Bloggety Blog

There probably ARE people who blog less often than I do out there, right? I mean, even excepting all those people who do not actually have blogs. Once again, I am here to promise to do better. And now I will tell you all about how busy I have been and will continue to be and thereby lay the foundation for future infrequent blog posting.

I don't even remember where I left off. I will go check. *Consults previous post* Oh, right. Baltimore Book Festival! It was great. Had a lovely time reading Library Lion and an excerpt from The Dragon of Trelian, and signed some books and chatted with lovely authors and illustrators and bookstore people. And I bought a shirt from these nice folks. Then I spent a couple of days with my nice friends Bridey and Joe and little Evie, and went to Evie's third birthday party at a FARM with a PETTING ZOO and there were CHICKENS and BABY GOATS and OTHER FUN ANIMALS. I gave Evie books for her birthday, of course.

Last weekend I went back to Baltimore for the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association conference, which was awesome. I went two years ago when Library Lion received the 2007 NAIBA Children's Picture Book Award and once again I had a great time. Booksellers are really nice, fun people. And they love books. And there were other nice publishing types and authors and illustrators there as well, and I got to talk to people about the novel and hear about other authors' books and generally just had a wonderful time. Plus I scored so many free books that I had to send a box home from the hotel. Yay!

In other news, I am continuing to work on the sequel to The Dragon of Trelian, the first draft of which will be finished by the end of the year. And I'm still working on my critical thesis for my MFA, which will also be finished by the end of the year, but hopefully sooner—say, by my next packet deadline, which is November 10. ALSO working on a new YA novel for school, which started out great and fun and exciting but has been less great lately...still trying to figure out what the deal is with this story.

What else...on October 17 I will be at the Mandell School Book Fair, and on October 24 I will be reading Library Lion to help celebrate the opening of Brooklyn's new Greenlight Bookstore, and on October 31 I will be reading from The Dragon of Trelian while dressed as a princess at the New York Public Library Shop at the NYPL main branch. And on November 7, I will be at the FABULOUS Rochester Children's Book Festival in Rochester, NY, which is my favorite event to go to every year. This time I'll be doing a joint presentation with Rebecca Stead in addition to signing books and talking with kids and parents and teachers and other authors and anyone else who comes out that day! If you are in the area you should definitely come. This is the 13th year of the festival, and it just keeps getting better and better.

And then on December 12, I'll be reading and signing books at the Elmira Barnes & Noble in Elmira, NY.

And because I apparently did not already have enough on my plate, I am in the ensemble of the Village Light Opera Group's fall production of Starship Pinafore. You should all come see it, because it will be AWESOME and a lot of fun. If you know me personally, you can email me directly for tickets. Otherwise, you can get them online here. Performance dates are:

Friday, November 13 at 8pm
Saturday, November 14 at 8pm
Friday, November 20 at 8pm
Saturday, November 21 at 2pm
Sunday, November 22 at 2pm

And, as always, I have been playing lots of Facebook Scrabble and reading lots of books. (If you are curious about what I'm reading, you can always check out my reading list on Goodreads.)

And I suppose that is enough for this update. I should get back to work!

Baltimore Book Festival!

I hope anyone in the area will come to the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend! I'll be presenting at 4pm on Saturday at the Children's Bookstore Stage, and there are lots of great authors and events all weekend long.

You can find out more here.

I'll be reading and signing Library Lion and The Dragon of Trelian. Looking forward to seeing you there! :)

Princeton Children's Book Festival!

Just a quick reminder that everyone should come to the Princeton Children's Book Festival tomorrow!

You can see full details here.

More than 40 children's book authors and illustrators will be there, reading and signing books and looking forward to meeting you!

BIG MEAN MIKE!

I'm very excited to announce that Candlewick will be publishing another picture book written by ME! It's called BIG MEAN MIKE, and that is all I will tell you at this time. :) Pub date still to be determined.

Candlewick will also be publishing my picture book ARGUS in Spring 2011 and the sequel to THE DRAGON OF TRELIAN...at some point after I have finished writing it.

In other news, I have finally updated my website a bit. You can see it here: www.michelleknudsen.com. I like the new colors; the old version was starting to seem a little boring. I'm still planning to have a real redesign at some point by some talented web designer-type person who is not me, but for now I'm having fun playing around with it myself.

In other other news, I had a wonderful time traveling around upstate NY with S. I hiked mountains and caught my first trout and swam in lakes and floated down rivers in tubes and saw a lot of lovely lovely nature.

Here is a picture of me enjoying nature:


And here is a picture of me enjoying nature on my boyfriend's motorcycle (I don't drive it myself, I just ride on the back. So usually he is sitting there in front of me, but in this case he is not because he is taking the picture.) Yes, those are fishing poles lashed to the back. That is the cool way to travel to fishing spots in the Adirondacks, FYI.


And here is a picture of nature for you to enjoy, without me in it:


Now I am back in Brooklyn, trying not to miss the lovely cool lakes and mountains. I am spending a little too much time looking at the pictures...

