Day Three and The Final Reckoning: SCBWI’s Western Washington Wonderfulness

As I said, Saturday was my easy day.  Sunday was the day to watch out for.  I’d already done my favorite Breakout Session.  Now I had two others to give, and I was worried about how they might sound.

The panel would only be an hour long.  I had prepared a variety of interesting questions, but since I’m the kind of kid who eats her chocolate cake before her coq au vin, I wanted these ladies to discuss their Newbery call first.  Everyone loves the Newbery call stories.  And even though I had helped make that call, I was unaware of all the drama and backstory behind each person’s tale.  Whether it was Cynthia Lord desperately trying to log onto the ALA site to hear the announcement (and getting annoyed by the ringing phone) or Jennifer Holm running hell-for-leather around her house for a cat that was sleeping peaceably indoors, each lady had a great tale to tell.  I asked how the award had changed their lives (apparently it does that kind of thing when the winner isn’t looking) and I finished with the scrotum controversy for a capper.  I do not know if the ladies of SCBWI taped this session.  They were certainly taping quite a few others.  Hopefully it’ll be available somewhere for you to hear.  Here are the pictures, as taken by the very kind Kate Schafer:

Immediately after this I had a Breakout Session to conduct on books that Kill Categories.  It was a play on my talk at the November SCBWI Conference.  Of course, this meant that some poor souls had chosen to listen to me talk for a good two hours at a time.  To them I apologize, but at least my Powerpoint went up like a dream. Kim Baker gave me quite a lovely intro and 87 people were slated to attend, though when I look at my audience during these talks they start to resemble funny vertical blurs rather than living breathing human beings.  I have no idea if anyone was even sitting there.  People assure me that there were.  I shall take their word for it.

Before hearing his name:

Upon hearing his name:

And suddenly he was on the stage:

As everyone wrote every little tiny word he said as fast as humanly possible.

The rest of the day involved a humongous statue of Lenin…

But that is a story for another time.

And, of course, I flew back on Monday.  I would like to thank the lovely ladies of SCBWI Western Washington and hopefully we will run into one another again in the future.  I’d like to thank everyone involved too.

A marvelous conference run by marvelous people.

• For other round-ups of the week-end, take a trip over to Kate Schafer’s site KT Literary where she dishes on the week-end herself and her thoughts.

• Laini Taylor does the same (and I can identify the exact cupcake I ate from her picture of them).

• And then Laini Taylor’s Jim adds in his two cents.

• Kirby Larson writes of the experience under the inspired title of Oldberies.

• Rachel Writes for Kids talks about the experience and is very nice to me, for which I thank her.

• Sheryl McFarlane’s News Blog does the same thing too.

• Brimstone Soup hits the highlights.

• Anne Hale was clearly in attendance.

And I bet there are a bunch o’ people out there who wrote other stuff as well.  But as they did not link to me (alas alas) I cannot find them.  Kudos to everyone who was there, though, and hopefully we’ll see one another again real soon.

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