling Boy, released last year, is about a young boy who is sent to Arcopolis, a vast city overrun by child-stealing monsters. His nameless father is some sort of war-god, and Battling Boy has been sent to this realm as a sort of coming-of-age ritual. But he’s not the only one fighting off the monsters.

Arcopolis has its own hero: Haggard West. He’s a bit like Batman–he has no superpowers but uses a lot of gadgets of his own design. Haggard has been keeping the monsters at bay and has been training his daughter Aurora in the family business … until he is killed in battle in the first scene of the book. It’s as Aurora is preparing herself to take over her father’s role when Battling Boy arrives on the scene, stealing the spotlight.

Now, the second book in the series arrives: The Rise of Aurora West. It actually serves as a prequel, and we get to see a lot more of Aurora’s relationship with Haggard and some of the events leading up to Haggard’s final battle. There’s a bit of a mystery about Aurora’s past–memories she can’t quite recall, hints at something driving the monster activities, and so on.

There are two books planned for Aurora’s story arc, and two books planned for Battling Boy. Paul Pope writes and illustrates the Battling Boy books himself, and Aurora West is written in conjunction with J.T. Petty and illustrated by David Rubín. Although the four books will form an interweaving story arc, they can also be read as two standalone stories, and First Second Books has elected to use a slightly different format for the two. Battling Boy is slightly larger and in full color; The Rise of Aurora West is a little smaller and in black and white. This may also reflect, in part, the different sensibility in the storytelling between the two books–Battling Boy is more action, with mostly straightforward, linear storytelling, where Aurora West gets a little darker, more nuanced, and jumps between current day and flashbacks.

Both are excellent reads, though, and appropriate for tween/teen readers. I look forward to the next two volumes!

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You can find Paul Pope online at paulpope.com (note: contains images that may not be kid- or work-appropriate) or follow him on Twitter at PULPH0PE (that’s a zero, not a letter O). For more about First Second Books, visit the website.

Disclosure: GeekDad received review copies of Battling Boy and The Rise of Aurora West.

Between a trip for my high school reunion and Gen Con, it’s been a while since I’ve had time to conduct any interviews, but Bounded Enthusiasm is back! Today’s episode is an interview with B.J. Novak about his brand-new picture book … with no pictures.

B.J. Novak is perhaps best known for his role as Ryan Howard on The Office (which he also co-wrote and co-produced), plus appearances in several other movies and TV shows. Earlier this year he published a book of humorous short stories for adults titled One More Thing, but this month will see the release of his first book for children: The Book With No Pictures.

The book, at first glance, appears to be a picture book, but with (as the title states) no pictures on the cover. But it is very funny–it’s a book that is definitely intended to be read aloud, and my kids took great pleasure in the fact that the book made me say all sorts of ridiculous things. If you love reading aloud to your kids–even if you don’t think you’re very funny–The Book With No Pictures will make a great addition to your shelf.

I had a brief conversation with Novak as he prepares to start his book tour. He talks about the idea of kids’ books as scripts for the adults, and the importance of not talking down to kids.

More information about The Book With No Pictures, including a peek inside the book, tour dates, and even a video contest, are available at the book’s official website.

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Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of the book.

Today’s episode of Bounded Enthusiasm is a double interview with Gene Yang and Sonny Liew, author and illustrator (respectively) of The Shadow Hero, a new comic book just out today from First Second Books. It’s a new origin story for an obscure WWII-era superhero named the Green Turtle, created by a Chinese-American artist. If the rumors are true, the Green Turtle is the first Asian-American superhero.

I wrote a little bit about The Shadow Hero earlier this year for Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, and the collected book is available today.

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Below are a few links to things mentioned during the podcast:

The Digital Comic Museum, where you can read the entire original run of The Green Turtle, which is now in the public domain.

Gene Yang has written and illustrated several comics, including American Born Chinese and  Boxers & Saints. He has also collaborated with several other artists on books such as Level Up and The Eternal Smile. You can find out more about him and The Shadow Hero at his website.

Sonny Liew has blogged about his creative process, and here are a few posts about designing Hank’s parents, the villain Mock Beak, and researching 1930s San Francisco for the backgrounds. He has previously worked on Malinky Robot (read an excellent review of it here) and a comic adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. His upcoming book, mentioned in the podcast, is The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye.

Finally, you can see two other Yang-Liew collaborations in the Asian-American superhero anthologies Secret Identities and Shattered.

Disclosure: First Second Books provided a copy of The Shadow Hero.

Today’s episode of the Bounded Enthusiasm podcast is an interview with Daniel H. Wilson, author of several books including Robopocalypse and its sequel, Robogenesis (read Jim Kelly’s review here). We only had time for a short conversation, but I asked him about what it means to have a Ph.D. in robotics, the plausibility of various robot scenarios like Terminator and Short Circuit, and the awesome spaceship simulator he built for his kids.

