A New Continent of Dragons Awaits!
Hello lovely wonderful readers!
We are only THREE WEEKS AWAY from the release of Book Eleven! I am so excited and so in love with this cover! (If the number of words in these blogs was proportional to how much I adore Joy Ang, it would be ALL JOY ALL THE TIME. She is beyond amazing! Look how beautiful Blue the SilkWing is!)
To celebrate, I’ll be posting on the Scholastic Wings of Fire forums on Tuesdays for the next few weeks, as we reveal the new tribes one by one…and the shiny new map! Please come on over and send me questions and hang out with us!
And then I’ll be doing my first-ever Washington DC event (eep yay!) on June 26 at 7pm at Politics and Prose at the Wharf — make sure you come to the Wharf store, not the other one! It’ll be a launch party for Book Eleven and hopefully I’ll finally be able to stop answering every question with: “Oooooo, great question THAT I CAN’T ANSWER, MWA HA HA.” 😉 (Well, I’ll probably have to say it a few times, but at least we’ll be able to talk about all the new tribes and some of the history of Pantala! Hooray!)
Also this summer, I’ll be visiting some places I’ve been before (Belmont Books and Enchanted Passage in MA, Books of Wonder in NYC, hooray!) and at least one NEW place (Ohio!!!!!), and all of those details will be on my Events page as soon as I know them!
Another Wings of Fire note: I hear that there are some very passionate shipper wars happening online, and I don’t want to wade into the details, but I do want to say: you guys! I love all of you! I love so much that you care about these dragons enough to have such strong feelings about them, and that you care about their world enough that you want to jump in and defend characters or fix the problems you see.
Just please remember that at the other end of all these bits and bytes, there are real lovely humans who love books and dragons as much as you do, and who would probably be your friends if you met in real life. You are all the smartest, sweetest people, full of enormous empathy and creativity. I trust you to read and write only whatever fanfiction makes you happy and avoid what doesn’t (and also to know that if you ever meet a Darkstalker in actual real life, don’t date that guy! Find a Clay or a Kinkajou or a Starflight instead!). 🙂
What I would really really love is if you could take all of your amazing fierce inspiring energy and use it to fight some actual bad guys and make the real world a better place. 😀 One easy way to do that: run a voter registration drive at your local high school! HeadCount.org can help you figure out how, and you don’t even have to be 18 yet!
If you do, let me know (through my Contact form or Facebook — send me a photo of the registration table or something) and I promise to send your school library a full set of Wings of Fire books for free (or all three Menagerie books, if they’d rather have that!). Teachers and librarians, this applies to you, too! I’m happy to send the books for your classroom or the library, whichever you need!
The future is all about you, wonderful readers. Whenever I get anxious or sad, I think about you and it helps very much, so thank you for being as wonderful as you are!
One more thing: after my last post, I went looking for more diverse chapter books/books for ages 5-8 and wanted to share a few I found that we really love!:
Lola Levine Is Not Mean! (and the rest of the series), by Monica Brown, illustrated by Angela Dominguez
Jasmine Toguchi series, by Debbi Michiko Florence
Jada Jones series, by Kelly Starling Lyons
Freddie Ramos series, by Jacqueline Jules
Race the Wild series, by Kristin Earhart
King and Kayla series, by Dori Hillestad Butler
and one of my new favorite books ever: Cilla Lee-Jenkins, Future Author Extraordinaire, by Susan Tan (also the sequel, Cilla Lee-Jenkins: This Book Is A Classic) — it’s so great! (And my eight-year-old loved it, too!)
These have all been so much fun to read and I recommend them very much! 🙂 They are a nice break from all the very bleak TV that I can’t even bring myself to watch anymore. (So I am slowly catching up on Supergirl instead and just realized that my enormous crush on Mon-El is 75% based on the fact that he wears adorable glasses half the time. And so does she! Awww, more adorable heroes in glasses, please!) 🙂
OK, I must get back to Book Twelve — but come on over to the Scholastic forums all month to find out more about the new tribes! And very soon you’ll be able to join me in Pantala — I can’t wait! 🙂 🙂 🙂
What We’re Reading:
Me: The Power, by Naomi Alderman; Goldie Vance, by Hope Larson and Brittney Williams; How I Resist, edited by Maureen Johnson; and All Out, edited by Saundra Mitchell
With my bigger bear: Holes, by Louis Sachar, and The Backstagers, by James Tynion IV and Rian Sygh
With my smaller bear: Secondhand Magic, by Ruth Chew