Under-18s have just a week left to submit to the Book Week 2012 Writing Contest for Kids & Teens. Students in grades 4-12 are eligible to submit stories or poems up to 1500 words in length for a shot at the $250 prize. (Smaller prize but hey, there’s no entry fee.)

On another note, thanks to Precious and her Fragments of Life blog followers for including me in Dystopian Domination 2 - it’s great to virtually meet new readers. If you haven’t seen it, check out my interview and enter to win a copy of All Good Children. (Super small prize but no entry free OR writing effort required – awesome!)

I got that kick, thankfully, from a couple of awesome bloggers who love dystopian novels and asked me to be part of their month-long Dystopian Domination extravaganza. I have emerged from hibernation to proudly take part.

If you missed 2011′s Dystopian Domination of the blogosphere, you have a fresh opportunity to get in on it in 2012. It is a month of interviews, reviews, and giveaways on two great book blogs. Check out the Dystopian Domination 2 schedule.

As you’ll notice from the schedule, the domination is already in full swing. I hibernated through the first week – sorry. But there are still several weeks of fun left. So take part.

I will add my two cents to the bid for domination on January 21st, with a giveaway of my teen novel, All Good Children and an author interview on the Fragments of Life book blog. Check it out on Saturday. And check out all the other dystopian and apocalyptic posts before and after that day. The domination runs from January 9th through February 11th. Plenty of time for the world to go terribly wrong.

And if you’re wondering about the book covers on this page, no, none of these stellar novels will be part of the 2012 domination of the blogosphere. Bummer. They are a few of my favourite dystopian novels from distant and recent pasts: 1984 by George Orwell, The Chrysalids by John Windham, The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, and Feed by T.M. Anderson. If you haven’t read them, try them – whether you think you like dystopian fiction or not. They’re just good books.

An ant stopped at a fountain one morning to quench his thirst, but he slipped into the water and began to drown. A passing dove, seeing the ant’s plight, snapped a leaf off a nearby tree and dropped it into the fountain. The ant climbed onto the leaf and floated to safety.

That afternoon, the dove was pecking at some dirt when a hunter snuck up on her with his net at the ready. The ant, seeing the dove’s danger, rushed over and bit the hunter’s heel. The startled man dropped the net, and the dove, warned of her danger, flew to safety.

And the moral is: One good turn deserves another.

You’re probably thinking, first, “Holy Smokes, the ants in Greece must be awfully big!” and second, “Wasn’t it a lion and a mouse?” To which I say, first, I spent a couple of months in Greece and never noticed a single ant, but here in Canada it’s the wee red ones that hurt like hell, so don’t judge an ant by its exoskeleton. And second, Aesop wrote over 300 fables and he liked to repeat himself – but don’t we all?

That is a good old tale. But if Aesop were a modern slave to the written word, he might have called his fable “The Blog Tourist and the Commenter”:

A writer took her new releases on a small blog tour, writing guest posts and interviews for a series of blogs that for the most part she didn’t follow herself because she was a technological dinosaur who still read newspapers (at least in the winter when the fire needed starting). She didn’t really know what she was doing and she worried if anyone would read her posts, let alone comment on them. A fellow writer and blogger followed the tour, read the interviews, and took the time to comment on several of them. When the writer saw this, she felt really good and the whole blog tour didn’t feel like a waste of time.

At the end of the blog tour, the winners of the book giveaways were notified but the frequent commenter who’d so kindly followed the blog tour didn’t win a damned thing. The writer, noticing this, asked her publishers to make the commenter an extra winner just for being awesome. The publishers said yes and the commenter won some books. When the commenter was notified of this, she felt really good and the whole effort of visiting all those blogs didn’t feel like a waste of time.

And the moral is: Even though writers could spend more time writing books instead of blogging and following blogs, it feels good to get out there occasionally and mingle with strangers in a mutually supportive way.

I don’t read many blogs, and I rarely comment on those I read, but this may change.

Today I read this article in the paper: You (not so) dirty rat. Anyone who scoffed at Aesop’s empathetic dove and ant should take a look and see how rats do good turns for each other all the time. (My son used to have rats until my dog ate them. I’ll save that story for another Friday Fable, one without any good turns at all.)

That’s it for this Friday.

(Thanks, Danielle. I hope you like the books.)

Thanks to all the great book bloggers who hosted me on this tour. It has been a lot of fun to virtually meet them, and a real pleasure to connect with their readers.

Do you think the reason many adults condemn contemporary children’s literature is because they don’t (or choose not to) remember what it was really like to be a kid? and

Tell us how you became interested in behaviour modification, and how it became central to this riveting story.

Holy Smokes, those are good questions!

There’s another book giveaway to go with this interview, so check it out and leave a comment sometime between now and Sunday. (Since hardly anyone else reads my blog to find out about the giveaway, you have an excellent chance of winning).

Congratulations to Cathy, who won the last giveaway from Just Deb, another great book blog.

(Cathy will probably not enter this new giveaway – because that would just be greedy – so with her out of the picture this time, the odds of winning are even better!)

I’ll be stopping by 10 Stories Up throughout the day to respond to any comments that come in. So drop me a note. You just might win two books. And if not, you’ll discover a really good book blog – definitely worth a click.