this/that on a Wednesday afternoon

Overdue and most hearty congratulations to all of our writer friends who were honored, awarded, and praised in the recent ALA Youth Media Awards! You all are, of course, winners with us whether anyone gives you a plaque or not.

If you didn’t make the awards, Colleen did, and even with the milkshake thing, she makes it sound fun.

As noted elsewhere, the Awards this year were disappointingly skewed toward the dominant culture except, of course, in those awards specifically for people of color. That’s why series like Bordertown, coming from Scholastic this year, are a continually hopeful sign. Malín Alegría (ESTRELLA’S QUINCEAÑERA) writing about growing up bi-cultural is should be relevant and brave and worth reading.

It’s the 21st year of the African American Children’s Book Fair, held in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. If you’ve never heard of it, you may now consider yourself schooled. Hope to hear some of you can check it out.

Austen fans have myriad reasons to rejoice these days, but the biggest one yet may be the soon-to-be released Austenland, by Shannon Hale. Shannon’s blog holds the latest news, and a little snippet of the film.

The Guardian Books kidlit club is hosting John Green for a podcast. It will be interesting the types of questions he gets asked, and the direction in which the discussion goes, with the recent clickbait piece in The Daily Mail about “sicklit” (and you’ll note I provide you no link).

Kate Beaton has many awesome artist friends who she’d rather you didn’t rip off for your suggestions Valentine’s cards. Just in case you were concurrently thinking of dictators and communists and the language of love.

YA speculative fiction authors discuss which books they think would work well rebranded as YA lit over at SF SIGNAL. All hail to another vote for THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD!

“Two relatively ordinary sentences, overlooked for the very fact that they are meant to be overlooked, for they are words, and not all words do the same kind of work. Some are like warped planks strewn across a swaying drawbridge—they command the reader to halt at the precipice and admire its steepness before taking a deep breath and proceeding with caution. Others push us along with haste like a fierce backwind. But neither is less essential, and what makes them work as a whole is the interplay between the two, the gusts that push us to the edge of the cliff.”

An absolutely fabulous article about making your words do the work their intended, and not overwriting from Brooklyn writer Jack Cheng, called “The Keyframe Bias.” Hat tip to Lissa Wiley for this gem on writing – and avoiding overwriting.