Here is your schedule for next week - it will be updated with direct links and quotes on a daily basis. Let the games begin!!

Monday, May 17

Kate Milford at Chasing Ray: "I love cities desperately, but I love small towns just as much. In both, even now, you can turn a corner and find something magical or something weird and alien."

(And folks interested in Kate's novel, The Boneshaker, should check out the giveaway at Kidsmomo running through May 31st.)

Mac Barnett at Fuse Number 8: "But we wanted the mystery and clues to be organic, and to blur the lines between the book and the real world. I just love the idea that treasure could be lost in a story and found somewhere in America."

Hazardous Players at Finding Wonderland: "We love fantasy, but so many fantasies impose such earnestness into the writing that it can come across as unintentionally silly. Characters speak in extremely formal ways, "I am Turnblatt, son of Corndog, son of Poptart and I have come to avenge them!", and writers create such complex internal mythologies with no sense of irony."

Malinda Lo at Shelf Elf: "Falling in love! I think this has to be one of the most important inspirations for pretty much any writer writing about human relationships. The good, the bad, and the ugly of it — all of it is inspiring."

Barbara Dee at Little Willow: "For her joke entries, I thought about how when I was a kid, I was convinced that my English teacher wasn't actually reading my essays. So one time I stuck the words "scrambled eggs" right in the middle of a long paragraph, just as a test. And apparently I was all wrong about this guy, because when he handed back my paper it had "SCRAMBLED EGGS? WHAT???" written in the margin. In angry red ink."

Tuesday, May 18

Rita Williams-Garcia at Fuse Number 8: "I called the Oakland Police Department to confirm the color of siren lights back in the sixties. I dug through old newspapers for the prices of everything from 45 records, to stamps to a whole fryer chicken. I took a sweep through my silly 1967-‘68 diary. Silly, indeed! "

Jennifer Hubbard at Writing & Ruminating: "We keep hearing how people have short attention spans now, how we live in a sound-byte society. And yet, short stories haven't found as big a market as novels have, just like short films haven't found as big an audience as longer feature films have. It seems counter-intuitive!"

Charise Mericle Harper at Shelf Elf: "Cupcakes = mini celebrations. You got an A on your spelling test, let's get you a cupcake. You didn't yell back at your boss, you deserve a cupcake. You fixed the toilet! I'm going to bake you some cupcakes. "

Holly Schindler at Little Willow: "The idea of the "mad genius" is so pervasive, there's even a Wikipedia entry for "Creativity and Mental Illness!"

Mary Jane Beaufrand at The Ya, Ya, Yas: "It's strange, but I think these days "historical fiction" has almost become shorthand for "historical romance." Which is fine, but there's so much more to it. Violence and art, for example."

Wednesday, May 19

Michael Trinklein at Chasing Ray: "What was interesting to me was that racism was the main roadblock to adding Cuba as a state. 40 years after the Civil War, most of the statehood discussion centered on the ability of "the negro race" to assimilate."

Nick Burd at Fuse Number 8: " I like it when mysterious things happen in books, so I think that kind of thing will always appear. But I like humor and satire. I don't really think about genre when I write."

Sarah Darer Littman at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy: "And how cool is this? The city of Buenos Aires has this database where you can look up exactly what species of trees are on each street! I did take one liberty by putting an Ombu tree in a park where there isn't one in real life, because I'd fallen in love with that tree in the first draft."

Tom Siddell at Finding Wonderland: "My family knows I have a comic and that it is available in books somewhere, but they don't read it and since I don't actually make any money off the comic, the "success" is pretty intangible to anyone not already into webcomics."

Jess Leader at Shaken & Stirred: "It turned the movie went from spare and strained to a Hugh Grant special, and while About a Boy and, um, Music and Lyrics are two of my favorites (hey, it's about the artistic process), the Montage of Transformation just did not belong Up in the Air. The montage was technically accomplished, but it didn't fit, and it was encouraging to see another artist murdering his darlings in the name of finding the right tone for his film."

Thursday, May 20

Matthew Reinhart at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

"7-Imp: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Matthew: "Sigh. Come on in. Your Mom said I HAD to let you in."

Jenny Boylan at Fuse Number 8: "What's better: to imitate something you're not, if it really means being able to survive? Or to embrace your true self, if your true self is--say, a zombie? How do we find the courage to become ourselves?"

Lisa Mantchev at Writing & Ruminating: "Waschbär is indeed my raccoon-man character and this came about when I was researching the various totem animals in Native American legends. Raccoons are wily and mischievous, and their masks conceal many secrets. I went hunting through various languages for a name that meant "raccoon" because I adore giving characters names that have a particular meaning and ended up in Germany... fitting because I'd studied the playwrights Brecht and Goethe extensively in college."

Tara Kelly at Shaken & Stirred: "One of those bands is called The Birthday Massacre--and they are RAD. They are an odd mix of 80's, goth, industrial, and they are like listening to a dark, creepy fairy tale. I ADORE them. "

Donna Freitas at Bildungsroman: "I was a late bloomer in the kissing department - I was almost sixteen and never been kissed and I thought I must be the only girl left on the planet (or at least in Rhode Island) who hadn't kissed anyone at my age."

Friday May 21

Julia Hoban at Chasing Ray: "I met this man at his apartment, and I must confess I was most disconcerted when I saw that not only was he old enough to be my father, but short enough to be my infant. We had less than nothing to talk about, but he did have a copy of Tristes Tropiques on his coffee table. Although I had never read it before, I certainly knew of Claude Levi- Strauss, and seized upon it as a lifeline. I owe Claude Levi Strauss a debt of gratitude. Without TT as a topic of conversation I don't know how I would have made it through the evening!"

Stacy Kramer at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy: "The story of a girl torn between two groups of friends but feeling a part of neither, who finds a magical recipe box in her grandmother's closet that can change the social dynamics of middle school. We loved the notion of placing real recipes throughout the book. And, after much discussion about our own middle school experiences, came upon the idea of making the girl a border crosser, a role I played in middle school – a person who can move within various cliques with impunity."

Nancy Bo Flood at Finding Wonderland: "If we want children to choose peaceful alternatives to diminish conflict, I believe we need to allow them a look at what war means. In the United States we are protected from what war really means, except for those who are deployed and their families."

Paolo Bacigalupi at Shaken & Stirred: "So SHIP BREAKER has knife-fights and sea battles and the bio-engineered warbeasts called half-men that are a lethal mix of tiger and dog and hyena and human, because those are the things that make me geek out, and also aren't really celebrated in literature so much."

Sarah Kuhn at Bildungsroman: "guess the biggest challenge was convincing some of my fellow journos that I was for real: yes, I know just as much about X-Men continuity as you do. Yes, I've watched every episode of the original Star Trek just as many times as you have. Yes, I am familiar with this whole "organic web-shooters" debate. Yes, yes, yes."

Jenni & Matt Holm at Hip Writer Mama: "Also, we had shared an apartment in NYC (a studio apartment, no less) for a few months, and if we could survive that, we could survive anything."