So one of the many excellent things I didn’t have a spare second to post about last week is Colleen Mondor’s latest amazing project. The thing about Colleen is, if something’s bugging her, she pulls people together and does a really cool thing to address it. I’m always honored to participate.
This time out, she’s heading up a group effort organized around a dedicated site that will serve as a resource for encouraging boys to read, connecting them with good book recommendations and new authors, etc. The new site will be known as Guys Lit Wire and you can read more about the plans over at her site. In particular, we need more guys, so if you’re interested in participating drop her a line.
How is this different from John Scieszka’s Guys Read (www.guysread.com) effort? Not to rain on parades or say there can only be one–I’m just wondering if the folks involved are aware of the other site and how do they see themselves differently in terms of mission/content/etc?
Yep, everyone’s aware of all those efforts and not looking to duplicate them. I think more to complement them, in fact.
Hi Justin!
One big difference is that we are aiming for teenage boys – pretty much exclusively over the age of 14. The other thing is that we have a big group of daily posters – 21 of them – so every Mon – Fri there will be new content in a very active blog. The group who will be posting is all over the place in terms of experience – authors – librarians – students – booksellers – artists – and on and on. So it’s a pretty eclectic group.
I think what Jon has done with Guys Read is very impressive – basically we’re just going to look to older readers for our site and try to engage them more directly with the blog.
Hopefully the two sites will complement each other perfectly.