The Grand Plan to Fix Everything!

Author and VCFA faculty member Uma Krishnaswami's wonderful new novel The Grand Plan to Fix Everything was released this week! Please head on over to Through the Tollbooth to read my interview with Uma about her book, breaking with conventions, monkeys, punctuation marks, and more.

You can get the full scoop on Uma's blog tour at her own blog, Writing with a Broken Tusk.

Saturday Six

1. Update: 2011 has been keeping me pretty busy so far. I've been teaching my class at Gotham Writers' Workshop, working on final revisions of my Trelian sequel, writing new picture book drafts, thinking about my next big project, doing a little freelance editing, and trying to still find some time to see friends and my nice boyfriend and go for walks and other things. I also got to spend a lovely long weekend at Kindling Words, recharging my writerly energy and wearing a fancy dress to a masquerade ball.

2. Twitter tells me that today is International Save Libraries Day. (Personally, I think every day should be International Save Libraries Day.) You can participate in the library love by going to your local library, joining if you're not already a member, and checking out a book or three. You can also use the #savelibraries hashtag on Twitter to show your support, and write to your local legislators to let them know libraries matter! I've just added a widget to this page in the column at right (thanks, ALA website!) that will help you identify and contact your local legislators.

(Thanks, Phil Bradley, for the library word art!)

3. I'm teaching a free one-hour children's book writing workshop for Gotham Writers' Workshop tomorrow evening, 6–7pm, at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan. If you don't have Super Bowl party plans, come learn about writing for children, instead!

4. WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint is hosting a birthday/book launch party for my new picture book, Argus! It's February 22 (my birthday!) from 6:30–8:30pm. There will be cupcakes and books and general merriment. Grown-ups and children of all ages are welcome. I hope to see you there! If you're on Facebook, you can RSVP here or here (or both), but no official RSVP required—just come on over!

5. My former teacher (and current all-around person of awesomeness) Cynthia Leitich Smith is on tour for her new novel, Blessed! Check out the full schedule and go get yourself a signed book. NYC events start tomorrow and continue through the week.

6. OK, I think I really only had five things today. So I will use #6 here to remind you that The Dragon of Trelian is out in paperback as of last month, and you should probably go get yourself a copy. Or give it as a Valentine's Day gift to a special young reader (or old reader) in your life. Yay!

I FOOLED YOU release day!

Hooray! I Fooled You is out in the world today! It's a middle grade anthology from Candlewick Press and contains my very first published short story ever, "The Bridge to Highlandsville." Stop by your favorite real-world store or order a copy through Indiebound.org!

You can see more info about the book in my 2/26 blog post.

Also out in the world today is the YA novel Saving Maddie, by my friend and fellow VCFA'er Varian Johnson! Visit his blog to follow along with the Saving Maddie blog tour and find out more about the book and the author.

Edited to add: just realized today is ALSO the release day for The Sky Is Everywhere, the debut novel from Jandy Nelson, also a VCFA'er! Yay!

January 2010 Reentry

Got back Wednesday from the winter residency at VCFA, and it was as expected—awesome and inspiring and exhausting and happy and sad and wonderful. Ten days of lectures, workshops, readings, and events, with dear old friends and many new friends and brilliant writers and teachers. There was a moving memorial for Norma Fox Mazer, which I was honored to have the chance to attend. There were fabulous conversations over meals and hilarious late-night games of Exquisite Corpse (or Picture Telephone, as most of us called it) and also a kick-ass party thrown by my class (the Thunder Badgers) for the graduating class (the Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines) which involved a Wild West theme and much dancing and fun and cowboy hats.

My cowgirl attire (note the awesome belt, borrowed from Nice Boyfriend):

There were also fun cowboy-themed items:

And cowboy-themed foods:

Also there was dancing and game-playing and a piñata shaped like a boot. Much fun was had by all!

During the rez we were also assigned our advisors for the next semester, and I am SO EXCITED to be working with the fabulous Margaret Bechard. This will be my final semester, which makes me more than a little sad, although at the end I will have an MFA, which will (I hope) help alleviate some of the pain of VCFA withdrawal. And of course, the VCFA community embraces alumni and keeps them involved, and so I know I won't really be saying good-bye to VCFA, just moving on to a new relationship with it. But still, I will miss being a student and going to residencies and all the rest. But it's too early for all that, really! Fourth semester is only just starting, and I have another six months before I have to think about graduating. So I will not think about that just now at all.

Another fun thing happened at rez, which is that I finished my first knitting project! It was a scarf. I am very proud. Many thanks to Madeleine, who got me started over New Year's and donated yarn and knitting needles and taught me how to knit and purl, and to the nice knitter/writers (like Sarah and Linden) at VCFA who helped me when I got stuck, and to knitter/writer/awesome VCFA faculty member Rita Williams-Garcia, who showed me how to cast off at the airport while we were waiting for our flight back to NYC. I am excited to start a new project, although I will have to figure out how to knit in the presence of my cat, who will no doubt want to involve herself with the yarn in highly disruptive ways.

