here’s why: she just read 1000 picture books in 100 days.

yeah. i know! she’s crazy, what can i say?
she was set on her course this past august when a speaker at a conference that she attends suggested that in order to know how to write a good picture book, one must have read a thousand of them. she decided to do so, and moreover, she decided to do it in only a hundred days. holy crap! here’s an excerpt from her recent post about it:

“On the last day of 2007, I reached my goal of reading 1000 picture books in 100 days. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing. I have a new understanding of picture books that I’m already putting to good use and much fun.

I kept track of all the books on LibraryThing. You can sort the entries by any category, author, ratings, or, most handy of all, publisher. I’m excited about using it to see what publishing houses are publishing what sort of books. I hope you find the list useful as well.”

so if you want to help me out, i’ve submitted the story to Propeller and Digg both. please feel free to vote on them! … (propeller, digg)

sara doesn’t really read my blog. she doesn’t need to, since there’s not much i could post here that she doesn’t already know about. but! i read hers, now that she’s started bloggin’ on a regular basis. i know, i know. everyone but the kitchen sink has a blog (and that particularly unfortunate piece of kitchenware probably has one and i just don’t know it).

but what you don’t know is that she just got a blogtacular facelift. back a couple years ago when i originally coded the site, it was static pages and yadda yadda because we didn’t have time to make anything fancy, since the SCBWI conference was coming up fast and she needed a presence on the web pretty damn quick. fast forward several months and sara asked me if she could have a blog integrated with her current site. so i think about it a little, and then put her site into a blender with a bare-bones wordpress theme, and out comes the new site, which you may have seen previously.

fast forward yet again to at least a year later (now). the site was still in its ‘no posts yet’ phase, as sara hadn’t really taken up the reins yet. she said she was waiting until she really “had something to blog about,” which turned out to be seeing Joss “Is My Master Now” Whedon in person. i’d say that that’s definitely awesome enough. so when that happens, she comes to me and we decide that the site really needs a facelift. so, we increase the real-estate of the text area, move some of the images around, redo the graphics, and pretty up the stylesheet some, and voila — happy new blog. what’s more, now that she’s blogging and reviewing books and talking about writing, she’s actually getting quite a bit of traffic (well, not TONS, but it’s better than nuthin’). congratulations, sara!