Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Hours, has this to say about the novelist's enterprise:

Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You ( Read more... )

Please, if you have a chance, visit the Mixed-Up Files today where tracyworld has posted a wonderful tribute to the banned books in her life.


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...and sometimes readers do, too.

I listened to this audiobook driving to and from Spokane this weekend and swear it took me ten minutes to drive 180 miles.


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Don't do what's easy for your revision; do what's right for your story.

--Simon Pulse Editor Annette Pollert on revision

Sometimes the stories that most need revising are in our heads, not on the page.

--Author Deb ( Read more... )

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Fourth-grader Noonie Norton is the quintessential misunderstood artist. No one seems to get her -- family, friends...principals. But Noonie isn't giving up. And today is her day....

If you scoot on over to The Mixed-Up Files of Middle-Grade Authors, my middle-grade home on the web, you'll find an interview with the creators of Noonie's Masterpiece ( Read more... )

School has finally started.

Mr. C is ensconced back at the university teaching YA lit. Next week he has his class reading Lizzy Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt, one of my favorite books of all time.

Catgirl has transferred from the charter school in town to our neighborhood school for sixth grade. She loves it. She has her own locker ( Read more... )

The shadow:

Mockingjay was amazing...and devastating. If you're wanting more discussion, the comment trail on Roger Sutton's blog has the best cross-talk I've found on the internet: http://readroger.hbook.com/2010/08/spoiler-free-zone.html

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Sun:

If you're looking for an antidote to post-Mockingjay trauma I have just the thing: Amy Goldman Koss's ( Read more... )

"I began to discover a way to expose the extraordinariness in ordinary things ... After that, it was as if Skellig had been waiting."


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