Mr. Fitz hit its 11th anniversary in the Daytona Beach News-Journal March 28th; it's been running since 2000. Because I'm not syndicated, I'm not getting rich off this strip (my one loyal newspaper, the News-Journal actually pays more for Fitz than it does for syndicated strips). But I keep going because I love it, and I think people appreciate it. If you appreciate the strip, please email me and let me know, especially if you are a teacher. Nice encouraging emails are the best reward I can get. You could also buy one of my books or unique Mr. Fitz products. That's nice, too. What are my books and products? Funny you should ask... 

Products: Go to http://www.zazzle.com/dlfinkle

MAKING MY ESCAPE (YA novel): 

Making My Escape, my first Young Adult novel, is the story of a Walter Mitty-like teenager named Daniel Finn. When he's not dealing with a troubled home life, or with his attempt to make an epic science fiction movie with his friends using a Super-8 camera, he is off in a world of his own, a world full of spaceships, robots, cyborgs, epic battles... and narrow escapes that parallel his real life. Available at Amazon.com. CONTAINS 3 MR. FITZ STRIPS!

WRITING EXTRAORDINARY ESSAYS: EVERY MIDDLE SCHOOLER CAN! (Teacher professional book)

This book was written for teachers, but I've now discovered that parents are starting to buy it and use it at home when they grow weary of test-prep writing at school (the dreaded Five Paragraph Essay). I've also had adults tell me they read it to improve their own writing, so it's very versatile! But it's also great for its original purpose-- to get teachers thinking differently about how they teach writing. CONTAINS 84 MR. FITZ CARTOONS!

TEACHING STUDENTS TO MAKE WRITING VISUAL AND VIVID: Lessons and Strategies for Helping Students Elaborate Using Imagery, Anecdotes, Dialogue, ... Techniques, Scenarios, and Sensory Detail (Teacher professional book)

If Writing Extraordinary Essays is Cheers, this is Frasier; if WEE is Happy Days, this book is Laverne and Shirley (but not Joannie Loves Chachi)... Okay, so it's a spinoff. But it's a good one. Full of fun writing exercises, writing ideas, charts, activities, and insights. And Mr. Fitz and his students made it on the cover this time! CONTAINS 114 MR. FITZ CARTOONS!

PORTENTS (YA novel)

MR. FITZ VS. THE TEST SCORE ZOMBIES (Comic strip collection)

SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

Are you looking for a speaker for your young authors' conference, teacher's workshop, or writer's workshop? Do you want a speaker who is motivational, funny, enthusiastic, and who draws his own cartoons for the presentation? Check out these presentations:

Programs for Students:

 Frustrations and Enthusiasms: Finding Things to Say

This program focuses on helping students find that they do, indeed, have things to write about. Students will brainstorm several lists that focus on their likes, dislikes, and lives, and then begin to figure out how they might write about them. David will emphasize how his own childhood preoccupations have become the things he writes about as an adult!  For Grades 3 – 8

 Making Writing Visual and Vivid

Many student writers try to write using strings of adjectives and adverbs when they write. These strings of words turn into dull essays and stories. The real key to good writing is to create pictures that illustrate your point. In this program, students will discover the simple secret of creating word pictures, and then get to work creating different types of word pictures: pictures of places, people, events, and more. The focus is on having fun with writing!

 Read Like a Writer, Write Like a Writer

Rather than following simple formulas that make writing easy but dull (and often dull to read), this workshop offers students the chance to notice what real essay writers do when they write, and then apply those observations to their own writing. This workshop emphasizes organization beyond the “formula” five paragraph essay, and gets kids to think about playing with, brainstorming, and arranging ideas.

 Fiction Writing: The Art of Setups and Payoffs

Many people view fiction writing as a “soft” kind of creativity that no one should take seriously. Fiction is actually one of the hardest types of writing to do well, even as it is fun. This workshop will get students thinking about storytelling as a “big picture” activity involving plot, character, setting, and theme, and as a “close-up” activity involving narrative style, dialogue, and description. Students will get a chance to practice all these skills, and to try their hand at writing a short piece of fiction.

