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

YOU GUYS. Over at Written? Kitten! , every time you write one hundred words, YOU GET A PICTURE OF A KITTEN. (Thanks, S!) Over at Teen Librarian Toolbox , I really like the post " Dear Media, Let me help you write that article on YA literature ." It begins, "Recently, there have been a voluminous number of articles written about YA literature. And they are mostly wrong. So if you are a member of the press and given this assignment, I thought I would help you out a little.  But first, let me start by telling you why I am, in fact, qualified to help you out. Credentials are important, something these articles always seem to lack..." (Thanks, R!) As a companion to her recent blog post, " Some things to consider when writing fat characters ," Rebecca Rabinowitz has written " Some things to think about when writing thin characters ." ****** Pardon me for a minute while I copy and paste everything I've written in this blog post so far a

Rebecca Stead texted me this picture she took near a canal somewhere-or-other in Amsterdam (I have explained before about the sense of direction we both share ) with the comment that it immediately struck her as a topless Graceling cover. Publishers: get on it.

I really like this map! (Thanks, B.) Super interesting. From mentalfloss.com . Image credit: Ben Blatt/Slate. Also, for them that's interested, the other day, to my astonishment, I wrote two and a half pages. Or, as I emailed to a particular group of interested friends, "tuna half pages." There are certain dictation errors that I encounter so frequently that at a certain point I give up correcting them and they enter our lexicon as a kind of code. My correspondents, who are usually not dictating, use them as much as I do. (And now I've remembered one of my favorite (of my own) blog posts, about dictation errors, angst, and Prufrock ^_^.) I wish you all well on this Wednesday.

Graceling now exists in Norwegian. Yay! -----> Published by Cappelen Damm and translated by Carina Westberg, whose excellent translation questions spurred my recent post about how Seabane Isn't Real . This is another randutiae post. Ready? I really like Rebecca Rabinowitz's short post called Some things to consider when writing fat characters . Some recent words my Scrabble app has rejected: Bearthin. Adjective. The particular degree of thinness of a bear coming out of hibernation.  Trocheey . Adjective. Adjectival form of "trochee." Meowlion . Noun. Really, isn't every lion a meowlion? Evebait. Noun. Perhaps a sexist synonym for "apple." Unshovel . Verb. Arguably if a walk is unshoveled, someone or something has unshoveled it. I would go so far as to say I've spent entire mornings unshoveling the walk. I did recently have the satisfaction of changing "otter" to "garotter," but I lament the lack of style points

An unexpected change in my weekend plans leaves me with some time this afternoon for blogging a bit of randutiae... My dear friend Amanda MacGregor recently wrote a piece for Modern Loss about what happens when the experience of traumatic loss collides with the way we use social media. She writes that following the sudden death of her father, "Thanks to social media, his death was old news by the time I found out about it." This piece brings up some questions it would benefit us to think about – like, what is lost when a person who's grieving doesn't even have the privilege of telling their own bad news? Check it out . At School Library Journal , Lauren Barack has written a great piece called "LGBTQ & You: How to Support Your Students," about the importance of the school library to the young LGBTQ community. That smiling library assistant in the photo is, in fact, my dear friend Amanda MacGregor, who wrote the Modern Loss piece – she is just poppin

Check out the conversation, today through Saturday: #WeNeedDiverseBooks Here some ways to participate: http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/post/83943947418/we-need-diverse-books-campaign Here's the Tumblr: http://weneeddiversebooks.tumblr.com/ Just for a taste, here are some wonderful entries coming from the Oakland library (thanks Sarah!): https://twitter.com/oaklibrary