MEGA Book Love: Teen Book Trivia Contest October 7, 2013

October 16 is gonna be nerdy. Real nerdy. I can’t wait.

This day is the Young Adult Trivia night at the McNally Jackson bookstore in NYC. I’m probably carrying the least weight of my team, because the others read a lot more quickly and manage to carve out massive chunks of time to read teen fiction books. And I think they don’t really watch TV, which sucks my time like whoa.

I’m currently in training for this competition, which means I am trying to cover some of the books we, among the three of us, have not yet read, such as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. We have looked for lists of the most popular books, looked for other ways to check out the most popular young adult books — what the kids are readin’ these days — and made ourselves a few assignments. Hopefully in the next week and a half you will see some rapid firing book reviews on kickass YA fiction.

And then, come October 17, you shall see a blog post of glory. Or graceful defeat. But really, I’m doing it for the

Even better: All proceeds will go to Literacy for Incarcerated Teens. There will also be opportunities at the event to donate books directly to Passages Academy, a NYC Board of Education program serving incarcerated and detained youths, ages 11-17.

If there are any good new young adult books you’re wild about, let me know so we can prepare! Thanks!

National Novel Writing Month October 1, 2013

National Novel Writing Month is nearly upon us!

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a 30-day period where experienced and amateur writers all over the country commit to drafting a novel, start to finish, from the morning of November 1 through 11:59pm on November 30. The goal is to create a complete rough first draft of 50,000 words by yourself — without using any of your previous writings.

Writers are often plagued with serious levels of procrastination, and a bunch of posers claiming to be writers who have not really written everything, like myself. People who call themselves writers or even think themselves writers are able to skirt along on this delusion without really producing anything.

This year, and this is something I promised myself on New Year’s 2011, 2012 and 2013, things will be different. To date, I haven’t written anything for myself that isn’t this blog or a to-do list. I’m happy (and nervous) to announce that my non-writing guilt will be assuaged come December 1. I have registered and told one person, and now you, blog, that I will be participating in NaNoWriMo 2013!

I have an idea ready to rock and I am appropriately wasting some planning time by reading 90 Days to Your Novel, a guide to writing a book in a short time. NaNoWriMo’s rules tell me that I can outline and research before November 1, so that the full month is dedicated to writing alone. And the 90 Days writing guide tells me it will take about a month to create a strong outline. The list-making person I have become appreciates this lead time and will relish the thought of being bale to start before I can start, because i am certain I will run out of steam before the end of the challenge.

This will be my first book. (It feels great to type that! And actually believe it!)

Breaking News: Bookstore Sales Are Down August 21, 2013

USA Today and numerous follow-up news sources have presented this terrifying information! Bookstores aren’t making profits! How could we let this happen?!

Here is why I’m not surprised: There are very few new good books out. Even the acclaimed Gone Girl won’t make this list, as it was released June 2012. If you found a great work of adult contemporary fiction that has come out this year, please let me know. It also seems that movie releases are major drivers of book sales, but most of the movies we are looking forward to are comic book movies (Thor 2) and series movies (Catching Fire) – both of which many of us have already read.

But enough of this Nostradamus-level doomsday speak for bookstores. We get it – it’s paper and paper is going to cease to exist in a matter of minutes. Even if that were true, B&N stepped into the digital age with the Nook. So why are sales still down?

Here is why I’m not fearful: The Nook has not fallen in line with the pace of technological advancement, meaning that it has not sold a new iteration of the Nook since February 2012. Rather, B&N and its software partners have committed to improving the devices they have. A noble effort, but this limits the growth potential for sales and depreciates the value of the Nooks already on the market.

So, of course your profits are down. You’ve made the weird decision not to advance in sellable units, and publishers just aren’t finding the top talent that engrosses audiences as last year. Hopefully this means we as readers have caught on to the lackluster serial books that are well paced but poorly written, which everyone reads with rolled eyes (Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey). Unfortunately this also means the book industry has more pressure on it to enrapture readers thoughtfully – not cheaply.

P.S. While I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey and don’t intend to, I can imagine that The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek was a better version.

Where Do Books Come From? March 27, 2013

Harper Teen tweeted a broken link last week and I was so interested by its microblurb that I found the fixed link and viewed the intended website. I was very, very glad I did.

Our girl Lauren Oliver created a website and video log about the creation of a book, from start to finish. Called Where Do Books Come From? Oliver talks about everything from the initial idea to fleshing out characters, and then the process of writing the first draft. Then we meet her editor, art director and printer, and we view their processes, of which we rarely get a glimpse.

The video series is focused on Oliver’s kids book The Spindlers and in the last video, Oliver herself reads the first three chapters of the book. Throughout the videos we also hear a line or two from The Spindlers and by the end I have to say I was way interested. And given the talk about the art in the book and the illustrator himself creating the world and adding little pictures in the content, I wanted to see the whole book for myself in physical form (another reason to skirt the eReader).

All in, a good series about stuff I always wondered, and a new book in the short reading list.