[fiction, instead of lies]

What I have been working on all this time in my Super Seeekrit lab!

Okay, maybe not. Kate, the Knopf Book Designer of Great Awesomeness, is the one who’s been working on this. I merely pointed and said, “Oooh.” This is the paperback cover, aimed at an entirely new audience, and coming soon to a paperback in Spring 2011.

What I have been doing in the Super Seeekrit lab is working on REVISIONS, which I will get back to shortly. But first:

Check out that Tangee lipstick, people.

Tangee was the lipstick of choice for many women during WWII. Although orange in the tube, it “changes color to accentuate a woman’s natural skin tone,” or so the ads said, and allegedly goes on clear. Postwar, my maternal grandma wore something called Blue Flame which was sooo dark red, it looked black. Now, as much as I love orange, I have to admit Blue Flame works better for me. I’d love to get my hands on some of that!

Note the unique texture of Mare’s helmet. The M1 helmet, issued to the U.S. Army, was covered with bits of cork and painted that famous Army drab, so it wouldn’t catch the light. Helmets were actually made of two parts — the shell, that sat, bucket-like, right on your head, and the liner, which had, in WWII, a brown leather chin strap.

So, most people who have seen this say, “This doesn’t look like Mare!” Well, probably not; the imagination of one doesn’t ever match the imagination of the many. But, didn’t Kate do a great job with her interpretation of Mare?

Here’s to a long shelf-life for our girl, Mare.

YES.

To any of the following questions, you have now received your answer:

1. Are you still alive?
2. Are you ever coming back?
3. Are you still working on your revision?
4. Are you still getting random ideas for your SF story in the middle of your revision?
5. Had you heard about Justine Larbalestier’s repetitive motion injury?
6. So, does that mean you’re getting out of your chair at times to get exercise?
7. Are you still slightly panicked about your Google Video chat with Oakwood School’s 6th grade Language Arts class?
8. Did you see that great Darcy Pattison thing about how to do lighting for your vid chat?
9. Are you already panicked about what you’re wearing to ALA?
10. Are you still having nightmares about the speech?
11. Have you heard from The Taskmaster lately? Did she remind you not to slack off?
12. Do you still love your job?

Yes, yes, yes.

March appearances look like they’ll continue to be a bit sparse, seeing as I somehow agreed to write an essay for the Hunger Mountain Journal and begin editing my church’s newsletter again, am doing long-distance book chats, still revising and writing and still getting all kinds of squirrelly new ideas for new books that I don’t need quite right now, and I’m trying to finish baby hats and baby blankets in my copious free time since everyone on the planet seems to be popping out a bairn, and I’ve fallen behind.

The essay I’m writing? Is on depictions of race on young adult book covers. I read this, and felt slightly ill.

I shall return. No guarantee whether or not I shall be sane at that time.

Bonne weekend.

I’m always a little grumpy that I’m not teaching anymore when I see the great book resources available now for those who work with young adults. I want to say, “No fair! They didn’t have that when I was teaching back in the dark ages!” Okay, so it was really only about ten years ago, and my last job was teaching fifth graders so some of it wouldn’t have mattered/applied to the age group anyway. But the point is: it’s awesome, and you need to know now. So, listen up, and pass it on:

I’ve previously mentioned the energetic and amazing Kay Cassidy, whose tireless efforts to pay forward the booklove she learned at her library as a kid has encouraged her to give back to librarians. By contacting over 150 authors and getting us involved in her Great Scavenger Hunt, Kay has created a free resources for librarians, enabling them to give away books and allow their readers to have more fun at her own personal time and monetary expense. Wow. And let’s all please repeat that little word together… F-R-E-E. This is a GOOD word for librarians, whose budgets are being eviscerated and bled dry. If you’re a librarian who hasn’t yet taken advantage of Kay’s Great Scavenger Hunt, find out how it works, and get involved!

Another great group of people working with classroom teachers are at Teachingbooks.net, an ALA affiliated website. They provide curriculum support in the form of book guides, links to author’s websites, little videos of authors, filmed in their homes, and probably the most fun thing, that great little feature about author’s name pronunciations — so now we all know how to say RYE-OR-DAN when we say Rick Riordan’s name, instead of the completely wrong REE-OR-DAN way I used to say it. (My all-time favorite is still Mr. Rhymes-with-Fresca, our former Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, but you can listen to mine here.)

