SCBWI Seattle

I always miss it before I'm even gone. Driving across the 520 bridge, passing the University of Washington...Mt. Rainier off in the distance...I totally took that all for granted when I lived there.

So it was pretty fantastic to combine my favorite place with my favorite kind of people--my family and my writer friends. Speaking of fabulous writer friends, here I am with Jolie Stekly and Sara Easterly.

And what great planning on the part of Laurie Thompson and those amazing SCBWI Western Washington people. Besides having an incredible conference, they

planted a cupcake place right across the street!

There's my partner-in-cupcake crime, Jolie Stekly (www.cuppajolie.blogspot.com)!

And I finally got my hands on a copy of my pal, Suzanne Young's, THE NAUGHTY LIST. They were all sold out at the SCBWI New York conference.

The person in

front of me in the bookstore line got the LAST copy! I told Suzanne I was going to have to get all Cabbage Patch Doll/Tickle-Me-Elmo ugly if it happened again. I had on my running shoes and I was prepared to use my Karate skills...

I always have a great time seeing Jay Asher. His amazing book, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY has now been on the New York Times list for 58 weeks!

It was so great to see Holly Cupola again. I

can't wait to get my hands on her new book, TELL ME A SECRET. It is arriving very soon!

And I always learn something new from Mitali Perkins . I have now gotten the opportunity to hear her speak on both coasts and I am so impressed with her generosity when it comes to the kidlit community!

I wish I could have spent more time with Joni Sensel, Jaime Temarik and Kim Baker! The last time I saw Jaime and Kim, we were fending off frostbite, searching for the perfect cupcake on a very frigid New York night! More support for the belief that true happiness is only a good book and a cupcake away...

Go Ahead and MadMen Yourself

So I've got a million things to do this morning, but my friend, Shelagh, had to go and give me the link to MadMen myself...

http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/madmenyourself/

Okay...definitely worth it. You get to pick your hair and all your accessories and whatnot. It reminded me of when my friend had this really great Barbie fashion designer stencil set...but you had to set up the stencils very carefully, because any false move to the left or right, and Barbie's design would become Project Runway gone very wrong...

I'm looking at the clock right now, because I think there still may be time to go do my makeup like my MadMen self. I opted out of the cigarette accessory, for obvious reasons-- Barbie's stencil set never had the cigarette or martini option. When I watch the show and think back to that time, I'm always amazed at how everyone thought they had to smoke--like they would be social pariahs if they didn't during that era. They had such great clothes in the fifties and sixties. Didn't they ever think about how bad they would smell, along with their impeccably styled hair?

And I would love to have that hair. It took forever to make that perfect up-do every morning, I'm sure. My mom was always up with the latest fashions, but she was the mother of three and very busy. I'm sure she didn't have the time to properly do her MadMen era hairdo justice. Being the fashion-forward time-saving mom that she was, she solved that problem. She had a wiglet. Not a wig. A wiglet. It was pretty amazing. I used to take it out of the cupboard under the bathroom sink and bobby pin it to my hair. It looked a bit like a swatch of frosted chinchilla hair, but it was very cool. There's many a bad-hair day that I wish I had a wiglet of my own.

In my next life, I will wear hose and heels everyday and have a job in the steno pool...but then again, maybe not...

Books and Chocolate Naturally Go Together

I'm competitive. It's in my nature-I can't help it.

I am currently doing a fitness challenge at work, so I am going for broke--spinning, kickboxing, running--I am into this competition. I am even wearing a pedometer to record every possible step. I'm also working very hard on Book 3. And in order to keep my creativity flowing and my energy up, I needed to get some essential supplies...

...chocolate, of course!

The Love of Jazz, Cowboy Songs, and Great Stories

I come from a long line of artists and musicians and teachers. My grandparents had a vaudeville act in the 1920s--"Haywood's Hawaiian Players". My mother was a teacher and a beautiful painter. My dad played the saxophone and has the best jazz collection of anyone I know. He also has a really good singing voice, but he won't do any solos unless he's belting out one of his cowboy songs. As a teenager, I lived in fear that he would do that around one of my friends, but now I actually look forward to it. My brother, Tom, plays guitar and bass, and my brother, Tim plays brass, a little bit of percussion, and is a talented graphic designer. All I'm going to say is, it's a good thing I can put a sentence together, because I can clear a room pretty quickly with my singing voice.

My family treasures books and good stories, but I am the first in the family to be a writer. When ALSO KNOWN AS HARPER became a reality, my brother and sister-in-law had a party at their house in Seattle. Before I got on the plane, my cousin called.

"I have something for you," my cousin, Lynn said. "I think it belongs to you."

Lynn is a special kind of relative. The kind who you love not just because you have a family obligation, but the kind you would choose for a friend, even if you didn't share a DNA pool. And the fact that we are separated by about 3,000 miles means I just don't get to see her very often. So I couldn't wait to see what she was talking about.

She arrived at my brother's with a thick brown box, the size that would fit a tall stack of manuscript pages. It was tied up with a thick white string, kind of like those wonderful bakery boxes in the Bronx, and Lynn sat down with me to watch me take the lid off. But what was inside was even better than a pastry from Arthur Avenue. It was our great-grandmother's stories. She had been a writer! My family is not quiet by any means, and I was pretty sure I would have heard about this before. My father had known his grandmother, but had not known that she was a writer.

The stories are in all of the drafting stages, from the notes she'd scribbled on the back of scraps of paper ( just like I do!), all the way through her handwritten drafts on old newsprint tablets, and to the final draft that she'd typed.

