Toon Thursday: Back on the Writing Track

After last week’s detour into politics, I’m back on track again with a writing-related cartoon–this one pertaining to craft, since we’re going to discuss voice and authenticity during our writing group chat next week. Of course, dialect (or even, dare I say, idiolect) is only one component of authentic narrative voice, and I’m most concerned with the idea of creating an authentic-sounding teen narrator…

Well, the Cybils nominations have closed–hope you had a chance to nominate some worthy books. In thinking about book awards, I remembered a link that a friend of mine sent me called Death By Newbery Medal. Although clearly the Somebody Must Die trope isn’t ubiquitous among Newbery books, it happens often enough that someone with a lot of time on their hands created a wiki article and list. It’s rather amusing, though I resent the allegation that “medal awarders are morons.” I’d like to think that our lovely Cybils panelists are a bit more discriminating than that.

Should boy books be judged by slacker standards simply because there aren’t enough of them, or enough good ones? A review of a dystopian novel over at Interactive Reader prompts an interesting discussion in the comments. I would have to say my answer is–to quote Andy Warhol–uh, no.

Lastly, in perusing more of the reports from the Kidlit Conference, I just wanted to link to a post by Mark Blevis (of Just One More Book) about the powerful community we’re building here in the kidlitosphere. Mark raises some important ideas about how we’re all changing the industry in little and not-so-little ways, just by virtue of our communication and coordination as a group.