1. This weekend, The Alex Crow was reviewed in USA Today. It's a very nice review, with lots of adjectives like weird, strange, odd, diverse; and humorous and touching.
2. Those are good adjectives. I've been at odds with adjectives for about a month now, but I'm giving them another chance. Also commas. Well, maybe not so much the commas.
3. See #5 if you want to know my take on verbs.
4. I am going to Denver this weekend, for the Colorado Teen Literature Conference. I am looking forward to it, and I am also fairly certain I will not succumb to altitude sickness, since I live at relatively high elevation. I have noticed that using "high elevation directions" when baking cakes requires way too much math.
5. I am heading to Santa Barbara next week, to do something that I never really thought I'd be asked to do--bake a cake at sea-level. Not really. What I am really doing is conducting a writing workshop for SCBWI. I feel conflicted about this in many ways, because I always tell my students this: Nobody can teach you how to write; you have to learn how to write. Learn is a verb--it requires you to take action. The teaching part can never happen without the active investment on the part of the learners, and writing, maybe more than anything else I can think of, is something that gets "learned" in ways that are entirely unique to each of us. So, I am going to show a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation. About cakes.
6. Tomorrow morning I am going to be doing an interview over Skype with a journalist who'll be talking to me from Pakistan.
7. The next day, I'll be visiting a group of students at Herndon High School, in Virginia.
8. I hope they all know how to use Skype. Nobody ever taught me, and I definitely have not learned.
