Here’s a slide from my breakout session presentation, Marrying Words and Pictures: What self-published writers need to know about hiring and working with an illustrator (and vice versa), given at the SCBWI MD/DE/WV Region Conference. #SCBWI

It always takes me a few weeks (or more) to process the heady experience of attending an SCBWI conference. The highlights of last month’s gathering here in Maryland: Betsy Bird’s entertaining and insightful rundown of current trends The chance to reconnect with illustrators I haven’t seen since last year Senior designers Mallory Griggs and Jess Tice-Gilbert’s illustration intensive The last included an inside peek at the rebranding of one of my favorite childhood series. It w

My illustration professor at Art Center College of Design once described the creative life as a sequence of plateaus punctuated by breakthrough leaps. My corollary to this image: as viewed from the bottom, the next breakthrough often looks like a wall. A daunting, seemingly insurmountable wall. A wall that would stop my craft and career from ever rising to a new level. Each time the wall appeared I resisted the urge to hang up my pencil. I took classes. Sent out samples. Upgr

When I read the theme for the 2016 MD/DE/WV conference postcard contest I was skeptical. Team SCBWI. Seriously? After all, so much of writing and illustrating is a solitary endeavor. The phrase “herding cats” came to mind. And so my entry featured a cheerleaders’ pyramid of felines, joined by one intrepid dog. It was the winning design. Fast forward to last weekend. Some of us from this region and the Mid Atlantic Chapter went out for the dessert discussion following the pict

The leaves are not yet turning, but fall is definitely in the air. Looking back, this was the summer I finished revising and sent out the YA novel that has been eating up much of my creative time. The summer my husband and I discovered Quebec has a fjord. The summer I fell off my bike on the C&O Canal, which led to a broken fourth metacarpal and four weeks in a splint. And the summer I drove out to Annapolis for my first MD/DE/WV SCBWI sketch crawl. I caught this impression o