The Teachingbooks Web 2.0 guru, Danika Brubaker, is corralling award honorees to become involved in the Coretta Scott King Book Award curriculum resource site. Have you ever explored this site? If you’re a teacher or librarian who works with older readers, it’s well worth your time. This site allows teachers to teach this year’s Coretta Scott King Book Award-winning books with extra help – a free online collection of primary source materials and lesson plans, including videos and audio clips from the authors themselves. Teachingbooks loves teachers, people. What a way to give back, and make their jobs easier!

(I sound like someone else, but here’s my little three minute reading from MARE’S WAR — and those in my grad school classes are now laughing at me, since I have successfully thus far avoided reading in public. I’m sure you can now hear why. I sound like I have a stuffy nose and I’m reading down a hole.)

(P.S. – Kay Cassidy’s book, The Cinderella Society is all about paying it forward… and comes out April 13, 2010.)

It’s nice to be right about how awesomely a book will be received by the larger world. I was awed and moved and impressed. And the Cybils Picture Book Award judges agrees.

Congratulations, Liz!

Congratulations to the rest of you fabulous writers as well.

Meanwhile, on the down side of Fortuna’s wheel, my corn snake died yesterday. I’d had him for eleven years — a long time for a normal pet, perhaps, but a very short time for a snake – they’re supposed to live for fifteen-twenty years or something. He was with me from my second and most challenging teaching job, and I’m feeling like an unfit mother for having left him behind in the States (first in a high school biology classroom, more recently with my horrified parents), and let him die. It’s likely very odd to cry over a reptile who never “felt” anything for me, but…one, I never claimed to be anything but very odd, and two, we don’t only love those things which love us, do we? Anyway, I’m not feeling chatty, so it’s a good excuse for me to dive into my work just now, and so I will. Ciao for now.

All Hail Amelia Bloomer!

Oh, yeah, that Amelia Bloomer. The one you did that report on in the fourth grade. Come on, you remember. She was responsible for bloomers, which were the means by which ladies of leisure in the 19th century were at long last set free to ride bicycles and enjoy the wind in their hair, on their own. Unencumbered by dragging dresses, they could ride the split-saddled French invention, and throw off the chains of the corset and the men who wanted them to wear them!

Why are we going back to the fourth grade? Because MARE’S WAR has been nominated as an Amelia Bloomer book.

From the website: “Exemplary books for girls and young women that celebrate their strengths and nourish their potential are needed now more than ever. The Amelia Bloomer Project produces an annual list of books for young readers, ages birth through 18, that contain significant feminist content-not just cardboard “feisty” or “spunky” girls and women, but tales of those who have broken barriers and have fought to change their situations and their environment. Members of the 2008-09 Amelia Bloomer Project committee evaluated over 400 submissions, discussed 128 titles, and finally, selected some 68 books for children and youth that comprise the best feminist books published in the last year and a half. These books show girls and women-past and present, real and fictional-breaking stereotypes to follow their dreams and pursue their goals, challenging cultural and familial stereotypes to gain an education, taking charge and making plans for community, regional, national, and world change. We celebrate the history of feminism and highlight strides made in U.S. history in particular, and hope that these books inspire readers to make the world a better place for all.”

The Amelia Bloomer Project creates an annual booklist of the best feminist books for young readers, ages birth through 18. They are part of the Feminist Task Force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association. Most readers probably haven’t ever heard of them before. I hadn’t, but I’m pleased to know that they exist, and I’m thoroughly honored to have the story of the women of the 6888th be a part of feminist history, as they deserve.

YOU GO GIRLS!

Every year, Aquafortis & I put out a call for people to get involved with RIF – Reading Is Fundamental – on our blog at Finding Wonderland. It’s a great organization (over 16 million books given to kids and counting) and the lovely staff always sends us a heads up on what campaign is going on. This year, they’re continuing the Macy’s link they started in 2007. Anytime in July and August, you can visit any Macy’s store in America and support RIF by giving $3 and getting a $10 off coupon for your next in-store purchase of $50 or more. Here are the details:

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2009 /PRNewswire/ — Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) and Macy’s have teamed up to launch Book A Brighter Future™, a national partnership to raise awareness and support of children’s literacy. The Book A Brighter Future campaign is an annual promotion held at Macy’s stores during the back-to-school season to help raise money for local RIF programs and to provide reading resources to the children who need them most.

