Wishing everyone a wonderful Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, much-belated Ramadan, and general winteriness!
In the spirit of the season, I’d like to commend literary agent Nathan Bransford for his generosity in donating a dollar to Heifer International for every person who comments on his blog. His donation period is over, but if you click the aforetyped link (“aforetyped” is absolutely a word, thank you), you’ll find a list of other blogs running similar charity challenges. Leaving comments with them lets you help out a great organization for free!
For those who may not know, Heifer International provides farm animals, trees, beehives, and so on to struggling people around the world. Heifer also provides training, as well as stud service for the animals provided. The first female offspring of the gift animals are then passed on to other members of the original receiver’s community. Heifer actively supports peace, education, prosperity, and equality for all people.
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In other blogtastic news, this post by The Intern offers some . . . creative . . . ways to cut costs in traditional print media.
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I haven’t posted in a long time, largely because of grad school preparation. Most of that is done now, and I was thrilled the other day to get the reading list for a class I’m taking in YA literature. It’s long, including classics like The Chocolate War and The Outsiders, more recent books like Speak (shout-out to Laurie Halse Anderson) and What I Saw and How I Lied, and popular YA genre works like Uglies and, yes, both Twilight and Eragon. The interesting thing about this class is that it’s not an English course, but one from the Library Science department. The professor emphasized that we won’t be doing literary criticism, but analyzing what makes books appeal to the YA audience. As a writer of young adult and middle grade fantasy, I’m all ears.