I'm sitting in front of this blog like a person with ten pounds of ground meat and only enough intestines to accommodate half that. How am I to stuff it all in? Woe, woe is me!!
Pardon that vile image, by the way. It comes from reading THE INFECTS by Sean Beaudoin, a brand-new zombie title published by Candlewick. Sean is one of the authors I got to hang out with at Wordstock in Portland, where we did a joint presentation and then a panel with Inara Scott, Tamara Ireland Stone, and Lish McBride. Zombies, necromancers, time travel, inept angels ... we had all kinds of fun.
Here is Sean. Don't let the angel wing fool you. He's trouble. And before he put the wings on, there were two of them. Look for remnants of the other in his molars.
So, Portland. Mere words can't capture the excellence of this town, so I will let pictures do the talking. Below, my hipster hotel room! (I refrained from photographing the judgmental elevator needlepoint, which reminded me that I would already be on the fourth floor had I chosen to take the stairs. That needlepoint was already an attention-whore.)
Portland also had some unusual bathroom art. Here's the title: Ode to a Women's Restroom. The subtitle, in case you can't read it, is even better: A celebration of our interconnectdness to the natural world. Because if there's anything I want to think about in the loo, it's this.
And now, here's a first look at my forthcoming picture book, The Dinosaur Tooth Fairy. The incomparable Israel Sanchez has illustrated it, and I could not be MORE excited. This one's due out next summer.
Thanks to everyone at Arthur A. Levine Books for making this one look so fantastic. I've never had a 400 words be treated so lavishly.