This campaign provides an opportunity for Macy’s customers to join the effort and have an impact on literacy in their community. From July 1 through August 31, 2009, Macy’s customers can give $3 and receive a coupon for $10 off a $50 in-store purchase at any Macy’s nationwide. Macy’s will donate 100 percent of every $3 to RIF.

“Giving back to the communities where we work and live is a long-standing priority at Macy’s,” said Terry Lundgren, chairman, president and CEO of Macy’s, Inc. “We are proud that, last year alone, more than a million Macy’s customers participated in Book A Brighter Future helping to raise more than $3 million dollars for children who lack access to books. It is a great way for our customers to support the education of children in their own community while enjoying special savings for their back-to-school shopping at Macy’s.”

A pretty cool deal, all in all. Shoppers do more than just visit a store, and kids win big. But, there’s another reason that RIF is pretty special to me right now. It’s something their CEO, Carol H. Rasco, said, just this past Sunday while on the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog, where every week, people celebrate the top seven “kicks” that have happened with them. One of Carol’s kicks was …MARE’S WAR.

I started MARE’S WAR today, love it, Tanita! And a Mother stopped in front of me as I sat in a hotel lobby today to ask what I thought about the book, her two daughters read it last week and loved it also!

Thanks, Jules, for making sure I saw that. And thanks, Carol! I am… gobsmacked. And awed and grateful that Mare’s tale — and the story of the 6888th — is making little circles in still water… that grow larger, and larger, and larger still. History. Memory. Meaning. May someone reading the story have the realization that their time to make all three is now.

It only took sixty five years, but the African American women who served in the European Theater in WWII have finally been honored at Arlington. Check it out.

I’m excited by this. I’m saddened that so many have died in the years since the war, who never knew that their country cared about their contribution, but this makes me SO HAPPY.

Today we welcome back young adult writer Sherri L. Smith to Finding Wonderland! Sherri is the author of Lucy the Giant, a novel about a tall girl from the immense state of Alaska who tries to lose herself and her past in the wilds — and finds out what it means to have someone care enough to find you. Lucy’s story was Sherri’s first novel, and one of our all-time favorite Under Radar Recommendations.

Sherri’s other novels include the 2009 Louisiana Young Readers’ Choice Award nominee, Sparrow, and last summer’s MG novel, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet. This month we celebrate Sherri’s newest release, Flygirl, which hit bookstores just last week, and received a starred review from Booklist.

Passing. People of one ancestry or ethnic group being able to pass for another. Where does the phrase even come from? Once upon a time in the days of slavery, African American slaves who traveled away from their owners were required show passes to anyone who asked for them, to assure that they were on legitimate business. People who were not questioned, who were light enough, due to the blending of their genetics with those of the master’s family, were said to be able to “pass.” And from a long ago and ugly place we come up with a word that is alive and well today.

When Sherri told us the topic of her book, we gave a little twitch. Passing — is a loaded word, and not really a topic that gets talked about much in “polite society.” And certainly not in a novel for young adults!

Obviously, “passing” was a great big deal in the Jim Crow days, because African Americans were legally not allowed to do a whole bunch of things. People anxiously protected the status quo because most of the time, society prefers to tell us who we are, instead of letting us decide for themselves, so that there’s some kind of stability. The full force of the law came down on those who tried to rock the boat and choose for themselves. It could have cost Ida Mae her life to pass for white — but let me not give away any spoilers! Instead, let’s let Sherri talk!

When Tadmack and Aquafortis invited me back to Finding Wonderland, we exchanged more than a few emails geeking out over the shared backdrop of our latest novels—my Flygirl and Tadmack’s forthcoming Mare’s War are both set during World War II with African American heroines. We commiserated over the amount of research required, and what it was like to imagine the experience of a black woman in a Jim Crow world, never mind a segregated military. What we discovered is that we could go on for hours talking about race and identity. What it means to be a woman in a man’s world, what it means to be a black person in a white landscape. And it got me thinking about what our characters had to give up in order to be who they become during the course of our novels.

