Fusenews: Though on second thought, maybe naked monarchs are kinda frightening in their own way.

My workplace is so weird.  I just sit about waiting around until things bop me over the head to alert me to certain facts.  For example, yesterday morning nice Harper Collins invited me to a Meg Cabot event happening this Friday in my library.  That’s cool.  I like Meg Cabot.  I wouldn’t mind attending either.  They’ll probably feed me.  Then I head on over to Cheryl Rainfield’s blog and see this interesting bit of information:

Huh.  Really?  I know that the Meg Cabot party is to celebrate the release of the last Princess Diary book.  This must be tied into all of that somehow.  I also know that they wanted to put tiaras on our library lions, but that there were some concerns about damaging the old statues.  I wonder if the donated tiaras will be at the party.  I wonder if I’ll be able to try one on?  You know the one I’d like of course.  Chris Van Allsburg’s.  It’s all in my last name.

• Thanks to Facebook I’ve been able to find additional links and little bits of information I might have missed out on otherwise.  For example, the newest blog I’ve grown fond of is Publishing Talk.  It describes itself as, "mashing up books and social media", so the Facebook discovery appears to be particularly apt.  It’s not strictly about children’s publishing but the information you’ll find here is certainly applicable.  Particularly the post 10 ways to use Facebook.  This is a site that’s consistently updated and chock full of stuff you would never have thought about in a million years.  Good reading.

• The Sydney Taylor Book Awards are so perfectly timed.  They come out just before the Newbery/Caldecott craziness, allowing for ample oohing and ahhing.  This year’s Gold Medalists for kids included:

The Sydney Taylor Book Award Winner for Younger Readers:

As Good As Anybody: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom by Richard Michelson with illustrations by Raul Colon (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books)

The Sydney Taylor Book Award Winner for Older Readers:

Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse (Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan)

You can check out the full list here.

• And in that omnipresent darkness, a single light shines clear.  Which is to say, in the midst of the TinTin movie nuttiness we’ve been hearing about, we learn that Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are playing Thomson and Thompson.  With casting like that, they may just turn this thing around.  I can haz Dylan Moran n flm 2 plz?  Many thanks to bookshelves of doom for the news.

• From  The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Mayor Nutter said yesterday that five of the 11 library branches once scheduled to close permanently on Thursday are instead on track to be taken over by private foundations, wealthy individuals, companies, and community development corporations."  What?  Oh.  Ha ha.  Good one guys.  I should have been been tipped off by the fact that the name of the guy saying this was "Mayor Nutter".  You totally had me going there for a second.  Thanks to Bookninja for the link.

• Extra extra!  Fairy tales too scary for today’s nebbishy children!  Wimpy parents in turn create wimpy tots!  The article quoted here happens to include a list of Top 10 Fairy Tales We No Longer Read.  Anyone else want to point out the irony of our modern society not reading The Emperor’s New Clothes anymore?  And while it may be considered many things, scary it is not.  Thanks to Educating Alice for the link.

• Author and Newbery Honor winner Kirby Larson done up and made herself a new blog.  Thanks to Wagging Tales for the news.

• I try to ignore anything and everything that has to do with teen stuff.  But that doesn’t mean that you have to do the same.  So if you’re looking for a good Printz debate on what is or isn’t going to win later this month, head thee over to Librarily Blonde and her titularly groanworthy post Someday My Printz Will Come. Guess I should write up a post of my own predictions soon, eh whot?  There’s ample time.  Thanks to Tea Cozy for the link. 

• Jacket Whys takes a closer look at a book jacket trend I’d not really thought of before: Telescoping.  Essentially you take the image on the cover, zero in on one aspect, and make that the focus of the paperback.  I’ve seen it but didn’t think of it as a trend.  Interesting.

• Some of you may recall the Robert’s Snow auction, that very well organized and undoubtedly exhausting series where children’s illustrators would paint individual snowflakes for auction.  The prices always climbed just a tad out of my range so I never got a snowflake of my own.  But that’s okay!  Though the auction of flakes is no longer happening, organizer Grace Lin now has a spiffy alternative.

• FYI: You starving middle grade and YA authors still have time to win yourself a cool $5,000 if you apply for the Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship.  Mind that you read the requirements first though: "Who Is Eligible:  A candidate is a writer of children or young-adult fiction in financial need; candidates have published at least two novels for children or young adults which have been warmly received by literary critics, but have not generated sufficient income to support the author. The writer’s books must be published by a U.S. publisher."  That knocks it down a peg, but I’m sure that there are a few of you who still fit the bill.  Got a crummy job?  I think that counts.  Got laid off recently?  Even better.  The deadline is January 16th, so be quick about applying.

I’m not sure how long she’s been doing it, but it looks as though Becky of Becky’s Book Reviews isn’t averse to a little Sunfire romance reviewing when it strikes her fancy.  I wasn’t a girly girl growing up, but man I had a sweet tooth for those trashy historical romance novels once in a while. 

• And now a new feature which I’m just gonna call . . . .

2009 Books I Want to Read:

One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin by Kathryn Lasky (Author), Matthew Trueman (Illustrator).  Thanks to Planet Esme for the heads up.

Alligator Bayou by Donna Jo Napoli.  Thanks to Sarah Miller for mentioning it.

• I would like to be an author someday, but there’s one part of the job I would not actually look forward to.  I know it sounds terrible, but it’s fan mail.  I’m a procrastinator.  If you write me an email it usually has to go through a weird 24 hour waiting period before I can make myself actually lift my lazy fingers to reply.  Now imagine if little tots wrote me actual honest-to-goodness snail mail letters and I had to respond in kind.  Yeeks!  Author James Preller goes through this all the time.  So he has a pretty intersting post on his site called Fan Mail Wednesday.  Because as he puts it, "one unhappy aspect of Fan Mail for me is, ‘Oh, great. A new way to hate myself’."  I hear you, buddy.

• Daily Image:  

You know what.  This one is so good that I would feel awful not directing you to the fellow who found it, rather than posting it here.  In conjuction with our nice Sesame Street post earlier today I simply ask you the following: Is Cookie Monster a Terrorist?

Filed under: Fusenews