Rochester Children's Book Festival!

The wonderful Rochester Children's Book Festival is happening tomorrow, November 10, at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY! I've been going to this festival for more than a decade and it is always super fun and awesome. It runs from 10am to 4pm, and there are readings and activities and fun all day long! Talk to some amazing authors and illustrators, get some signed books, pick up free goodies (mini monster trucks! bunny pens! temporary tattoos!) and lots, lots more!

The festival is free and open to the public, and features authors and illustrators of books for children, middle graders, and teens. Click the link above for more info. I hope to see you there!

Upcoming events!

I have a bunch of book signings and other events coming up. Here's a list of what's on the schedule for April and May. If any of these are in your area, I hope you'll come!

APRIL
• April 3 @11am: Reading and signing ARGUS at BookCourt in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

• April 9 @12 noon: Educator Reception at Barnes & Noble in Manhasset, NY

• April 9 @3:30pm: Reading and book signing at Voracious Reader in Larchmont, NY

• April 23 @1pm: Animal Tales Extravaganza at the Bronx Zoo!

• April 27 @4pm: Reading and signing at Mendham Books in Mendham, NJ

• April 28: Larchmont School Book Fair in Larchmont, NY


MAY
• May 3 @11am: Barnes & Noble at 86th & Lexington Ave in NYC

• May 7 @10am–4pm: Hudson Children's Book Festival

I'll also be at ALA 2011 in New Orleans in June, and at the Warwick and Rochester Book Festivals in the fall. You can always see a frequently updated list of events in the right-hand column of my blog under "Where I'll Be." Please check back often for the latest additions!

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!

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!

Rochester Children's Book Festival

Got back today from Rochester, NY, where I attended the 12th annual Rochester Children's Book Festival on Saturday. I've been going for about...five years? Six? And it just keeps getting better and better. There were more than 40 authors and illutrators this year, covering everything from board books to YA novels. Amazing numbers of kids and grown-ups came to get books signed and listen to readings and do fun activities. It's wonderful to get to meet and talk with so many book-loving people, and to see author friends I only get to hang out with once or twice a year at events like this one.

Here is the festival hall in the morning, before it was opened to the public. That's Bruce Coville right in the center, and Vivian Vande Velde with the camera to the left. You can also see some of the fabulous volunteers (in the yellow t-shirts) who make this event possible (not to mention awesome) year after year:



Here's the hall a bit later, after the doors were opened:



Packed does not begin to describe it. I don't even think this was the festival at its busiest point.

Later on, there was a celebratory dinner, where the authors and illustrators and organizers and volunteers got to kick back and relax after a great but exhausting day. I didn't take nearly enough pictures, but here are a few. I am in most of them, because I like to get my picture taken with fabulous people.

Me with author Mark Shulman, whom I also know from the Kindling Words retreat and who is a great person to talk to when you are stuck on a story idea and need advice:



Me with Newbery-award winning author Linda Sue Park:



Leander Watts and I with Spock-hands and blinding flash:



Me with author/illustrator Dan Mahoney, who was also nice enough to ferry some of us around in his car on festival-day:



Fearless leader Carol Johmann, being thanked on everyone's enthusiastic behalf by Volunteer Coordinator Barbara Underhill:



Festival attendees who stopped by my table got to see a special sneak peek of the cover The Dragon of Trelian. If you weren't there, you will just have to wait. :)

Can't wait to go back again next year! In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the fifth annual Savannah Children's Book Festival next weekend. If you're in the area, I hope you will come on by!

Three Weekends of Reading and Signing

This Saturday, November 1, at 1 p.m., I'll be reading and signing Library Lion at Best Bargain Books in Centereach, NY (WalMart Shopping Center, 217 Middle Country Road). Please come by and say hello!

The following weekend, I'll be reading and signing at the Rochester Children's Book Festival on Saturday, November 8. If you're in the area, this is a GREAT event with lots of authors (more than 40!) and fun activities and wonderful people. I've been going to this festival for about five years now, and it's one of my favorite annual events, both because of the author friends I get to see while I am there and because of all the great kids, parents, teachers, librarians, and other folks who come out for it every year.

The weekend after that, I'll be presenting and signing at the Savannah Children's Book Festival on Saturday, November 15. This is another fabulous event with multiple authors, including Marc Brown, Katie Davis, Charles Ghigna, and Mo Willems! Plus, it's in Savannah, where you can get delicious Chick-fil-A and pralines (yum!).

Somehow, in between all of these events I will be keeping up with my reading and writing for school, going over the pages of The Dragon of Trelian ("pages" are when the publisher sends the text all laid out in pages for the first time, in the same typeface and everything that will be in the book, and it's my last chance to make any significant changes), and finally really getting to work on a sequel to TDoT, which so far is just some vague ideas and a page or two of notes.

And sometime soon I will need to work on editorial revisions to my upcoming picture book ARGUS (no pub date yet, but we're looking at 2011 at the earliest, sigh) and hopefully one of the other picture book manuscripts I'm working on will come together into something my editor will want to publish. There are three or four I'm actively working on right now; I will give them some code names for further discussion, because that's fun and will let me avoid having to talk about their actual prospective titles or what they are about:

Picture Books Currently in the Running:

1. Codename "Secret" (has been through multiple drafts, still trying to find the right approach)
   
2. Codename "Baker" (first draft completed; will be included in my next packet for school so I can get some feedback from my MFA advisor)
   
3. Codename "Two" (latest draft currently with my agent for her thoughts)
   
4. Codename "Mike" (revised version currently with my editor)
   
5. Codename "Frank" (first draft in progress)
   

Okay, the fifth one is currently only one sentence long and so obviously has quite a ways to go, but it's a good sentence, and I'm kind of excited about it, so I'm still going to consider it as being in the running.

But speaking of writing...I should get to work. Blogging doesn't really count, I guess.