Happy New Year! A few good bookish things, a lot of revising and some vagueness and waiting.

lying in confetti... what else does one do on January 1?

Hey!

Happy 2015.

Been so busy, hard to find my way here.

Mostly busy revising my manuscript called THE MEMORY OF THINGS.

I have my reasons and some self-imposed deadlines... we shall soon see if they amount to anything. . .


In the meantime, I have a ton of goals for the New Year, some you'll find HERE  if you want... others, well, I'll let you know how I do.

You? Any new goals for 2015?

There's a "thing" that goes around in the amazing teacher/educator circles I'm now lucky to run in called OLW (maybe it's not just limited to them?) which stands for One Little Word. You're supposed to pick a word to be the focus of your year: some choose grace, or writing or inspiration or some other magical word. Those are all good, but I'm actually thinking of choosing the word "focus" for my focus... for the very same reason I'm here. The revising got hard, and I went, "ooh, blog! Different easier shiny thing!" I need to stop getting distracted by the shiny things. . .

Speaking of shiny things: a few lovely year-end notes for THE SUMMER OF LETTING GO: It won a Nerdy Book Club Award HERE (did you click there?)

This means a lot to me. The NBC members are VORACIOUS readers. I've never met a group as a whole who cover more Children's Lit reading in one year. So to make their list... well it's a very good thing. Oh, and FYI, I'm a two-time recipient, SEE, HERE, so I think with a third I should at least get a tiara and a sash. . .win a new car. . . (*spits so as not to jinx anything. . .*)

THE SUMMER OF LETTING GO also appeared on a few other wonderful Year-End favorites lists that I know of:

http://hollymueller.blogspot.com/2015/01/favorite-books-of-year-2014.html

http://www.foodiebibliophile.com/2014/12/my-14-favroite-books-of-2014.html

http://thereisabookforthat.com/2014/12/30/favourites-of-2014/

Those are always wonderful to see!

And, last but not least,

you all know how I feel about my involvement with Teachers Write! and the extraordinary Kate Messner, right?!?



Well Kate's book, 59 REASONS TO WRITE, Mini-Lessons, Prompts, and Inspiration for Teachers, based on the TW! program, in which I am a contributor (see?!):

Comes out this month on the 13th, from Stenhouse.

Kate's lovely acknowledgment. . .

I have a whole section on my Friday Feedback portion of the program, as well as appear in several of the "The Best of Q & A" sections. It's very cool and exciting to be included in a book that may be used to help inspire teachers around the country!!

Tiny snippet sneak peek.

If you know teachers who teach writing, teachers who want to write themselves, please share this beautiful new resource with them.

So that's it. I have a bunch of appearance-y things coming up. Will update the sidebar with those this week! In the meantime, I'm off to focus again. Hopefully some fun new book news may appear in the coming weeks... cross your fingers for me.

Happy New Year!

xox gae