Winner!

Happy Friday, everyone!

The randomly selected winner of Five Flavors of Dumb is:

Christina Ferko!

Congrats :) Keep watching the blog for more giveaways leading up to Christmas. I'm going to celebrate the weekend with one of my favorite Christmas songs:

Now in Technicolor! Christmas Specials

It's Christmas Eve and we're snowed in (and will be snowed in for some time - more on that tomorrow), so what better way to while the away the hours than by watching one's favorite TV Christmas Specials! (You thought I'd say reading, didn't you? Okay, you caught me, I'll be reading too. A lot.)

But before reading, I wanted to continue in the vein of favorite holiday wackiness and some of the wackiest wack comes in the form of televised holiday cheer. Some I just can't stomach, but others make me giggle, and still others draw the nostalgic tear.

Good for giggles:
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)Stop motion animation? An elf who wants to be dentist? Burl Ives the snowman? And of course the Abominable Snowman? What's not to love??


A Christmas Story (1983)From double-dog dares to the Bumpbus dogs there is too much to love in this movie. But my favorite: Snow Suit Immobilization.


But the special most likely to make me snort eggnog up my nose from laughter:
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)



(And I know it's crazy, but I love that song!! Proof that I'm a child of the 80s, no doubt)

And last but not least, nostalgia-filled favorite Christmas special of all time:
A Muppet Family Christmas (1987), which contains this unforgettable moment -

Oversight

It's one of those days. On the morning walk with dogs, leaves glittered with frost. Winter's approach wraps around me like a cloak and all I want to do is hibernate.

My brain's creativity has already departed for napland. So all I can offer today is the Halloween creature feature I somehow missed in my week of spooky posts:

Night of the Living Dough

Banned Books Week Adieu

Thank you for all the wonderful comments and thoughtful responses during my dedicated week of Banned Books Week posts. Thanks especially to Irene Latham for her wonderful guest blog yesterday (go buy her awesome book, Leaving Gee's Bend!)

A few last words on book bans and challenges. If it wasn't already abundantly clear...ahem, I'm against both. I'm taking a page from Carrie Harris who has a lovely BBW post on her blog today. Bans and challenges are about fear and the burden of replacing fear with understanding falls to us - the authors (and to readers, keep reading and talking about why reading widely and deeply is important!)

And because I love any Muppet-like creatures, I'd like to give the last word to the good folks at bannedbooksweek.org

Get What You Give

There are some very interesting ongoing discussions by Authoress and Screaming Guppy about writing rule breakers. The points made by these two astute bloggers are informative and important, if unsettling.

And my naive little self can't help but be a bit shocked. Why are writers trying to skirt the protocol of querying/publishing?

I could understand if the "rules" asked you to hand over your first born a la Rumpelstiltskin, but Authoress gives aspiring authors wonderful venues to learn the craft AND the chance to show their stuff off to Secret Agents. She's doing the writing world a great service - so I had an eye-bulging episode when I heard she'd had entrants who cheated on the contest rules.

These sad, sobering tales of evil shortcuts is even more shocking to me because I've found the writing community to be such a cooperative and welcoming one. When I hear horror stories about authors forcing manuscripts on agents at conferences or submitting blanket queries addressed "Dear Agent" I wonder who these folks are. Certainly they aren't the wonderful writers I've met in the blogosphere and at conferences.

Real success in this endeavor isn't about cutting corners and getting ahead, it's how much we learn from each other and help our fellow writers traveling on the same road.

A few bad apples should not be allowed to taint our beautiful word orchard. At the end of the day writers, agents, publishers are all on the same team with the same goal.

Team: Book Love
Goal: Get more great books out into the world

Time for campfire songs! Or even better, Beaker doing torch.