The Book Broads

 

 Youth Literacy: A Discussion with The Book Broads [28:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (336)

Kim and I sat down in Starbucks this afternoon to talk about youth literacy. As usual, we cover a variety of topics related to this huge issue.

Some books that we talk about in this recording are:

- Halo, by Alexadra Adornetto
-  The Guardian, by C.J. Gosling (to be released in 2011)

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(Kim here) had the great pleasure to chat with Thora Howell. Thora is one of the people who is part of Nanaimo’s Bookfest. This great, fun kid’s book festival happens on May 1st. Check out www.bookfest.ca.

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Nothing to do this month? It’s not too late to join at NanoWriMo.org, an alliance of authors each striving to write a 50,000 word novel by midnight Nov. 30th.

How does it work? You set up a profile, upload things like your avatar, a cover image for your book, a brief excerpt of your novel, and tell your account where you are on the planet.

Then you start writing. And writing. And writing some more. There are real-life meetups for particular cities where people get together with their laptops and write like fiends, fueled by caffeine and other sustenance, encouraging each other to keep up the daily word count.

Here’s the crux of it: once in a while, you copy the plain text of your entire manuscript, and paste it into a small field on your account at the site. A little javascript app performs an official word count of your book, and posts that count to your your public profile, but does not post the text of your novel. It promptly deletes the text you posted in there – nobody can go on to read your novel off the site.

The site organizers are very clear about this not being the next great piece of world literature, and that the focus is on quantity rather than quality. The act of writing is exciting, cathartic, energizing, and creative. It’s about the experience.

The organizers also run a fantastic youth writing program. Why not show your support by buying a T-shirt? Then write your own bad novel, just like I am!

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