And that is all for now. I have ridiculous amounts of things to do, writing and otherwise, and should get to work. Wednesday was all about getting home and seeing my boyfriend and my cat, and yesterday was all about cleaning up my apartment and trying to get oriented, and now I need to be all about the writing for a while. And then hopefully maybe soon I can think about some other things, like my apartment-fixing-up plans. I was briefly daydreaming today about hiring an interior designer to help me make the most of the space I've got and give me painting and decorating advice. This will probably not happen, as I imagine interior designers are expensive and so are new furnishings and as you may remember I was hoping to NOT spend money like a crazy person this year. But it's fun to think about anyway.

OH! Almost forgot to say I am SO HAPPY for my friend Rebecca Stead who WON THE NEWBERY!!!! Congratulations to her and to all the other award winners. YAY! :)

BEA, Cat Yodeling, and WHEN YOU REACH ME

I'll be signing The Dragon of Trelian at BEA this Saturday, May 30, at the Candlewick Booth from 3 to 4 p.m. If you're going to be at BEA, I hope you will come by!

Also BEA-related: I will be attending the BEA edition of Betsy Bird's Kidlit Drinks Night on Friday evening. Looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting some new ones, too!

Been catching up on some blog reading today (because I have a ridiculous amount of stuff to get done, and so of course blog reading seemed very important suddenly) and very much enjoyed the cat yodeling video posted by Jo Knowles, which she heard about from Eric Luper.

Speaking of blog reading AND of Betsy Bird... my friend Rebecca Stead has a wonderful book coming out July 14 called WHEN YOU REACH ME. If you have not been fortunate enough to get your hands on an advance copy, you should run out and buy her book as soon as it comes out. Betsy did a lovely interview with Rebecca recently, which you can read here.

And speaking of interviews... I'm currently answering lots of interview questions for my blog tour June 1–3. I'll post links to those interviews when they go up next week.

OK - back to work with me. Also today I need to return some library books and go visit my poor kitty at the hospital, who had to be operated on because she ate a very long piece of string. :(

National Poetry Month, and other things

In case you were unaware: April is National Poetry Month! Gregory K. over at GottaBook is celebrating children's poetry with the first annual 30 poets/30 days event. Take a look today to see poems by my awesome writer friend Charles Ghigna (a.k.a. Father Goose)!

Also being celebrated today: author Kate Messner has declared it to be Say Something Nice Day. I think this is a lovely idea, and will happily participate. Here are just a few people I'm appreciating right now:

• The administrators and parent volunteers at the Manhattan New School who kicked off a series of author visits yesterday so that every class in the school will get a chance to meet an author, ask questions, get signed books, etc. I had a great time visiting the first graders, who were excellent story-listeners and asked really good questions during our talk!
  
• My agent and editor, who are both awesome beyond measure in every possible way and who do a wonderful good-cop/bad-cop routine and apply just the right amount of pressure regarding certain manuscripts and proposals THAT THEY WILL HAVE VERY VERY SOON I PROMISE!!!! (Thank you for not going ahead with the bad-cop/bad-cop approach...yet.)
  
• The nice woman who works at my local laundromat who always has a smile for the customers and who makes the often-annoying task of doing laundry very much more pleasant. Little things like being friendly really make a big difference. I wish more people would remember that.
  
• My friend Steph, whose birthday it is today, and who has been a wonderful and supportive and all-around fabulous friend since we first met freshman year of high school. Happy birthday, Steph!
  
• A certain other person, whom I appreciate more than he probably knows, for lots and lots of reasons.

OK - Back to work with me.

writer's hours

I've been reading bits and pieces of various craft books lately for inspiration and advice, including Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. Today I was reading his chapter on writer's hours, and all the things that "count" as work and not-work to his writing mind. Bascially, nothing REALLY counts as work except writing—not editing, not revising, not reading, not correspondence with editors, not (he didn't say but I am certain he'd agree) blogging. And it's true, I am sorry to say. Even though it's all necessary and important, it still doesn't feel like Work with a capital W unless pages are being produced and word counts are growing. Fitting that I should read that chapter today, when I spent way too much time playing around with making the Dragon of Trelian countdown widget you can now see at the top right of my blog's main page. I won't even mention all the additional time I wasted trying to get the damn thing to work in Facebook. (It never did; I finally gave up.)

As much as I share Block's feeling about only writing counting as, you know, writing, I am trying to relax that mentality just enough to let me feel good about all the background and figuring-out work I've been doing on my novel-in-progress. Because all that stuff really is essential right now, and I can't move ahead with writing until I get some things figured out. But I hate that there's no way to measure it, really. I can't add it to my pages/word count log, can't brag to anyone about what a great writing day I had, can't point to anything concrete as the fruit of my labor. I know it's important. It is. I just have to try and remember that while retaining just enough of that uncomfortable this-doesn't-count feeling to help speed me along to where I'll be ready for the actual word and page accumulation to begin again.

By the way:

Finally updated "where I'll be" with upcoming festivals, etc.

Also, check out my friend and classmate Janet Fox's interview on Cynsations!

And today is the release of fellow VCFA'er Julie Berry's debut novel, The Amaranth Enchantment!