As both Gwenda and Midori have already mentioned, author Catherynne Valente is posting a YA novel in near real time online. The first chapter of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is up now with succeeding chapters to follow each Monday. Cat explains at her lj the financial reasons that have prompted this literary act and asks that anyone so inclined please make donations. Regardless, the novel is there for the reading.

The SFF community has already blogged on the novel but it strikes me that the word has been a bit slower on the kidlitosphere front and please - a story about a girl named September is really not to be missed. So go read and support this worthy artist who is selling what she does best to help get by. (I should mention that Cat is a favorite short story writer of mine. We have never met nor emailed but I adore her story "A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica" which ran in Clarkesworld. The title alone should explain why it's pitch perfect in my book but you don't have to be a map/polar nut to love it.)

In other news, the blogging and publishers conversations have gotten to the point where I think everybody has said pretty much everything that could be said and I think if publishers want something to change then they should just go try and do that. The notion of keeping track of who writes positive vs negative reviews in return for ARCs though - that is just a whole other kind of logistical and moral sort of crazy. I didn't mention this in a comment at Roger's but if publishers can't even keep track of how many copies of a book they send out to bloggers (2 copies, then 3 copies, no wait - 4 copies!!) I seriously doubt they will develop a spreadsheet for every blogger review of every one of their titles. Or at the very least - it's not going to happen anytime soon. (Harper Collins recently emailed to ask me if I wanted to be placed on an automatic mailing list - to which I had to reply that I have been trying to be removed from their auto mailing list for over a year. You can see where I'm coming from on all this.)

I should not have opened Lizzie Skurnick's Shelf Discovery because I have a freelance project due Monday that I had less than a week to pull together (normally I would say this is insane but I really want to do it). I however now officially want to hang out with Lizzie (can I call her Lizzie?!) and talk books all day everyday. Listen to me people - if you were a girl in the 70s or 80s, if you love Meg Murray and Margaret (as in "Are You There God...") or Vicky Austen or Claudia in the museum or Harriet or Summer of my freaking German Soldier!!!! Well this is the summer book for you. It's a paperback original due out in August and I think must be read with a bologna sandwich, chips, pickles and ice tea (or lemonade) while lounging in the backyard. This book will be transformative - a tonic for all that ails you.

I'm loving it.

In other news, a book on Alaska and one on Zimbabwe both for Booklist - those reviews are due by the 7th though so time to write them up. Ed has announced the book for the roundtable discussion and I am just starting it now. Very excited about this one for obvious reasons. And most significantly, other than two pesky dates I need to dig out of my files I am done with my second Alaska flying book - the novel which has had about a dozen different titles and will likely have a dozen more. It is in many ways the counterpart to Map of My Dead Pilots which is a memoir and other than changed names, 100% true. In the second book I combine experiences of several pilots and give them to one character and invent a lot of conversations which likely did happen in one way or another but could not be verified at this point and thus could never be found in a NF book. (However, all of the characters are the same as in Map. It's tricky that way.... sort of the fictional adventures of NF characters. But all the flying and dying is true and again real figures from the past are included.) Making it fiction gave me more freedom to explain some things. Mostly though I have tweaked this book to no end and I need to just stop. I found a good ending - finally and if/when the first book finds a publisher then I can give them this to consider as well. I need to just stop with Alaska for awhile.

Most delightfully, I can now work on two short stories I've been messing with for quite (quite!) some time and start mapping out my next book. It is completely different. I am shelving the YA book I have about 30,000 words on because I think it needs to drastically change. I'm doing something else. Something new. Something I want to read and write about....because I really need to be doing this kind of project right now. It is YA though and it is about a girl and a summer and parents and growing up on the beach and discovering the whole wide world. It is about what I wish I had learned when I was 17. We'll see how it comes together.

Now go read about September and her adventures!