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Today’s episode is an interview with author Jonathan Auxier, the author of an upcoming book The Night Gardener. I first met Auxier in 2011 at the Wordstock book festival in Portland, Oregon, when he had just published his first book, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes. You can read my interview with him at Wordstock, and my review of Peter Nimble.

Auxier and I talked about his new book, being new parents, the power of storytelling, the difference between mystery and confusion, and why books aren’t vegetables. We also took a detour into tabletop games. I had a fun time talking to Auxier, who loves to promote kids’ literacy … and also happens to be pretty great with a yo-yo.

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The Night Gardener will be available on May 20, and I’ll have a review soon!

Tony DiTerlizzi is one of my favorite author-illustrators, and his WondLa series is a family favorite. I spoke to him two years ago when book two, A Hero for WondLa, was released. The final book of the trilogy, The Battle for WondLa, is out this month, and I got a chance to speak with DiTerlizzi before he heads out for his book tour. You can listen to the full audio of the interview (the first episode of my Talking About Stuff podcast), or read the (slightly abridged) transcript below. We talked about all things WondLa, his upcoming Star Wars book, Dungeons and Dragons, and more. Stay tuned–I’ll have a review of the book soon, too!

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Update: After posting this, I discovered there’s already a podcast called Talking About Stuff, so I’ve renamed the podcast. You can find episode two here under its new title, Bounded Enthusiasm.

Liu: I’m really excited about this book. It was one of my 10 Things I’m Anticipating in 2014, and it’s finally out.

DiTerlizzi: You and me, we’re the two people waiting for this book to come out!

Liu: Well, my family is excited. My wife was home when the package came, I was out of town, and she said: “I saw what was on the address label, and I didn’t open it.” Because if she did, I think she would’ve been done with it by the time I got home.

DiTerlizzi: Awww. So she’s like, “Instead I’ve used it to hold the door open. It’s a big book, perfect for that.”

Liu: We’re excited because I read the first two to my kids so now we get to see how the story ends.

DiTerlizzi: That’s so awesome. You and I have talked about this before. It’s my favorite time of day with my daughter Sophia: we always sit in bed and read together. Even though she can read her own books now, she still wants me to read to her, and I will ride that train as long as she lets me. And I always think about that with the WondLa books–that’s totally what I was thinking about when I was writing all three of them.

Liu: My kids are now 10 and 7, and I’m still reading to them in the evenings. It gets busier; they now have a little bit of quiet reading time to themselves at bedtime, but we still love reading books out loud to them. Actually, WondLa was one of the first ones where I was reading the same book to both of them. It was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and I forget what the other one was, and then we started on the WondLa series. It’s been fun being able to have that shared experience, as opposed to when they were younger and I’d read to them separately.

DiTerlizzi: I still have memories: my mom read to us kids growing up. I remember that carried into even high school. My mom and I would read a lot of the same types of books. She likes fantasy, and in the ’80s that’s all I read: obviously Tolkien, and Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, Elric, and we would always then talk about the books afterward. “Did you read it? What did you think? What do you think this is about?” I hope that’s what happens and how it evolves with both your girls and as well with me.

Liu: So what other books do you read with Sophia?

DiTerlizzi: We just finished the last Ramona book. We’ve gone through every single Beverly Cleary Ramona book. It was great, she really enjoyed them. I read a couple of them when I was a kid, I mean, I remember them vaguely. I remember the characters and some of the things that happened. She loved them, and so we’ve been tearing through all of them. In fact, we were just talking about what we’re going to dive into next. We may start the Little House books next. She’s six, so there’s certain books she can read on her own and so chapter book-wise, they’re still kind of the younger chapter books that we’re enjoying.

What’s interesting to me is the stuff that I loved as a kid that she’s not as into. So for instance, I tried and tried to read her Winnie the Pooh. Because I loved Winnie the Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and, no, she wasn’t buying any of it. She wasn’t into it. I was a little bummed out about that. We did get through Mouse and the Motorcycle, which was another favorite of mine. She liked that one, but I don’t know if she was just being nice to me or not.

Liu: My kids are pretty adventurous in what they like, but what I’ve found they really enjoy are things that are just silly, lots of humor. So the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang books, the new ones, are really great. We’ve been reading The Last Dragonslayer series by Jasper Fforde. It’s really good, but a lot of the humor I’m sure is just going completely over their heads. It’s his first book that’s meant for younger readers, but there’s a lot of British humor that they’re not really getting, and a lot of the puns are a little sophisticated. But it’s a fun story.

