The Young Adult Scavenger Hunt Teams

Colleen Houck has posted here the two teams for the Young Adult Scavenger Hunt on her website, with all of the covers included. I'll be honest. Pretty cool to see mine included among all of those others. Here's the link to check it out. Still not exactly sure how this scavenger hunt is going to work, but everything has run well up to this point, so I'm going to trust that it will all work out. Tomorrow's the next deadline, so I'm assuming I'll know more about it then.

Follow Your Fates Part of the Young Adult Scavenger Hunt

I saw on Twitter something called the Young Adult Scavenger Hunt, so I checked it out, applied, and Follow Your Fates was accepted. I'll be honest; I'm still not exactly sure how it works. I know that I post some exclusive content (I think on another author's site) and I host another author's content, and then others (both authors and readers?) go from website to website looking for information. In any case, it seems like a great marketing tool, and I'm excited to have been accepted and to participate. So if you want to join in, here's the link to YASH. More later as I get more info about it.

Presentation at the Wayland Literacy Institute

This is a few weeks late, but I wanted to mention the presentation I gave at the Wayland Literacy Institute. This was my first Wayland Literacy Institute, and it was pretty impressive. The keynote speaker, Cris Tovani, started the day off. There were maybe 100, 150 people in the Little Theater. And she did a great job. She was honest and open about both her successes and failures, and had some interesting things to say about reading and literacy. I got to talk to her a bit at lunch (admittedly, I either interrupted or stalked her lunch until she was done), because a lot of what she said seemed related to the Follow Your Fates series: interest, interaction, etc. We had a great little talk and she seemed genuinely excited about the books.

The presentation itself went well also. I had maybe 15 or 20 people there, and they all for the most part seemed interested in the idea of interactive fiction and how it could help their teaching, from third grade all the way to eighth grade. We covered everything from using the format for adapting historical curricula to using it for teaching or covering social issues. Alayna C. even introduced a series of middle school books that use the interactive fiction format in a more extended format, i.e. each chapter ends with a choice with a more elaborate intro / lead-in. I'm not sure people were particularly interested in my books but they seemed interested in the format, which is a good thing.

So thumbs up for the Wayland Literacy Institute. Thanks for letting me participate.