This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

I'm getting a lot out of the discussion in the comments of Roger Sutton's blog post in response to Daniel Handler's racist watermelon joke at the National Book Award ceremony last week.  I haven't read every comment yet, but there's a lot here, a lot of people making astute observations and criticisms and explaining muddy things with great clarity. For example, I like the way some commenters are eviscerating Roger's criticisms of poet Nikky Finney's response to Handler's comments. (That link is to only one of the comments on this topic -- keep reading.)

Also, this seems like a good segue to reminding people that the We Need Diverse Books campaign is still going strong. Help the organization reach its stretch goals!

We Need Diverse Books from Undercurrent on Vimeo.

Everybody, please go check out the We Need Diverse Books fund-raising campaign. Lots of good information over there about WNDB, which is dedicated to advocating and supporting non-majority narratives in children's literature. If you can, contribute; if you can't, consider passing on the news to someone else. Some of the prizes for contributing are pretty nifty: for writers, "Bypass the Query Queue" -- one pass to jump to the front line of an agent's inbox for a PB, MG, or YA manuscript. Another one for writers: an agent critique (MG and YA). For art lovers: original art by Cindy Pon, and let me tell you, I would be jumping on that. Go check it out!