DiTerlizzi: Yeah, there’s always that element. We’ve been talking about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I read it to her when she was really young, and I think she just kind of sat through it. So now I’m like, “We should read it again. You like the film, so we should read the original book.” And it’s such a short read anyway, we could probably read it in a couple nights. Sometimes that humor or something from another time period transcends with a kid, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Liu: Back to the WondLa series, how does it feel to have this third book wrapped up?

DiTerlizzi: A bit surreal. You know, I started them in 2009 and they’d been in my head for years before that. So I feel it’s a great accomplishment that I was even able to see it through. You know, with Spiderwick it was with Holly [Black] so there was always someone to spur the other person on to keep going, when you get tired, or a deadline is looming, or you get distracted. With these books, it was just me, and that was a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is you can come to the end of it and go, “I did this.” I made this whole story that I had in my head and I got it down on paper. And the bad thing is you have to do all the writing and all the illustrating on your own.

So I really intensely focused on this third book for all of last year. That’s all I did, was work on this one book. It’s interesting, when you get to the third book, you know the characters well enough. When I outlined the trilogy as a whole, I already knew what the big, general beats of the plot were gonna be and I knew that they would probably change and evolve as the story started to come into focus.

But the good thing about it is, you know the characters well enough by the third book that you kind of know, well, this is what Eva would do in this situation, or this is what she would say. This is what Hailey would do, and this is what Rovender would do. So that kind of thing helps an awful lot; it makes it a lot easier to do.

I think the trick is, how do I raise it and deliver what I hope would be a very grand and satisfying conclusion? That’s where you get nervous and the jitters and you hope that you can really provide … for all the people who have read over a thousand pages before this, that when they’re done they feel like, “Okay, that was worth the read. That was a good read. I really enjoyed it.”

Liu: I’m in chapter eight so far, so I’ll let you know.

DiTerlizzi: If the interview never airs, I’ll know how you felt about it.

Liu: When you wrote, I know you said you had your major beats planned out. Did you ever find that you had more things that you wanted to write than you had room for? Did the book get any bigger than you had planned?

DiTerlizzi: Yeah, the first one was the longer book, and then the second was a little shorter, much to my surprise. I actually thought it would’ve been the other way around. I thought the middle book would’ve been the longer one. And I thought that this one was going to be closer in length to the second book, but in fact it ended up being a bit longer, and closer in length to the first book. It’s gotta be 500 pages, I think, with all the art. And I think part of the reason for that was the ending. I don’t like a “happily ever after, the end” ending to a story. I want there to be … ripples. I want there to be a little bit beyond it. It helps in this book because of the theme, being the things we do in our life, the people we touch in our life, the actions that we take, we don’t always see the repercussions or the conclusion or the response immediately. Sometimes it takes time. It’s definitely a theme in this book, it’s talked about in this book, so I realized I had to do something along those lines.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, Ari Berk. He’s an author and he’s written a lot of great books on his own, and he’s also worked with Brian Froud on some of Brian’s books. And Ari was the one who suggested: You know, why don’t you really push that idea? Like, go further and further out with it. After Eva’s story is over, how does Eva’s story ripple through time? And it was such a fascinating idea and I took it and ran with it. So that added a bit to the end of the book, but I think it will give you that feeling, like: Man, that was such a great meal, so delicious, and the dessert was really good … I feel like I need a little espresso afterward. You know what I mean? You want that one little thing, just a little more. So I’m hoping that this delivers that.

That was a big part of it. And it also extended the story, made it a little longer than I had originally anticipated.

Liu: You’d mentioned doing, like you did with the Spiderwick Field Guide, some sort of Orbona field guide or travelogue type book…

DiTerlizzi: That was definitely the idea, and I thought that we could do that. When I first signed the books up we talked about doing the three books and then do kind of this “art of” book. The interesting thing that happened was, we ended up doing these little sketchbooks that go along with it. And between the sketchbooks and then the sheer amount of art that I had to do within the books, I kind of felt like I didn’t know if it needs a big field guide. Because I felt like the sketchbooks are pretty exhaustive and then we have all the art in the books. I think what we may do, and I could get in trouble for saying this, but I think when they all go into paperback I think we’ll probably put all the sketchbooks into one finished book and release it that way.

Liu: I’d love to see the sketchbooks be more widely available, because those were more like promo items, right? Not something you could go to the store and buy.

DiTerlizzi: Yeah, not something you could go to the store and buy. I wanted to do something special for the people who I got to meet, people who would come out to a book signing… You know Ang [DiTerlizzi] and I had been going to Comic-Con for years, and that’s one of my favorite things to purchase in the sea of stuff to buy at Comic-Con. Artists will make these little limited-edition sketchbooks that you can only get from them. I love that feeling because I think for me, I started out doing stuff like that, back in my Dungeons & Dragons days. And I love that I’m with a huge publisher and that they support my books, but you do sometimes long for that hand-crafted, grassroots kind of thing. Like: I got this thing, and the only way to get it was you had to meet him.