 Make-Your-Own Cartoons

Many people think that writing comics strips is “kid stuff” and therefore easy to do. Nothing could be further from the truth. This crash-course in cartooning gets students thinking about how to generate ideas, create characters with personality, draw characters, write gags and storylines, and layout frames with lettering and artwork for clarity and humor. David has been a cartoonist for the Daytona Beach News-Journal for over ten years, and has been teaching cartooning for over twenty years.

 Professional Development Programs For Teachers:

Program topics may be combined, depending on the length of the program.

 Engaging Student (and especially Reluctant) Writers

Many students have learned to hate writing by the time they reach middle school, and some are highly resistant to writing at all. This workshop focuses on activities that will engage student writers. Learn how to help students find topics they care about, have fun creating details, break away from the five-paragraph formula essay, and write essays they actually want to share with each other. The workshop will also address how to get student buy-in and achievement on state writing tests. For Grades 4 - 10

 Helping Students Prewrite and Organize Writing

Many students are very resistant to planning their writing, which often leads them to produce either formulaic, uninspiring writing or rambling, unfocused essays. This workshop focuses on prewriting methods that are actually useful for students, that promote thoughtful writing and critical thinking, and that help students produce well constructed essays. For Grades 4 - 10

 Read a Genre to Write a Genre: Reading Like a Writer to Increase Writing Skills and Reading Comprehension

Writing instruction geared toward tests tends to lean toward the formulaic and artificial. This workshop will focus on having students read real, published essays from newspapers, magazines, books, and the internet, and to analyze them for structure, elaboration, and rhetorical techniques. The focus will then shift to getting students to emulate real writers in their own essays, which tends to raise their scores more than any formula. For Grades 6 - 10

 Class-Starters and Bell-Work for Practicing Writing Skills

Teachers are often looking for new “bell-ringer,” start-of-class activities that are more than just busy work. This workshop presents a series of engaging bell ringer activities that give students lots of practice with important writing skills. Activities include using a proofreading story, a Clunker Clinic for revising awkward sentences, quick outlines, and one sentence word pictures. For Grades 6 - 8

 Teaching Students to Make Writing Visual and Vivid

Many students struggle with making their writing come alive with specific details. They tend to write using adjectives and generalizations. This workshop presents teachers with activities and writing exercises that will help them to teach students that creating word pictures is not only the key to good writing, it is also fun! Exercises teach students to describe people, places, and events, and to use hypothetical scenarios, figurative language, and movie techniques. The workshop will also include methods for getting students to transfer these skills into their own rough drafts and revisions.  For Grades 4 – 10.

 Overcoming Revision Aversion

Revision Aversion is student resistance to changing a rough draft for the better. This workshop will focus on the causes of revision aversion, and what you can do to help students revise by actually looking at their writing in a new way. Very practical conferencing and revision techniques will give you ways to help students see for themselves what needs improving, and how to improve it. For Grades 6 – 10.

 Teaching Student to Proofread (so you don’t have to do it for them)

Teaching students proofreading skills is one thing; teaching them to apply those skills to their own writing is something else entirely. This workshop focuses on how to do both, first with a variety of instructional techniques, from the proofreading story to the Fix-It-Fast, and then with advice for getting students to proofread their own, and each others’ writing—so you don’t have to do all the work for them. For grades 6 - 8

 Tips for the Test: Raising Scores without Sacrificing Authentic Writing

Most schools are under pressure to make students perform well on state writing assessments. Under that pressure, it is easy to lose sight of what really matters: students’ authentic writing. This workshop will focus on steps teachers and departments can take to ensure that all students can pass writing assessments—without sacrificing our beliefs about writing. Every strategy geared toward raising test scores is paired with a “real writing” application that emphasizes the real world writing skills all students need for future success.  For grades 6 – 10.

BIOGRAPHY

I'm never sure: do you write your own bio and web page stuff in first or third person point of view?  This used to be written in third (DAVID FINKLE is a native of upstate New York) but I've decided that's a little weird to talk about yourself in third person...  So I'm hereby declaring this bio a first person zone.  I, David Lee Finkle was born and raised in a very, very small town called Round Lake, just below Saratoga Springs, New York.  I then came south to get a B.A. in English with a minor in Theater from Stetson University, went back north for a year to do my student teaching at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY, but then returned to Florida after getting engaged to (and later marrying) my wife, Andrea. 

