I found out yesterday that Saving the Griffin made it onto the Kentucky Bluegrass Awards Master List for grades 3-5! This is Kentucky’s children’s choice award program. Students will vote for their favorites next Spring. It’s so exciting to know that my book will be in a really high percentage of public and elementary school libraries!
Any of my students or critique partners reading this know where I stand on the use of exclamation marks. In fiction, they should be reserved almost exclusively for when your characters are yelling. In nonfiction, they should be used for only the most astonishing of facts and limited to one or two an article if the facts warrant it. But in blogs, personal letters and comments in the margins, exclamation marks can be used for emphasis. And frankly, to have Saving the Griffin on two children’s choice lists now–Georgia is the other one–is to me both astonishing and delightful.
Kristin Wolden Nitz 
LOL. 🙂 I remember your exclamation point cross outs on my very first article. 🙂 Great blog, Kristin.
Thanks, Keri. Yes, I am an official member of the exclamation point patrol as well as the POV patrol. In fact, my friend Jeanie Franz Ransom still teases me when I use a lot of exclamation points in emails because I emphatically crossed them off on some of her manuscripts. I’m actually a proud aunt to her most recent picture book, WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO HUMPTY?