Friday, January 02, 2009


My latest venture

Please come visit and enjoy a new chapter each week (updating at 11:59 PM Saturday night). This site, www.weeklystorybook.com, will publish the stories I've been doing in newspapers for the past eight years, with illustrations by Christopher Baldwin, Dylan Meconis, Marina (Rinacat) Tay and Clio Chiang, as well as some classic illustrations as in the example currently featured.

(I am beginning with a delightful series of fairy tales that I literally heard at my mother's knee, from a book that had entranced her as a child. This is a sentimental choice, but it's also a chance to try to build a little traffic before I put the more complex, original stories up there.)


The challenge is to bring readers back every week for another chapter, furnishing a teaching guide for teachers and parents but letting the kids just enjoy the story. I don't really have a business plan at this stage, but these stories have provided me with a little extra income over the years, as well as some for the artists, and, as newspaper education programs fade, I hate to let the stories fade as well, so I figured I'd share them on-line and maybe figure out a way to make enough cash to pay for the effort. Or not. Whatever.

The stories are fun and the kids will enjoy them. Please share this site with any kids, or former kids, you happen to know. A new chapter every Sunday, just like Prince Valiant!

(Post-Postscript: The link to the site, which was buggy when first posted, seems to be working now.)

7 comments:

Dann said...

The weeklystorybook.com link is 404, Mike.

Mike said...

I was fiddling with the URL - it should work now. Typepad hosts the weblog, but the domain itself is hosted at Dreamhost and so I had to do some nerdy stuff to make the URL www.weeklystorybook.com instead of a Typepad address. And I'm not nerdy, at least in that respect, so it took some poking around.

Short response: Try it again.

Anonymous said...

Right now it redirects to http://teachup.typepad.com/weekly_storybook/, which is still 404 from where I sit.

Sherwood Harrington said...

Give him time, boys, give him time.

Mike said...

As noted in the postscript, for some reason it doesn't like the link. I hope this is a momentary glitch, perhaps caused by the changes in the DNS mapping as they propagate between the systems.

Or it could be owing to the agency of an ill-tempered fairy ...

Dann said...

I'm linking directly to weeklystorybook.com from my blog and the link works fine from there.

Hrmph. The vagaries of Blogger.

Best of luck on the new project.

Regards,
Dann

Sherwood Harrington said...

Your link doesn't work for me, Dann. It just takes me to an ad for Newsguy. I think Mike's right; it'll just take a while for the info to propagate around the 'net.