Wednesday Hangovers

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I heart the semicolon:

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

Used judiciously, of course; the semicolon’s one of the few advantages of academic writing.

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Saturday Hangovers

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Cybils-tastic

Children's Lit Fabulosity / By /

The 2007 Cybils winners (Children’s and YA Bloggers’ Literary Awards) have been announced.

I was a judge in the science fiction and fantasy category. There were so many great books recommended that the panel reading all the nominees decided to split it into five finalists for elementary/middle grade and five for YA for us lucky judges to decide on. All ten books were well worth reading, and it was a tough decision. We ultimately settled on Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days for the YA division and Adam Rex’s The True Meaning of Smekday for elementary/middle grade. Two very deserving winners, and I’ll be talking about all the books as soon as I come up for air.

(And, yep, Justine’s right about Skin Hunger. It’s amazing.)

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Excuse My Excuses

Excuses, Excuses / By /

Until this critical thesis draft is done, things’ll be sparse around these parts (it’s due Monday morning, so not that long). Today we bought a shiny new car*, which we pick up tomorrow. That isn’t nearly as big as the news that Colleen Lindsay is henceforth an agent with FinePrint Literary Management (congratulate before querying!). Oh, and go over to Micol’s and follow her instructions on helping save Teen Central by dropping a line to the NYPL.

That is all.

*Storm silver, if you must know. And I also love the fact that the commercial features giant eyeballs! And the fact that Slate and US News and World Report love it too!

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Critical Mass

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Today was all about assembling the "It’s time to write that critical thesis draft" workstation:

P1000802_2

Taunting me, or perhaps motivating me, I have this:

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Pretty good motivation. Unrelatedly: I love the Sporn no-pull mesh harnesses; they make dog walkers very happy. We also bought a double leash, but haven’t tried it out yet. I’m sure much excitement will ensue. Oh, and we loved, loved, loved The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, complete with Atari flashbacks.

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Dear Mr. Itzkoff

6 Comments / Books / By /

Please STOP:

To my mind, perhaps the most unusual example of a well-known genre author crossing over into YA turf is a long out-of-print relic called “Nick and the Glimmung,” written by none other than Philip K. Dick. Published in 1988, six years after his death, and never released in the United States, “Nick and the Glimmung” has the gentle pacing and simplified vocabulary of a young-adult novel, but its sensibility and subject matter are unmistakably Dickian.

Gentle pacing? Simplified vocabulary? Huh? (Hat tip to Carrie!)

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Friday Hangovers

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