Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Celebrity Guest Judges! and Sundry Other Good News

I'm delighted to announce that the Celebrity Guest Judges for the Thomas Bowdler Fiction Contest below are none other than Dan Santat and Lisa Yee!


Lisa is the author of a series of three related middle-grade novels affectionally known as the "Milly trilly," as well as the young-adult novel Absolutely Maybe.


Dan is the author/illustrator of the past AALB picture book The Guild of Geniuses and future graphic novel The Domesticated Four. And the two of them collaborated on . . .


Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally), a very funny and heartfelt new chapter book coming out this September! My thanks to Lisa and Dan, who will render their verdicts in the three contest categories early next week.

Other news:

  • ALA this past weekend was terrific, from seeing Elizabeth C. Bunce get the Morris Award to talking for the very first time with the translator and author of Heartsinger (we edited the book entirely over e-mail) to attending the Newbery-Caldecott dinner to spending time with my grandfather to giving the Batchelder acceptance speech with Arthur to just hanging out and talking with many awesome and passionate kidlit people. I've rarely had a happier or more exhausting five days, so thanks to you all!
  • It turns out that the very nice Jacqui Robbins is also having a bad-first-lines-of-children's-literature contest inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton, and hers started before mine. It ends today, so hop over there to leave a last-minute entry.
  • My book is going to happen! Hooray! Yes, thanks to all you kind people, Leaf and Tree* is already a fully funded project over at Kickstarter, with $2000 raised (to print 500 copies) in less than two weeks. The project page will remain open through September 1 should anyone else be inspired to donate; every additional dollar goes to printing additional copies, which in turn affects my unit cost, which in turn will affect the eventual retail cost, so donations are good for me and for you if you think you might buy the book. Thanks again!
  • * Though I'm now thinking of calling it Second Sight (plus a subtitle), since so much of it deals with revision and getting a fresh look at your work. No one would confuse it with this, right? Right.
  • I just discovered (via @editorgurl) a terrific post by Justine Larbelestier on How to Write a Novel. I particularly like her spreadsheet method of bookmapping.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link to Jacqui's blog! I didn't know about her contest. She's a cool lady and a talented writer -- nice to see her get noticed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Congrats on the funding. Second Sight is an intriguing title though i really liked that beautiful image of the leaves. But then, I do have a thing for trees.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WOOT on the book money! Only forward.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was SO HAPPY to see Elizabeth get the Morris. I can't wait to see the video or audio of it. I keep looking for it!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I thought you and Arthur were fabulous when you-two made your joint speech Monday morning at ALA. (and wished it could have been part of the Newbery/ Caldecott festivities so that more people could have enjoyed it.)

    And thanks for inviting me to sit with you and the rest of the child-lit people for lunch at ALA. But I got hit with shyness and automatically said no, thinking the rest of you were a group that knew each other.

    I just now returned from the Romance Writer's Conference in Washington, DC (never do two conferences back to back), where A curse Dark as Gold was mentioned and shown several times. I was excited for you and Elizabeth.

    -wendieOld (who tends to be that knitter in the back row, often sitting on the floor because of arriving too late to find a chair.)

    ReplyDelete