Dragon of Trelian review at Fuse #8

Yay! Lovely review by Betsy Bird at her Fuse #8 blog!

I've been traveling almost nonstop since July 11, which is my latest excuse for the lack of blog posts. Currently I am in the Adirondacks, trying to balance nature-appreciation-time with critical-thesis-writing-time. The first draft of my critical thesis is due Sunday morning at 6 a.m.

I should get back to it. Just wanted to stop in and say hello and post the above link. I will try to do a proper update when I get home!

Hello and pelicans and interview and things

Yikes - more than a month since my last post. Busy, busy, as usual.

But you know, I've been thinking that maybe it's not such a bad thing that I don't post more often. Whenever I fall behind on reading other people's blogs, I am always a little distressed to see 12 or 34 or 119 new posts waiting to be read on each blog I follow. Sometimes it's nice to see that only one or two posts have gone up while I've been too busy to read regularly. So maybe it's nice for anyone out there reading this blog to know that if you don't check in every day, you're not going to miss tons and tons of posts. I am the intermittent blog reader's blogger!

Anyway. Now that I'm here, quick update.

Just got back last night from a lovely vacation in sunny, sunny Florida with my nice boyfriend. We visited his friend Erin there, and had a great time. Here is a picture of me, in Florida:



There are lots of pelicans in Florida. They are cool, but also kind of creepy up close. They often look as though they are sizing you up for possible ingestion.


While I was in Florida, I stopped in at Haslam's Book Store, which is huge and wonderful and if you are in the area, you should go there. I happen to know there is a signed first edition of Library Lion waiting for you! Or at least there was, as of several days ago, when I signed it. They sell both new and used books. I bought a choose-your-own-adventure-type Dungeons & Dragons book from 1983 called Dragon of Doom. I am very excited to read it. I used to love those choose-your-own adventure stories. And with a dragon theme...well, it seems just up my alley. :)

I am now getting ready to head out again on Saturday for my next residency at The Vermont College of Fine Arts. I'll be kicking off my third semester in the program, and am very excited to see my VCFA friends and find out who my next advisor will be!

While I was away, Amy Kraft of Media Macaroni posted her recent interview with me. You can see it here, and there are some additional questions and answers on the Hooked on Phonics blog. There's a photo of me in the Media Macaroni interview that shows my dragon tattoo. (Nope, it's not Jakl - a lot of people ask me that!)

Amy and I actually sat down and talked in PERSON. It's the first interview I've done in a long time that wasn't conducted over email. It's harder to make your answers sound smart when you have to just, you know, SAY them, on the spot. But Amy asked such great questions and it was very fun to chat with her. Also, there was iced coffee.

OK - I am supposed to be doing a million things to get ready for school. But I wanted to check in because it had been so long, and also to let people know about the interview!

I hope you're all having a great summer so far. I probably won't post again until late July. So don't worry if you are going on vacation and will be away from your blog reader for a while. I won't get too far ahead of you, I promise. :)

Excuses

Real life continues to interfere with my efforts to post things here with any kind of regularity. What are my excuses this time? Here you go:

1. My poor cat has been in and out of the hospital over the past two weeks, first because she ate an enormous piece of string for some reason (like, the biggest piece of string EVER) and had to have surgery to get it out of her intestines, and then because she became super-sensitive to her insulin during her recovery and went into insulin shock and nearly died. Oh and also her incision is infected. BUT the good news is that she gets to come home this evening, and I will hang out here with her as I deal with my second-most stressful blog-interfering item, which is:

2. My final packet deadline of the semester. The cat drama really set me back, and so now I am racing to get everything finished. My revisions are done, but I'm still working on my new pages and my essay. I'm a little sad that the semester is almost over; it has been so awesome working with Cynthia and I will miss having her thoughtful eye on my work and receiving her encouraging comments. I feel really good about the progress I've made this semester, though, and I'm actually almost sort of looking forward to working on my critical thesis starting in July. (I'm sure I'll feel differently once I'm actually in the thick of it, though. CT definitely = kind of scary.)

3. I also got called for jury duty, but luckily only spent the one day (Thursday) and was then dismissed. If the timing had been better I think I would have liked to serve on a jury. The selection process was really interesting, and I'm sure the trial would have been even more so. Oh, well. I'll get another chance in 8+ years.

4. Oh and BEA was here in the mix, too.

5. Plus there's all the rest of the regular life stuff, like cleaning my apartment and finding things to eat for dinner and trying to get outside for walks once in a while and occasionally getting to see my friends. But that stuff is always there, of course.

OK. I suppose I should try to get back to work, assuming I can manage to block out the ridiculously loud music pumping in through my closed windows. I like my neighborhood, but nice days on the weekend = very loud outdoor BBQs and I suppose I really am going to have to get myself a pair of noise-canceling headphones if I'm going to get anything done this summer.