My Week Away

I left last Sunday and drove myself 5 1/2 hours to Cullowhee NC. I was at a conference there until Thursday. This conference was all about how to write and publish books for children. The downside was that I want to publish picture books and there was not a whole lot of talk about that... it was mostly about how to write novels. I am secretly glad that I heard all about writing novels because the idea scares me... I am a little more interested in it now. We met two great authors who were our presenters this week. Joyce Moyer Hostetter who gave us copies of her novels Healing Water and Blue. She has also just published a novel called Comfort which is the sequel to Blue. I will be starting Healing Water this morning! (I really want to read Blue first but then I know I will have to run out and get Comfort as soon as I am done and I would hate to ignore Healing Water!) We also met Carol Baldwin who gave us a copy of her book called Teaching the Story Fiction Writing in Grades 4-8. I am excited to play with these lessons a little bit so that I can use them in my first grade class! These ladies have great ideas and wonderful in site into the world of writing and getting published.


Amazingly I left with LESS of a need to get published. I will still try, but at this time my driving force is to share my life stories and the stories in my head with my family and the kids in my class. The good news is I can do that with or without being published. We learned how to make our own books called altered books and I am excited to hand make books that I can then put my stories in... wouldn't that be fun to pass down to my family.

I ate like a queen and never did dishes! They did not even give you the chance to get hungry! They fed you every 2 1/2 hours! I also made amazing friends and I cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard! We have also already set up a reunion weekend. We are going to get together on a Sunday in January to share our writing and reconnect. We will stay the night and hang out all day on Monday. I am so excited! If there are any NC teachers out there... you have to go to NCCAT! It is amazing!