Life stuff continued (great news!)

Today I want to share some exciting news and then fire off some quickie book reviews. Here we go.

I’m now working full-time as a community and social media manager for Classcraft, a really cool browser-based role-playing game that teachers and students play together. It’s not game-based learning (eg., Minecraft) but rather gamification, which is when you take game mechanics and principles and apply them to non-game settings (in this case, middle and high school). Students choose whether they want to be a mage, warrior, or healer, and teachers reward them for positive behavior and punish them for negative behavior. Kids also learn fun powers that help them work together as a team to win. So anything that’s happening in the game is corresponding directly with their performance and grades in class.

This all happened super fast. The team’s founder, Shawn Young, encouraged me to apply for the position after I interviewed him for an article (here’s the piece on Fast Co). I still work from home, make my own hours, and get all the other perks of being a freelancer, but it’s full-time and pays well enough that I was able to drop a lot of gigs. I’m still keeping some because I love writing about video games, but this is a nice change of pace for me, and I’m excited to see how it goes.

What do you think? If you have any tips for me or want to ask me questions about Classcraft — anything at all (maybe you know some teachers who might be interested?) — go right ahead. :)

And in other good news, I don’t have to relocate to Philadelphia as previously thought, so my boyfriend and our cats and I are pretty happy about that.

On to the book reviews! GO, GO, GO!

The Girl Who Would Be King by Kelly Thompson – Probably one of the better superhero novelizations (are there a lot of those?). Original property, so it’s not based on anything. It tells the origins of a superhero and a super villain who are connected through their mothers and a long line of superpowered women. It’s good, but a little cliche/predictable at times, so I wasn’t huge on this. Awesome ending, though.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver – These are all life stories about ordinary people. Great but depressing? That’s Carver. Perfect if you don’t feel like getting invested in any one story more than 15 pages long.

Things are about to get interesting: working for Kirkus Indie

Bit of good news: I’m now a reviewer for Kirkus Indie! As a long-time comic book (and video game … and movie) reviewer (see my other blog for more), I can’t wait to start writing advance reviews of traditional books as well, and I hope you’ll be kind enough to read my thoughts on them. As anyone who’s been reading this blog knows, book reviewing is something I like to dabble in once and a while. (Add me on Goodreads!)

Writing for Kirkus also means shrugging off the old MLA coat and trying AP on for size. I’ve never worked with the AP style before now, but I borrowed a handbook and started studying it in preparation. Grammar and punctuation seem to be the biggies, along with spelling and abbreviations. Much of it is already familiar to me through general experience, and much of it carries over from MLA, but if you have any tips or advice, please share.