The CYBILS Shortlists are here!

Yes, the waiting is over. The Cybils shortlists are up! The qualifying books for Fantasy, Fiction Picture Books, Poetry, and Middle Grade (MG) Fiction have already been listed on the Cybils site. And the other categories will be up there shortly. Check out http://dadtalk.typepad.%20com/cybils/ for the lists of finalists.

IN THE CATEGORY OF FANTASY (which I'll be judging this year), THE FINALISTS ARE:

(drum roll please....)

YA Section

* Book of a Thousand Days (by Shannon Hale)

* Incarceron (by Catherine Fisher)

* Northlander - Tales of the Borderlands (by Meg Burden)

* Repossessed (by A. M. Jenkins)

* Skin Hunger (by Kathleen Duey)

.

Elementary/MG Section

* The Chaos King (by Laura Ruby)

* Into the Wild (by Sarah Beth Durst)

* The Land of the Silver Apples (by Nancy Farmer)

* Skulduggery Pleasant (by Derek Landy)

* The True Meaning of Smekday (by Adam Rex)

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF THE CYBILS FANTASY FINALISTS!

I look forward to reading each of your books (which the panelists are swooning over,) and I'll be blogging about them here as the judges select the winning YA and Elem/MG fantasy books for 2007! Having made it to the shortlist is a huge feather in your fedora! Take yourself out to dinner and live it up! You are one of the celebrated writers of 2007!

And to the rest of you out there in blogland -- please join me in a cup of fair-trade hot chocolate, put your feet up, snuggle down in your softest jammies and lose yourself in one of the 10 books listed above. The count-down to the 2007 Cybils' has begun!

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On a side-note that is completely unrelated to the fantasy shortlist for which I'll be judging,

I'd like to send out a celebratory writermorphosis "toast" to Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Kimberly is a fellow SCBWI writer whose book "Leap of Faith" has made the Middle Grade Fiction Cybils "finalist list" this year. I met Kimberly at the SCBWI Carolina's conference two years ago and found her presentations on fiction writing very helpful. So congrats, Kimberly -- my opinion won't help you at all in the judging arena, as I'm on the fantasy panel not the MG panel :) -- but Congratulations on being named a Cybils finalist this year! I lift my cup of hot chocolate in your honor.