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

Ready? David Levithan and Billy Merrell are putting together an expanded edition of The Full Spectrum and are looking for essays about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning and other queer identities by writers under 21.  If you have a story you want to tell, go to www.queerthology.com for details on submitting.  Deadline is August 1st!  I loved this: photos of the onscreen and real-life wedding dresses of 13 movie stars, in Vogue . Emma Thompson, Grace Kelly, Julie Andrews, Keira Knightley, etc.  If you have 15 minutes to watch a video: Sydney Opera House / Living Mural . "A global animation project by Universal Everything, collaborating with over 20 different animation studios worldwide to create a living mural on one of the world’s most iconic buildings." In other words: lights and pictures specially designed to be projected onto the Sydney Opera House. Pretty cool. From the Huffington Post: " Laverne Cox's Reaction To Caitlyn J

The Supreme Court declares same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states . States cannot keep same-sex couples from marrying and must recognize these unions. Dear world: THANK YOU FOR SOME WONDERFUL NEWS. ETA: Check out the White House facebook page!!!  

This was pretty challenging, especially because in order for everything to line up correctly, the more complicated planets had to end up on my dominant hand. Turns out it is really hard to paint a tiny Saturn with a nail polish brush and toothpicks, right-handed! I tried to represent their relative sizes correctly, more or less. Well anyway, I did my best, given my limitations of tools and skill. :o) And yes, Pluto gets to be part of my solar system! Click to embiggen. On the far left (my right pinky) is the sun. Might be hard to see here. I'm quite pleased with Jupiter and Mars. My palette! The giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and Pluto. Thanks, Kevin, for the pictures. Somehow we failed to take a close-up of my right hand, so here's a bad iPhone selfie, just to share details: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Sometime last fall, I discovered the strange and beautiful work of Pete at The Builder's Studio . Pete creates his work by hand out of wood. I got in touch and asked him if he would consider making me a lion robot. This guy showed up on my doorstep a few weeks later. Oh my goodness. Look at his mane. He's wearing GLASSES.  I wrote back to Pete.  I said something along the lines of, "Pete, given that this is the most wonderful thing I've ever seen, would you consider making me a unicorn robot?" A lot of time passed. I had given Pete a specific window of time for the lion, but I decided not to do that for the unicorn. As the months went by, Pete emailed me now and then to let me know how it was going. He was having trouble with the mane, he couldn't get various parts quite how he liked them. I wasn't in any hurry. I foresaw no emergency need for a unicorn robot. I told him to take his time. Boy am I glad I did, because look what just s

Some industry news: my marvelous agent, Faye Bender, formerly of the Faye Bender Literary Agency, is forming a partnership with three other fabulous agents, Julie Barer, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed, to form a new literary agency . They're called The Book Group. ((1) Isn't that a great name, and (2) how was that name not taken???) Together, these four women represent a broad diversity of literary interests, including fiction and non-fiction, literary and genre fiction, and middle grade, young adult, and adult literature. Check out some selected titles . And here are their submissions guidelines . And, children's writer Rebecca Stead will be joining them as an agent ! Faye and Rebecca are two of my favorite people so it's hard for me to be all objective and reporty about this. You will have to take my word for it that it's going to be GREAT. Aw, look at this picture of Faye and Rebecca . *melts* Here's one of the press releases . And here is the agency

Write the World , a global online community for high school-aged writers, is currently running a fantasy story contest for writers aged 13-18, writing 400-1,000 word stories. Go check it out if you're interested, and take a look around their website while you're there! To coincide with the fantasy contest, I've just done a Q&A for their blog .

There are a bunch of things going on that I really want to blog about, but work is very consuming right now. I keep telling myself I'll just wait until I have a long moment, then blog them all at once, but I'm finally accepting that this is not going to happen. So instead, I'll do what I probably should have done in the first place, which is blog each of them separately when I can… The first is the beautiful cover for Cindy Pon's new book, Serpentine , coming out in September! Um, sorry about that enormous blurb covering her hair, which actually makes this a somewhat embarrassing cover to post on my blog (because it feels self-indulgent)! If I'd known they were going to do that, I would've given them one of those one-word blurbs. "Awesome." But putting that part aside, isn't it a lovely cover? You can read more about Cindy's new book over at her blog . An excerpt from the description there: "Serpentine chronicles the tension and st