Yesterday was a day in which much was accomplished on the always mundane homefront but also included a review of CM Mayo's The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire which I will be submitting for the next issue of Bookslut (along with a column on SFF titles - only one more review, of Zetta Elliott's A Wish After Midnight, to be written for that).

I am reading many good books and must update on them shortly.

But last night I started watching the Frontline special on "Poisoned Waters" which focused on the Cheasapeake Bay and Puget Sound and completely lost track of pretty much everything having to do with anything other than my sudden disgust with the poultry industry. Get this - factory farmers do not own the chickens - the chickens are owned by the company (like Tyson) and the farmers simply raise the chickens according to very strict company guidelines and then the company comes and takes them away for "processing". But the chicken manure - that is owned by the farmers and they have to deal with it. Now imagine you have 500,000 chickens on your property. How big of a manure problem do you think you will have? And now imagine a line of poultry farms running down the coast of the Chesapeake Bay. Starting to see how the bay is getting so many "dead zones"? Now listen to the lame ass poultry people explain why having to abide by federal guidelines would hurt the poor farmers who are already miles past getting screwed. Now get pissed.

We buy our chicken from a local company and we already pay more than most for the pleasure of eating food from a place that isn't trying to destroy the planet. Everyone who thinks they are getting their chicken cheap, well, they are fooling themselves. A dead bay is going to be a lot more expensive than a few pennies more a pound for chicken breasts.

Off soapbox now (and I haven't even started on the storm runoff problem in Seattle).

Then my son started exhibiting symptoms of the cold from hell which mainly included him saying he could not breathe and wimpering - all night long. He does not do the stuffy nose bit well at all. It drives me crazy but you can't insist a child breathe through his mouth while trying to sleep or...what. So not much accomplished in the evening or the night (like sleep).

However, late in the day FedEx dropped off Funny Business, compiled and edited by Leonard Marcus. It's a collection of interviews with writers of funny fiction like Daniel Handler, Beverly Cleary and Daniel Pinkwater (among many other great names) and while it seems like a worthy endeavor I have no time to read the book or review it right now as I'm on other things but then I saw HIlary McKay's name and I thought, well - there's always times for Hilary McKay.

I mean, really.

Here's the bit I just loved from her interview:

Q: Has being a parent influenced your writing in some way?

A: I try not to overprotect our children. We're lucky that we live in a little village and I can let our children loose to go around by themselves. There are a lot of children here in England and I suppose in American too, who are driven around everywhere and have an adult always in the background. It's very hard to write about them, because they're so supervised. I think that's why so many people write fantasy. In the old days, you could always get rid of the parents in the first paragraph by saying they're all going camping, or to India, or something like that - as E. Nesbit did. But now children have adults peering down their necks at all times. So, it's very hard, in a realistic story to let the children do anything adventurous. I remember having Rose go up a stepladder and being told by an editor, "I'm sorry, but you can't have Rose do that, because children might copy her and fall off."

And now we know why fantasy is so popular - because otherwise we would be dealing with the meddling parents all the time! And she is right - it is true. The parents were always off somewhere in those splendid British stories. Maybe this is why the Penderwicks books have been so popular; the kids have a safe place to wreak havoc but also freedom from their parental control (mom being conveniently dead of course). The appeal of Kiki Strike is obvious - it's all breaking out late at night and exploring on your own. Hmmm, interesting. I do love the Casson family a great deal - it is 100% the childhood I think so many of us wish we had. Still loved, but completely free.

Maybe we all need to move to a small village in England or something. (Miles from a chicken farm of course.)

[Funny Business is due out in October from Candlewick.]