Ten-Minute Blog Break - 17th September

Welcome back to the Blog Break - there's no crochet this week, but I can promise you giant dinosaurs, Asian superheroes and a time-wasting new spin on an old story format...



At the edge this week, Katie Dale takes on the size zero culture by surveying book covers and asking Are YA Girls Too Skinny? Is it that readers don't want to read about overweight or unattractive girls, or more that book covers don't accurately represent the characters within?

It's one SCBWI author interviewing another at The Enchanted Inkpot, as Caroline Hooton quizzes Sarwat Chadda about his recently-complete Ash Mistry series. The refreshingly outspoken Sarwat talks about Hindu mythology, the difference between Middle Grade & YA and why he thinks age banding for books was a "stupid idea".

Talking of outspoken, the Crabbit Old Bat (her description, not mine) Nicola Morgan has recently joined SCBWI and also restarted her seminal Help! I Need a Publisher! blog. Nicola's been blogging about finding a good agent over her last few posts and provided this very site with a condensed version of her wisdom. But it's worth checking out the full unexpurgated version on her blog, not least for this sentence: "I know that if Godzilla, egged on by a Dalek, lumbered into your garden and offered to be your agent, get you published and make you a millionaire, you’d agree."

Finally, you're probably procrastinating already by reading the Blog Break, so why not make it official by visiting Mark Jones' latest blog post. In a symphony of interactive meta-fiction, he invites you to descend into The Fidgety Pit of Procrastination: A Choose Your Own Adventure.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round techno-ninja. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead.
This week on his blog, Nick hasn't written another word of his novel but is somehow feeling much better about it. It's all because he's been Taking Stock.