I've been working on several projects lately, beyond the regular reading and writing. First up, the Summer Blog Blast Tour is scheduled for the week of May 18th. I have two interviews done - with Melissa Wyatt, author of the great new YA title Funny How Things Change (my June column) and Andrew Mueller, foreign correspondent and author of I Wouldn't Start From Here (which I loved and reviewed in my March column - written for adults and older teens). I'm also hoping to have an interview with my friend Jenny Davidson about the research for her YA alt history title The Explosionist and its sequel, not yet published, The Snow Queen. There are eleven blogs participating this time with about twenty-five interviews. As always, we hope our readers will find plenty to enjoy.

Next week I will be unveiling the first big project from Guys Lit Wire. I've been working with InsideOut Writers for several months and along with the GLW crew we have put together a list of books at Powells for the first Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys. We are embarking on what we hope to be a long term relationship with InsideOut to benefit the teenage boys incarcerated in the LA Country juvenile justice system. Right now the teens in LA County Juvenile Hall, over 70% of whom are boys, do not have a library and most have little access to books (only if they are given to them by someone). What we want to do is bring some attention to the fact that these boys basically have no books, that they desperately need books and what InsideOut Writers has been doing to help them for the past thirteen years. We hope to slowly and steadily, over book fairs held semiannually, build a library for their use. We also hope to involve the boys in our site, and expose their reviews to the lit blogosphere. I will admit though that I am very nervous about this - nervous that as much as I hope it will work, that in times like these when presented with the request to buy books for kids in juvenile hall a lot of folks might find it easy to ignore.

I'll help someone, they might think, but not them.

And we are going with Powells for our wishlist which means no registry address and everyone will have to type in the mailing address themselves (this info will be in the post next week at GLW). It's an extra step and that might be too much as well. The GLW crew pushed very very VERY hard to buy from an indy seller however (I thought amazon would be easier and thus a better bet to get a bigger response). And that's important to them and to who we want to be and who we want to support. But man, I hope it works - I hope a lot for this. My goal is 100 books bought in two weeks - all of them are paperback (they have to be) and there is the used option at Powells so for $10 with shipping someone can buy a book. But what if it fails? What if everyone is just "cared out"? Anyway, as excited as I am at the project I'm also worried. I want GLW to matter and this is a step towards that. Big dreams, big leaps of faith, scary stuff. But still - you don't get anywhere without trying, right?

For this summer I'm hoping to shake things up just a bit here at Chasing Ray with an occasional series "What a Girl Wants". This comes a bit from my own curiosity about books for teenage girls and how so many of them are so similar. While I read a lot of teen romance/teen angst when I was in high school I'm starting to wonder if that was because I wanted to or just because that was pretty much the only option. I loved mysteries and started reading John D. MacDonald and Robert Parker in high school but what I would have loved for sure was a modern teen girl detective. I also would have liked more SF with girls, and more interesting history about women and beyond all that, I never read a book with a minority teen character in the lead when I was a teen. I know they were there (had to be right?) but there were so few they were easy to overlook or ignore. All of this has been swirling around in my head a lot lately and as much as teen boys are my focus through GLW, I'm interested in exploring books for girls as well. So, I'm reaching out to various authors of books that would interest girls (whether aimed at them directly or not) and over the summer I'm going to throw a question their way and run the answers here. Just one question at a time, either about what they like to read, what interests them personally or what they think might work or not for girls. Stuff like that. It's a virtual round table on a big broad subject that will continue for months. I like the idea of one question to a group so they can opt in or out if they are busy and so it is easy to read the answers and see the variety of opinions in a relatively quick perusal. Summers get so slow in the lit blogosphere so I think this will be a cool different low key alternative to waiting on the fall titles.

And finally - my books. I talked to Michele (agent chick) and she says there are increasing signs of life in the publishing world (as in editors are calling her and asking for stuff to read) so after a quick shaping up of my first chapter, Map of My Dead Pilots is about to go out for another round. It's a good time now, I think, to be trying to sell - much better than eight months ago for sure. Some of the editors who turned the book down have been laid off so we will try some pubs again (different eds) and others as well. Alaska is still a popular subject and thanks to the Hudson landing, aviation is even more popular. I'm still trying regardless, and Michele is still jazzed.

And that's the update, so there you go. Now back to reading T.S. Spivet and Deeply Rooted, an excellent look at three independent modern farmers and So Punk Rock from Micol Ostow. I'm also reading Clear Heart which was self-published by Joe Cottonwood and is the clearest peek I've ever seen into the hearts and minds of men (who in this case are carpenters/contractors). Thus far all of them are great which personally I think I deserved after my last reading experience.