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An 8-year-old snuck his handwritten book onto a library shelf. Now it has a 56-person waiting list.

Dillon Helbig's 81-page graphic novel— written by "Dillon His Self"—captured the hearts of his local librarians and their patrons.

KTVB/YouTube

Dillon Helbig's 81-page graphic novel captured the hearts of his local librarians.

Writing a book is no easy task, even for adult professional writers. Many would-be authors dream of a day when their work can be found on library shelves, unsure if it will ever come.

But for 8-year-old Dillon Helbig, that day has already arrived—in truly unconventional fashion—thanks to his own determination to make it happen.

Dillon wrote his 81-page graphic novel, "The Adventures of Dillon Helbig's Crismis" (written by "Dillon His Self") in a hardcover journal with colored pencils over the course of a few days.

He even put a label on the back of the book that reads "Made in Idho" [sic] and put an illustrated spine label on it as well. Then, without telling anyone, he brought it to his local library in Boise, Idaho, and slipped it in among the books in the children's section.


The library Facebook page shared that it had officially added the book to the collection at the branch, writing, "Imagine our surprise yesterday when Dillon's mom called to tell us that her son had authored an entire book, shelved it at the Lake Hazel Branch, then announced to his family later that he had written a book and it could be checked out at the library."

The library also announced that Dillon's book had won the first-ever Whoodini Award for Best Young Novelist—an award created in his honor.

Dillon told local news station KTVB that the book features him, his mom, Santa, a bomb, a portal and a giant carnivorous turkey. Because of course.

"I've been wanting to put a book in the library since I was five," Dillon told the station. Nearly half his life, in other words.

Dillon said there were a lot of librarians he had to sneak past with his book to surreptitiously put it on the shelf, but he did it.

"I'll always be sneaky, like how I get chocolate," he explained. Classic.

The adults on every front handled this kid's creativity and determination the best possible way. His mom called the library to let them know the book was there so it wouldn't get lost or taken.

And rather than just returning the book, the librarians actually put it into circulation.

"His parents were worried we would find his book and we would get rid of it," Lake Hazel Branch Library manager Alex Hartman told KTVB. "Which was an unfounded fear because if there's ever a place a book would be safe, it would be here."

The librarians loved Dillon's book.

“It deserves a spot on our library shelves,” said Hartman. “It’s a good story.”

At the time of this local news report, the book had a handful of people in line to check it out. But The New York Times reports that as of the end of January, the waiting list has grown to a whopping 56 people. If each person kept the book for the maximum four-week checkout period it would take four years to get to the people at the bottom of the list.

The experience has made Dillon decide to become an author, his mom said, and he even has some career goals laid out.

“I’m going to stop writing when I’m 40,” Dillon said. After that, he will switch to game creation. In the meantime, he has a sequel to his first novel in the works.

“My next book is going to be called ‘The Jacket-Eating Closet,’" he said, "based on actual events.”

Amazing. Kudos to Dillon for following his dream and making it happen, kudos to his mom for encouraging him and kudos to the librarians who saw an opportunity to support a child's creativity and ran with it.


This article originally appeared on 09.13.22

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The 'How would a male author describe you?' Twitter challenge is a lot of fun.

"She had an ass like a plump popsicle and I deigned to admire her."

Can male authors write powerful, strong, and accurate female characters? Totally. Do many struggle with it? Well...

Author Gwen C. Katz was scrolling through Twitter, reading a thread about members of marginalized groups advocating for more work written by marginalized individuals. Of course, it went haywire — especially when a man just had to jump in to assure others that he was every bit as capable of writing an accurate female character as any woman.

"I think writers should be able to write from any perspective as long as they can pull it off. It takes research, skill, and creativity, but if a good writer can't do those things, he/she isn't a good writer, right?" he wrote. "My book is a first-person [point-of-view] and the [main character] is a woman. I'm definitely not a woman. But it works because I was able to pull it off. I reject someone saying I couldn't write a female [main character] because I'm a male, because, well, I just did. It's called writing."

Oh boy. Was he able to pull it off?

"I sauntered over, certain he noticed me. I'm hard to miss, I'd like to think — a little tall (but not too tall, a nice set of curves if I do say so myself, pants so impossibly tight that if I had a credit card in my back pocket you could read the expiration date. The rest of my outfit wasn't that remarkable, just a few old things I had lying around. You know how it is."

