Long time no post!

Hey, so what's been going on with you the past five months or so?

Here's what's been going on with me:

Big Mean Mike has been nominated for several children's choice awards, was a finalist for the Children's Book Council's Children's Choice Award, and won the 2013 Irma Black Award!

I finished a major revision of my next book, which is a dark and funny young adult novel that will be published by Candlewick Press in fall 2014. I'll share the title and other info when it's final ... stay tuned!

I have news about my next novel (the one that will come out next after the YA above) that I can't quite share yet, but I will post it as soon as I can!

I'm working on some new picture books too, but it's way too early to tell you anything about those yet. Sorry! :)

Also, I will be at a bunch of events over the next few months — please check out the list in the "book signings and events" sidebar at right. If you can come to any of those, it would be great to see you!

What else?

If you haven't yet liked my Facebook page, please do! 

And if you can't make any of my upcoming book signings but would still like a signed book, see my website for instructions for how to get one.

I hope you're having a good summer, and that 2013 has been nice to you so far. Looking forward to posting more often in the months to come and sharing more news as I can! 

M

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...

good day for the to-do list

I actually crossed off all three items on my to-do list today. What were they, you ask? Here, I will tell you:

1. Call the gym to reschedule my Tuesday morning training session for the afternoon.
2. Work on novel for school.
3. Work on freelance editing projects.

All three of these things were accomplished. And in addition to some more backgroundy, world-building, figurey-out-y stuff, I wrote ACTUAL NEW WORDS in the novel. A whole new scene. Three and a half pages. 1142 words. I feel very good about this, considering how panicky I've been feeling about not moving forward.

I also even managed to get out for a couple of hours tonight and saw Shayfer James play at Bar 4 in Park Slope. Very fun—I've been trying to catch one of his shows forever, and was very glad to finally make it happen. I'm a big fan.

In other news, yesterday I finally finished a website redesign for www.michelleknudsen.com. I think it looks a little more streamlined and professional than the old version, and hopefully it will be easier to update as well. Someday there will be a real redesign, by a real web designer, but I'm happy with this for now. Part of me was a little sad to say good-bye to my old site, which I did completely in HTML (and I liked getting to be all proud of myself for doing all that coding and stuff). But it was a pain to update, especially to add new book information, and so I hadn't been updating it, and not being updated is not really a good thing for a website.

Here's hoping for another good productive day tomorrow...