Tasha K. Rookswater

Oh my friends, I am overwhelmed. Today was the launch of "The Nominal Hero" in paperback and ebook, and the outpouring of support from the Nouns community has been just amazing. I hope all of you who bought or downloaded the book enjoy it, I hope your kids enjoy it, I hope it brings you the kind of happiness I'm feeling right now. For those who want to purchase the paperback, you can buy it on Amazon here . All you wonderful people actually managed to make it show up as "Temporarily out of stock" multiple times today, because their processing system did not realize what a fantastic community I am part of; so if you get that message, please just wait a few minutes and try again, and it ought to work. As well, my cover artist, the talented @Messhup , is offering his cover illustration as an open edition on Zora for all you digital art appreciators to add to your collections. This is such a cool idea; I always think it's so neat when people ha...

The proofs copy of "The Nominal Hero" has arrived, and it's everything I hoped it would be. I'm going to be launching the book officially this Monday, April 8, and the cover artist, @Messhup , will be putting out an open edition of the cover art on Zora at the same time. I'll be making PDF and ePUB versions of the book available here for free download; like Nouns themselves, this book is in the public domain, and I encourage everyone to share it, remix it, do all kinds of cool things with it, and tell me about them! The paper book will be for sale on Amazon - sadly, not free, since paper and printing cost money and we do not yet live in a Star Trek world, alas. But I will probably give you a copy if we run into each other in person somewhere. :) This is so exciting!

As I get myself organized to put out the ebook of "The Nominal Hero" -- it's getting there, I swear! It's just been quite the month with my day job, and the holidays, and this unseasonably miserable weather, and the suspiciously large flocks of ducks I keep seeing everywhere, which I begin to think may be following me around... Ahem. Anyway, as I was saying: as I get things organized for the ebook, it belatedly occurs to me that I don't have an index post, which a more organized person would definitely have put together sometime before they finished their entire book . Let's all pretend I did this earlier, shall we? Much appreciated. The Nominal Hero: A Nounish Tale Chapter 1: Specially Marked Boxes Chapter 2: Situation Nominal Chapter 3: Words and Rules Chapter 4: Something Fishy Chapter 5: Verbing Weirds Everything Chapter 6: Beyond the Fields We Know Chapter 7: Fungi-ble Chapter 8: The Revolution Will Not Be Randomized Chapter 9: A Council o...

Everything had gone quiet. An expectant hush lay over the crowd of Nouns, and over the human audience as well. A few flakes of snow drifted down. And out of the woods came the witches. They should have looked silly, Caden thought: twelve identical people with heads like cartoon toadstools, gazing out from behind square glasses like the ones Caden--(he touched his face)--like the ones Caden used to have. But instead the witches only looked otherworldly, their strangeness adding to their dignity somehow. It was Mushroom who broke the stillness. They jumped down from the stage and strode to the border of the trees, and spoke rapidly and urgently to the witches, in a low voice that Caden couldn’t hear. The witches swayed in unison, listening, and then a few of the closest inclined their heads in what might have been agreement. Mushroom bowed, and came back. “What was that about?” Caden asked quietly. Mushroom shook their head. “Later.” “Okay, but what--” Masami began, but then sto...

“Once upon a time,” Caden said, “there was, um. There was a world.” He stood to one side of a stage that was made from boards laid across haybales. The woman running things had given him a microphone. That was it, as far as sets and equipment went. Presumably most people brought their own. Two other stages flanked his. One of them held a crew in the middle of building some sort of complicated scaffolding. On the other, a line of women in Santa hats and short skirts did a dance routine to recorded Irish music. They looked cold. There wasn’t really much of an audience for any of this. People passing by looked curiously at Caden’s stage and at the dancers, but mostly didn’t slow down. The Winter Carnival’s main shows were in the evening, Mushroom had explained. Right now was for a grab-bag of amateurs, just to have something going on so there weren’t a bunch of empty stages dragging the ambience down. The Noun had seemed miffed at that. Well. Maybe they’d surprise people. “Um,”...

