And here we go - the fifth and final day of the Winter Blog Blast Tour:

Mayra Lazara Dole at Chasing Ray: "Teen love is conflictive, but even now that things are more open for LGBT's, love can be brutal for closeted or 'coming out' young adults because they understand the prejudice, hatred, isolation and intolerance for being 'different.' LGBT teens, young adults, and adults coming out, deal with a lot of other issues that straights are free of, thus love will be more intense and mean a great deal more to us than to straight people."

Francis O'Roark Dowell at Fuse Number 8: "My older brother and I used to tell my younger brother that there was a carnival underneath our house, and that at night, after he went to bed, we’d go into the family room closet and crawl through the secret passageway and spend all night eating cotton candy and riding the Ferris wheel. I asked my younger brother a couple of years ago if he remembered us telling him about the carnival under the house, and he said, 'Remember it? I used to dream about it.'"

J Patrick Lewis at Writing and Ruminating: "No subject on earth or apart from it is immune from poetry. I am trying to write in a hundred voices and as many forms on as many subjects, to write across the curriculum, about everything under heaven. The poem is always more important than the poet. Poets biodegrade; poems, if they have any merit, stand a middling chance of living on for a little while. My advice is to stretch your mind’s muscles. I set for myself the hard, well-nigh impossible task of writing great poetry every day. Do I succeed? No, but so what? Otherwise, why bother to write?"

Wendy Mass at Hip Writer Mama: "The worst advice probably came from my dad. He expended a lot of energy over the years trying to convince me to get a “real job,” you know, one with dental and a retirement plan and a weekly paycheck. It took till my sixth book was published for him to stop. Although I may prefer it to his new crusade, which is to storm into bookstores demanding they stock my books. When I begged him not to do this, he said, and I quote, “Look, the only way anyone is going to know about your books is if they stumble across them on the shelves. You’re not James Patterson.” He means well. I think."

Lisa Ann Sandell at Bildungsroman: "And I always wanted to retell an Arthurian story from a girl's perspective; it's the women in these legends who pretty much get the shaft. They're either helpless and weak or evil and manipulative, for the most part. So, to take this story of a girl who falls in love with Lancelot only to die of a broken heart and turn it on its head and to re-imagine their whole world was great fun."

Caroline Hickey/Sara Lewis Holmes at Mother Reader : "Always have an agent! You must have an agent or you will lose rights! The publisher does not look out for you! Publishers dont want to give away film rights or audio rights or sub-rights, but agents fight for them, and they get them. You’ll also get a bigger advance with an agent, and you’ll have someone looking out for you if things with your publisher don’t go smoothly."

A.S. King at Bookshelves of Doom: "My dog knowledge comes from having dogs and from reading up on them. It started with a fascinating article I read in National Geographic in early 2002, when I began writing the book. But the Dog Facts cover a little human psychology too, about which I know squat, except for what I see with my own eyes. Short version: Humans are pretty messed up. Dogs are totally awesome."

Emily Wing Smith at Interactive Reader: "One was the idea of how the boy in my community had died—by giving up his water on a hiking trip. At face value, that is the ultimate in unselfish acts, and from what I know about this real-life boy, I fully believe that this caused his death. But I also couldn’t help thinking that there was no way I’d do the same thing in that situation. I mean, I like to think I’m pretty unselfish. But I’m also practical. Lots of people on a hiking trip + all of them requiring water to stay alive – enough water for everyone = someone isn’t going to make it. What if you did the math and decided the person who wasn’t going to make it would be you?"