Twenty-five glorious years

Today is my 25th wedding anniversary.

Seems like only yesterday.

You can probably imagine a small, intimate wedding party on SAINT PATRICK'S DAY (in L.A.)!

Hint: We had champagne BEFORE the ceremony. Heh!

(Thanks for the iPhone, honey!)

I won!

Guess what?!

How to Steal a Dog won the South Carolina Children's Book Award!!

Two words: WOO HOO

This one is particularly meaningful.

First of all, it's voted on by children - the ultimate award!

And second of all, South Carolina is my home state.

Born and raised there.

Graduated from the University of South Carolina.

And heading down there on Thursday (sadly, for my mother's memorial service. She would have been tickled pink by this award. Sigh...)

I'm back

Okay, my world is up and spinning again and I stepped back on.

Thanks so much to all of you who sent such lovely notes and comments. I appreciated every one of them.

Isn't it amazing how the internet turns this big wide world into a much smaller one and connects us to each other?

It makes you realize that we can be very different from each other and live thousands of miles apart and in completely different environments, but we all have one thing in common: a heart.

Two little toots

How to Steal a Dog nominated for Pennsylvania Young Readers' Choice Award for 2009-2010.



Greetings from Nowhere named to Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices list for 2009, nominated for the Pennsylvania Keystone Reading Award, and received a recommendation for the Kansas State Reading Circle.

Stopping the world

My mother passed away yesterday...

so....

I'm stopping the world....

....and getting off....

for a while.

Meatloaf?

I received an email from a fan recently.

An excerpt:

I'm in a reading group with my school librarian and she has been reading Greetings From Nowhere to us! It's a GREAT book!

I have also read the book How To Steal A Dog, and Fame And Glory In Freedom Georgia and Moonpie And Ivy. and I was wondering if you would want to use me in one of your books.

... I love music, sports, meatloaf, and the color purple!


Meatloaf?

I love kids.

It only took me 25 years.....

For my 25th wedding anniversary (which is St. Patrick's Day, for those of you who want to send gifts), my husband got me an iPhone.

He just doesn't know it yet.


Of course, I need a manual. I have OMD (Obsessive Manual Disorder).

When I was at the Apple Store, I asked the Young Whippersnapper Baby Salesperson if it came with a manual.

He replied: ???????? [and in his head he was thinking: These old broads are ridiculous.]

So I had to BUY a manual.

Here it is. Only, it took me 30 minutes to figure out why Photobooth on my Mac shows the photo backwards.


I DID figure it out, by the way - it's called "Flip Photo" in the Edit menu, in case you need to know.

I NEED A MANUAL.

Writing Tip Tuesday

No, you're not going crazy. It is not Tuesday. But this got published today by mistake, so, oh well...heh!

The best writing tip in the world?

READ.

So....I offer this post as a testament to that.

I'm not a book reviewer and I don't play one on TV....so I wouldn't attempt to review this book.

But I AM gonna say how much I loved The Floating Circus by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer.

First of all - the subject is fascinating: historical fiction about a circus on a boat, based on a real boat, called Floating Palace. Who knew?

But it's the writing that grabbed me with this one.

I mean, how can you not love a book that starts out:

I shoulda listened to my brother. Right follows Zach like a shadow, but wrong wears me like a skin.

I definitely had to lock the highlighters away while reading this library book, because my fingers were just itching to mark all the lovely sentences and phrases. (I suffer from OHD: Obsessive Highlighting Disorder.)

• It smelled like dirty boys. And dirty boys are mean boys....
• My family was a pile of rags now - shredded and torn.
• Still, the corner felt safe and good, like vegetable soup on a rainy day.
• Anger and fear took turns with me all night, so sleep did not find me until the pale lavender light wedged its way through the open door.
• I couldn't picture myself in their top-buttoned world anymore. [I love that: top-buttoned world.]

Lovely writing.

Check out the checklist

For anyone out there who loves lists as much as I do, this is kinda cool.

Grace Lin's Auction

Check out Grace Lin's March offering for the Foundation for Children's Books auction.

Starts March 9.

(P.S. I love this one!)

Tap dancing and writing

Yesterday was the first Wednesday in ages that I haven't had a school visit or had to write.

So I decided to go to tap dancing class.

I've been tap dancing for FIFTY years.

I take a class whenever I can, which, alas, isn't too often anymore.

My tap shoes cost more than any other pair of shoes I own.

I sent them to a special shoe shop in New York City to have Savion build-ups (which means adding to the sole in a way that adds weight and gives a better tone - named for the tap dancer Savion Glover).

I keep them in a beautiful hand-woven bag from Guatemala.

What does this have to do with writing, you ask?

Okay...I'll tell you.

Author Ann Cameron is a dear friend and mentor of mine.

We have the same editor at Farrar, Sraus & Giroux (Frances Foster).

We became e-mail buddies and grew very close. She was living in Guatemala at the time.

Because she's such a nice person, she sent me a lovely hand-woven bag from Guatemala.

When her book, The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1998, she invited me to join her in New York for the festivities.

I jumped at the chance.

She agreed to pick me up at the train station.

But these were the days before websites and blogs and Facebook and all that stuff, so we hadn't seen photos of each other and didn't know if we would recognize one another at Penn Station.

She suggested that I carry the bag from Guatemala so she could find me (which I did).

I had a fantastic time on that trip - schmoozing with Ann and the other nominees: Jack Gantos, Louis Sachar, Anita Lobel, and Richard Peck!!

There!

That's how tap dancing and writing are related.

And by the way, that little gold coin in the photo? That's a coin from Guatemala that Ann must have put in there and I never knew it was there until yesterday!!!!!!

Translation

My son has a friend from Korea who translated this advertisement for How to Steal a Dog from the Korean publisher, (Dasan Books).

It reads:

Even though my Dad has disappeared my 11-year-old self will take care of my family

One day my dad and home disappeared.

All that's left for my Mom, brother and I is a car and one gram of courage.

Now Georgina's ambitious project to the world has started.

How to Steal a Dog Perfectly
by Barbara O'Connor/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Feeling the love in Korea

How to Steal a Dog has been on the bestseller list in Korea for three months!

Dasan Books (the Korean publisher) created this lovely ad. They also came up with some pretty creative marketing ideas - like a puppy giveaway promotion from an online bookstore!

Who knew?

(Note: I confess that I wrote this blog post back in November when I was doing school visits in Iowa City. I never got around to posting it....so since I have nothing else to report...here it is. That's what we call "a slow news day." Ha!)

Until my trip to Iowa, I had never been to the Midwest at all.

It was interesting to see things I'd never seen before.

Like hedge apples!

These were all over the ground in the yard of the B&B I stayed at.

They are big - about the size of a grapefruit.

They come from a big beautful tree called a sage orange.
They supposedly keep spiders away.
Who knew?

Dear Uncle Sam

Yes, I am spending this SNOWY day (arrrgh) doing taxes.

Can I write off a trip to Aruba?

Trust me, it's a necessary expense.