Around the Bend

Just last Sunday I began a list of what I am looking forward to doing as soon as I finish the illustrations I have been painting for the past three months. The list so far goes like this:

• Clean playroom (my kids are grown, but we still call it the playroom. Everything we do seems to be done in this room. It needs some help.
• Re-hang art in stairwell. (It was all taken down to film a dystopian version of MacBeth over spring break.)
• Garden. (I have hardly noticed spring, locked up in my studio. I dream of plunging my hands into black dirt.)

It is not a long list, but it is the beginning of hope. At the end of a long focused bout of illustrating a book, I always look forward to returning to ordinary things like picking up the house, clean laundry, hot coffee with a friend, reviving the garden, and walks around a lake.

I am looking forward to finishing the illustrations.

I am also looking forward to this book coming out in the fall:

I am looking forward to finally updating my website and blogging on my own blog about this book. I look forward to working on activity sheets to go with it and planning publication events. I look forward to reading it out loud to a listening audience for the first time.

All of these things I look forward to, but sometimes we look forward and we don't know what is around the bend that could change everything for good or bad. This is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago and luckily for the good! Last fall I finished a manuscript to submit for the biannual McKnight Fellowship in Children's Literature. Two weeks ago, I received a phone call telling me that I had been chosen for the Fellowship! Around the bend came fantastic news  and a whole new list of things to look forward to! The list looks like this:

• Plan a trip to Venice, Italy to research a middle grade novel set in Venice that I began during NaNoWriMo .
• Plan a trip to California to stay with an author friend there for a week of writing.
• Buy an iPad and begin learning how to design and make apps for my picture books.
• Enjoy a year of breathing easily about finances.

That is my list so far and it is a dream list thanks to the McKnight Fellowship. The story I submitted to the McKnight is called When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky. I look forward to telling you more about this story. It will be published in May of 2013. Since I am still in the midst of painting it, I will stop here and let you look forward to reading more about it in future posts. The posts I look forward to writing when my house is picked up, my laundry is clean, and my garden is planted.