Odds y Ends

Boy, this is a week for fierce discussions. Last week, a review of Wild Girls was under witty debate from various literati. I love what Colleen of Chasing Ray has to say about it today.

“Young girls in particular love to write. They write bad poems, bad stories, notes in class and many many overly dramatic diary entries. Writing is a big deal to them as an age group and it does help in all kinds of ways. In this case, I didn’t think that learning to be better writers solved all their problems – the problems were being solved (one way or another) by the adults. What Sarah and Joan had to do was learn how to be brave enough to see their parents as people and not just parents and to share their own thoughts and concerns about the decisions those parents were making.”

That’s huge. I very much want to read this book!!

Meanwhile, other debates rage… After thinking about it: I still don’t much care about the Dumbledore thing, but I do think that it’s strange that it matters so much to some people. We are taught, in writing children’s books, to have the children take center stage in problem solving and in adventures. I guess if you’re done with the series, you can go on and talk about the adults… but why? What Ms. Rowling has done doesn’t upset me — and just for the record, I haven’t gotten to the last book yet, (so I don’t know if this other wizard guy even shows up — I assume that he does [which begs the whole question of “Hey! Wasn’t Dumbledore dead?!” but Hogwarths wizards don’t die, they… go into paintings. Or something.]) and maybe it will make more sense when I do.

It seems to me a lot like the Lemony Snickett thing with the Book Burning parents association — a kind of Gotcha! Made you look! kind of P.S. to a series of stories. It’s not thoroughly pointless, I mean, it makes a lot of sense from a PR standpoint… but like fans who were very offended at Daniel Handler for what they saw as a cheap publicity trick, there are people who feel that the stories needed nothing else, and are upset about additions to what they saw as set in stone, printed, and done.

I’m not sure story ever IS “done” – especially since every reader brings something new to the story, and writers only imagine they’ve revealed its entire scope. We live in the world of Fan Fiction; Dumbledore’s probably been gay a long time …

The Chronicle has a story on the profits of blogging — since I know we’re all making bank in the YA/Children’s blogosphere…

Via Bookshelves O’ Doom, I am now addicted to… Free rice, rice, baby! I had to quit after 1100 1840 grains… I was sort of horrified into playing as long as I could. I mean GRAINS of rice?! How many grains in a pound?!