As a boy, I learned to read so that I could read the newspaper funnies by myself instead of having them read to me.  I drew my first cartoon in kindergarten.  During fire safety week, Mrs. Castle asked us all to draw pictures of what we should do if the school was on fire.  Did I draw everyone following the teacher out in an orderly fashion?  No, I drew smiling children roasting marshmallows over the smoldering embers of the school.  Later, I started drawing comic strips about a dog named Poochey (where I got that name I have no idea), and took over a  closet in my bedroom as my studio.  My friends, the Vallelungas, and I started our own media conglomerate called "Finkle-Vallelunga Productions" and wrote cartoon books, children's books, and magazines.  We sold these items to passers-by from a card table in the front yard.  Since we lived on dead-end streets, sales were not very brisk, but my relatives kicked in to buy some of our wares.  When we hit junior high, we began plotting our greatest triumph, a science fiction epic entitled "Nebula."  I've since fictionalized our efforts in my young adult novel, Making My Escape,  which was recently published by May Davenport Publishers and is available at maydavenportpublishers.com and at Amazon.com. 

Making My Escape is the story of a teenage boy named Daniel Finn who uses his overactive imagination to escape from his problems at home and at school.  He is daydreaming about an epic Science Fiction movie he is making with his friends, and the two stories, real and fantastic, begin to parallel each other. It's similar to both "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, as well as my own childhood, and continually flip-flops from reality to fantasy and back again.  It also deals with some heavy home issues, but, I hope, has a light enough touch to not be depressing.

Zapping back in time, though, in High School I wrote a comic strip called  "Camilot the Unicorn" that appeared in my  hometown newspaper, The Round Lake Journal.  I also tried a couple of fantasy novels and wrote and directed a play about wizards called Gamyarie (long before Harry Potter was a twinkle in Rowling's eye, thank you very much). In 1985, I graduated from Shenendehowa High School and headed south to Stetson University.  Two of my strips ran in the Stetson Reporter from 1985 - 1989: "The Mod Hatter" and "The Forest of Arden." I first got the idea for Mr. Fitz when teaching at Taylor Middle-High School in Pierson. I decided some of the events taking place in my classroom might make good fodder for a humorous strip, and also provide some therapy to help me deal with the frustrations of teaching. I worked up a six week sample, and started running on the funny pages in March of 2000, the same week Making My Escape was accepted for publication. "Mr. Fitz" currently appears in the Daytona Beach News-Journal five times weekly. I live in Deland, Florida, with my wife, Andrea (who one of my editors refers to as Mrs. Fitz). Our two children, Christopher and Alexandra, insisted that Mr. and Mrs. Fitz needed to have children so they could be in the strip: hence the recent birth of Mr. and Mrs. Fitz's twins, Tom and Jen.  Chris and Alex picked out the names, based on imaginary characters they used to play in their elaborate make-believe stories concerning Jedi Thomas the Tank Engine vs. the Evil Sith Lord Barbies who plot to take over the world as they work incognito as McDonald's drive-thru workers.  (I am not making this up.)  We've gotten a little beyond those games now.  Alex is currently in 7th grade (and in my class) and Christopher has moved on to the high school this year.  Both of them sometimes contribute ideas to the strip.

In 2004, I was named Volusia County Teacher of the Year for 2005, an honor from which I hope never to recover.  It has been deeply meaningful and a complete, unadulterated blast-- always a nice combination.  In 2007 I wrote an op-ed piece for the Orlando Sentinel about the fact that the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test only rewards mediocrity in writing. This drew the attention of Gloria Pipkin, an editor at Scholastic Professional books, who asked if I wanted to do a book proposal. I said, "Yes!" I told her about Mr. Fitz and she asked if I wanted to put cartoons in the book. I said, "Yes!"  My proposal was accepted, and the book, Writing Extraordinary Essays is now for sale. I'm working on a second book now-- Teaching Students to Make Writing Visual and Vivid. 

One other recent project involves my son Christopher. On a series of walks last year, we kicked around the idea that it would be interesting to take every mysterious phenomenon we could think of (Elvis's supposed alien abduction, Bigfoot, Area 51, where socks go when they vanish in the dryer) and combine them in one story that tied them all together. We finally came up with a premise that linked them all, and this year published the first of a trilogy of books about Ian and Chloe Portent-- siblings who have some very strange adventures. Portents is available at Lulu.com. We are currently at work on book 2-- Portals.