Book Friends Forever podcast!

I have news! Grace Lin and I have launched a new podcast together. It's called Book Friends Forever, and you should be able to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on Soundcloud here:



Grace launched the Kidlit Women podcast last year, and we had been talking about doing another podcast together when our team at Hachette Audio mentioned that they were open to producing podcasts. I told them about Grace and my idea, and they agreed to edit and produce it, which has been wonderful.

We try to post a new episode every Thursday. We talk about publishing, life, family, and more. Each episode we catch up with each other's life, take a trip down memory lane, talk about what's on our minds, and share what we're grateful for. So far, we've talked about how we define success, being widows, work-life-balance, micro-aggressions, and more.

We've been having a great time doing it. Honestly, I'm a podcast junkie, and it's been my dream for a long time to do a podcast. When people ask me what I'd be doing if I weren't in publishing, I say I'd love to be working in radio or podcasting. I did radio in college (KALX Berkeley! 90.7), and loved it.

It's also been nice talking to Grace regularly! We generally email, so it's been nice to hear her voice once a week. I hope you'll check it out, and if you like what you hear, please subscribe and rate and review us on iTunes! Thanks!

Just One More Book interview

The fine folks over at Just One More Book interviewed me a while ago, and I just found out that the interview is now up and posted on their site. Even though I did some radio in college, it's weird for me to hear my own voice in a podcast (and I feel like I was mumbling throughout!). The interview is mainly about Sound of Colors by Jimmy Liao which they gave such a wonderful, glowing review for, but it also dips into the role of an editor, how many risks publishers take, and my path to publishing.

The interview is about 25 minutes long, so don't worry, I won't be offended if you don't listen to the whole thing. Heck, I won't be offended if you don't listen to it at all. But check out their website, it's filled with countless treasures, great interviews and reviews.

The interview is here.

Thank you, Mark and Andrea! Hope to see you in Toronto next month.

Ants on stilts

Great name for a children's book, eh? Maybe a sequel to Whales on Stilts?

On Saturday night while on the bus on my way to a Halloween party, I was listening to old NPR podcasts from July, and heard the craziest thing (I'm once again coming into amazing news late, so forgive me if you've heard this before).

German scientists were studying the navigational abilities of Desert Ants, and had the theory that ants somehow counted their strides to navigate. To prove this theory, they cut the ants' legs so that their stride was shorter. They found that the ants came up short of their home. So then they tested the ants by making stilts for their legs to make their strides longer. To do this, they glued hog hairs onto each leg of the ant. Sure enough, the ants with stilts were overshooting their home. Therefore, they determined that these ants somehow counted the steps they were taking to find their ways home--they have some sort of internal counting-mechanism! Isn't that crazy?

The original study was printed in Science Magazine, but the language there is so full of science mumbo-jumbo; the articles on Seed Magazine and The Economist are much easier. This is the final paragraph from the latter:

The story, however, has a happy ending. Having proved his point, Dr Wittlinger returned both stumped and stilted ants to the nest and gave them a few days to recover. Then he let them out for another run. Now that they could re-count their outbound journeys, they were able to calculate the journey home correctly. Ants may not be very bright, but it seems they have a head for figures.

And check out this picture--an ant on stilts!

Kinda scary looking, actually.

Mentos and Diet Coke

Okay, I know I'm probably the last one to discover this--I was listening to an old podcast from June (NPR: Most emailed stories) and heard the story of these guys who were recreating the Bellagio fountain show using Diet coke and Mentos! It's so cool:



And for comparison, here's a shot I took of the Bellagio fountain when I was in Vegas this past July:



Which do you like better?