And so that was kind of the idea behind doing those little limited-edition sketchbooks. But I think, once they’re done, you know, I don’t want them to not be available. So, that’s the plan. A year from now the plan could change, but the idea is that we’ll eventually put them all together into one supplemental book.

Liu: Since you brought up Dungeons & Dragons, I figured that’s actually a good topic for GeekDad.

DiTerlizzi: Let’s go! Let me get my dice!

Liu: So, I’m actually a role-playing newbie. I have not played a lot of roleplaying games, but–

DiTerlizzi: I’m sorry, we’re breaking up. I think I gotta go now, dude. You call yourself a geek, come on!

Liu: I know, I grew up in a pretty conservative family, so at the time Dungeons & Dragons was not allowed. So I made up my own little role-playing games that I played with friends but I had idea of how D&D actually worked. So I just made things up, right? But a lot of our writers have been playing D&D, so I wanted to know: what did you do and how did you get involved?

DiTerlizzi: Well, I played Second Edition in the ’80s. When it first came out I was in middle school, so like most kids I was playing it. In fact, I think my parents bought it to play with some of their friends and that lasted a night or two and they were done with it. They were over it. I think when they realized what a time suck it was they were like, all right, give it to the kids. And we loved it, so we played

Then I lost interest. Moved on to the next thing. And I forgot about it. I kept all my D&D books as I got older and I’d still look at them and loved that, but mostly I forgot about it as I finished high school. When I was almost done, just about ready to graduate art school down in Fort Lauderdale at the Art Institute, and I had moved back in with my parents, because that’s what you do when you’re a poor art student… some of my friends were finishing up school and they were coming back, and there was a group of us hanging out at the bar one night, and were talking about D&D and we started reminiscing about how much we loved it when we were kids, and we were like, “Let’s play again. Let’s do it. Next Saturday, let’s all do it.”

And one person had one book, one person had another book, and between the group of us we had everything we needed. So we started playing, and everyone was like, “Oh, you gotta draw my character” and stuff. It was great, it was fun. And I remember I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

One of the things that was so interesting about it was I always played with the little lead miniatures. That was one of my favorite parts of D&D. You know, you made your character, then you went to the toy store, the hobby store, you bought a little lead miniature that looked a little like your character. You took it home, you painted it. Or if you were the dungeon master you’d buy the goblins or the lizardmen or whatever you were gonna use. I loved all that part of it. I liked it because it was like a way to play with toys, but you weren’t really playing with toys–they were more like game pieces. But really, you were still using toys to tell a story. I loved that component of tabletop games.

So my younger brother, who’s nine years younger than me, hadn’t experienced Dungeons & Dragons. And he was also playing with us and he was kind of fascinated by these little lead miniatures. So we went and got these miniatures and I showed him, oh, you paint them and all this stuff. And so later we started drawing the miniatures and everything like that and then, at the encouragement of my gaming buddies and my brother, I sent a bunch of stuff to TSR. They were still there, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and they were still publishing the game. This would have been the early 1990s. And after a few failed attempts to get in, I got in and they started hiring me. I worked with them through most of the ’90s.

I worked on the first ever color edition of the Monster Manual. And then I worked with some original game designers like Zeb Cook. I was the illustrator for a series of campaign settings in a series of adventures for the Planescape line, which was kind of a crossroads or a confluence of all the mythologies of D&D realms, and you could plane-hop to different realms. It was a great time in my life. I have no bad memories of working there, except the deadlines were always pretty tight. It was such a great time. The people were amazing, and I learned a lot. I really, really learned a lot as a storyteller.

I feel that a lot of things in life kind of happen to you for a reason, and I think it was important that I work for those guys before I started making kids books. I really do. Because I learned how to world-building. I learned it wasn’t just about the character–it was about the costume, and the artifacts, and the other characters, and then the creatures and monsters and the environment and the architecture and all that stuff is all integral to each other, to one another. I think about all those things when I work on and create a book. It helped with Spiderwick and it certainly was absolutely integral for WondLa. I used a lot of the same skills that I used illustrating Planescape to design the world of Orbona.

Liu: Have you played any role-playing games with Sophia?

