Congratulations to the Seattle Public Library for making the world’s longest domino book chain to promote their Summer Reading Program and successfully blowing my mind in the process. The library is careful to assure us in its YouTube video description that none of the 2,131 books used “were harmed during the filming of this video.” Darn skippy. Libraries are the best.

(via: io9)

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Adapt this, Baz Luhrmann. Actually, adapt Bulgakov’s The Masquerain and Margarita.

No, seriously, I think you’d do a much better job at The Master and Margarita than The Great Gatsby. But I guess if you’re not doing anything else you could look at these works of classic literature with Pokémon in the title.

E. L. Konigsburg, Elaine Lobl Konigsburg, is probably remembered best as the long-named author of the even longer named From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book about a brother and sister who ran away to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to teach their parents a lesson about appreciating them and to live in comfort while doing it, and wind up uncovering the secret origins of an unattributed angel statue in the Met’s collection, a mystery as old as Michelangelo.

The author, not just of Mixed-Up Files but rahter a score of books and novels died this last Friday in Falls Church, Virginia.

West Virginia Republican legislator Ryan Canterbury’s bill to make sci-fi a mandatory part of public school required reading just landed him on our Awesome People list.

I usually write a post about the American Library Association’s top ten list of the banned, pulled, contested, and challenged books in American libraries every year, because more often than not the list is a lovely illustration of how our society is disproportionately uncomfortable with stories by women and minorities when they actually talk about their experiences as women or minorities.

But this year everything’s pretty equitably awful. In fact, this is the first time since 2008 that male authors on the ALA list have outnumbered their distaff counterparts. Hooray?

So. I wrote a book. I tried to do this once before. It was a gritty, noir-ish detective story, undoubtedly born out of repeated viewings of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Sundays spent watching Mystery! with my mom. I wrote two pages, sketched out a cover design, decided that the whole thing would take way too much time, and went back to playing The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary. My hopes of being the first second grader ever (ever, I tell you) to write a book fell to the wayside.

It took twenty years for my patience to improve, but I finally did what seven-year-old me could not. This time around, I went for science fiction, a more constant love of mine. My younger self had a lot to learn about her genre preferences, but she was right about one thing — books take time. And as I’m about to set off on the hunt for a publisher, I need a little more to get it right.

One of the odd side effects of the digital age is the gradual loss of the acres and acres of handwritten or typed manuscripts that could be catalogued by archivists interested in following the career of an author. With “save” taking primacy over “save as,” those windows (no pun intended) into the process of an author stay shut. Probably there are a lot of writers who prefer it that way.

Like most smaller changes wrought by advancing technology these days, I find this more interesting than depressing or uplifting. However, it does mean that two hundred years from now, probably nobody is going to be bidding six figures for a copy of my Scrivener file.

The Morgaine Stories, or Cycle (Gate of Ivrel, Well of Shiuan, and Fires of Azeroth) are one of those genre fiction series that are hard to classify. If it’s full of fantasy tropes and low-technology societies, is it fantasy? If much of its “magic” is really just incredibly complex technology, is it science fiction? Either way, it features a sword wielding heroine time cop from a line of now extinct time cops and her faithful vassal traveling through time and space to keep time travel out of dangerous hands, so I can buy into that. Frankly a movie adaptation does not seem likely, but I’m willing to entertain the idea long enough to tell you about it.

Congratulations, writers of Beautiful Bastard, you just got a five-book deal for creating hot, steamy Twilight fanfiction. 

Before I really knew anything about Jason Segel except that he was in that show How I Met Your Mother that my mom really liked to watch (Freaks and Geeks is on my watch list, I’msorrydon’tshootme), I sat spellbound by an interview he gave NPR where he cheerfully talked about what he considered one of the dumbest, silliest decisions he’d ever made: as a young kid, just out of school, he’d decided that what he should really be doing with his life was not trying to get a job but to really buckle down on the completely serious, not a parody, puppet Dracula musical he’d always wanted to get made.

This was why, when his involvement in The Muppets was announced, I knew he was the person for the job. And it’s why, if he wants to write a trilogy of young adult novels based on an idea he came up with when he was twenty-one, I’m absolutely okay with it.