Seven Great Years with SCBWI

No seven-year itch happenin' here.

Just a quick shout-out today to my peeps at the Palm Beach Gardens SCBWI critique group, which celebrated its SEVEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY last Wednesday. Under the guidance of Donna Gephart and Linda Marlow, who each bring along their unique literary and critical talents (and cookies!), this group gathers in one place the strongest passel of kidlit authors I've ever been blessed to spend time with. 

Gephart (How to Survive Middle School and As If Being 12 3/4 Isn't Bad Enough (My Mother is Running for President)), who won the 2009 Sid Fleischman humor award, teamed up with Marlow at the request of Sylvia Andrews, who has her own long-running SCBWI critique group in West Palm. Pictured left to right above are Laura Fournier, Amy Ford, Ruth Darrington, Linda Marlow, Donna Gephart, Becca Puglisi (check Becca's outstanding blog, Bookshelf Muse, here), Sylvia Andrews, and Riley Roam. I was there too (taking the pic!)

And in other news: Query Writing Workshop
If you're getting ready to enter the big, bad world of querying your book, writer, editor, and librarian Amanda Bosky is running a timely workshop on crafting queries that kill. It's at the Royal Palm Library, Saturday, Sept. 24th, at 9 a.m. Call the library to sign up, at 561-790-6030. Trust me, as a writer currently on draft three-gazillion of my own query letter, this is a subject we could all use help with.