• Please visit the many excellent literary bloggers who are staying on top of current developments while I attempt to break the 40,000 word barrier on my novel (more on that later) and keep the folks at the day job happy. If you haven’t burned out on year-in-review book panels, I participated in Alex Good’s again this year.

• The new issue of Poets & Writers features an interview with John Haskell (whose I Am Not Jackson Pollock makes for a dark, engrossing read), a new column devoted to creative writing workshops, and Cris Mazza’s “Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre.”

• Bookslut’s new issue includes a survey of Edith Wharton’s novellas and Jessa Crispin’s interview with Jane Brox.

• Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land receives deserved accolades in the Village Voice.

• Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, talks about the school districts that have banned his book and others that would like to ban it.

• Nominate your favorite online stories of the year for storySouth‘s second annual Million Writers Award, designed “to honor and promote the best fiction published in online literary journals and magazines during the past year.” Last year’s winner, Randa Jarrar (for “You Are A 14-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Just Moved to Texas“), went on to publish a short story in the estimable Ploughshares and to become Moorish Girl‘s Friday blogger.