In Flygirl, Ida Mae Jones is a young black woman, the daughter of farmers, who learns to fly on her daddy’s crop duster. When the war comes, her brother enlists, and she finds herself, in a time of rationed gasoline, faced with the chance to fly again by volunteering for the Womens Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). This was a non-military program that trained women to fly Army planes in the United States—everything from towing targets for artillery training, to ferrying and testing new planes to be shipped overseas—all in order to “free a man to fight,” as the propaganda posters said. The catch is a big one, though—no blacks allowed. Ida Mae, thanks to her father’s side of the family, is light-skinned enough to pass for white. Her mother warns her against such a path—it could cost her her safety if she is found out, and her family if she wishes to stay on the “white” side of life. But Ida is young. She can only think of the immediate future, of a need to do something to help end the war. And so she leaves her mother, her grandfather, and her little brother behind. She changes the way she talks, the things she says, and she becomes, in all outward appearances, a new woman. A white woman.

T: This is such a great hook to the story – readers are interested already on many levels. Can she do it? Is it right to do it? Will she get caught? Perhaps for an African American reader, there’s an even greater drama. This is The Betrayal. This is the thing so many people are taught is The Great Evil. In stories passed down, in books, in old, old movies, this is what is known: you don’t “act White” you don’t “talk White;” you’ve got to “represent,” even if you have no clear idea what any of that is supposed to mean. The court of public opinion is in session, and if you’re not careful, you may find yourself held in contempt. But to choose to accept that part of her ethnicity that is not African American, and to choose to embrace that part… Wow. That is unimaginably heavy, indeed, at least for that time period.

Right?

AF: This IS a great hook into a story with a provocative theme—one that has the potential of making readers of any ethnicity think more deeply about our history and about what a struggle it can be to have to make a deliberate choice about how we portray ourselves to the world.

In thinking about it further, I strongly feel we need stories like this, stories that help us not to forget the more painful parts of our racial history, or, to paraphrase what George Santayana said, we might risk repeating it in some less flagrant but still insidious way—especially at a time that, some opine, is somehow “post-racial.” The idea, maybe, is to go forward aware of our histories, regardless of whether we choose to “represent” or not, whether we identify with one history or another.

It’s easy to leave where you come from. Just jump a car, hop on a bus or an airplane with a one way ticket and never go back. It might be hard. You might miss it, but once you’re gone, you’re gone. How, on the other hand, do you leave behind who you come from? The fact that you have your mother’s smile, and her way of shaking a finger when you’re angry. The way you walk like your dad, shoulders squared against the world, but a roll in your step like you’re always on vacation. How do you change or deny the fact that you and your grandmother both love to dance? How do you forget that knock-knock jokes always make you and your little brother laugh? I don’t think you can leave those parts of yourself behind. To do so is an act of great violence. It’s suicide. Self-immolation. Or, more precisely, it is surgery. Sharp, exacting, and without anesthesia.

T: It’s erasing yourself.

AF: Yet don’t we all want to exist on our own terms, independent of that “who,” that “where,” at the same time that we’re part of them? How much of that self-separation is a mask, an illusion?

I suppose at first that the rewards this surgical removal of self gains you act as a painkiller of sorts. The euphoria you feel breezing past the “members only” signs. The knowledge that you sit at the big table now, that you are looking out of the windows of the same big houses you used to stare into so longingly. You have become the face on the movie screen. That might ease or mask your pain.

But it must wear off. Everything does. Can it console you in the middle of the night when all you want is your mother’s cool hand on your fevered brow, when you are sick and feel hopeless and alone? You have money now, position, power. You can hire a chef to make the same soup your mother would have made you. You can even pay someone to sing the same songs to you. But would the recipe, would the lyrics give you away? You have traded a child’s solace for your new position. And you can never trade it back. Not evenly. Not equally. You might lose your new role one day, but the old one is definitely gone forever.

T: Well, to a certain extent, every one of us who leaves home to grow up walks away from a place, a role, a set of clothes that has grown too small and too confining. We lose our place because we become too big for it – we allow ourselves to grow. But if we’ve chosen to grow in the direction of the dominant culture, that’s so different, because we have chosen. But does that always mean that there would be no place for us within the minority? I guess historically, the answer would be… yes.