DiTerlizzi: We have, we started up this winter a new campaign, and we’re just playing Second Edition because, again, it’s the books everyone has. And I’m running it, I’m the dungeon master. We’ve had a couple sessions. The trick now that’s harder is that everyone’s so busy, so it’s hard to get everyone together in one room. But she absolutely loved it. The way we did it–because the adults are like, “I’m good from 5 o’clock until about midnight or 1,” and then everyone’s kind of done. Obviously we’re not going to keep our six-year-old up that late. So we made her a pixie. She’s either a pixie or a sprite, I don’t recall. I’d have to go back and look at her character. We looked at the stats in the Monster Manual. So that allows her to kind of come and go in the adventure.

And Angela, my wife, is this dwarf fighter who’s just amazing. Arrogant, totally in it for himself, not a team player. But he’s got this little pixie that he grew up with, and so they’re kind of buddies. So we’ve had already some really great adventures. And she’s great, she totally gets it. It’s been a lot of fun.

As a complete tangent, I have a lot of lead miniatures. I don’t have as many as I used to when I worked for TSR. But one of the things we thought would be kind of fun was I had written this article about the plastic toys that had inspired a lot of the Dungeons & Dragons monsters, and I had a lot of them. And I thought, what if we just played using these plastic toys. After all, that’s what the original guys were using. You know, Gary Gygax and Tim Kask, and Dave Arneson, when they were first creating the game. So I had been on a quest of just buying little plastic figures and characters and rubber monsters. At the end of the day I think it probably cost me about two or three hundred dollars off eBay, buying all these little lots of cheap toys. But if that was lead miniatures, it would have been like a thousand dollars.

So I have this crazy tackle box filled with, you know, How to Train Your Dragon plastic figures and bad Hong Kong monsters. Everybody loves it. Everybody’s really into it. Everyone felt like it added a lot of fun back into the game. I think, too, they can take the wear and tear of a bunch of people playing a game. Always, when I was a kid, the thing was you’d paint these lead miniatures and then the DM would go, “Okay, that guy’s dead.” And he’d tip him over and slide him off the game board and you could see the paint just smear on the game table. And you’re like, “Noooo! That took hours!” With these guys, they can take the hit. You can throw them across the room and they’re fine.

Liu: So when does the WondLa RPG set come out?

DiTerlizzi: Oh, man, don’t I wish. But there’s a lot of similarities. If you know your classic D&D monsters, there’s a lot of similarities–the ankheg and the sand snipers are very similar creatures, kind of burrowing crustacean monster. I know Otto’s a water bear, a tardigrade, but his lines to me are very much like an owlbear. He’s very big, burly, he’s got the claws and the little beak like an owlbear would have. So it’s there, it’s all there, it’s still in my DNA. It’s still gonna come out. All my years of working on Planescape and stuff. It’s part of who I am and it’s part of me that I really love and sometimes miss.

Liu: I bet if you just tweet or post on your blog that someone should make a WondLa RPG that someone’ll do it for you.

DiTerlizzi: Someone tweeted me recently and said that they had run, I think, Numenera, to do a WondLa adventure. I was very tickled by that. I thought that was really awesome. And who knows? Maybe down the road, we’ll see.

You know, I’ve come to this and it’s kind of an interesting thing for me, especially coming out of something like Spiderwick. You come to the realization, I think a lot of times in the industry of–I can’t speak for adult publishing but children’s publishing, you think of things almost like a movie. You put a lot of pressure on them to open big. You know, the book came out: did it get on the Times list? Did it make any other bestseller lists? Did it do this? Did it do that? And certainly those things are gratifying and they’re important to the sales force and stuff like that to sell a book.

But unlike a film, which takes maybe 90 to 120 minutes of our time to consume, these books take a really long time to read. And if you’re ten years old, all the more longer. WondLa has always done well and I’ve gotten great, beautiful letters from people. But it could be, like the type of thing like a role-playing game, it could be three or four years from now when someone’s like “I finally read all three of them. There should be a game!”

Liu: Yeah, that’s the thing–it takes even longer reading them out loud. And there are so many books I want to share with my kids but it’s like, I gotta finish this one first. My ten-year-old, she reads constantly and she reads fast. So I feel bad sometimes when I’ve got a book, and I know we’ve all been waiting for this, Book Two, Book Three, and she’ll say “Can I just go read that one?” and I’ll say “Nonono! I want to read that one to you!” But at some point I end up saying, “It’s going to be a while before I get to that with you, so go ahead.” But she can’t have WondLa yet.

DiTerlizzi: The next day, she’s like, “Done.”

Liu: But I like the idea that the first time we read this, we’re gonna read this together and really savor it, get to experience it together for the first time. I really love doing that.

