Happy New Year!

Puerta del Sol, panorama-style

I'm a few days late with this post, but I just got back from holiday travels and my brain is finally catching up to the local hour. The trip was great--first we spent a few days in NYC being shown the sights by some friends who used to live there, eating great food (the pastrami, omg) and walking until my legs declared mutiny. I even got the chance to swing by the New Leaf office to meet Joanna, who was delightful and enthusiastic and made me all the more excited about working together. After New York we flew to Paris for Christmas, and I am now making a concerted effort to convince my husband that that city should be our next home. Love. I could totally see myself strolling in the Tuileries and eating lemon macarons every day, because that's what everyone there does, right? We finished up our trip by flying to Madrid for New Year's, which we celebrated in the freezing rain in Puerta del Sol, jamming a dozen grapes into our mouths at midnight per tradition (only they had all these tiny seeds and there was no time to spit them out, so I don't think I actually choked down my grapes until about 12:03).

Overall it was a fun vacation, but you may have noticed that all the cities I mentioned are in the colder climates, and since we are soft little Anglenos, of course we got sick--my husband considerably moreso than I. So it's with several levels of gratitude that we returned home to rest up and snuggle with our warm furry cats. And now it's 2013, hooray! I've been reading everyone's New Year posts and getting inspired by all your resolutions and words of the year. I've got my own resolutions lined up too--some boring and ordinary, others scary and for my eyes only. I'm writing a new book, and that's going to be the focus of early 2013 for me. Looking forward to a quiet January full of hard work, and the reward at the end will be that I'm flying out to NYC with my critique partner Liz for the SCBWI Winter conference! Will I see you there? Let me know!