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