Saturday, November 26, 2005

Happy Birthday, Happy Thanksgiving, etc.

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving -- we spent a quiet day with a turkey from Central Market (fyi, pick up the thing on Tuesday--by Wednesday, the place is a zoo).

Yesterday, we went to the 90th birthday party for Betty Davis, an elegant lady in Austin SCBWI who still plays tennis. (She was born in Ohio when Wilson was president and she still writes on a typewriter.).

Today, we began decorating for Christmas -- one of the most signficant things about Austin vs. places north and east, is that when you put up the outdoor lights, you can wear a tee-shirt and sandals. (It got to about 82 here today).

Of course, you also don't have specifically seasonal indicia of the holidays -- cold, trees losing their leaves, etc.

Tomorrow, we're going to put up the tree...

And, I actually got three pages done on my WIP!

Monday, November 21, 2005

Santa news...

When we got back from Quartz Mountain, we found that the long-awaited sketches for Santa Knows had arrived (okay, well, not really "long-awaited," but impatiently awaited :-)). Illustrator Steve Bjorkman has done a fantastic job with all the characters and (especially) Santa's workshop. We can't wait to see the final art!

OFAI

Cynthia and I spent the weekend at Quartz Mountain, Oklahoma, teaching a program on Writing for Children and Teens for the Oklahoma Fall Arts Institute. It was a lot of fun (and a lot of work :-)).

We had about twenty-five participants, which was a bit large, but manageable. Everyone was enthusiastic about their writing and were very creative when it came to the writing exercises. Days began at about 8 AM, went through to about 5:30 -- then we had dinner and then instructor presentations until about 9 PM.
Somewhat uniquely for us were the programs running in parallel -- (NOTE: Link is to a PDF file) monotype printing, ballroom dance, theatre production, choral singing, arts integration. It was refreshing to be around other artists, and particularly the performing artists, in the bar at the end of the day. :-).

We're planning a very quiet thanksgiving -- it was the last of three weekends out of town for us -- the previous weekend we were at Star Lit up in Dallas, which Cyn blogs about here; the weekend before that, we went to Houston for the TSRA Awards.
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