Recent mentions that made me smile
• Over at Waltzing Matilda, Charlotte shares the details of the Prairie Thief book club meeting she hosted. She is tremendously creative and I so enjoyed seeing the activities and treats she came up with to go along with the book. She had the fun idea of having me record a video greeting for the kids.
• At Everead, Alysa’s young son wrote a book report on Fox and Crow Are Not Friends and drew the absolute cutest illustration to accompany it. I melted. Several times.
• Kort, whose blog is quietly wonderful and gives me a little burst of happiness whenever it pops up in my reader, wrote a sweet note about Julie Bogart and me. Julie‘s one of my favorite people on the internet, too, so I was delighted to be in her company.
• Last Saturday, one of my books made an appearance at the Virginia Discovery Museum: children were invited to “join Kelly Sulick, principal flute of the Charlottesville & University Symphony Orchestra, and Kate Tamarkin, CUSO’s music director, for a musical reading of Fox and Crow are Not Friends.” Now that’s a performance I wish I could have seen! Especially since there was an “instrument petting zoo” afterward. 🙂
I have been pretty low-profile about my work this past year, after a busy 2012 when I had three books launch in the same month. I do occasional local events but don’t undertake a lot of travel, not nearly as much as most of my kidlit author friends. I’m always reading (with pleasure) about the conferences they attend, the bookstore appearances, the school visits all over the country; and I enjoy their travels vicariously but know that I couldn’t maintain that kind of pace myself, not without giving up the learning-time with my kids that I treasure so much. (Not to mention without seriously impeding Scott’s ability to do his own work.) So while I do have several events planned for this summer, and a giveaway in the works for next week, I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about not having lined up a full slate of events to usher Inch and Roly and the Sunny Day Scare into the world. I’m fond of the childbirth metaphor for book publishing, but it falls apart the moment the book is ‘born’ into the world (generally about a year after delivery)—because by then, the moment of its appearance in the wide world, I’m already about fourteen months pregnant with the next one. So it is with this newest book-baby—actually in this case I’m about forty months along with the next one, who promises to be a twelve-pounder. (It’s possible the metaphor is getting away from me here.) At any rate, the point of all this musing is that in a season when I can’t do a lot of traveling to help my books meet new readers, it is deeply gratifying to see them land in the hands of kids who enjoy them.