The thread (which you can read in its entirety here) included a few other choice passages from chapter one of this mystery book, but the point was made: Some guys just don't know how to write about women without being really weird about it.

Now, maybe you're saying to yourself, "Sure, but that's just one guy that nobody's heard of." Fair point. For another example, which was uncovered by writer Julia Carpenter, let's look to renowned author John Updike:

Excerpt from "The Witches of Eastwick" by John Updike.

It's not limited to books, either. Take, for instance, this 2016 Vanity Fair profile of actress Margot Robbie, which begins:

"America is so far gone, we have to go to Australia to find a girl next door. In case you’ve missed it, her name is Margot Robbie. She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character."

To be sure, there's nothing necessarily wrong with describing people or characters as sexy (though, if you don't understand how women pee, maybe don't try to go into detail about that). It's just that this type of writing is so formulaic, so common.

Twitter users had a bit of fun with the format after Whitney Reynolds recently offered a challenge: "Describe yourself like a male author would."

The replies were absolutely epic, with thousands of people responding.

Thanks to a new chart from Electric Literature, creating your own personal description is as easy as spelling your name.

The result follows this format: "She had ____ like a ____ ____ and I ____ to ____ her."

For instance, if your name were Sarah, your description would read: "She had knockers like a silken princess and I longed to proposition her." If your name was Brittany, you'd get: "She had a bust like a shrill popsicle and I ached to fondle her."

Fun, right?

"The Twitter challenge originated in response to a man who was claiming that his female characters were so convincing, they proved that there's no need to elevate a wider range of voices. White male writers can do it all!" Electric Lit editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman says. "But when writers take on characters they don't really understand or respect, what you end up with is a kind of puppet show: all the 'real people' look the same, and everyone else is just a weak, potentially offensive bit of 2D guesswork. This is not actually good for the state of literature! It's alienating to readers and impoverishing for books."

Zimmerman elaborates, clarifying that she knows it's #NotAllMen who do this, chalking the prevalence of the detached and unnecessarily sexualized descriptions as the result of a culture that never really asks men to see things from a woman's perspective.

"That's why the joke in our generator is that the woman is described according to the man's reactions: a lot of male writers, including famous ones, never get any closer to 'imagining a woman's experience' than 'imagining my experience of a woman.' But keen observation, empathy, and the ability to take on someone else's perspective are crucial novelist skills. Male novelists should relish the effort it takes to do better."

Let's all have a laugh, and for the authors in the audience, don't let your writing become an internet meme.

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A cheeky Twitter challenge between 2 authors aims to raise $500k for refugees.

The velvet-voiced 'American Gods' author could soon be doing a very special reading.

Like so many of the world's great stories, this one involves a couple of well-known authors, half a million dollars in charity, social media, and The Cheesecake Factory.

It began when author and comedian Sara Benincasa issued a somewhat silly challenge to fellow author Neil Gaiman on Twitter: If she could raise $500,000 for charity, would Gaiman commit to hosting a staged reading of The Cheesecake Factory's (surprisingly lengthy) menu?

Much to Twitter's delight, Gaiman said yes and selected the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as his charity.

OK, but why Cheesecake Factory? Why Gaiman? Why that charity?

"Neil's a magnificent human," explains Benincasa over direct message on Twitter. "Cheesecake Factory is the greatest restaurant of all time. I love to contribute to good causes, though I surely don't have a half million dollars on hand."

For years, Gaiman has been an advocate for refugees around the world, so UNHCR made for an obvious choice. The whole project combines, as Benincasa writes, "the truly goofy with the truly meaningful."

You know you want to hear this man describe this piece of cheesecake. Photos by Darryl James/Getty Images and Paul Morigi/Getty Images for The Cheesecake Factory.

$500,000 is a lot of money to raise, but Gaiman feels confident Benincasa can deliver.

"Sara Benincasa is a powerful woman and I am glad she uses her powers for good," Gaiman says over e-mail. "At least, I hope she's using her powers for Good. Because I strongly suspect I'm going to be doing a public reading of the Cheesecake Factory Menu."

