Talk Like a Pirate Day is silly, originated by a couple of jokesters, John "Ol' Chumbucket" Baur and Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summers. They wrote a silly pirate book that actually does have some data inbetween the booze'n'broad jokes, and they picked Sept 19th as the day as it was the birthday of one of their ex-wives and they wanted to tweak her ( Read more... )

I love ediscovering old favorites and finding the old magic still works, if not as intensely. One of these--I've never heard anyone mention it--is Mary Chase's Loretta Mason Potts. It was pubbed by Lippincott (how many of my generation's old favorites were put out by Lippincott?) in '58, and illustrated charmingly by Harold Berson. I do remember ( Read more... )

asakiyume attended this panel, and camera-snapped her notes here.
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Touching, as it happens, on teh gay again.
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YA and Sex. Heads up for my more conservative friends here: this post is going to include some discussion on crossing gender lines with sex, friendship, and love, if this makes you uncomfortable--or you're underage and your parents don't want you reading it (I know there are at least a couple twelve year olds linked to this blog on their ( Read more... )

As a reward for vetting textbooks, I treated myself to rereading Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia trilogy. Excellent books! For those who might not have sampled them, I highly recommend them--but please don't go any farther, as the discussion (if people want to discuss it) might get totally spoilericious.

In fact, here's a cut.
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One of the things I've been doing in fits and starts is discussing SF with kids, specifially why they prefer fantasy, and why they won't read it, though some do watch it on TV. (None of them like Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, etc--all too grown up, not surprising, but a bunch of them watch anime, esp. the kids who speak Asian languages as first ( Read more... )

I've poked into a few of the books I've received due to being connected with the Norton Award thingie. There's one that's gotten touted bigtime that made me wonder if it was really written for kids, or uses a lot of kid tropes but is actually written for adults. I realized a page or two in that I would probably have been puzzled at some of it ( Read more... )

A question that came up on one of the Ya panels: "What does writers owe readers?" has still got me thinking ( Read more... )

Three excellent YA reads:
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