Friday Five

1. Tonight is opening night of Iolanthe! Performances this weekend only!! You can buy tickets here. Come see me and the other ladies of the cast work some fairy magic. Also, there are Peers of Parliament and a half-fairy shepherd and a lovely young ward of chancery and a general abundance of awesomeness, set to music, with occasional dialogue.

2. I am very pleased to announce that I'll be teaching a course with Gotham Writers' Workshop in 2011! It's Children's Book Writing I, and it meets Tuesday nights, 7–10pm, January 18 through March 29. You can enroll online through the GWW website.

3. The third and final part of my blog series on sequels is up at Through the Tollbooth today. Click on over for more Q&A with Ellen Jensen Abbott, Cinda Williams Chima, Janni Lee Simner, and Jill Santopolo.

4. I'm currently scheduling school visits for the spring 2011 semester. See the School and Library Visits page on my website for more information.

5. Have you come across Hyperbole and a Half yet? It makes me happy.

Visit me at the Tollbooth! Also: Iolanthe!

I'm blogging this week over at Through the Tollbooth. Come on over today for the first of three installments about the pains and pleasures of writing sequels.

Also - if you're in the NYC area, you should come see The Village Light Opera Group's production of Iolanthe this weekend! It's our 75th anniversary season and Iolanthe is one of Gilbert & Sullivan's most beloved operettas. There are fairies (I am one) and peers of Parliament and a love triangle (kind of a love pentagon, really) and beautiful music and dancing and general awesomeness of all kinds.

Performances are this weekend only:
Friday, Nov. 19th @ 8pm
Saturday, Nov. 20th @ 2pm & 8pm
Sunday, Nov. 21st @ 2pm

At our new theater:
The Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University
3 Spruce Street
New York , New York 10038

You can buy tickets here.

Also, you can watch this fun promo trailer:



You can see more about the show at VLOG's Iolanthe website.

Yay!

Library Lion in Hungarian!

Got a nice surprise from the mailman this morning—the Hungarian edition of Library Lion!

How cool is that? Yay!

I was interested to see that they left Mr. McBee and Miss Merriweather's names in English. Many of the other foreign editions change the names of the characters. A friend in Israel (Hi, Sarah C.!) recently told me that in the Hebrew edition, their names are Mister Nakdi and Miss Dafni, and I know they've been changed in the Italian edition and several others. Someday I'd love to find out how the different publishers decide whether to change the names and what to change them to. It's so odd sometimes what they choose! And odd too to catch my characters walking around with new identities. :)

Katie Davis on the Rochester Children's Book Festival

Children's book author and all-around awesome person Katie Davis does a great kidlit podcast, and she just put up a new one about the Rochester Children's Book Festival from this past weekend. You can hear her interviewing several of the authors who attended, including ME! :)

Here is where you can go and listen:

New Podcast! Brain Burps About Books: a fly-on-the-wall at Rochester Children's Book Festival! http://t.co/SMy68a7

The festival was awesome once again, by the way, and if you were not there you should feel very sorry to have missed it. But don't worry - you can make yourself feel better by resolving right now to come next year no matter what!

As usual, I did not take nearly enough pictures, but here is one of me at my table, either about to sign or having just signed a copy of Carl the Complainer for a very nice young reader:

I am already looking forward to next year - can't wait!

2010 Rochester Children's Book Festival!

Guess what is happening this weekend? It's the fabulous Rochester Children's Book Festival! And it will be awesome! As always! But even more so because there are wonderful new authors and illustrators coming this year in addition to those of us who, because of aforementioned awesomeness, have been coming year after year after year.

I will be reading Library Lion at 1:40pm, and the rest of the day I will be at my table signing books and talking to the nice people who come to the festival and giving out postcards and things. If you come on the early side, you might be able to score an ARGUS postcard. I'm just saying.

This Saturday, November 6
10:00am - 4:00pm
Monroe Community College Brighton Campus
1000 East Henrietta Rd.

You can see more information, including a list of all the authors and illustrators who will be there, at the festival website.

I hope to see you there!