A Quickie Update

I haven't been blogging much as there's a deadline looming in my near future, but this week I'm up in the Bay Area on a work trip for my day job. Sitting alone in my hotel room at night is making me stir crazy, so I thought I'd hop online for some quick updates.

First and most exciting--we've sold translation rights for THE LOST PLANET in Spain! This is my first foreign sale and I'm so thankful to New Leaf's incredibly awesome subsidiary rights director, Kathleen Ortiz. I'm super excited to share my book with Spanish readers!

Last weekend was the summer SCBWI conference in Los Angeles, which was a blast as always. This was my fourth year attending, and I couldn't help but marvel at the changes that have happened since that first conference:

Year 1: clueless writer with a completed mess of a manuscript and no friends
Year 2: aspiring writer with a manuscript in revisions who'd started to make a few new friends
Year 3: querying writer who had just received an offer of representation the day before the conference
Year 4: soon-to-be-published author with a two-book deal!

These days I don't attend the conference so much for the content being offered as for the chance to spend time with "old" writer friends and make new ones. I also hosted the always-delightful Ghenet Myrthil at my home and had a ton of fun getting to know her better. And as an added bonus, my agent was on the faculty this year and I got to spend a bunch of time with her, which was so awesome. I seriously still have to pinch myself some days because I can't believe I get to work with her. She's the best!

I'm spending the weekend in beautiful San Francisco with my husband, but starting next week I'm going to be on a mega-tight schedule and will probably not be blogging for a while. So enjoy the rest of your summers, and I'll see you on the other side!

NEWS!

If you happen to subscribe to the Publisher's Weekly Children's Bookshelf newsletter, you might have seen this little tidbit earlier today:

AHHHHHHHHHH I AM SO EXCITED TO BE ABLE TO SHARE THIS!!!!! My book is going to be published by Macmillan!!!!!

We got our first offer about two weeks after we went on sub, so I've been sitting on this news for a few months. Remember my post about flying to Turkey for a family emergency? Yeah, that's when the auction was going down, a testament to Why You Want To Have An Agent, because while I was a jetlagged, dazed, rambling mess, my fabulous agent was handling everything like the amazing pro she is. I am SO grateful to her and the awesome New Leaf team for giving me great support and advice on a really big decision. Since then everything has been going really fast--like, greased lightning fast--and I've been having a great ride with the excellent people at Feiwel & Friends. I'm SO happy to be there!

My friend Jack is going to help me sum up my feelings on everything:

Happy news!

It is my absolute delight to announce that I am now represented by Joanna Volpe of New Leaf Literary! Joanna reps some really excellent authors like Veronica Roth, Kody Keplinger, Susan Dennard, and Leigh Bardugo, and I can hardly believe that I get to work with her!

For those of you interested in how this came about, the answer is: massive amounts of serendipity. Joanna has actually been closed to submissions for a while now--you may have heard how she recently opened her new agency? But back in May she offered a full manuscript critique by random drawing to anyone who pre-ordered a copy of Leigh Bardugo's SHADOW AND BONE from Books of Wonder in NYC. I was all, Hey, a fabulous signed book and a chance at a great critique? I'll buy a ticket in that lottery! And then holy crap, I won! I won't share the chat I had with my CP Liz when I got this news, because it's about 85% shocked profanity. I was so thrilled.

Like most (all?) writers, I am a daydreamer. I imagined how cool it would be if she read my book and loved it. I didn't realistically expect this to happen--it wasn't like she'd requested material from me, you know, on purpose. So when I got her email asking if we could set up a phone call, I told myself, Don't get your hopes up, lady! Maybe she just wants to tell you in person that your story is crazypants!

But instead she told me she loved it, and she offered me representation. And then my head exploded.

I've been busting my tail on the same book for a long time, revising and tweaking until I wanted to club myself unconscious rather than open that doc again. I've learned a ton from the entire process, and I wouldn't even be close to this point if it weren't for all my awesome critique partners. And for SHADOW AND BONE--which, by the way, is an *excellent* book. Buy it, read it, love it!

And Leigh Bardugo, if you ever read this: I think I owe you a drink.