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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I just finished writing the acknowledgements for THE BOY, THE BOAT, AND THE BEAST, and they’re extensive! Nothing we do in this world is done within a vacuum, and this book has been blessed by a lot of people during its life so far. With Thanksgiving next week, I thought I’d highlight some of the…
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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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As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, writing conferences are gggrrrreeeaaatttt! (For example, the recent Austin SCBWI conference and Houston SCBWI conference, where I was nominated for the Joan Lowery Nixon Award.) The chance to hang out with like-minded people and talk about books is wonderful enough, but there’s also the seminars where you…
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