Celebrity Guest Judges! and Sundry Other Good News

I'm delighted to announce that the Celebrity Guest Judges for the Thomas Bowdler Fiction Contest below are none other than Dan Santat and Lisa Yee!


Lisa is the author of a series of three related middle-grade novels affectionally known as the "Milly trilly," as well as the young-adult novel Absolutely Maybe.


Dan is the author/illustrator of the past AALB picture book The Guild of Geniuses and future graphic novel The Domesticated Four. And the two of them collaborated on . . .


Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally), a very funny and heartfelt new chapter book coming out this September! My thanks to Lisa and Dan, who will render their verdicts in the three contest categories early next week.

Other news:
  • ALA this past weekend was terrific, from seeing Elizabeth C. Bunce get the Morris Award to talking for the very first time with the translator and author of Heartsinger (we edited the book entirely over e-mail) to attending the Newbery-Caldecott dinner to spending time with my grandfather to giving the Batchelder acceptance speech with Arthur to just hanging out and talking with many awesome and passionate kidlit people. I've rarely had a happier or more exhausting five days, so thanks to you all!
  • It turns out that the very nice Jacqui Robbins is also having a bad-first-lines-of-children's-literature contest inspired by the Bulwer-Lytton, and hers started before mine. It ends today, so hop over there to leave a last-minute entry.
  • My book is going to happen! Hooray! Yes, thanks to all you kind people, Leaf and Tree* is already a fully funded project over at Kickstarter, with $2000 raised (to print 500 copies) in less than two weeks. The project page will remain open through September 1 should anyone else be inspired to donate; every additional dollar goes to printing additional copies, which in turn affects my unit cost, which in turn will affect the eventual retail cost, so donations are good for me and for you if you think you might buy the book. Thanks again!
  • * Though I'm now thinking of calling it Second Sight (plus a subtitle), since so much of it deals with revision and getting a fresh look at your work. No one would confuse it with this, right? Right.
  • I just discovered (via @editorgurl) a terrific post by Justine Larbelestier on How to Write a Novel. I particularly like her spreadsheet method of bookmapping.