DiTerlizzi: That means a lot to me. That’s really awesome. And like I said, that’s something I thought about while I was writing these books and putting them together, the idea of an adult–and it doesn’t even have to be a parent, it could be a librarian or a teacher, just a favorite adult in someone’s life–sharing that. I feel like WondLa works on multiple levels, at least that was my goal. It asks a lot of philosophical questions. They’re questions we’re aware of when we’re children, and we start to realize them and think about them, but they’re questions that remain with us even when we’re adults.

Liu: Do you feel like the three stories are for progressively older readers, or more mature readers–emotionally and philosophically?

DiTerlizzi: I definitely planned in Eva’s arc to have her see the world very black and white in the first book, a little more tinge of grays in the second book, and then by the time she gets to the third book she realizes that everyone’s operating on their own set of morals. And it’s up to her to find out what set of rules in life guide her that just sit well with her, despite what other people may say.

I guess you could say that that is aging it up as you go from book to book, but it is a coming of age book. This is kind of where Eva really, really grows, where she kind of starts to understand that concept. And it’s a tough concept to learn. Because, for me at least, when you’re a child and you’re young, you view all adults as right. You think everyone is good, and you think everyone is looking out for children. They would never do anything that would be harmful in any way. As Eva learned right from the get-go, that’s not always the case.

She starts to understand … Besteel, the huntsman in the first book, he’s a bad guy, right? And then in the second book, she finds her sister, but then her sister’s not quite exactly what she thought. Then by the time she gets to the third book, she starts to rethink things about a lot of the characters that she’s met previously. Really, almost every character returns in some form in the third book. There’s really only one or two new characters, but I really felt like the stage was set and now Eva, with this little more understand of the world now is going to go back to some of these places. But she’s a little more enlightened now, based on the experiences she’s had.

Liu: Is there a significance to the color choices? So I noticed the first one has the illustrations with the green tint, and the second one is blue. The first one really was set a lot in the nature scenes, and this last one has this orange-red color.

DiTerlizzi: Oh, the second-color printing. Yeah, definitely that was inspired by the Wizard of Oz, which uses a two-color printing process, actually throughout the book. They kind of changed it from chapter to chapter or section to section. So we decided to do it but on the WondLa books each book would get its own thematic color. And I knew green was one.

And I knew this other kind of honey, peachy … it does a lot of neat things. It was a designer friend that I’ve worked with named John Lind who said, “You’re not gonna believe this, but if you go with an orangey peach, it works amazing in two-color.” I’m like, “Really?” And he says, “I know, it doesn’t sound like it, but when you overlay the black tones and gray tones on top of it, you’re going to get some amazing mixes.” I realized that, and so I held onto it and didn’t use it in the second book because I wanted to save it for the third book.

And then definitely [for the second book] we said, let’s go with the blue, because so much of it took place in New Attica and I wanted New Attica to feel very Brave New World, a city that looks like it was made by … Apple. So I kind of wanted that antiseptic feel to run through the whole book. That blue was the bane of my existence, though. It was such a tough color to work with. You’d think it wouldn’t be, but we had a really hard time because tonally it can be so close to the greys. It just doesn’t feel as colorful. So I was glad to get back to a color that is much more rich, like the green in the first book.

There’s a couple of sunsets, because the sun is setting on our hero. This is the end of it. So it worked out, in a serendipitous sort of way.

Liu: It’s really gorgeous. I see what you mean, with the more black or grey, it does have that really rich red look to it, but also it works for the paler skin tones.

DiTerlizzi: Yeah. I think that color can be such an integral part to setting the emotional mood and tone of the entire book. It’s an important decision to make.

Liu: Is there any plans for any Augmented Reality on this one? I noticed the little Omnipod icons, but there wasn’t any mention of it.

DiTerlizzi: We’re done. We questioned whether to do it. It was amazing to do it on the first one. It wasn’t ever part of the plan at all when we worked on WondLa. The folks who designed the Augmented Reality had come to Simon & Schuster and shown them the technology, and the folks at Simon & Schuster were understandably blown away by it. They were kind of waiting for the right book. I remember very well my editor calling me and saying, “We have this technology and we’ve been waiting for the right project and we think your book is it.”

I was really torn, to be honest with you. I thought, aww, I dunno, it feels a little gimmicky. I worked so hard on this book and I don’t know if it needs that. And he said, “Well, think on it overnight.” I went to bed, going: “What would Lewis Carroll do? What would L. Frank Baum do?” And I thought, they would go for it. They would think this is really cool–in my mind, they would. So I went for it, and I’ve no regrets on it. I loved it, and it was amazing.

But our browsers … I don’t know about you, but I’m on Safari and Firefox and they’re constantly requiring updates and so the software to run it becomes obsolete fairly quick. We talked about it pretty heavily in the second book, whether we should do it or not, and they made a good case, and showed us some pretty neat stuff. And I liked the idea of almost playing a video game with the book. But by the time it came to the third book, I felt like it didn’t need it anymore. We’d kind of grown past it.

