Thursday, January 3, 2013

Meet Our New Members, aka Fresh Meat!



Hello all and Happy New Year!

It's going to be a great 2013 for Project Mayhem, as we've added four amazing new members! We were a bit overwhelmed with not just the amount of applicants we received, but the quality of applicants. We voted democratically, and to be honest, each candidate got votes! That says a lot about how good this crop was and we thank everyone for putting themselves out there and applying to Project Mayhem. We know it's not easy!

Starting next week, our four new members will be spreading mayhem along with your old favorites! We promise more posts for 2013, awesome contests and giveaways, and maybe even a video of one of our members doing the robot (read below)!

If there's any MG topic you'd like us to cover in 2013, please feel free to reach out and let us know! 

Dianne Salerni
Dianne is a fifth grade teacher by day and a writer by night. (Not to mention also being a wife, mother, blogger, and social media addict.) She's the author of two YA historical novels, WE HEAR THE DEAD (Sourcebooks 2010) and THE CAGED GRAVES (Clarion 2013), and a MG fantasy series (THE EIGHTH DAY (HarperCollins 2014). She loves the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, especially in the ski season, and is prone to hanging around creepy cemeteries and climbing 2000 year-old pyramids all in the name of book research.

Chris Eboch
Chris writes from her office with a view in small-town New Mexico. She gets bored when she starts to feel too competent, so she keeps things interesting by mixing up genres and age ranges. Her middle grade fiction includes The Well of Sacrifice (a drama in ninth-century Mayan culture), The Eyes of Pharaoh (a mystery in ancient Egypt), and the Haunted series, about a brother and sister who travel with a ghost hunter TV show (starting with The Ghost on the Stairs). She wrote two inspirational biographies for ages 8 to 12 under the name MM Eboch: Jesse Owens: Young Record Breaker and Milton Hershey: Young Chocolatier. She also writes books and articles on writing, science, history, and culture, and she writes for adults under the name Kris Bock.

James Mihaley
James Mihaley may or may not be a robot.  There is mounting evidence that he is in fact a robot.  James emphatically denies this.  "I'm a trained hip hop dancer who can do 'The Robot'.  That doesn't mean that I am a robot.  What is wrong with you people?"  Those who believe James is a robot called him The Jim-Bot.  They believe the Jim-Bot takes hip hop classes because a dance floor is the only place where you can do 'The Robot' without being accused of being a robot.  They are convinced that 'You Can't Have My Planet But Take My Brother, Please' (Macmillan/April, 2012) is the first book in history written by a robot.  NASA and the FBI are currently investigating the Jim-Bot.

Lee Wardlaw
Lee hates writing her own bios, probably because she has ADHD and often gets distracted in mid-sentence. So, instead, she’s offered these bullet points about herself:
  • Her first spoken word was ‘kitty’
  •  Early in her career, to support her fiction-writing habit, she worked as a tooth fairy (don’t ask)
  •   She’s published close to 30 books for children, tweens and teens, selling more than one million copies world-wide
  • Her middle grade series 101 Ways to Bug Your Parents, 101 Ways to Bug Your Teacher and 101 Ways to Bug Your Friends and Enemies (“They are novels, not instruction manuals!”) have received numerous awards and honors (and only a handful of hate mail)


So there you have it! 

Our awesome USDA inspected Prime Project Mayhem Team Members have arrived!

Let the mayhem begin!

xoxo -- Hilary

28 comments:

  1. WOW! Lots of great new talent here. Congrats to the new members!

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  2. How exciting! I'm looking forward to hearing more from Project Mayhem!

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    1. Thanks, Andrea! I can't wait to hear what this 4 new voices have to say!

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  3. Welcome, all. So glad to have you on board!

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  4. I am so excited about these new members! And especially about the fact that we will now have more posts overall (without having to write any more of them ourselves).

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    1. I know! It's great to give more without having to kill ourselves! :):):)

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  5. Great New Year news. I'm so glad to have these four stellar writers on our PM team.

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  6. Awesome new members. Congrats1

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  7. I'm a total carnivore, so the label 'USDA Prime' is mayhem magic to my ears! Thanks for the tasty welcome. Middle Graders RULE!

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    1. Ha! Lee, that is meaty music to our ears!!! Welcome, lady! ;)

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  8. Welcome to the dysfunctional family. Seems you'll fit right in. J/k...or am I?

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    1. We put the FUN in dysfunctional!!! Yeah, I just said that! :)

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  9. Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone! I'm excited to be part of the team!

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    1. We are too, Dianne, welcome to the madness! :)

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  10. Hooray! Glad y'all have joined us!

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    1. Do you like all those new book covers on our Goodreads bar? They are super shiny!! ;)

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  11. Welcome, welcome!!

    Lovely to have you on board.

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    1. Lovely and amazing! I just love our team! :)

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  12. Welcome, everybody! *adds more books to the TBR stack* great way to start off the new year.

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    1. I know! I'm going to need to add a room to our house for all the Team Member books!! :)

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  13. Yay! It's so wonderful to have all of you on board--welcome, welcome, welcome, and welcome! :)

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  14. I am so thrilled to be a part of this amazing team!

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Thanks for adding to the mayhem!