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.

Library Lion at the New York Public Library Shop!

I'll be reading and signing Library Lion at the NYPL Library Shop at 2pm this Saturday, October 18 - please come by if you're in the area, and bring your kids! Reading starts at 2pm, and I'll be staying after to sign books. Not sure how much after, though, so if you want to get a book signed, don't come too late!

Here's all the info:

Saturday, October 18, 2008
2:00 p.m.

The Library Shop
New York Public Library
5th Avenue and 42nd Street
212-930-0641
libraryshop@nypl.org

ridiculous procrastination

It's interesting to me how I continue to sink to deeper and more ridiculous levels of procrastination the closer I get to my next packet deadline. Here is what I have been doing lately to avoid writing:

• Wasting time on Facebook (nothing new there).
• Scrolling through home tours at Apartment Therapy and daydreaming about all the ways I could fix up my apartment.
• Looking at lolcats.
• Ordering things online. This morning, even though I knew I had limited time today and wanted to get right to work, I ordered a plastic chair mat to protect my floor, a tray for Cleo's cat food and water bowls, a new drain strainer for my kitchen sink, gray shoelaces, a litter-trapping carpet square for Cleo's litterbox area, and a new toner cartridge for my printer. All things I need and have been meaning to get for some time, but it certainly didn't have to be TODAY.
• Deciding I absolutely must buy a pot rack right now, then, after looking around for way too long at different types and measuring the space above my stove and looking at photos of other people's kitchens online, deciding I need more time to figure out exactly what I want/need in that department and not ordering anything.
• Emailing all my friends to whine about how I'm not getting any work done.
• Eating Lucky Charms.
• Feeling bad after eating too many bowls of Lucky Charms.
• Watching Dexter on Netflix.
• Looking up Rita from Dexter on imdb because it was killing me that I couldn't figure out who that actress was, then being really appalled at myself for not immediately realizing it was Julie Benz, who played Darla on Buffy/Angel. Did I not just recently finish rewatching all of Buffy? Yes. Yes, I did.
• Playing with the Pandora Radio website.
• Trying to find (more) good music to write to.
• Taking on more freelance editing work and then doing that instead of writing because it's due even sooner.
• Scheduling and then unscheduling personal trainer appointments.
• Scheduling and then unscheduling doctor and dentist appointments.
• Looking up "unscheduling" on Merriam-Webster and deciding to use it even though it's apparently not a real word ("unscheduled" is a real word, but "unschedule" and "unscheduling" are not).
• Making way more plans with friends than I should even think about making right now.
• Collecting books for one of my essays and then not reading them.
• Posting to my blog.

All right. Now that I only have about an hour of worktime left to me today, I should get to it. And then tomorrow, tomorrow, I will REALLY start working early in the day. Until it's time to get ready to go out because of course I have plans tomorrow evening, too.

Sigh. And also: sigh.

whiny and growly

If there's a fly in my apartment, doesn't my cat have a responsibility, an obligation, to chase that thing down and catch it? She should be running after it with her eyes all wide and crazy and her mouth making little unconscious chewing motions. Instead she just lies there on the floor, kind of glancing up with annoyed disinterest whenever it buzzes by. I have tried urging her on with both supportive words and general mockery, but to no avail. Some predator. Lazy thing.

Of course, I can't really throw stones in the laziness department, since I have done pretty much nothing but lie on my couch for the past couple of days, nursing this horrible cold. It may actually be a sinus infection at this point; it's starting to look that way, anyway. I got sick on my last day in Oregon, where I was visiting my dad, and have been feeling pretty awful ever since. And the timing is not very good, because I have tons of writing work to do. I have enough resistance to writing when I'm healthy; when I'm sick like this, the thought of actually trying to be creative is almost painful to contemplate. Pretty much everything becomes almost painful to contemplate. I turn into a big baby. To be fair, it's a really bad cold/sinus thing... we're not talking a little bout of the sniffles here. I actually threw my back out coughing yesterday morning. And my head is all heavy and yucky and I'm generally just feeling weak and gross and unable to muster much energy for anything other than pressing the buttons on the DVD remote.

Waaah. See? Big whiny baby. And I'm missing out on all kinds of fun social things this week, including some live music tomorrow night with someone I'd been looking forward to seeing. I suppose it's possible I'll wake up feeling 100% improved tomorrow morning, but somehow I doubt it. (In addition to whiny, being sick makes me grumpy and pessimistic. Grrr.)

