I've been a very bad blogger lately, but I have a good excuse.
Road Trip!
I spoke at my local SCBWI in August on a panel with two other illustrators (Sue Ward and Alan Stacy). Nice way to get my public speaking feet wet.
I spent most of October visiting bookstores around Texas on the Read It - Write It tour (Anastasia Suen, Dotti Enderle, Shirley Duke, Willy Welch, Kim Morris, Diane Roberts, Chris Ford, and me). It was a great experience, and I highly recommend a group book tour for promotion. It takes a lot of the pressure off when you're speaking in a group.
My favorite part of the book tour was bonding with the other authors and meeting booksellers. It's nice to hear how your book is doing directly from the sellers. It was a perfect time for me to be talking about Ghost Eats It All! right there at Halloween.
On Halloween day, I got to hang with a couple of awesome librarians at the Grapevine library (Hi Leigh! Hi Darla!) and read Ghost during both story-times. I learned a lot about reading to groups of children from these two professionals (and their puppet pals).
I also led an illustration workshop at the San Antonio SCBWI conference in November. This was the one I was most nervous about, but it went really well, and I had a great time.
I'm very happy to have all that public appearance/speaking experience under my belt now. And I'm even happier to be back home.