Links!

• I shared this one on Twitter earlier, but it's a fun one, so I'm including it here, too: Why is the 'mor' in 'Voldemort' so evil-sounding?
• Today's Kindle Daily Deal: Rick Yancey's Alfred Kropp.
• Are you going to re-read Harriet the Spy in honor of her fiftieth birthday? Liz B. is.
• Okay, Marshmallows: You'd better put on your jealous shoes before clicking through to Diana Peterfreund's post about attending the Veronica Mars movie premiere.
• Gwenda Bond on the Reading Police: "I'm actually not bugged by the Heinlein juvenile rhapsodizers not being current on modern YA--if it's not their thing, it's not their thing. What I'm bugged by is the casual dismissal of a body of work they're not familiar with, a determined averting of the eyes from it with their explicit or implicit insistence that the old classics are somehow innately better than books they haven't read."
• Shannon Hale asks: Is your default character white and male? "As a writer who is white, I definitely fall into this trap. If a character isn't white, I often describe that, but if they are white, I don't describe because it's assumed. For the first time writing this book, from the POV of a character who isn't white (she's half white, half Latina), I found myself realizing I had that habit. In Dangerous, when we first meet two important characters, Dragon and Howell, I had Maisie describe Dragon as a "black man" and Howell as a "white woman." Interestingly, the copy editor noted that and asked if the "white woman" signifier was necessary. Because "white" is default, assumed, even if you don't specify."