countdown and revolution (and playlists and computers and phones)

I haven't shown you the paperback cover of COUNTDOWN that made its appearance in April! Ta-da!

I've heard from some that it's an acquired taste, but I loved it immediately. It tells a story. It asks questions. It's got a lot of orange in it. ahem. There's Franny and Chris Cavas, and that checkerboard floor, that chalkboard title. I've loved signing these paperback copies... and soon there will be a NEW BOOK to sign:

REVOLUTION is the title of book two of the Sixties Trilogy. It takes place in 1964 Mississippi during Freedom Summer. Sunny Fairchild is 12 years old. I can't wait for you to meet her, and her step-brother, Gillette, his little sister, Audrey, and the town of Greenwood, Mississippi, which was the headquarters of SNCC in 1964.

Lots went down in Greenwood during the civil rights movement years, and Sunny lives through the  summer of 1964 with a whole lot of grit and even a little bit of grace. Or maybe it's the other way 'round.

You'll meet Jo Ellen again, in REVOLUTION. She's one of the one-thousand souls who came south to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, to register black voters and open community centers and Freedom Schools. Jo Ellen and Sunny meet and sparks fly.

There's also a mysterious boy named Raymond who lives on the other side (literally) of the railroad tracks, in Baptist Town. I fell in love with Ray, and I hope you do, too.

And now, here's some housekeeping:

I've had quite a bit of mail lately about the playlist for COUNTDOWN. It's so great to see y'all using the novel in classrooms. I'm having trouble bringing up the playlist on iTunes, just as you are. I'll see if I can fix that. In the meantime --

The playlist is expensive to buy (there are 46 official tunes/speech snippets in the playlist), but you can find it here, on my Pinterest page.

These pins all link to YouTube, where you can watch Little Eva singing "Locomotion" or Brian Hyland singing "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie..." or see the Duck and Cover public service announcement Franny sees in school, hear JFK's speech during the Cuban Missile Crisis... etc. The pins are in the order they appear in COUNTDOWN.

Sometimes a link breaks, when a video is removed from YouTube, but you can usually find another easily, if you search a bit. I update broken links on this board when I can.

There is a REVOLUTION playlist as well, right here. It is in no particular order right now, and it's *huge*. I'll put it in order, move some of these pins to the resources page, and make it all tidy, soon. You can also find links to "book two resources" and "book two bibliography" (in progress), and boards that contain all the photo resources for book two, here. You can see photos of Greenwood, Mississippi, too, at the board "hey, Sunny."

Eventually, I'll have COUNTDOWN boards that are just as complete. I'm slowly working on it, now that I've finished REVOLUTION.

I'm liking Pinterest (link is to my Pinterest landing page) as a resource tool. It feels just-right for me as a social networking tool as well. I think I'm going to feel the same way about Instagram, once I bridge over to a smart phone. I really need a new phone. Mine is almost 5 years old and keeps turning off at the most inopportune times.

I need a new computer, too. Who loves her laptop and can tell me about it? I am so bad at these things (phones, too). I've been online and to Best Buy (and to Verizon) half-a-dozen times, and I just leave feeling more confused. I use my laptop for everything (no iPad or other devices), so it needs to handle lots of photos, videos, music, and books. It needs to hold novels I'm writing. When I research, I often have a couple dozen windows open at a time, on Firefox, not to mention the book(s) I'm working on and iTunes and email and my beloved mahjong. hee.

My camera is broken, too -- my Nikon D-40 -- and I'll get it fixed, but I miss taking photos and often don't take the D-40 with me when I travel by plane, so I want to purchase a hand-held point-and-shoot. I want good photos but don't need a fancy hand-held. Any suggestions? I loved my Canon Powershot 130 and miss it...

Whew. Lots of housekeeping today. Jim has made lunch -- baked potatoes, broccoli, and an enormous salad. The house is being treated for termites (it's the 10-year renewal for the house; we don't have the critters). It's drizzling. I want a nap in the worst way, but there's an awful lot of drilling going on outside. Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill.

I obviously need to stop here. xo

gathering primary sources

September 12, 1962. John F. Kennedy's speech at Rice University: "I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency. "

You can hear these famous words (immortalized in Countdown's first scrapbook, too!): "We choose to go to the moon!" You can hear the entire 19-minute speech here, at the NASA website, and read the transcript here, at the JFK Library (you can watch the video at this link as well). Finally, here is a list at NASA of various ways to see and hear the speech that launched the race to the moon.

Here is a 2-minute clip of said speech, on YouTube, complete with stirring sound track, for heaven's sake... but that could lend itself to a discussion of primary source material vs what we do to/with it!
So. For those of you working with Countdown and looking for primary source/Common Core material, here's some, on a 50th anniversary, no less. I'll be posting more Countdown resources here, and will also link them to a board I've called "Countdown Resources" on my Pinterest page.

There are and will continue to be far more resources at Pinterest, just fyi, for all my books, and they'll be gathered in one place. I'm experimenting with moving resources off my website, which I find clunky and hard to find and navigate, and onto Pinterest, where they seem much, much easier to manage.

I've just started this Countdown board, but it will grow, as will the playlist for Countdown (which I will put together as soon as I'm done with 1964's book two playlist) so you can use the music with the book as well.

Whew. Resources. They are important. More and more I am seeing how the images and the sounds of the sixties are telling the story of the sixties every bit as much as words are telling the tale. It's how we live, isn't it? We use all our faculties. It's how we learn -- with all our senses. It's how we experience story. It's exciting to have public places to gather research and so easily share it.

I also kinda like my Pinterest page. hee. I've done some surfing on Pinterest, and I've decided you can tell a lot about a person from what she pins and how she arranges what she pins.  Ahem.

As Franny Chapman would say, "Heavens to Murgatroyd."