Anyway. Oregon was great, and it was good to see my dad and some old and new friends while I was out there.

I haven't posted any photos on here in a while... here's one of my dad and me at the International Rose Test Garden in Portland:



Back to whining: there is some sort of pep rally or something going on at the school a few blocks from my house, and there is lots of VERY LOUD drumming and shouting going on. I am all for school spirit, but it's been going on for hours and it's one more obstacle to actually being able to concentrate on reading or writing or anything else productive that I should be trying to do. GRRRR!

My next due date for school (Packet 3!) is October 7, and I've got 30-40 pages to write on my novel, plus tons of reading, one new essay to write, and one old essay to revise. I have not yet started any of these things, except a tiny portion of the reading. And I don't really know where the novel is going, which complicates the whole "write 30-40 pages" thing. But my advisor gave me some very helpful comments, and permission to jump around in the timeline, which makes me feel a little less anxious. It also means having to trust that eventually all the jumping around will work out and I'll be able to work everything into one coherent narrative... but that's the part of writing that I always have trouble with, the trust and the acceptance that there will be lots of revising, and no matter how clean and right I try to make the first draft, revising is PART OF THE PROCESS, and not punishment for not getting it right the first time or in any other way something to try to avoid. Revision is where the real book comes together. I know this, intellectually; I just need to keep working toward truly accepting and believing it.

As my VCFA friend David has said: Hail the process!

I am trying.

And now all I can hear is Yoda's voice in my head: No. Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.

[And after Yoda frees the X-wing from the bog...]

Luke: I dont- I don't believe it.

Yoda: That is why you fail.

Sigh.

Um, August?

Okay, so I kind of skipped August. Here's what happened: I did some writing, I did some reading, I tried to win tickets online to see Hair with my friend Steph but we never won, I went to the gym, I made a difficult decision and later reversed it, I received loving care and attention from friends, I went out, I stayed in, I stressed about Packet 2 (that part is still ongoing), I saw Hellboy 2 (so good!), I bought new earrings, I got two MRIs (but apparently I'm fine), I visited the library several times, I cooked bluefish from the farmer's market in my grill pan and it was delicious, I ate too much frozen yogurt, I made good use of Netflix, and as the month wrapped up I had a wonderful weekend off the coast of Maine with some very lovely people.

So far September has been mostly about writing/reading stress and getting ready to visit my dad in Oregon next week. I've still got another essay and many more pages of my novel-in-progress to write before Monday morning. So clearly it was time to procrastinate by updating the old blog here.

I should probably get back to work, though. Just popping my head up to say hello.

July 2008 Update

So clearly this posting-at-least-once-a-week thing is not exactly happening. Maybe I should be shooting for once a month. Ah, well. It's not like blogging is the only thing I'm not doing as much of as I would like. (Hello, writing, reading, exercising, cleaning my apartment, spending quality time with friends...)

I'm a little over a week into re-entry after my first residency at The Vermont College of Fine Arts. It was everything everyone said it would be, and more. Met some wonderful people (you can visit some of them online - see the list of VCFA peeps in the right-hand column); attended excellent lectures by faculty, visiting writers, and graduating students; received wise and helpful guidance from my awesome workshop group on two picture book stories I have been struggling with; enjoyed the (mostly) lovely Vermont weather; and was introduced to the addictive anagram game Snatch, which promises to haunt me for years to come. I was also assigned my advisor for the semester: Uma Krishnaswami! I am so looking forward to working with her for the next several months. Now I just have to actually stay on top of all that work... I've got 20 to 40 pages of creative work and two critical essays due August 12, not to mention tons and tons of reading.

I'm starting a new middle-grade novel for my semester project, and will be working on some new picture books as well. I'm also hoping to continue work on two other novels in my, uh, spare time (hahahahahahahahahaha)—a sequel to The Dragon of Trelian and a new, unrelated fantasy novel. Wish me luck. Wish me lots and lots and lots and lots of luck. Please.

In other news...Library Lion has been nominated for another state book award! It's the 2009 Nevada Young Readers' Award in the picture book category. Hooray!

And...I sold another picture book to Candlewick! It feels too early to share details, but I am very excited. I will post more about this when it feels appropriate.

So, with everything I've got on my plate, I have no idea how often I'll be able to post, but I'll try to pop my head up whenever I can. Hope everyone out there is having a good summer and doing fun things and enjoying life in general. :)

My book has a title.

And it is:

The Dragon of Trelian.