Some Timely News

I Almost Forgot About This
We've already started Teen Read Week. Yikes!

Teens can vote for their favorite books at the Young Adult Library Services Association website. The top vote getters will be named YALSA's Teens' Top Ten. Personally, I believe I've read only four of the books on the list. I'd really like to vote for one of them, but I feel honor bound to abstain, not being a teenager and all.

Tonight at 8:30 pm (EST)YA Authors Cafe will hold a chat on YA books with three YA librarians and a teen literacy advocate. I have yet to attend a YA Chat. Maybe tonight will be the night.

More Awards?
Didn't I do a whole bunch of posts about awards a couple of weeks ago? Well, it appears that it's award season again. I am overwhelmed by the number of awards I've been reading about recently. Fortunately, they're mostly for adult books, so I can ignore them. (The only important awards--Newbery and Caldecott--are announced in January.)

However, the National Book Foundation does give out a little something called The National Book Award and young people's literature is an included category. Sooooo, the finalists are:

Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf)

Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam)

Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum)

Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest)

Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt)

I'm so humiliated. I haven't read a single one of these titles. And I read a lot of YA and kids' books. What's wrong with me? Am I not attracted to awardie-type fiction?

An Interesting Tidbit From a Writer's Life
I had a lovely experience yesterday. I was finally making some progress on a chapter I've been working on--sort of--for the better part of a month, when I realized that I just couldn't use it in that book. This is why when I'm visiting schools and teachers say to me, "Would you speak a little bit about your writing process?" I always think, "You don't really want me to do that."