Last week I attended the South Carolina Association of School Librarians Conference in Columbia SC. I’m thinking there’s no better place to be than with a bunch of people who love children and books. What a happy event!

My participation in the event started with an Author’s Round Table. During this, librarians moved around the room and spoke with different authors about their books. The different groups were interested in different aspects of a book’s life. One question I got more than once was whether or not I designed the cover. I did not. Almost all book covers are designed by in-house designers with input from Sales and Marketing teams. These are the people who usually know consumers best. If my book is going to be judged by its cover, I definitely want them to be behind it.

The next even for me was the book signing. Here I am at the Scholastic booth with a stack of The Boy Problem, which is only available through Scholastic clubs and fairs until April 29. We sold out by the end of the event. I love the girls who work for Scholastic book fairs! They are fabulous. 

It was also great to meet the Barnes and Nobles representatives who were super nice and took a picture of me and nerdy chick Amy Carol Reeves that I couldn’t get to upload. Grrrr. (Amy and I will both be at the SC Book Festival this year on May 17).

On Friday I led a poetry writing workshop for librarians, which introduced a way to use poetry for nonfiction research assignments and book reports. This might have been the best group of students I’ve ever taught. Now they’re all poets! One attendee blogged about it HERE.

The event ended with an Author’s luncheon, for which I was the keynote speaker. Can I tell you how thrilling that was for me? And intimidating.

The Flash of Blue is Wonder. “An author might want the world to be a kinder, gentler, less judgmental place.”

I promise the world would be a happier place if we could hang out with librarians every day! But since there’s no way  to make that happen,  I will give you this little bit of happiness that I discovered this morning on Facebook. I watched it a couple of times to get my day off to the right start!

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Hooray for School Librarians!