Your fearless leaders have special socks! With crowns! To celebrate the Pyrite and because we are just that cheesy. Also, feet shots are trendy and we do like being on trend.

We are at roughly the 50% point for covering the contenda list*, and most of the year’s books are available to readers, so we’ve determined that the time has come (the walrus said) to launch our Pyrite Printz!

The Pyrite is intended to be fun, maybe even raucous, but it’s not just for fun.

Part of the RealCommittee’s process is culling the initial “list” (created through conversations and personal reading lists) down to a formal nomination list, and then, through in-depth discussion, further shrinking that nomination list to the shortlist.

We could just create a shortlist on our own. Certainly we all have a few books we think are the top contendas. But one of our major goals all along has been to make the RealCommittee process more transparent by emulating it as much as is possible via blog, so we need your nominations!

Nominations are open to all 2012 YA books, whether it’s a title we’ve already covered, an upcoming book from the contenda list, or one we haven’t even mentioned. Note: we are artificially limiting nominations to one per person for the time being, so think carefully about what you want to nominate and read through the list before nominating. This is not at all in line with the RealCommittee process, but we also have a lot more than 9 people likely to submit nominations.

A few other technical details: We might vote the list down at some point, much as the RealCommittee uses straw polling, with the goal of a tight list of 10 or so nominations to be revisited in early January (after all the contendas have been covered). We are hoping that everyone who chooses to go the distance with the Pyrite will read all the titles on the shortlist for those January discussions, which is part of why we wanted to get this going now. And then we’ll vote shortly before MidWinter, and see how our process compared to the RealCommittee’s. We will ask that you don’t vote unless you have read all of the shortlist titles, although we may also run an open vote, as we did last year, because it’s always interesting to see those results as well.

So (we say, finally getting to the good stuff) submit your nominations using the comments here!

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