One page of notes is written on the back of an old milk receipt from the dairy farm that she owned. It was dated November, 1933, which meant she was already a grandmother at that point. Did she wait for her kids to grow up to start writing? And when in her busy day as a dairy farmer, did she find time to get out her pen and paper? And since nobody knew she was a writer, did she write in secret? Her stories are full of action and adventure and great dialogue. I picture her standing at the counter in the kitchen, dreaming about places seemingly out of the reach of her farm, and scribbling as fast as she could.

I wish I could sit with her and talk about writing. Had she ever sent a story off to a publisher? Did she dream of seeing her work on the shelves of a library? Would she love the same books that I love? Would she think Dorothy Parker and Flannery O'Connor were brilliant and ahead of their time? Was my great-grandmother ahead of her time?

But my biggest question was this: would she have ever imagined that her great-granddaughter would be reading and cherishing her stories almost 80 years later?

"I wish she could tell her about my book," I said to my critique group.

"Oh, she knows," they said. "She knows."

Writerly Togetherness

I am always saying, out loud and in print, what a solitary life it can be as a writer. No doubt, Hemingway's bare bones existence in A Moveable Feast would have been considerably changed had he had social networking.

Would he have still gone to that cafe? Or would he have just consumed mass quantities of wine and oysters in the comfort of his own icy apartment while seated in front of his Facebook screen?

And would Gertrude Stein still have invited him over to 27 rue de Fleurus, or would she have been too busy Tweeting or blogging to talk about books with the likes of him?

He wouldn't have been nearly as lonely had he been in the Class of 2k9... I gave my take on writerly togetherness over at our new blog this morning.

Also, look for another video blog from Jame Richards and me in the next week or so. The critique group is showing up at my house this weekend. I love that they will travel miles for good dessert and stories! Jame and I might be able to convince a few guests to join the vlog. And Jame, if you are reading this, I just had this great thought...now that we have had Andrew Gutterson on The Backstory, teaching us how to beat box...maybe we could get a few of our writing peeps to give it a shot!! Oh...maybe I shouldn't have said anything...now they'll be prepared with lame excuses...

And speaking of Jame, I absolutely love the hilarious "Francisisms" that she posts on the sidebar of her blog. In the true spirit of Francis, I need to share some recent quotes from a couple of my first graders:

I am grabbing a pencil from my desk, and as usual, someone follows me...(by the way, I don't know why the school office furniture people bother to provide a chair to go with a first grade teacher's desk. It's just a place that I put my purse...)

Anyway, I'm grabbing the pencil and I hear, Mrs. Leal? I have a paper cut. Can I have a Band-aid?

Sure, I say.

Then he sighs with relief and says, Good! 'Cause I can see my bone sticking out.

Then, same week, but different kid:

Mrs. Leal? Can I tell something to the class?

Is it your sharing day? I ask.

She shakes her head. No, but it's really important.

Okay, go ahead, I say.

She stands at the front of the room: I have something to tell you guys. My dog is getting tutored tomorrow. Does everyone know what that means?

I hold my breath and get ready for damage control, but then thank God for the kid that always calls out. He says, Isn't that like getting a shot?

She nods her head importantly, Yep. It's like getting a shot.

I'm certainly glad I don't need to be tutored right now, because I hate shots.

Writer Peer Pressure

It had been not quite six months since SCBWI (Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators) Los Angeles, and I was having serious withdrawals...I couldn't wait to get to New York and see my Seattle friends.

I am originally from the Seattle area, so when I see the Seattle SCBWIers, I feel

like I'm back in the old neighborhood. My purple stingray with the high handlebars and the banana seat may be gone, but the people are just as awesome. You've got to love people who will go on a cupcake quest with you late at night in Greenwich Village when it is about thirty below zero!

We may have looked lost, but we were just huddled in the subway to get warm! On the left is the talented Jaime Temairik, aka, Cocoa Stomp and my 2k9 sister, Sydney Salter's husband, Mike. (Does that make him my 2k9 brother-in-law??)

On the right with me are my East Coast pal, Penny Piva, aka, sweetbrownpoison, and Sydney.

We finally found the elusive cupcake place and even though we were all suffering from hypothermia, it was definitely worth it!

And there I am with the wonderful,

Jolie Stekly, aka, cuppa jolie. It was the third anniversary of our friendship which spans over three thousand miles! Ours is kind of a twilight zone friendship where we led practically parallel lives for years, until three years ago when we finally collided at the writer's intensive at SCBWI New York!

On the right is me with the amazing Kim Baker. Kim doesn't know it yet, but I might be sneaking into her Seattle conference in April...I have a family event a few days later, so really, how could I not go? It's a weird kind of writer peer pressure...you know you want to go...everybody's going...the next thing I know, I'm looking for plane tickets and filling out the conference form...

Looking pensive on the subway is my vlog partner, Jame Richards.

Both Ja(i)mes are amazing, and I can see as it

would be easy to confuse the two...

Jame Richards writes historical fiction and vlogs with me...

Here is her book...

Jaime Temairik has never vlogged at my house,

but I have her wonderful art on the wall in my house. It makes me happy every time I walk by it.

You can buy it on Etzy.com and you can

see her latest creations on her

blog, CocoaStomp. Come on, go there;

you know you want to...

When my parents tried to teach me about avoiding peer pressure, I'm sure they had no idea how persuasive writer friends can be. One second you are safely in your toasty warm hotel room, and the next second you are forming a posse on the subway in subzero temperatures. I've always said the writer's life was solitary, but not when you are at SCBWI...

Facebook Rules and More SCBWI New York

I am pulling out some of my mad first grade teacher skills and asking the question, can you identify the owner of the boot? Which author/illustrator/artist belongs to each boot? And no, Penny, it's not the same as the Sesame Street question, "which of these things doesn't go with the others"...

Well? Put your wild and not so wild guesses in the comment section.

If you would like a few hints, click on this for a video edition of The Backstory. (If you missed Part I, you can go to the blog post before this and click on "video blog"...)