A Holiday for Writers

How will you celebrate National Punctuation Day? Personally, I love the idea of semi-colon meatloaf; too bad I’m a vegetarian.

Happy Poets Day!

So, apparently today is Poets Day. However, there are various interpretations of the word poets. But hey, there’s a blog or two out there that asserts that today is Poets Day as in, you know, the people who write poems. Either way, you can unleash your creativity this Friday afternoon and celebrate BOTH meanings of Poets Day. You may have thought I used up all my poetry jabber during National Poetry Writing Month, but that’s not the case. For example, I just recently discovered

• The Poetry Foundation, which has a cool Poetry Tool that will help you find a poem for every occasion . . . that is, if you’re not feeling creative enough to write one yourself. If you are, however . . .
• Try some poetry prompts here or here, not to mention the writing prompt sites reviewed in this entry.
• Vote in WEbook’s Poetry Competition. Voting ends on August 31!

I confess that I’m actually not much of a poetry reader, although I find myself enjoying it when I do pick it up. I am currently reading a novel in verse, A Bad Boy Can be Good for a Girl, which is not nearly as good as David Levithan’s novel in verse, The Realm of Possibility. As for me . . . will I write a poem today? Well, that all depends on how the noveling goes, since I’ve told myself I am NOT allowed to go to sleep tonight without having written on it. Tempting as it may be, I’m not going to allow Poets Day to become a tool for procrastination . . . at least, not anymore than it already has been.

Happy Birthday, Judy Blume

I can’t stay long, but I didn’t want to let this day pass without mentioning that today is YA author Judy Blume’s seventy-first birthday (if my math doesn’t fail me!). In addition to being the mother of young adult literature as we know it, she’s also a champion of free speech. This is one cool septenarian!

(I wrote a bit more coherently about her significance to generations of girls here.)

Happy Science Fiction Day!

January 2 is Science Fiction Day in honor of Isaac Asimov’s birthday. Confession: I’ve never read anything by Isaac Asimov. But I still couldn’t let this day pass without at least a brief mention of it on my blog. I wrote a short piece about it for NMG.com, and it was hard for me to keep the article from ballooning into a treatise about why EVERYONE should check out sci-fi. But actually, I understand if it’s not your thing. When I was younger, it wasn’t my thing, either; I liked fantasy, but I thought sci-fi was just a bunch of techno-talk. Then I discovered post-apocalyptic fiction, and another sci-fi fanatic was born.

If you’d like to celebrate the day with a Lacey-approved sci-fi novel, here’s a list of my favorites, in no particular order:

1. The Uglies Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld (Pretties is my favorite, but read them all)
2. The Time Quintent by Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time is my fave)
3. The Ender Series by Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead is my fave, but I haven’t read them all yet)
4. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel
5. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
6. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
7. Jack the Bodiless by Julian May
8. The Giver by Lois Lowry
9. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
10. The Family Tree by Sheri S. Tepper

You may be surprised not to see any of the “classics” on my list (1984, Farenheit 451, Brave New World, etc.). Although I’ve read many of them, none of them “did” much for me except make me feel well-read. I was always irritated that the authors could imagine vastly different societies, but couldn’t stretch their imagination past traditional gender roles.

I would have very much liked to spend today reading and watching sci-fi, but, alas, a life in which a significant portion of my time is not taken up by earning a living is speculative fiction indeed.