CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The US-based weblog Chasing Ray is coordinating the annual Summer Blog Blast this week. Last year lots of our Australian YA authors participated in this blogging feast. The 2008 Blast stays a little closer to home with a list of UK and US writers taking part.

How does it work? A number of litblogs host an author for a day. For example, today (US time, remember) David Almond will log on to Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast and Susan Beth Pfeffer (always good value) will be at Interactive Reader. Tomorrow SBP hops onto the YA YA YAs .

Others taking part include Laurie Halse Anderson, Barry Lyga and Elizabeth Scott.

The full program for the week is here. And the beauty of blogs is that the posts and comments remain, so if there’s no time this week to check out what is being discussed, there’s always next week.

More than a dozen blogs, all passionate about discussing YA books and writers, are taking part in the Summer Blog Blast. These include Finding Wonderland, Fuse #8, shaken & stirred, Bookshelves of Doom, Writing and Ruminating, Bildungsroman, HipWriterMama, A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy and Miss Erin.

Simmone Howell, she of the award-winning Notes from the Teenage Underground, has been in touch to alert us to some Australian YA author blogs. Just what we wanted to hear. Simmone suggests we look at:

• Kirsty Murray (Magic Casements)
• Penni Russon (Eglantine’s Cake)
• Lili Wilkinson (Thinkings of a Lili)
• James Roy (headvsdesk)
• Catherine Bateson (CattyRox)
• Adam Ford (self-described poet, novelist, zinemaker, artist, editor, showoff)
• Sherryl Clark (Books and Writing)
• and of course, her own blog, post-teen trauma.

In the hunting, we came across Gabrielle Wang’s A Passing Whisper, Carole Wilkinson’s self-named blog, Scot Gardner’s Jingo Lingo, Nicki Greenberg’s There’s a bug in my inkbottle and Margo Lanagan’s Among Amid While. And Simon Haynes has a Hal Spacejock blog for the many fans of that popular series.

So they are out there - please keep the suggestions coming and we will build up a pretty useful list. Thanks again, Simmone.

How authors find the time to blog as well as create highly readable YA fiction is a bit of a mystery, but writing is writing, and a few of our favourites have great blogs out there to keep readers up to date with their latest news.

Susan Beth Pfeffer (Life as We Knew It) has a self-deprecating wit that is always a delight to read. Yes, her posts can be a tad long, but invariably contain several gems. Over the past few months we have shared in the gestation of LAWKI’s sequel, the dead & the gone, due here in a few weeks.

Other author blogs worth a look include cynsations, the informative blog of Cynthia Leititch Smith (Tantalize); Justine Larbalestier (Magic’s Child) , while Scott Westerfeld (Peeps) keeps us up to date with his travels, new writing and particularly the many and varied covers of the international editions of his work.

Most YA writers, however, are where their audience is - in social networking sites such as MySpace. John Green (Looking for Alaska), David Levithan (Are We There Yet?) and Ned Vizzini (It’s a Kind of Funny Story) all have their MySpace presence where they connect with their readers.

And LiveJournal has an online community called yawriterblogs, where you will find Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen) and Alex Flinn (Breathing Underwater) amongst a number of other North American names.

But apart from Justine and honorary Australian Scott, there doesn’t seem to be a huge blog presence amongst local YA authors. If you know of any good ones, please tell us about them.