Prolific Blogger Award

I was so pleased to be awarded the Prolific Blogger Award by Ruth Donnelly at Readatouille!  Apparently, once you are the recipient of the award, you need to award it to three other bloggers.  This was a tough decision but, here are my three choices:

Blee Bonn  who always has fun and interesting posts and who makes the best book trailers around!

Kelly Pollark  who has the highest energy blog posts I've read - they're exhausting!

Scotti Cohn   whose blog, It Happened in Chicago! includes all-things-Chicago and fascinating interviews with authors with a Chicago connection.

Congratulations, Blee, Kelly and Scotti!  Now go forth and pass on the award.

39th Annual SCBWI Conference in LA!

I'm so excited - I signed up for this year's SCBWI conference in LA!  It's going to be "4 days of agents, editors, publishers, workshops and networking designed to take your writing and illustration to the next level." (scbwi.org)

It's expensive so I wasn't going to give myself permission to go until I sold another manuscript - don't get excited - it didn't happen :-(  But, my husband, John, got free airline tickets and a hotel voucher from work and he's been wanting to visit his brother in San Francisco so, CA - here we come!  While I'm at the conference, he'll be visiting  his brother - it worked out perfectly!  We'll  tack on a couple of days after the conference to see LA.

Another great thing about it is, I'm going to meet my agent, Jamie Weiss Chilton, in person for the first time!   I'm really looking forward to that!

Are any of you going?  I hope so - it would be great to meet online friends in person!

My First Negative Review on You Tube

I found a negative review of 1 Zany Zoo on You Tube and it's hysterical.  Check it out:

I Made a 1 ZANY ZOO Book Trailer!!

Our regional SCBWI chapter hosts wonderful workshops on different aspects of children's publishing, called "Food For Thought".  Yesterday's workshop, Book Trailers and Online Promotion included a panel of SCBWI-IL authors and illustrators who shared their experiences creating book trailers and other on-line promotional tools for the picture book, middle grade, and YA markets.

The panel included:

Host, Librarian, blogger, Amy Alessio.

Middle grade writer, Brenda Ferber, who shared her trailers for Jemma Hartman, Camper Extraordinaire.

YA writer, Laura Ruby, who shared her trailer for Play Me.

Picture book illustrator, Larry Day, who shared his animated trailer for Nanook and Pryce.

I was so inspired by the presentation, I went straight home and created a trailer for 1 Zany Zoo.  Thanks to the amazing illustrations by Colin Jack and the jacket copy by Chloe Foglia, I think it turned out pretty well.   I'd love to know what you think!!

Interview on "Monsters & Money in the Morning" on CBS!

I did an interview on the CBS show Monsters & Money in the Morning at the crack of dawn yesterday morning.  I think it went well and it was so much fun!  Everyone there was extremely nice and they made me feel very comfortable!  By the end of the interview, I was enjoying it so much I would have stayed for the full two hours :-)  After the interview, Terry Savage asked me to sign the hardcover book and Mike North had me sign the Cheerios box.  Terry gave me a signed copy of her book The New Savage Number.