it was a long winter

It wasn't the amount of snow. It was the cold. It was how long it was cold, in Hotlanta. It was so cold this past winter. I just wanted to make soup and popcorn and burrow under old quilts and watch old movies; and look out the kitchen window to see the winter birds forage on all the old seed pods in the garden; take selfies of ourselves now, and compare them to old pictures of us on my dresser and tell ourselves we're not that old yet; buy an enormous (heavy!) cast iron pot and make more and more soup; get up at four in the morning and turn on the lovely lamps and write in my cozy writing place; skype with students sitting at their desks while I sit at my kitchen counter, soup bubbling on the stove; write encouragements on my chalkboard wall so I remember what's good about the isolation of winter; eat all the salads Jim made and all his baked potatoes, too; and wait for spring, spring, glorious faraway spring.

Making home in winter. I loved every quiet minute of it.

my scholastic family, ala midwinter, revolution

And so it begins again, a new book to shepherd into the world. Here are some catch-up shots from ALA Midwinter in January, in Philadelphia, PA. Here are some of the inside pages of REVOLUTION that my editor David L. and I were working with up to the last second, trying to get just-right, sitting at rehearsal the morning of the Scholastic brunch. We'd done this at NCTE, too, the previous November, going over a first-pass of these same pages, looking at design and making some hard decisions. I arrived in Philadelphia and took public transportation to the gig:

Readers' theater with Julia Donaldson, Jon Muth, Rod Philbrick, and Cynthia Lord

Fuzzy photo of Scholastic conference goddess Lizette Serrano, Lucy Christopher, Natalie Lloyd, Lori Benton and me, at the Scholastic brunch.

Barry Cunningham of Chicken House Press with Lori Benton and Lucy Christopher.

Me with my good friend and fabulous teacher Nancy Johnson from Bellingham, Washington.

David Levithan and I rarely have our photo taken together. Here we are, the two people who know REVOLUTION inside and out right now.

Teacher extraordinaire (and great cook) Dean Schneider came (with the equally fabulous Robin Smith) to one of the very first events I ever did for any of my books, at Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, in 2002. I love Robin and Dean. Such champions of books and authors and young readers.

Oh, these women. Maria Gentle, Sharon Grover, Joan Kindig, fellow Children's Book Guild of D.C. members. We've known each other for a long, long time.

Susannah Richards! She shows up and surprises me, every time. I love that.

There's nobody like Candace Greene, Scholastic Fashion Plate and Conference Guru.

Me'n'Cyndi Lord

Arthur Levine and moi, The fuzzy people

Truly the Conference Goddess, Lizette calls us all to order.

Beautiful Philadelphia

Beautiful John Mason

On the way home

It's exciting and nerve-wracking to send forth a new book. For years it belongs just to you, then to you and your editor, then the circle widens, and your publishing family begins to read the manuscript and design the pages and put together the sending-forth plan. Then, pretty soon, the book is out in the world without you, and it doesn't belong to you anymore. It belongs to whoever reads it, then. The reading of the story you've created brings the tale full circle. My Jim always says that story -- like music -- is dialogical. It requires a listener, or a reader, to be complete.

Midwinter was our first coming out. We didn't have galleys yet, but we could talk about the book. Galleys arrived this week, though, and we'll have them for TLA next week -- Texas Library Association in Austin, April 8-10. I'll be there, signing and speaking and greeting and sticking close to my Scholastic family as we help this new book make its first real steps into the world.

I'm going to pack my Nikon. I'm getting better with my phone camera, but I really want people to be in focus! And I really want to remember to just soak up this special time. I am a slow writer. It takes me time to figure out a story and do a good-enough job writing it, revising it, writing some more. Here I am, four years after the publication of COUNTDOWN, ready to introduce readers to book two of the Sixties Trilogy.

this and that to begin a new year: experimenting

I'm sifting through an experiment. I got my first smart-phone in late November, and I put down my Nikon D-40 for four months. I've just learned (maybe this is a new blogger thing) that I can work on my laptop and access my phone photos here... very good! Google has done some silly stuff with animated gifs and an end-of-year doo-dad that's sweet, silly, and confusing, as I don't know a couple of the people in this little movie, but that's fine, I did take the photos. Take a look

I like the togetherness and community I see here, and I'm grateful for these folks in my life. I've started using Instagram as a photo journal, which has left me less present on the blog, but I'm going to catch up now, with the next several posts, and pick up my camera, and see what it brings me. I'm about to travel quite a bit for REVOLUTION, as we now have galleys and we are moving into the book's debut season. I want to capture that season here.

This blog is seven years old, and I'm not ready to quit telling stories. But I am thinking about the different ways I have of capturing the days and telling stories now. I'm experimenting. I'll be talking about that here, too. Meantime, you can find me on Twitter for mostly professional conversation about teaching, writing, and stories; at Facebook for book news; on Instagram for daily photos; and on Pinterest mostly as a way to catalogue book resources, including work in progress.

I'll update the website at some point as well. For now, there is a new REVOLUTION page that I want to add content to.

We're also planning a family wedding here, and a local book launch, and a whole host of other stuff that's keeping us hopping. It's a happy time. Life is good. I have just turned sixty. Who knew that was even possible? Time to breathe deep and exhale. Time to reflect, and time to catch up a bit.