Compulsory Reading

This strip at comic artist Alison Bechdel's blog is genius (Thanks Leila).

Last one, I promise

Read the GalleyCat entry on the Glenn Beck "emasculation" thing if for no other reason than to giggle at the Dr. Strangelove reference.

Anne Spollen on Anne Spollen, and More Emasculation

The Shape of Water author Anne Spollen has a blog at Amazon.com where she's discussing some of the details behind her novel. Check it out.

Also, though I was reduced to incoherent sputtering by the Glenn Beck interview with Ted Bell, Colleen at Guys' Lit Wire was not. Check out the post and the abundant comments.

A good review for The Tree Shepherd's Daughter

Bookshelves of Doom just posted a great review for The Tree Shepherd's Daughter, book one of The Faire Folk Trilogy. Do check it out, and, as always, I suggest you make Leila's blog a regular stop.

Something for Nothing

Robin Friedman's next novel, Nothing, is due out soon, but it's already getting some excellent notice, particulalry in this review from Little Willow.

More Good News for Barbara Shoup

Leila Roy of Bookshelves of Doom just a posted a fine review of Shoup's Everything You Want. Head on over for the full review (and add her to your feed reader. It's one of my favorite blogs and sources for shamelessly literate T-shirts). Here's the gist: "I really enjoyed this one . . . . Definitely recommended to older fans of Sarah Dessen and other contemporary realistic fiction."

A.S. King on Writing Pissed

A.S. King, author of The Dust of 100 Dogs has a great post on writing over at the Mystic-Lit blog. Do have a look.

"Frankly, I learned to write with my middle finger up. I'd had it with the changing fads I never fit into. I didn't want to do what the how-to books told me to do. I didn't aim or outline. I didn't learn a formula for fiction. I didn't read the right books for pleasure. I didn't join internet writing groups. I stayed away from advice and articles and books about writing. This wasn't about selling. It was about learning. So I wrote – what I wanted to write – with my middle finger extended."

And, for anyone who's interested in seeing what Ms. King's writing looks like when she's got her central digit fully extended, here's a tiny bit Dust.

7 – The Invasion of Doctor Lambert

The psychologist my mother sent me to was a nice guy, I guess. He was about six foot three with a soft, rounded plump in the middle, and he wore a pair of round framed glasses that he would occasionally push up with his middle finger.

My first visit was the slowest fifty minutes I ever lived through. I didn't want to say too much, so I let him ask the usual questions between bouts of silence.

"Saffron, why do you think you're here?"

"Because my mother is worried about me." Short and sweet – try not to show too much angst while already popping his fingernails off, one by one, with an awl.

"Why?"

"Because she wants me to be a doctor."

"And you don't want that?"

"No."

"What do you want to be?" he asked, realizing how condescending he sounded a second too late. "I mean, what are you interested in?"

"Lots of stuff."

"Like what?"

I listed a few things. I talked about my favorite classes, history and advanced chemistry, but didn't name any one thing, then said, "I know what I want to do. I just want to do it, that's all. I don't want to talk about it for months and months before I do it."

"But you can't just go to college without planning," he said quite seriously. "You have to talk about it with someone."

"It's not college."

He smiled at me. He had trustworthy eyes, a brown sort of hazel, with a twinkle. They nearly made me want to stop seeing myself whipping him with his own severed forearm.

"Let's talk about school for a minute."

"What about it?"

"Your mother says you do very well."

"I do. It's easy."

"So, you're bored, then?"

"Yeah. You could say that," I said, looking around his disheveled office. "What's that?"

He turned around to see what I was looking at, and explained, "It's an eighteenth-century chest brought from Europe by my great grandfather."

"Are those brass?" Brass catches like Emer's chest.

"I believe so. Have you seen one before?"

"In museums and stuff," I lied.

Band Geek Love

We're hearing some great things from the blogosphere about Josie Bloss's Band Geek Love--like this post from the Ya, Ya, Yas and this one from Book Divas.

"I really enjoyed all of the characters and was pleased Josie Bloss took the time to focus on the very endearing secondary characters and concluded their respective storylines in a satisfactory way as well. Overall, I give BAND GEEK LOVE a resounding two thumbs up and will look forward to what Josie Bloss writes next!"

Mr. V. on the Summber Blog Blast

Brian just reminded me of this:

"All this week, the major YA lit bloggers have been hosting the 'Summer Blog Blast Tour,' offering a slew of interviews with some pretty big names in YA. Our own Varian Johnson gave a great interview that was posted today on Finding Wonderland. Check it out."

Yes, do.

Overshare

Gawker calls blogger Emily Gould one half of blogging's equivalent of George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia, and if that's the case, then Martha's taking the war to the New York Times, with a piece in this Sunday's Times Magazine, wherein she gives a great deal of insight into her life online.

The details of who Emily Gould is and the Gawker backstory are readily available and well covered in the piece, and none of it is explicitly fodder for a blog about teen fiction. After all, Gawker and its ilk are creations of 20 and 30 somethings who straddle (barely) a pre-Internet era. You can only talk about "overshare" if there was once an established level of appropriate sharing and you can kind of remember it. In Emily's words:

Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

It's that last sentence that I think has interesting implications for writing teenager characters and scenarios. What does it mean when your youthful indiscretions are Googleable? When you no longer have the luxury of the circumscribed playground of high school, where your record is essentially expunged at the end--at least as far as the public is concerned?

Inevitably, in high school you will seek a platform and want to be heard. When you get that platform, you will, in all likeluhood, say something you won't want to be reminded of in a decade. Ten years ago, the scope, audience, and longevity of that platform for all but the most outrageous acts was narrow, small, and short. You could be someone at sixteen and not hear about it when you were twenty six. I didn't quite rise to Emily's level in high school, but I certainly wrote some things in school publications that I'm glad not to find on Google (I recall evoking Nazi fascism in a critique of a relatively mild dress code). I'm the only one who remembers them. For lot of teenagers, there is no similar experience. Very little is truly temporary or private. What's it like not to have the experience or expecation of privacy and impermanence?