I am so bloated with pie and stuffing I can barely reach the keyboard. God, I love Thanksgiving! Ours was relatively small and quiet – it was the first time we had an Official Boyfriend at the table, and the first time I ate T’giving dinner with my parents in 22 years, so yeah, I had a blast. Beloved Husband did most of the cooking because a) he is much better at it than I am, and b) he does a great job. My job is to set tables and wash dishes. We find that I poison fewer people that way. I do make wicked good soup however, so I spent yesterday boiling the turkey carcass to death and turning it into gallons of turkey soup. I think I ate forty pounds of leftovers while I was making the soup. One of these years I will convince BH that we should cook the entire T’giving meal the day before the holiday so we can eat the best part – leftovers – on the day itself.
This weekend is Catching Up on Paperwork Weekend. Be still my beating heart. Ack. I loathe paperwork. I loathe the business end of being an author. But this is a necessary evil. If I’m a really, really good girl and get caught up on everything, then I go back to RevisionLand when the house gets quiet on Monday morning. One set of children headed back to PA yesterday morning, another set turned up for the weekend yesterday afternoon (here – have some soup!), plus we have a painter here, so things are a wee bit chaotic right now.
Before I dive into the morass, I promised the last NCTE photos.
I was the (ahem) lucky author who pulled the first thing Tuesday morning speech slot. English teachers work very hard at NCTE and by Tuesday morning,
they were exhausted.
Really exhausted. I took these pictures so you could see that sometimes even English teachers have a hard time waking up for school.
But they had all eaten a healthy breakfast and when I was handed the microphone, they were polite enough to wake up and I’m pretty sure nobody fell asleep while I was talking. Some of them took notes, however. That was unnerving. I really wanted to know what they were writing.
This is Sharon James from Gardena, CA who uses CATALYST with her 11th grade AP English students!! When she told me this, I wanted to fling myself to the ground and bow down to her awesomeness. Ever since CATALYST was published, I had been secretly hoping someone would do this. I was stoked. Thank you very, very much, Ms. James!
One of the coolest parts of the conference was hanging out with this stunning woman, my editor and friend, Sharyn November (sdn). I am very thankful we get to work together.