The city was covered that day in a layer of new clean snow. Caden spent the morning at the kitchen table, making notes, going back and forth to the bookshelves all over the house to look things up in his favourite stories. At eleven-thirty he ate a banana-and-cheese sandwich, put on his coat and boots, and headed out the door, Paz trailing behind him. The seven of them had agreed to meet in the parking lot on the east side of the university campus. It was near enough to Ruth’s school that she could walk there easily, it was close to where the Nouns had been spending their time, and it was spacious enough for Caden’s plan--his old plan, that was. But his new plan would need lots of room too. Masami and Hunter were already there. Ruth turned up a few minutes later. They waited. Duck and Mushroom were nowhere to be seen. “Could they have gotten lost?” Hunter wondered. “Or gotten the time wrong, maybe? Can Nouns tell time?” “They managed it yesterday,” Ruth pointed out. “I think they...

Caden woke, thrashing, tangled in his blankets. He was breathing hard, and he thought he might have cried out, but he wasn’t sure. The nightmare was already fading at the edges, in the usual way of dreams, but the last image stood out sharp and clear in his mind. Craters in the ground, huge and black, their edges melted into glass. Ruined buildings on the horizon like broken teeth. A setting sun, red in a smoky sky. And there’d been somebody with him, standing behind Caden’s shoulder so he couldn’t see them. He’d asked: “How long has it been like this?” And the answer had come: “Since always.” His breath was steadier now, and he could look around the room in the dark and see the safe, familiar shapes of his furniture, and the outline of the window, and the bar of orange light from the streetlight that shone across the foot of his bed--but none of it was reassuring. Caden knew it had just been a dream, but he also knew, or felt like he knew, that it could easily be real. If they we...

It was Wednesday lunchtime before they all managed to get together again. As expected, the elementary school was closed, so there was no problem inviting Hunter and Masami over to Caden’s house for the day. Ruth didn’t normally come home for lunch, but she was allowed to if she wanted, so they had an hour. Mushroom and Duck reappeared; they hadn’t gone back to the Nouns’ world, but had decided to stay and see a bit more of the human city while they waited to discuss the witch situation. Ruth had advised them to stay near the university campus and tell anyone who asked that they were part of an experimental theatre group. It seemed to have worked; at least, they hadn’t gotten in any trouble. So there were seven of them in Caden’s room, including Paz, whose participation was the price of getting to have his friends over. “Just let her play with you,” Mr. Keller had said tiredly, before disappearing into his office for the day. “It won’t hurt you to make her feel included.” Right now sh...

“They evacuated your school to ours while they try to get everything fixed,” Ruth explained. The six of them were headed back toward Ruth’s school now, at a walking pace since there’d been no sign of pursuit. “Rutherford Junior High--that’s where I go--is only about six blocks from Hesiod Elementary,” she added for the Nouns’ benefit. “It’s too cold for all the little kids to stand around outside, so they packed them into our gym. I went to check on you and Paz so I could text Dad you were okay, and your teacher said you hadn’t shown up today. And I thought, well, mysterious emergency the day after you found those glasses--I assume your friends know about everything?--anyway, I figured it was probably all your fault. Then Bethany said someone was setting off fireworks in the woods, and I thought, hey, Caden’s missing and stuff is exploding, gosh, could these things be connected somehow?” She shrugged. “So I followed the lights and the noise, and here I am.” “That was brave,” Mushroom ...

So: witches! I feel like a lot of witches in middle-grade stories tend to be basically humans with magical powers. Sometimes the story is told from the perspective of the witch (like "Kiki's Delivery Service"); sometimes the witch is a kindly figure who helps out the protagonists (Morgan Le Fay in the "Magic Treehouse" series - possibly she's a sorceress, but I'm not sure there's a difference for this purpose). If the witch is the villain, she's more likely to be non-human, but she's still got pretty understandable, human motivations: take over the kingdom, get revenge for something, etc. There are a lot of good stories there! But what I don't feel like I see enough of is incomprehensible witches. Witches that are like some kind of weird, mysterious force of nature, doing things for their own reasons that aren't necessarily explained to the audience. Like in "Macbeth" - why are the witches wandering about on the heath y...

