All the links I’ve been hoarding:

• With Veterans’ Day coming up, it’s a good time to remember how children are affected by war.
• Cave paintings to Amazon: a brief history of publishing.
• A reading list for Harry Potter characters.
• Forget the rules: write opening lines that work for your stories.
• Not that I’m biased or anything, but Boston is an awesome literary city.
• Pets. In. Costume.
• Cannot wait for Bleed Like Me.
• These book-inspired beers need to be real and a bookstore/bar near me.
• Writing “unlikeable” girl characters and how readers react to them.
• Maggie Smith basically made Daniel Radcliffe Harry Potter, continues to be the best.
• A playlist for Andrew Ladd’s upcoming novel, What Ends, aka that book about a Scottish family that will give you all the feels.
• Inspiring writing quotes to power you through NaNoWriMo.
• Excellent post on the Ender’s Game movie and how we can use it as a teachable moment.
• Series you may have missed and need to check out. Or revisit. Because SO GOOD.
• Elizabeth Wein looks at who’s reading and buying teen novels.
• A guide to all the dystopian plot elements Katniss could want from a book.
• A fun YA reading flowchart.
• Writing about mental illness from the inside.
• Rejections facts for when you need to keep going.
• Excellent look at the actual gender breakdown of the New York Times YA Bestseller List.

Link it up:

• Sometimes even famous writers need a random job to pay the bills. (My random jobs have included ice cream scooper, front desk assistant in a film studies department, and salesperson at the American Girl store.)
• Digging these notebooks.
• A literary emotional thermometer.
• Once in a blue moon you’ll find a video on idiom origins.
• Nova Ren Suma with a great post on why deadlines matter.
• “What is important is the immediacy of the story and the point of view of the teen. YA lit speaks to the teenager, current or past, in its readers, regardless of the protagonist’s age.”
• Really, was Mallory anyone’s favorite baby-sitter?
• Love these literary city guides (especially the one for my personal favorite place, Charlottesville, VA).
• Fear and the economy reflected in YA.
• Helpful post on attending educational conferences as a writer.
• Two things I love: gifs and the Fourteenery. Seeing them combined on Buzzfeed pretty much makes my year.

A few links for your afternoon:

• Totally agree with a lot of these book turn-offs, especially number eight.
• William Faulkner is still a master of words.
• The New York Public Library shares its list of the top 100 books of the last 100 years. No “best of” list can ever be complete, but this one does include a lot of favorites.
• Writing in bed, cars, and other unlikely locations.
• I never read Go Ask Alice, but this post about discovering it wasn’t real reminds me about discovering there’s no unabridged version of The Princess Bride.
• Meg Rosoff on why children deserve the truth, even when it’s hard.
• Songs for Punctuation Day, or whenever you want to celebrate the Oxford comma, aka always.
• Characters you love to hate.
• Messed-up families in literature can make your own look pretty good.
• Probably not surprising to educators and librarians, but now there’s evidence: students that read for pleasure do better than their peers.
• “Book banning isn’t about quality control; it’s about thought control.”