Doing It Up Washington Style (And a Potential Kidlit Drink Night)

• You know you’re old when the newest American Girl living in the dire and distant past turns out to be discovering the historical marvels of … the 70s.  Shoot, dude.  I kinda remember the 70s.  Which is to say, my two-year-old brain can vaguely conjure up shades of orange and brown.  That’s pretty accurate, right?  Quick question for you too.  Why is it that 20th century American Girls are always white while the American Girls of other races end up relegated to previous centuries?  And if newest girl Julie Albright (penned by Megan McDonald, no less) is living in San Francisco in the 70s, does that mean we’ll have our first gay rights American Girl?  I would buy that book.
• I’m all kinds of mad at my movie blogs. Usually I pick up on this sort of thing before the Publisher’s Weekly Children’s Bookshelf does. Not so much this week, I guess.  Here’s what they had to say about the movie adaptation of City of Ember:

  Bill Murray will star in a film adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau’s YA novel City of Ember , to be directed by Gil Kenan ( Monster House ) and written by Caroline Thompson ( Edward Scissorhands , The Secret Garden and Corpse Bride ). Murray will play the Mayor of Ember. Production begins in Belfast this summer, with an October 2008 release date planned. Playtone and Walden Media will co-produce.  Not actually a bad role for Murray, you know.  I’m picturing him in a role similar to the one he played in Rushmore.  There will probably be fewer mentions of hand jobs, though.

• A great bit at Editorial Anonymous on whether or not the world of slush piles is in need of an overhaul.  And, if it is, how would one go about changing it?  Plenty o’ comments already.  Plenty more to come.
• Why has no one properly mourned the passing of Mr. Wizard?  Maybe because if you’re anything like me you were under the impression that he’d passed on years ago.  He was great though, wasn’t he?  A kind of proto-Bill Nye.  As a kid I always got him confused with Leonard Nimoy.  Remember his voice?  It wasn’t that odd an association to make.
• Thanks to Galleycat I now know that Penguin is going to be relaunching some Vintage Classics with interesting covers.  Listen to this saucy recap of the move via premiere de couverture: Two of Britain’s biggest book publishers are locked in a battle for control of the lucrative literary classics market. Penguin is the leading classics publisher, with its familiar black or silver-spined series accounting for about 65% of all classics sold in the UK. But next summer rival Random House will launch an audacious bid for a slice of those sales, aiming to transform Vintage into a recognized classics brand. Oh la la!  Why is this of any interest?  You should see the covers man (scroll down).  They’re something else.  Alice in Wonderland can finally be considered to be crossing into the world of Chick Lit… 

      
  

  and points to Penguin for making it perfectly clear how adult the Grimm stories really are sometimes.

  

  Saucy stuff.

Colleen Mondor has the full schedule up of authors and participants engaging in the SBBT thingy thing next week.  The post is entirely linked AND the clever girl even made sure that my interviews would go to my new site rather than the old.  If you’re interested my schedule looks like this:

Tuesday, June 19th
Shaun Tan

Wednesday, June 20th
Julie Ann Peters

Friday, June 22nd
Kirsten Miller 

Thanks to Finding Wonderland for the image.

Oop.  The 30 seconds are up.  You know what that means.

Does that term mean anything to you at all?

Well it should. 

The great and wonderful Colleen Mondor (who doesn’t get nearly enough air-time on this blog simply because she works primarily in the world of YA) has organized a Blog Blast Tour of heretofore unbelievable depth and intelligence. 

Starting next Sunday, with an interview posted at Finding Wonderland with 2006 NBA finalist and Printz Award winner Gene Yang, there will be multiple blogs in the kidlitosphere conducting multiple interviews for the following week. We will average ten interviews a day with authors like Justine Larbalestier, Brent Hartinger, David Brin, Hilary McKay, Christopher Golden, Kazu Kibuishi, Chris Crutcher, Holly Black, Kirsten Miller and Shaun Tan. Between Yang’s interview on Sunday and the last one with Justina Chen Headley on Saturday there will be over 50 author interviews posted. These authors include multiple genres (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, Drama), multiple formats (prose, graphic novel, manga) and for mutliple audiences (boys and girls, straight and gay). Many of the authors agreed to more than one interview although fans should not be worried – the bloggers were careful to make sure that different questions were asked each time. In the end we hope to provide a wealth of information about how these authors create, the kind of books they write and what they have to offer to new readers and long time fans.

We plan, quite simply, to rock the literary world.

And by "we", Ms. Mondor is including myself as well.  I will, during this time, be pleased to present interviews conducted with such luminaries as Julie Ann Peters, Kirsten Miller, and (the flower in my cap) Shaun Tan.  More information will be forthcoming as it happens.  I will, of course, be also directing you to fellow interview around and about the blogosphere.  This is, as they say, a Very Big Deal. 

Full credit must, of course, go to Ms. Mondor however.  In a sense, the tour is being done in response to those critics that dismiss the blogosphere as anything but a bunch of maggots with 18 cats (yes, I’m mixing my metaphors) without an original thought in their craniums.  You may read Colleen’s further thoughts on the matter here for a full accounting of what the SBBT will entail. 

It will begin next week.  Be ready.