AF: And what if even the less visible, but no less fundamental, choices of identity—your aspirations, your goals, the ideas you hold most dear—also separate you from where you came from? What if the assumptions and judgments of your family, of the culture you chose to leave, build an invisible wall just as much as the choices you’ve made?

On the flipside, how do you forgive someone who has traded your love for brighter lights? You might. If it’s your child, you might forgive them anything. If it’s your friend, you might take pity when they come home. But how do you forgive yourself, if you are the one who has crossed the line? I cannot imagine. And imagination is my trade.

T: The question few people ask is whether or not there needs to be forgiveness — or, whether or not there was any wrong done except in the legal sense, during the Jim Crow era. The sense of moral outrage that people had over this was, in part perhaps because there was a Line, a broad line between the races that strictly divided ‘have’ from ‘have not’ and ‘can’ from ‘cannot.’ Would people truly have issue with someone “acting White” or “choosing White” if there were not still social and monetary consequences for doing so? Does the privilege of the majority actually exist without the subjugation of the minority — I mean, isn’t deciding one group of people is better basically a game you play, based on who you decide not to like? It’s very much like a playground game, with no real right/wrong, rhyme/reason, and when the whistle blows, the reality of the game dissolves. Which brings up the question of if there is a kind of moral obligation for a person who can go either way to embrace the minority culture, or else be considered a bad person?

AF: Another question: If you embrace one of your cultures, does it automatically entail a denial of the other(s)? I believe we have a tendency to assume that’s still so, because in previous eras—e.g., in the Jim Crow era—it did mean that in a very real way. But now, the idea of the “dominant culture” is a little more complicated than simply “white culture.” Maybe that means there’s some room for variation, and room to keep what once had to be denied.

My mother passed away a little over a year ago, and my father passed just this last November. More than ever, I am constantly reminded of the pieces of them that make the whole of me. Why I read what I read, why I speak in the cadence I do. Who gave me that favorite sweater—what did they know about me that would make it my favorite? Why I feel about the world the way I do. Some of it is unique to me, I suppose, but so much of it is given to me by my parents, and their parents and so on. Our personalities are our inheritance. So, then, how do you walk away from who you come from when they are encoded in your DNA? If Ida Mae marries a white man, will she still worry that their first child’s skin will be dark like her mother’s, or her brothers’? Will the baby’s heritage show itself in the genes? Or just in a familiar smile, a way of laughing that twists Ida’s heart because it sounds like the brother she left behind?

To always be afraid that some of your “self” might be showing—what kind of a life is that? It’s a life so many people have lived, by choice or by necessity. I know at least two people who discovered only after their mothers’ funerals, that their mothers had been secretly Jewish. I know a boy whose oldest sister is in fact his mother. A charade that the entire family played for years. I only learned the truth when the boy was whining one day and called his sister “Mommy.” The middle sister, my friend, pulled me aside later to explain. And it was never mentioned again. And then there was the former acquaintance who believed himself to be securely in the closet, unable to remember the drunken cocktail hour during which he outed himself (in very unfortunate language) to his bosses. (It did not matter to them that he was gay, but the manner in which he told them… and the entire bar, left something to be desired.)

T: That is such a tough way to be outed — when you stumble and do it to yourself. A woman I knew had a child with a man of Mediterranean ancestry, and did not let that secret go until her son had children of his own, and her grandchildren had a genetic disorder common to people of Mediterranean ancestry… there really is no way to walk away from who you are, when it is encoded into your DNA. And even if the secret is mostly kept, when it is discovered, that same explosion occurs sometimes, as those who thought they had a right to know the secret of your true self feel ultimately betrayed.

What does it cost to be “sister” to your son or your nephew? What does it take to deny that you ever gave birth? What does it mean to hide your faith, your heritage because the people you move among, work with, the people you marry might despise you if they knew the truth? Clearly, for at least one of the above people, the pressure was too much, and the secret burst forth like steam erupting from an overheated engine. Imagine, then, the pain of holding the truth in for the rest of your life.

AF: It’s quite interesting living where I do, in a rather large town that still, in many ways, retains many small-town characteristics. There are still milieus where I keep quiet about the Pakistani heritage I get from my father—especially over the past eight years—and about the fact that, yes, he is a Muslim. And I feel like, on a day-to-day basis, I AM passing—for somebody Latina, maybe, or Mediterranean, or just somebody with a really dark tan. Being mixed does mean that sometimes, even if you don’t mean to, you’re hiding something about yourself simply because it’s not immediately apparent.

