Bits and Pieces

Short items today--

• I met with one of my critiquers today and received excellent feedback. Mostly positive, but he did a very good job of responding to the book as a reader, which makes sense because he doesn't write, but reads TONS of books for kids. He also found plenty of typos and grammatical screw-ups.
  

• I want to publicly thank Tracy for his kind words about the same book. If you haven't checked out his blog recently, Tracy did a nice job of highlighting moments from his time at SCBWI Los Angeles. I'm also extremely jealous of him because he met both Chris Rylander and Ben Esch at the conference. No word on Ben's choice of sweater.

• Speaking of Ben Esch, his blog is having a problem. If you go to it, you'll see an old post about Kanye West. But right under that you'll see a link to my interview of Ben. So maybe not a problem after all.

• I subscribe to Writer's Digest (although I sometimes wonder why), and every other month they run a writing contest called Your Story. They give you a prompt; you write a 750 word story. I didn't enter last time because I thought my idea was too simple, but then I opened the mag last night and saw that the winner had used the same idea, even had the same "surprise" ending. (That's in quotes because one of the reasons I nixed the idea of entering was that I figured readers would see the "surprise" coming from a few furlongs away. And I did. See it coming, that is.) So this time I'm entering. I wrote my entry last night. If you'd like to compete against me, click this link and have at it.
  

• And here's a video of Michael Jackson saying the phrase "doo-doo feces." I think I could watch that all day. Credit to Joe.