I haven’t been blogging much these days. Not because I haven’t had anything to blog about…I’ve actually had quite a bit to blog about — lots of school visits, author events, new book possibilities, my kids etc. But when I haven’t been actively involved in one of the previous activities, I’ve been working on my Monkey Man sequel. There just hasn’t been time for blogging…and I’m starting to miss it!
I’m just back from a great school visit in Gretna, Nebraska. What was especially nice about this visit (well, aside from the kids…and the librarian…VERY nice school librarian in Gretna, NE!) was I had company on the way over/back. My best friend (who I also have hardly had any time for recently) has a good friend in Gretna, so she rode over with me and spent the two days with her friend. So we had nine hours together in my van (not to mention two meals in Des Moines) to catch up.
Tomorrow I’m doing a reading/discussion of The Truth About Truman School at the Coralville library. I’m hoping I have a voice…my husband and I had lunch with friends of ours last Friday and the other husband, who was sitting across from me, was kind enough to cough in my face about 35 times, thereby sharing his cold with me. If worst comes to worst, the librarian would probably do the reading part for me so I have voice enough for the discussion. I’m looking forward to discussing cyberbullying with local fifth and sixth graders.
And then this weekend is the big Iowa SCBWI conference. I’m supposed to pick up my editor (and two of our other speakers) at the airport, so I should probably clean out my van (not until tomorrow, though…I drive the children’s theater carpool tonight and one of my passengers tends to make a bit of a mess of her dinner in my van).
I’ve already warned said editor that the book is not going to be done. I warned her last week so she’d have a full 9 days to get used to the idea before saw each other…fortunately, she’s a very nice person (I’ve met her twice before) and seems to be over it already. Though she did cheerfully suggest we could work out a new deadline during our presentation on the author-editor relationship. Ha ha. What a funny editor I have! So…I wonder how much chocolate and how many bottles of wine I should bring to this conference? How many pieces of chocolate/bottles of wine will it take to bribe her into pushing that new deadline out as far as I’d like? Seriously, though…it should be a fun weekend! And I’ve already been promised Chinese food!
I suppose I’d better see how much work I can get done between now and then…which means, this will probably be the last blog entry I’ll write for a while…