Now, some of you are thinking, “I could never do such a thing.” Those of us who believe we are too righteous, too proud, too much our selves to pass as anything other — what are we lying about? How are we passing?

Now imagine that that terror never leaves. That it grows, that it wraps itself around the base of your brain and calls it home to stay. It can’t unmake who you come from, only force you to suppress it time and time again. And then, I wonder, do you eventually suffocate? Or does only the part of you, the secret, the offending detail, die?

Keeping who we truly are a secret must cripple in so many, many other ways. Passing for reasons of race, gender, class, or ethnicity is historically depicted tragically in literature and film — and nowadays, it’s played in an exaggerated way for laughs, but few people explore it seriously, and even fewer in YA literature. Sherri, I really appreciate that you kind of climbed out there on a limb and wrote about this — from a historical perspective, which allows us to both consider our distance from the past, and to think about our identity within the context of our own times.

AF: Yes–and we’re honored that you chose to stop by and share your thoughts with us. Thanks!!

A discussion guide for Flygirl is available on Sherri’s website.

Read Sherri’s funny interview at The Five Randoms,
Find out what she’s looking forward to this month at Bildungsroman,
Next Monday, stop by The YA YA YAs for a thoughtful Q&A, and then wind up the tour with Shelf Elf on the 13th.

After that, Sherri’s off to Hedgebrook, for two weeks with no phone, no worries, and someone else to make the coffee. Sounds like a well-earned writing retreat to us! Congratulations!

Graphic courtesy of the Chinese horoscope site.

Welcome to The Year of the Ox!

I still maintain that having two New Year celebrations is the best idea, ever. All of the resolutions that you’ve already blown through twenty five days ago are over — so, you can start over while munching on a banh tet trung thu or mooncake, and decide that the Lunar New Year might work better for you!

The perfect book for this two-week celebration of the Year of the Ox is Kao Kalia Yang’s The Late Homecomer. Conveying both the horror and the sweetness of a life lived in the midst of war, yet protected by a loving family, Kalia is a voice for the Hmong, a tribal people who lived peacefully in villages in Laos, until the CIA and The Secret War destroyed that way of life.

Kalia’s memoir details the story of her family’s escape from Laos to the refugee camp in Thailand, where she was born in 1980, to their immigration to St. Paul, Minnesota, when Kalia was about six. She talks about the grandmother who kept alive the traditions and the customs of the Hmong people, many of which were lost, as separate groups of Hmong were thrown together in the refugee camps, and re-educated in American ways. More than just the story of the Yang family or of the Hmong, this is the story of Kalia’s grandmother, who named her, enchanted her, educated and loved her, and represented to Kalia the bedrock of everything she had ever known. In 2003 when she died, Kalia realized that her grandmother’s life and the life of the Hmong was something everyone should know about, and she wrote it all down.

Kalia is a young writer whose engaging, clear narrative makes her family’s history, and our shared Hmong and American history poignant. Her family’s struggles and victories become our own, and young people looking for a book on a portion of American history they might not have read before will be able to devour this very readable book in a single afternoon.

Since we don’t review non-fiction, at our book site, I sneaked this satisfying memoir in under Non-Fiction Monday status, and in honor of my little sister, whose birth people are Hmong. Happy Tet.

Y’know, Blog Blast Tours rock! It is so much fun to have an excuse to peruse blogs and read author interviews first thing every day for as long as we like!

We’re all busy celebrating books this week, but I don’t want this celebration to sneak past: Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris IS OUT. Not one, but two starred reviews, and the School Library Journal invoked the sacred name of Indiana Jones! Whoo!

Congratulations, Robin LaFevers, whose fabulous presence graced us during the Summer Blog Blast Tour this past May.

Of The Serpents of Chaos we said, “It’s a novel with mystery, magic, adventure, sinister villains, cool Egyptian artifacts, a moody Victorian London setting, cool cover art and—perhaps most important—an inquisitive and indomitable heroine.”

We can’t wait to talk about Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris. Tibi Gratulamur! Cheers!