The Return Of Susan The Clipping Queen

I come from a family of newspaper readers, and my mother was always fabulous about f sending clippings of articles she knew you'd enjoy.

The Internet provides a universe of article clipping possibilities. So get your linking fingers ready, because here are a few things I think you might find interesting.

For starters, YARN with Figment has posted the winner of the Family Gatherings Essay Contest that I helped judge. This essay was my first choice, and I'm very pleased it won.

I really really really liked this article from the New York Times about what themes and endings in movies leave the audience most satisfied. Parts of it resonated with me and the choices I made writing Life As We Knew It:

What this suggested to her is that "the accomplishment the audience values most is not when the heroine saves the day or the hero defeats his opponent. Instead, she said, "the accomplishment the audience values most is resilience."

I got a letter recently from some middle school students who asked me, "Why did you make the meteor hit the moon instead of a planet?"

I replied that the moon got hit because I thought that could cause more damage than hitting Mars. Well, what did I know? It turns out this very planet of ours recently got hit by meteorites from Earth's Red Planet neighbor.

Those rocks should only have hit one of those nasty astronomers who maligned my sweet darling Pluto, the solar system's cutest onetime planet.

I think I liked this story about finding Charles Darwin's missing fossils because of everything I found when I cleaned out my file cabinet. There's gold in them thar files, if you're willing to look for it.

I'm off to read today's New York Times in search of even more interesting things to clip!