It’s been a while since I have had the time to post, but there have been a number of things that I have discovered about recently, which I would like to share just in case some of you don’t know about them.

The first of these is the Summer Blog Blast Tour, which was organized by Colleen Mondor, the brainchild of Chasing Ray.  This tour consists of a number of interviews with assorted children’s and YA authors, which will take place all week on a variety of lit blogs.  It kicked off on Sunday with an interview of Gene Yang, the author of American Born Chinese, on Finding Wonderland: The Writing YA Weblog.  It will go throughout this whole week and will feature many authors including a few of my favorites like Chris Crutcher, Kazu Kibuishi, and Brent Hartinger.  I would highly recommend going over to Chasing Ray for a peek at the schedule to see what authors you like and where you can find their interviews. Also, thanks to Colleen for putting all this together.

Next I need to mention a phenomenon that I am sure most of you are already aware of, but I just discovered it a few weeks ago so I feel the need to mention it.  The phenomenon that I speak of is called Brotherhood 2.0.  This is a video blog run by John Green, author of Looking for Alaska, and his brother Hank Green who is the creator of a great environmental technology blog called Ecogeek.  The purpose of this vlog is for the brothers Green to avoid textual communication for the entire year and to therefore communicate largely by use of these videos.  Every week day there is a new entry and they are all quite hilarious.  They also give an interesting view into the lives of these two brothers.  This is especially interesting for YA librarians since John is an award winning YA author.  You actually get to see some intimate moments detailing his experiences in the world of YA lit.  The site has developed an extremely large audience, so I am assuming that many of you are already regular viewers, but if you aren’t you should give it a look.  You won’t be disappointed.  I would however suggest starting with the early archives from the first week or two just so you have an idea of what the site is about.