Something AMAZING has happened. THE BOY, THE BOAT, AND THE BEAST won the SCBWI Crystal Kite Award for the Texas/Oklahoma region! It’s always excited to know that your work is appreciated by readers, but this award in particular means so much to me for many reasons. Firstly, SCBWI’s Crystal Kite Awards are the only peer-voted…
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Next week, I will be faculty at my first Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators writing conference, and it feels like a milestone. The first SCBWI conference I attended was in 2007. I was living in Los Angeles then, so attended the huge annual Summer Conference organized by SCBWI headquarters. As a wallflower who…
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“Writing is such a diverse field with so many options and possibilities, it’s easy to choose the route with the immediate payoff, or the one that best strokes your ego, but if they don’t get you closer to what you want most, then it’s not worth your time.” — author Jennifer Nielsen I love this quote…
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I’ve said on this blog numerous times that I’m a HUGE fan of writing conferences. When I took on the Regional Advisor job for the Austin chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, I wanted to honor the organizers of all the wonderful conferences I’ve been to over the years and put…
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At the Austin SCBWI conference last weekend, author/illustrator E.B. Lewis pointed out that writers and and illustrators are the same people, all trying to create art the captures peoples’ imagination. Whether we’re using paint or words, we’re both making pictures that tell stories. And those stories have to have a few things to be successful:…
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Writing is solitary. Just us with a computer and a head of ideas. But we’re not really alone. And going to a writing conference is a wonderful way to celebrate that. Of course, seminars at writing conferences are great learning opportunities. Query letters, characters, plot, dialog — I’ve learned about all these at conferences. But…
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I spent last weekend at the Austin SCBWI conference, and reafirmed my understanding of why going to events like these are so good for writers. I was there in a volunteer capacity, helping to organize the critiques and make sure they went smoothly for all participants. On that front, it was wonderful to see the…
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