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Bestselling author Suzanne Collins (pictured, via) is writing a new young-adult series. According to The New York Times, the untitled project will be her “most autobiographical work to date,” using  family members’ names and illustrations inspired by family photos.

This new project will focus on war, a theme present in her two series, The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games. Collins’ grandfather, uncle, and father all served in military careers, and the novelist will write about war for teenage audiences.

Collins explained: “I specifically want to do this book, one as a sort of memory piece kind of honoring that year for my family, and two, because I know so many children are experiencing it right now — having deployed parents. And it’s a way I would like to try and communicate my own experience to them.”

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A visual post today... Here are a few old photographs that I have collected over the years. I do not know any of these wonderful people, but I think it is fun to imagine what they, and their lives, might have been like.

The temperature and humidity are dropping. The days are getting shorter. Between May and September, here's what the weather seemed like to me: springlike, rain, rain, rain, hot, really hot, continued hot, can't-stand-it-hot, cool, muggy, 48 degrees, socks, thunderstorms...

But I know that soon the leaves will change color. I will look out our kitchen window and find the small tree where the birdfeeder hangs has turned yellow, yellow, ORANGE! After I spent s e v e n t e e n looooonnnngggg years smoldering in Florida, I returned to Ohio (and a March blizzard) with joy and anticipation of Spring! Summer! and Fall!

Now, 11 years later, I still feel excited when the leaves start to change, and now that Mark and I have over four acres of trees, I have lots of opportunity to study their cyclical hues. As the days shorten, the sun rises in our dining room window and sets right across from the kitchen window. When the leaves give up and scatter to the wind, it is then I can see the hot rosy sun set behind the hills as we meet in the kitchen for dinner. Here are some photos* from our place on Earth to you, from fall 2009, scenes I will enjoy this year as well.

(*All photos ©2009 Janice Phelps Williams. All rights reserved. If you want to share these with friends for noncommercial use, please tell them about AppalachianMorning.blogspot.com.)

Today's Ypulse Guest Post comes from our friends at I Heart Daily Melissa Walker and Anne Ichikawa. Since the pair recently teamed up again for fun side project turned viral hit Before You Were Hot, a submission-based collection of awkward... Read the rest of this post

My cousin Libby gave my brother the gift of family photographs years ago—slides, mostly, taken by my father's father, which my brother systematically recovered and scanned. This is the mystery photo in the bunch. My father's father and mother to the left. My Uncle Lloyd (architect of the Waldorf Astoria and other grand buildings) and Aunt Anne beside them. The gorgeous Marilyn Monroe-like creature and the woman behind her (we don't know who they are).

And then the child—dressed so finely in blue silk and turned-up sleeves and determined to sour the family pose. I wonder who she is. I wonder if she recalls the moment, or would, were she to find this picture here.