Long time no see!

Sorry, I haven't been a very good blogger this year. What have I been up to lately?

Well, in the middle of April I was in London for meetings and the London Book Fair. A colleague from subrights and I visited our UK sister companies, which included Hodder UK (both children's and adult), Orchard, Headline, Orion, and Atom (part of Little, Brown UK). We also squeezed in some sightseeing and went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Modern, and I wandered around the Tower of London and saw the Crown Jewels. We had a dinner with the international publishers of Barry Lyga's I Hunt Killers, and I spent a day at the London Book Fair meeting with UK agents and publishers. And I saw some old friends, too--took a trip out to a friend's home in the English countryside (kinda), and had fish and chips at the local pub, and sticky toffee pudding for dessert! Yum! I absolutely love London. I fantasized about living there, of course.

The weekend after I got back, I was off to the "Creating an Authentic Cultural Voice" conference, led by the amazing Donna Jo Napoli and Mitali Perkins, featuring special guest Kathryn Erskine, and editors Stacy Whitman and myself. It was held in the beautiful conference center in the Poconos--I stayed in my own private cabin! It was a beautiful, enlightening, stimulating time. Great, passionate discussions. I would highly recommend attending a conference run by Highlights--the locale itself is inspiring and beautiful (see photos here.) I'll try to post more about this later...

Work has been crazy busy--two weeks ago we had our Focus (sales) meeting for our Spring/Summer 2013 list (editors presented the list to in-house Sales for the first time), and catalog copy and ARC copy was due. All of us editors have been scrambling to get the novels on that list into copyediting, too--lots of deadlines!

Also, I'm off to Singapore at the end of May for the Asian Festival of Children's Content. Grace and I were originally going to go together, but--well, she had something come up! :) I've never been and am excited to see the city. Recommendations welcome, and if you're in Singapore, let me know! Perhaps we can meet up?

And on a personal note, wedding planning is still ongoing (the big day is a little over two months away...), and I had a fun bachelorette party and wedding shower weekend amongst everything else going on--which featured Karaoke, of course!

So, yes--I've been a bit busy this year...in fact, I think all of the Blue Rose Girls have had a lot going on! Apologies for our sporadic posting. Thanks to our loyal readers for sticking with us!