Goodbye, 2010

Downtown Red Wing in the morning, just before Christmas.

It was a quick, blurry, sugary holiday, and I ended up wishing, as usual, that I could slow it all down and savor it more, even as it was happening.  There are now many lovely presents to be enjoyed, including the spanking new laptop on which I am typing (thanks, family!), many, many books, and these absolutely amazing Horatio, Leopold, and Harvey ornaments made by my brother's absolutely amazing girlfriend:



2010 has been that sort of year all around - quick, blurry, sugary, and unreasonably wonderful.  It saw two book birthdays: Cherma, my poetry series, was released by Parallel Press in March, and The Books of Elsewhere, Volume One: The Shadows was sliced out of big cardboard boxes and arranged on bookstore shelves all over the country in June.  Throw in quite a bit of travel, lots of school visits and dinners and readings, and our first full cycle of seasons in Red Wing, and it almost seems impossible that so much was squeezed into one year.  But it was. 

Here are two things that made me smile:  A review of The Shadows in the San Francisco Book Review (www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/tweens/the-shadows-the-books-of-elsewhere-volume-1/) and a librarian's top five list of 2010 kidspot.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/my-top-5-of-2010/.