This weekend was a blast! Very busy though. I took a vacation day on Friday so that I could attend the annual literacy conference of OCIRA (Ohio Council of the International Reading Association), where we presented the 2008 Buckeye Children's Book Awards to three authors. I'm on the BCBA Council, as a representative from the OLC (Ohio Library Council--are you keeping up with all of these acronyms? :-) and I'd never been to the reading teachers' conference before. It was held at Youngstown State University, about 45 minutes away. First major hurdle: getting there! I'd mapquested the directions (or maybe it was yahoo maps or google maps, because I use all three indiscriminately), and was following them merrily along. I noticed when I got off the freeway that I was in my mom's old neighborhood, in fact it was also my old neighborhood from when I was a preschooler, when we lived a few streets down from my grandmother. So I took a quick detour just to drive by my grandma's old house--hadn't been there in a long long time, since before my grandmother passed away, in 1991 I think it was. That was a sweet nostalgic moment. But then I continued to follow the mapquest directions, and they took me to some residential street! Not a college campus at all. Oh dear! Luckily I had a state map with me, which had a decent blowup of Youngstown, because I might have lived there as a kid but I sure didn't know my way around the rest of the city. I was over 15 minutes out of my way! Totally off! I have never been so furious at an online map site before. I know they can be off, but usually by one or two streets. This sent me to an entirely different address in a different part of town, but said on the directions that it was the Kilcawley Center at YSU. Go figure!! Thank heavens I had actually left an hour early, having planned to walk around campus a little. Sheesh. So I got there just in time to hear the keynote address by Cynthia Lord, author of the Newbery Honor-winning, Schneider family award-winning, and now, Buckeye Children's Book Award-winning novel, Rules.


Her talk was wonderful, and so touching, many of us were wiping away tears. She talked about how to write a book about something close to your heart--in this case, raising her son with autism and how it affects his sister--and how that is different from writing entirely made-up fiction. If you haven't read her book, please do, it is funny and heartwarming and just a great story. And she talked about winning the Newbery Honor, and how as exciting as that was, winning the Buckeye award made her cry, because it is an honor bestowed by children (the books are nominated as well as voted on by kids all across Ohio). She was just wonderful to meet and to hear speak.

That was the only thing I did at the first day of the conference; I drove home right after. I stopped briefly in Newton Falls to drop off a book with my friend Chrissy at her library and have a quick visit, and that turned out to be an expensive little detour because in my hurry to get back to the horses I passed a car a little too fast and got a speeding ticket. Ouch! I was NOT meant to be in a car that day, methinks...). On Saturday I got up earlier than the usual oh-dark-thirty (4am this time) to be able to feed horses and still get back to YSU in time to help at the conference registration table. This time I knew right where I was going! I did some gofering and prize-stickering for the staff, and then I hosted authors/illustrators Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash for their breakout session and to lunch and to see their Buckeye award acceptance speech. They gave a funny talk with a slide show all about their home/office, which is a cool brownstone in Brooklyn, how they created Bow Wow Bugs a Bug, the wordless picture book that won the award, and a "few words about wordless books." This being a literacy conference, they were quite well prepared, and had a funny "Top Ten Uses for Wordless Books" list as well as a more serious list of ways to use wordless books in the classroom and why visual literacy is so important for reading development.

Here I am with Mark and Megan, wearing my Bow Wow shirt. We had a great time, it was cool to meet them and they were very friendly and have a nifty sense of humor. They were totally up for clowning around with the decor, taking turns in photos like this:


We had some tense moments with technology screwups for their presentation, entailing a lot of running around for the right projector cords and things with YSU staff, but it worked out fine, and I was glad to be of help. Their Buckeye "acceptance speech" was a wordless slide show with animations, and it was adorable! And hilarious! Bow Wow the dog wakes up as the doorbell rings, learns he has won an award. Then he takes off running through the streets, flies in an airplane, runs across the deserts and past the Eiffel Tower and around the world (which is hilarious because he "lives" in NYC), then at the podium he catches a bone thrown to him!

Then he runs back home, where he falls asleep dreaming of Ohio--which changes shape into a heart. Awwww. So cute.


I also got to hear keynote (non-awards) presentations by:

Diane DeGroat, who writes and illustrates the "Gilbert the opossum" series of pictures books--Roses are Pink, Your Feet Stink! etc, very cute!--as well as illustrating hundreds of other books over the years. She gave a very funny slide show of her life story, with animations and views of her studio, etc. Her website is full of fun stuff. She's had a long varied career in book illustration and does great work. And the other guest of honor that day was

Bruce Langton, another children's book illustrator (I first saw his work in B Is For Buckeyes, a state history alphabet book, and he's done several in the series, like H is For Hoosier or something like that) who started out as a commercial artist and a fantastic wildlife artist. Check out his website to see the phenomenal wildlife art, so realistic and beautiful. Wowsers. Wolves, elephants, lions, just gorgeous. He talked about how he entered "duck stamp" competitions over and over again, trying to win one to get recognition. Man, can he ever paint a pretty duck! :-)

It was a wonderful day. But, it didn't end there! I said goodbye to Mark and Megan after getting my book autographed (they did a really nice color pencil illustration in it, instead of the usual black Sharpie, boy did I feel privileged!), and raced home to put on my vampirella costume and go to the Warped Corps Halloween party. This is our annual shindig of food and merriment. I don't have a photo of me in costume, but this is what it looked like last year when I wore it to a vampire author visit:

(I didn't paint my face white at this party.)

We had some cool characters show up at our party:

This is Karen and Charlie as Storm and Gambit. Even their dog Velvet got into the act:

We play a lot of silly scifi games at our parties, and the main event is the Crossword Puzzle game, created and hosted by the devious Charlie.

There are over a hundred words to figure out; we divide into two teams and it's a team effort to try to figure out what words are meant by the obscure clever punny clues Charlie comes up with. Teams earn points for every letter in a word when it's guessed. We like to say you have to figure out Charlie's brain in order to figure out the clues. And it helps if you know a lot of scifi shows and comics. (For example: "What happens when a rock pile meets a black bear?" Four letters. Even with "second letter E, last letter S" it took us a while to come up with BENS. For Ben Grimm "The Thing" and Gentle Ben. That is just an easier example!) It's a lot of fun to play, and amazingly enough, this year's version ended in a tie! First time ever that we can think of. So that was a long day, til well past midnight.


Just to wrap up the weekend, on Sunday morning after horses I went back to bed for four hours--partying is exhausting! ;-) then did a ton of walking around neighborhoods in Kent, doing a "lit drop" with a friend all afternoon. We handed out literature and notepads for our friend Becky Doherty who is running for Portage County municipal judge. It was a beautiful fall day, sunny, warm, perfect for walking. And we happened to be in the neighborhood of other friends of mine, so we had a lovely break at their house, met their cat, etc. Great timing, as they had just returned from a bike ride. We ended the day with dinner at our new local Jimmy John's--has any of you ever eaten at this 'gourmet sandwich' shop? They have franchises all over the place, I'm learning, but this was our first time to eat there. I'd never heard of them before. Well, let me tell you, I will happily eat there again, any time! Delicious! And they have this cool low-carb item called an "unwich," which is any of their sandwiches wrapped in giant iceberg lettuce leaves instead of a bun. Clever idea, not only for dieters but for celiacs (gluten allergic folks). Mmm mmm good. Ciao for now!