As a bit of a bonus, if Benincasa is able to raise a full million dollars, Gaiman has also agreed to read Dr. Seuss' "Fox in Socks" in his wonderfully warm and velvety voice.  (Here's a video of him reading Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham" — you're welcome.)

While this is all in good fun, it's an important reminder that the refugee crisis is very much ongoing and that refugees need our help now as much as ever.

65.3 million people worldwide have been displaced by one crisis or another, and it's on the rest of us to pitch in and help — for the sake of humanity.

This 2014 photo shows a Syrian mother and son in a Turkish refugee camp. Photo by Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images.

Benincasa says the project is "a selfish way to marry [her] three favorite things (awesome art, a wonderful cause, and the world's most perfect food)," as well as a bit of a thank you to Gaiman and others who work hard to support refugees — even when there's no cheesecake involved.

Learn more details about the project and donate at the campaign's Crowdrise page.

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This bookstore found the perfect way to show how sexism affects publishing.

If you walk into the fiction section this month at Loganberry Books in Cleveland, Ohio, you'll see a whole lot of white staring back at you.

Like this:

Photo courtesy of Harriett Logan.

And that's no accident.

Store owner Harriett Logan — with the help of her employees and a few volunteers — deliberately flipped around all the fiction books written by men, hiding their colorful spines from view.

"I wanted to do something provocative and interesting for Women's History Month that also displayed the disparity of women working in a certain field," Logan explains. And that field, naturally, was book publishing.

Logan estimates that of the approximate 10,000 fiction works at her used bookstore, nearly two-thirds were written by men.

Photo courtesy of Harriett Logan.

The gender gap in book publishing isn't limited to the fiction section at Loganberry, of course. It's reflective of a much bigger pattern.

Female authors still face hurdles getting their work published — hurdles that their male peers often don't encounter.

Although it might seem like there are just as many women as men writing books and working in publishing overall, power structures and implicit bias still influence which books get published and reviewed and, as a result, reach commercial success.

A 2011 study by VIDA, a women's literary group, found many more men were writing book reviews for major publications, such as The New York Times, and (maybe unsurprisingly) the significant majority of the books reviewed in these same publications were written by men too. In other words, book publishing, the study found, tends to be a boys' club where women's work is more easily overlooked.

One anecdote that puts this reality into perspective is author Catherine Nichols' shocking 2015 experiment submitting her novel to be published: After sending identical queries to dozens of agents under both her own name and a fictional male-sounding name, Nichols found her fake male counterpart was 8.5 times more likely than her to get manuscript requests from agents. Or, as Nichols put it, he was "eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book."

Stories like Nichols' illustrate why many female authors choose to publish their work under male or ambiguous-sounding pseudonyms (J.K. Rowling's publisher, for example, was afraid a woman's name on the cover would hurt book sales).

This inequality gets to the heart of why Logan is honoring Women's History Month the way she is: by challenging booklovers to think more critically about the titles they choose to read.

Photo courtesy of Harriett Logan.

It's damaging to all of us when books only reflect a certain perspective, Logan explains. But when we read books by people who've lived different experiences than our own, it challenges us to grow.

"Reading — and especially reading fiction — is a wonderful tool for building empathy, for building an understanding and awareness of places and times and people who are different than you," she explains, noting it's not just important to read more works by women, but from other marginalized groups as well. "That’s an important educational tool, no matter what your age is."

She made sure to point out her store's book flip certainly doesn't mean it's opposed to celebrating male authors — "We still buy and sell, read and love, novels written by men," Logan says — but Loganberry is simply taking the opportunity to do its part in righting an industry-wide wrong decades in the making.

The response to the book flip has been very positive thus far, Logan says — although she has seen a few bewildered faces upon entering the fiction section.

If you're wondering how to help solve the gender gap in publishing, you can start with your next trip to the bookstore.

Logan encourages all of us to "look at your own shelves at home" — both the titles you've already finished, and what's coming up next in your to-be-read pile — and make sure to read more works by women and other groups whose stories have been overlooked too often for too long.

"You learn empathy by listening to other voices," she says of why reading diverse books makes a difference. "You learn to have constructive criticism about the world and your place within it when you realize you’re not the only person in that world."

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