Passive Voice Article

Fellow SCBWI member Christina Wilsdon sent us this link (thanks Christina!). Nancy Pearl reposted an article discussing the merits of selected use of the passive voice by another author. It's a good article to check out! And make sure you visit Christina's website.

Nancy Pearl interviews Kirby Larson

And look! There's Winston!

Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up

Nancy Pearl has a new blog

Do check it out. Here's a bit of what she has to say about WHEN YOU REACH ME, which Elana Roth talked up earlier this month.

Some extraordinary teen fiction has been published recently (E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, for one), and now we have an equally outstanding novel for middle grade readers: Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me (Wendy Lamb Books, 2009). If this doesn’t win the Newbery Award, which is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, “to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” and/or end up high on every critic’s best of the year list, I’ll be shocked. It’s that good. Stead’s book is one of those all-too-few-and-far-between novels that you want to reread as soon as you finish it, because you want to be able to see how the author so successfully accomplished all that she set out to do, which is write a fantasy that feels completely real.

And here's the blog.

Girls vs. boys: the throwdown

Kirby Larson has organized the Ultimate Throwdown on Gender in Books.

Following the SLJ article that suggested making characters boys when it makes no big difference to the story, and a rebuttal on MSN Entertainment written by a certain opinionated person whose name rhymes with Schmartha, Kirby's adding even more voices to the debate.

Starting around noon today, you can read a lively series of posts exploring the question of gender and reading/writing featuring the likes of librarians Jerene Battisti and Nancy Pearl and writers Erin Blakemore, Dave Patneaude, Rodman Philbrick, Jon Sciezska, Joni Sensel, Terry Trueman and Ben Watson, plus avid reader, Tyler Larson (NYU Film School grad, Associate Producer at HBO, and son of a certain blogger).

What a great lineup! She's also giving away an autographed copy of HATTIE BIG SKY to the first commenter each day. So you can't miss this. I'm bringing popcorn. And maybe a Hefty bag to protect my clothing from tomatoes. I hear that Ben Watson kid can throw.

Click here to go there.