Zack Proton is wacky outer space fun intended for kids 7 to 10, but he has many fans outside of that range. It's great for reluctant readers and is an excellent way to get kids started on reading for fun.
Check out the web site at zackproton.com. Go ahead and do it now, I'll wait for you. When I'm not writing kids' books or making piñatas, I teach chemistry at the University of Texas. You can reach me by e-mailing brian at zack proton dot com. Take out the spaces, put in the symbols, and it ought to work.
So how did I get started making piñatas? When I was a kid growing up in suburban Chicago, my Uncle Bob and Aunt Darlene always had a piñata at our annual family Christmas bash -- and with 15 assorted cousins lined up to whack away at it, it was a bash!
But I never made a piñata of my own until fifth grade art class, where I received an Honorable Mention in the school contest. (Everybody who didn't win a prize got a "Horrible Mention.") My piñata was an oversize football made from a three-foot long oblong balloon that was covered in papier mache and painted brown. Since it wasn't pointed at the ends and didn't have those two white stripes, it looked less like a football and more like a huge brontosaurus turd with a white scar painted on it. But when the prize-winning piñata that was chosen to be broken in the big finale turned out to be structurally unsuited for hanging, I offered up my scarred turdball instead. This wasn't the selfless act of generosity it may appear to be -- I just wanted to save myself the embarrassment of carrying that big ugly bronto-turd all the way home and showing it to my mom. Until that moment, my plan had been to leave it in the yard and blame the dog. Thankfully, my "football" was smashed without ever leaving the building, bringing my brief and humiliating career as a piñata-maker to an end.
Twenty-five years later while cleaning my garage, I found a box of shredded paper packing material, and for reasons that baffle psychologists to this day, my first thought was that it would make an excellent outer covering for a ghost piñata. So I set about making two piñatas for a neighborhood Halloween party.
A couple years after that, I offered to make some traditional Mexican six-pointed star piñatas for the Spanish classes at my daughter's school to decorate for their Diez y Seis parties. I had very little time to make nine piñatas, and I set up a kind of one-man assembly line, working massive overtime hours for no pay at all (which turned out to be great preparation for being a children's book author). It was during this frenzy of last-minute piñata-building that my daughters dubbed me "Piñata Boy." The name stuck, and that same year I started making piñatas for their birthdays. I have been making piñatas regularly ever since.
This is the order in which the piñatas were made. Not all of them are on this web site. I'll add them later if I can find photos.
1995 Bat and Ghost
1998 3 Heart
1999 Barbie Heart, Shark
2000 Pokeball, Hello Kitty
2001 Green Dragon, Smaug
2002 Tropical Fish,
Porcupine Puffer Fish
2003 Dolphin, Parrot
2004 Shoyru, Disco Feepit
2005 Medusa, Rainbow Zebra
2006 Pirates of the Caribbean Skull, Princess Rubber Duckie
2007 Pigasus, Space Mouse (a Warlord of Nibblecheese), Tarantula
Zack Proton and the
Wrong Planet
Zack Proton and the
Warlords of Nibblecheese
Zack Proton and the
Red Giant