In fact, I don’t think it even works on the books anymore. I think moving forward the subsequent printings of books one and two won’t have the AR element any longer. But I loved those flourishes, so we put them in. Hopefully nobody will be too baffled. The twenty people who got it to actually work on their computer, hopefully they won’t be too disappointed.

Liu: I know, in addition to WondLa, you’re also working on Star Wars, because you just need to take over another universe.

DiTerlizzi: That’s right. I know, my geek cred, it’s going up, man! I wish I had, like IMDb has their star meter, I might have like a blip on it now.

Liu: How did you get involved with Star Wars? For people who don’t know, there’s some novelizations. It’s the first three movies, plus your book. (See the announcement video here.)

DiTerlizzi: Yeah. LucasFilm, now working with Disney and Disney’s publishing division, Disney Press, is going to start its own imprint, basically Star Wars-themed books. And I had the unbelievable honor to be the first book on the list.

Liu: No pressure.

DiTerlizzi: No pressure. The folks at LucasFilm knew I was a huge Star Wars fan and have been since I saw the films originally. Carol Roeder, who’s head of the licensing, actually came from Simon & Schuster, which is where I’ve published almost all of my books. So she and I have known each other for a long time. I think she was waiting for just the right project for me. Because I would dance around some projects but I was just so darn busy it was hard for me to really commit the time.

She called me last fall and said, “We would like to take Ralph McQuarrie’s and make a book out of Ralph’s art.” And Ralph, if you don’t know, was the first concept artist to work with George Lucas. He painted paintings of iconic scenes for the first film that, as far as I understand it, helped George actually even get the funding to make the first film. And he also designed–if you’re a Star Wars geek like me–a lot of our favorite characters, like C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader… He designed the Death Star, a lot of major components of Star Wars, Chewbacca, he designed.

You know, I have the “art of” books, the ones I’ve had since I was a kid, so I was familiar with his work. But if you asked me, I probably knew about ten to twenty images. So I thought, well, yeah, maybe there’s something there. And then they’re like, “Ok, we’ll send you over a PDF of his art.” And 200-plus images show up, and I’m like, holy cow, I had no idea. Tons of paintings, tons of sketches, a lot of stuff that I had never seen before, and that was really, really cool.

So, the trick was, they wanted it to be like a picture book, and so they kind of were like, “Can you write this and assemble this and make it into a picture book?” So I said, all right, I think I can do this, and I want to do this. I printed out all of Ralph’s art. Obviously, I know the story. My daughter knows the story, she can tell you the story. So the trick now was, how do I present it in a book format, in a narrative form, using my philosophical approach of how a picture book should read, and be paced, etc. But you’re not creating the artwork, nor can you get the artist to create new artwork. So you’re bound by the art that you have.

In some ways it answered a lot of questions, because I was able to see right away where the art could do a lot of the storytelling and where the text was going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting. For instance, Ralph painted a lot of amazing images, but he never painted Obi-Wan and Darth Vader fighting with their light sabers. He never painted the destruction of, really, both Death Stars. There’s an explosion on one of the Death Stars but there was no painting of the Death Star blowing up. So big moments were missing.

And a lot of his paintings were very scenic vistas: this is what Cloud City looks like. You’d have figures, but they were not always the predominant element in his paintings. There’s some that were, but there were a lot that weren’t. So that was also a challenge. I feel like for me, a picture book is so much about the human element, where you have to project ourselves into the character, whether it’s Max going to where the wild things are, or the Once-ler talking to the Lorax. I’m a very character-driven person. The books I like tend to be character-driven.

So based on compressing the stories down to such a short length, we knew right away that it would have to focus on just Luke Skywalker. And unfortunately things like bounty hunters–as much as there were so many cool paintings of Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters–there was no room for them. We kept it focused on Luke, and it also helped answer a lot of questions and kept it moving. In the end I tried to mix as much of Ralph’s iconic paintings that, if you’re a Star Wars geek, you’ve known, you’ve seen, along with some lesser-known and lesser-seen images that he did.

In fact, in the scene where Luke goes back to Dagobah and he’s talking to Yoda and later to Obi-Wan. Yoda confirms that Darth Vader is his father, and through his conversation with Obi-Wan he realizes that Leia is his sister. There’s a cover that Ralph did for the first spin-off book called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. It came out in the late ’70s or early ’80s. It has on the cover Darth Vader, and it looks like he’s on Dagobah because he’s in this forested area. He’s facing you, and then there’s Luke and Leia looking at him, and I’m like, there’s the illustration! And they had the art, and they were like, “Yeah, you can use this.” So I was super-psyched to be able to tie that in. So if you’re an old die-hard fan of Star Wars stuff, you’re gonna see some of these amazing pieces of art that Ralph did that maybe not everyone has seen.

