Sunday Afternoon Visits: May 6

This week I did not have any business trips, and I was home all week. You would think I would have blogged more, but I had a lot of other catching up to do. As I write this on Sunday afternoon, however, I'm feeling more caught up than I have been in months. And that's a very happy thing. I'm not one of those people who can have a big list of unfinished tasks, and feel relaxed about it. Anyway, here are a few things from the blogs that caught my eye this week:

• Please join me in congratulating our very own Liz B. from A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy for being selected as a member of the 2009 Michael L. Printz selection committee. Yay Liz! It's her two-year blog anniversary, too. Pretty impressive stuff for a two-year-old.
• Congratulations also to a. fortis and TadMack from Finding Wonderland, along with Little Willow, Kelly, and Gina, who will be presenting a panel on the kidlit blogging world at the upcoming SCBWI conference. Sounds like it's going to be a great conference. I would have loved to attend, but I'm scheduled to be on the East Coast that week.
• cloudscome sums up her family's experience with TV turn off week over at a wrung sponge. She also won an Amazon gift certificate in a random TV turn off week challenge, which seems fitting to me, since she took so much time out to share her experiences about it.
• Mitali Perkins held an entertaining contest asking people to complete two writing-related limericks, announcing the winners on Poetry Friday. Congratulations to Jennifer from Snapshot and Pam from MotherReader for the winning entries.
• Sherry shares a list of recommended titles about foster care and homelessness at Semicolon, including a favorite title from my childhood, The Pinballs by Betsy Byars.
• Kelly put out a call for recommendations for early reader titles at Big A little a, and received a wealth of responses. She's summarized them into a convenient printable PDF file (available from here), which promises to be an excellent resource for parents.
• There's been a strong reaction to the recent banning of Maureen Johnson's YA novel The Bermudez Triangle in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Maureen offered a well-considered response on her own blog, and has been reporting up-to-date news. The cause has also been taken up by various others, including John Green, and sparked an extensive letter-writing campaign. It sounds now like the committee that voted for the ban is trying to the old "we don't recall saying that" defense. But what's sad about the whole thing is that it doesn't seem like many of the people requesting the ban have actually read the book. I haven't read it either, but I intend to. It's due out in paperback any day now. I first heard about the story (naturally) from bookshelves of doom.
• Prolific reviewer Becky lists 31 reasons to get excited about May at Becky's Book Reviews, offering short synopses of 31 titles coming out in May. There's a lot of great stuff due out soon.
• Kris Bordessa is offering a free downloadable PDF of complete instructions for making a colonial pump drill, an excerpt from her book Great Colonial America Projects.
• The ESSL Children's Literature Blog has a nice article about high interest low vocabulary books (age appropriate material for struggling readers), including references and recommended titles.
• Kirby Larson has selected the third winner in her Hot Women of Children's Literature series: Ann Whitford Paul.
• Robin Brande attended Stephenie Meyer's Eclipse Prom this week, and writes in detail about the experience. What fun! I would have loved to see it. Robin said that girls flew from as far as London for the event, which was held in Tempe, Arizona.
• Gail Gauthier shares the gory details of a not so heavily attended author appearance, noting: "Thank goodness for my virtual life. While I was sitting in that room trying to listen to those poets, I was working out how I'd describe the experience on my blog."
• Michele has an ode in prose in praise of Doctor Who at Scholar's Blog, written in response to a challenge from Elaine Magliaro. Michele says "So for those of you who've been wondering lately what a "serious" scholar of literature is doing raving incessantly about this madcap British TV show, here are my reasons."
• Tricia offers some suggestions for coping with rejection at The Miss Rumphius Effect. She links to a list of The Eight Rules of Rejection, and offers her own suggestion, which is starting an I AM TERRIFIC file. The idea is that any time you receive a positive note or letter from someone about your work, you save it in a file. And whenever you have a bad day, you can go back and look at that file, and cheer yourself up. I think this is a good idea for anyone, not just writers, because we all have good days, in which we do receive positive feedback, and other days with not so much appreciation.

And that is quite enough for one post. I wish you all happy reading!