There were thirteen of them. Thirteen mushroom-headed Nouns all clustered in the little clearing. One, Caden realized, for each shard of the broken lens. Had it split the power somehow, like a prism split light into rainbows? And if it had, did it hurt them? He took the glasses off his face, to make it safe to speak. “Um, are you okay? Mushroom? Mushrooms?” “Gah!” the nearest one cried, jumping back. “That’s freaky.” “What?” Caden asked, confused. “Your Noggles, you just took them off , like--” The Noun seemed to notice the other kids. “You’ve all taken off your--ghah!” The other Mushrooms didn’t seem to have noticed anything. They weren’t even looking at Caden or his friends, only at each other, and sort of--humming? Making a noise, anyway, weird and wordless, and, Caden realized, getting louder. “Do your glasses not come off?” Hunter asked Duck. “Well, not in public ,” Duck said, as though it were obvious. Maybe that was why Hairspray had disappeared, Caden thought. Not be...

Behind the soccer field, separated by a chain-link fence, were the woods. Part of them belonged to the conservation area, and part of them had something to do with the university, and if you went far enough there were the train tracks and the hydro right-of-way. It wasn’t wilderness, not even close. But it was the next best thing when you were limited to what you could reach on your own short legs. The air wasn’t quite as cold under the trees, with the evergreens blocking the wind, and soon they left behind the fire alarms and the sirens of emergency vehicles and the whooping and yelling of students released from routine. Everything was very still. Snow crunched underfoot. A bird called harshly, kark, kark, and another answered. The day felt bright and jewel-toned, like stained glass. This is what setting off on an adventure ought to feel like, Caden thought. It didn’t last, of course. It couldn’t. Before long his nose and cheeks and fingertips were numb with the cold. Trudging thr...

“This is better than your water jar, Masami,” Hunter whispered. The second Noun had a duck’s head, rather than its head being an entire duck the way Fish’s head was an entire fish. A small part of Caden’s mind wondered why, while the rest of his thoughts spun frantically, trying to figure out a way to tell them both to get behind the racks that wasn’t also another noun. Down was a type of feathers. Hide was a type of skin. You had to say the words by themselves, Bookshelf had told him. Caden took a deep breath. “Please-get-down-here-where-nobody-can-see-you,” he said all in a rush. This was a success in the sense that no more Nouns appeared, but a failure as far as getting them to listen to him went. “Would you please get down here!” he repeated, louder. “Humans!” the fish-headed one exclaimed, sounding delighted. “I thought they were a myth!” “Nah, my cousin’s met a bunch of them,” the duck Noun said loftily. Their voice was a sort of nasal honk. “They’re not so much.” “Your c...

One of the things that's hard for a kids' author is replicating the way kids talk to each other. Not so much the actual vocabulary level, grammar, speaking style, etc. of individual kids (though that's tricky too!), but the way they interact when more than two of them are having a conversation. For once thing, kids haven't always learned the rules of conversational give-and-take yet. By the time we reach adulthood, we've figured out what our local culture feels is the "right" length of pause to indicate you're done speaking, the non-verbal sounds that indicate you're interested, what counts as a rude interruption versus "taking your turn". Kids are still working this out. You get a lot more interruptions, where one child was definitely not done talking and the other breaks in with something that may or may not be related. One of the friends of my favourite eight-year-old pretty consistently responds to this by repeating what he was sa...

The temperature plummeted overnight, and the morning was bright and clear with a Severe Cold Warning on the weather report. Caden perked up when his dad mentioned it at breakfast, but Ruth, who had her phone out in defiance of the house rule about devices at the table, promptly dashed his hopes of a school closure. “They specifically sent an email saying school is open ,” she grumbled. “Just to rub it in.” “I don’t think that’s why,” Mr. Keller said mildly. “They probably don’t want parents to worry about childcare if they don’t have to. Not everyone’s as lucky as your old dad.” He did bookkeeping for various clients from his home office, as well as the accounts for the store, which Mrs. Keller had left early to open, as she usually did on Tuesdays. “Can our old dad drive us to school?” Ruth asked with a wheedling smile. “So we don’t get frostbite?” “Or eaten by polar bears?” Caden put in. “I think you’ll survive,” their dad said. “I’ll lend you my muffler if that floppy thing you ...