Liu: So how long is this book, then?

DiTerlizzi: It’s 64 pages. So the trick then is, “storybook” can be a bad word in publishing, because it’s kinda neither fish nor fowl. It’s not a picture book, because it’s longer, it’s denser, but then it’s not really a chapter book either because it’s presented in a picture book format, it’s got a lot of art that can be viewed as juvenile… Though I love a picture book, they are hard books to do. Although it’s 64 pages, we really adhered to a picture book kind of word count and length. There are passages that are a little longer than I would’ve liked but for the most part it’s like two paragraphs, three paragraphs on a page and that’s it. It keeps moving. So the story’s obviously truncated. But I wanted to give all the real estate to Ralph and all the amazing art that he did.

Liu: There needs to be a new word, then, for these bigger picture books. I feel like I’m seeing more of them.

DiTerlizzi: I think it’s just silly categorization, and it happens. We do that. Someone will break it and blow it out huge, and then there’ll be five million of them. Robert Sabuda did it with pop-up books, the folks that did Dragonology did it with the interactive lift-the-flap books. Someone’ll do it and then all of a sudden it’ll be the new thing. Maybe I’m doing the wrong thing. Maybe I should get back to WondLa and that big guide, a big storybook.

Liu: The junior novelization of the movie.

DiTerlizzi: Yes! So I’m doing this picture book, and then they tapped these beloved middle-grade authors to write middle-grade adaptations of the original three films. Raquel Palacio, who did Wonder, which is a great, amazing story, and the main character is a Star Wars fan in that book–she’s doing A New Hope. Adam Gidwitz, who did A Tale Dark and Grimm, which I love love love those books, he’s doing Empire Strikes Back. And then Tom Angleberger, whom many Star Wars fans know as the author of the Origami Yoda books, he’s doing Return of the Jedi. My book, The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, is out in October, and theirs I’m guessing are going to start early next year, probably throughout the year. I think they’re all out by the time the new film comes out.

Liu: So December 2015.

DiTerlizzi: Not that we’re like counting.

Liu: I heard they just announced the cast–I hadn’t gotten to go read it yet, but we’ll see.

DiTerlizzi: In some ways I’m very excited to see that the original cast is going to be in it. It’s to what extent are they in it, and to what extent are the new characters given a chance to do their thing. That’s the trick.

Liu: You put the old guard in, because that’s gonna call out to the older audience, but the newer audience isn’t going to care quite as much.

DiTerlizzi: Yeah, most children today… because I’ll talk about Star Wars a lot when I do my book presentations in schools and in bookstores, and when I ask kids what their favorite Star Wars film is, or character, it’s not the original trilogy. It’s the prequels that came out afterward. That’s what most of the kids like. Sorry, I know that’s like blasphemy.

Liu: It’s one of those things where, you know, the parents hope the kids love Empire Strikes Back because that’s the best one, but they like the pod racing, right? And Jar Jar. They just think he’s hilarious, and you’re like, “Noooo!”

DiTerlizzi: Exactly. You’ve hit the nail on the head, that’s it. Or the bounty hunter on the head. The Gungan.

Liu: Yeah, hit the Gungan on the head. It’s been fantastic talking to you. Good luck on your book tour! I hope The Battle for WondLa does really well and I’m excited to read it.

DiTerlizzi: Thank you. I’m excited to share it finally. Even the artwork, I’ve been very tight-lipped. I would say this, you almost don’t want to flip through the book and look at the art, because it was hard to not put spoilers in the art. And even then, the artwork appears sometimes several chapters after the spoiler is revealed. And even then, there were scenes I just didn’t draw because I was worried it would give too much away if somebody just casually flipped through the book. So that’s why I’ve been really not sharing. I’m going to start putting some art up here leading up to the release of it, but I’ve been really careful about not putting a whole lot of art because I don’t want to give anything away.

Liu: I’m a no-spoilers sort of guy, but I had to at least look at it a little bit–I hope I don’t see anything I don’t wanna know yet!

DiTerlizzi: I tried to be thoughtful about it so when you see it, if you happen to flip through it, you think you know what it is, but then hopefully you realize, oh, it’s not exactly what I thought it was. That’s the idea at least, we’ll see.

Liu: Well, good talking to you. I’ll have to find some other excuse to talk to you again soon, now that the WondLa series is done.

DiTerlizzi: Let’s do it again in October.

Liu: All right, sounds good!

The Battle for WondLa will be released on Tuesday, May 6. Here’s a list of Tony DiTerlizzi’s tour dates and locations.