Grateful

I want to take a second here to say a huge, huge thank you to everyone who commented, tweeted, emailed, DM'ed, liked, followed, and was just generally awesomely nice to me in response to my book deal news. Every year at the SCBWI Summer Conference, Lin Oliver calls kidlit people "the tribe," and to me that's the perfect expression for all of the wonderful and supportive people I've met in the book world. This also marked the first time I shared my writerly side with a lot of other people (Hello, old friends clicking over from Facebook!), which took some guts and about half a day of dithering. Since I took up creative writing again a few years ago, I've felt more like "me" than I've felt in a long time, and I'm really looking forward to the coming year, even the hairy scary parts. I've worked so hard on this and I'm so excited to share Chase and THE LOST PLANET with everyone.

Anyway, enough with the emoting. In other news, I got my bionic vision installed yesterday and everything went great. Although I'm pretty sure lying tightly swaddled on a table with your head taped down and your eyelids taped open has got to be someone else's nightmare, at least it went quickly. I'm pretty sure I'll still be reaching for the saline solution every night for a while still, but I'm not complaining!