Hey there! I’m back with another super belated (and super long) recap post.

This past May, I attended BookExpo America and BookCon again. This year they decided to try something different and host the two conventions in Chicago.

This made BEA and BookCon really different, feel-wise, from what they’ve been the past couple years. For one thing, Chicago’s so close that my mom and I drove (which meant no luggage restrictions or having to ship heavy boxes of books home). For another, it meant that we didn’t have to stay in a stupidly expensive hotel, because we have family in the area. (However, downside: this meant we had an hour+ drive to get to McCormick Place every morning. Also, it felt like less of a vacation.)

BookExpo America (Friday)

Getting Lost and Finding Food

Like last year, we forewent attending the whole week of BEA and just hit the last…

Well, this post is now three months overdue. (Sorry! I will eventually catch up. Hopefully.)

Anyway, THIS APRIL I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE. And it involved four ceremonies and a lot of picture taking and I maybe burst into tears in the middle of Pizza House at the end of it all. (Warning that this post is about to be a billion words long. And involves me being at my melodramatic height. I’m mostly putting this up for posterity’s sake, so totally don’t feel obligated to read it.)

I hit a couple rough patches during undergrad (who doesn’t), but overall I adored my time at U of M. And I am so desperately sad about leaving. (Although the Ann Arbor Art Fair began yesterday, and that’s basically hell on Earth, so my opinion could be different in a few days.)

Graduation Weekend began for me, really, Thursday night. This was because…

Hey there, ya cool cats! We’ve had some questions recently about the deadlines to order t-shirts and books for the conference.

The deadline to order a Ch1Con 2016 t-shirt is 11:59 PM EDT on Wednesday, July 27.

Interested in getting a Ch1Con t-shirt? It’ll look like the one in the picture below (except the year on it will be 2016, of course). You can order a t-shirt either as part of the registration process or independent of a conference registration here. (Yes, you do not need to be a conference attendee to order one of these snazzy t-shirts.)

You too can sport a giant tomato on your chest.

The deadline to order any books you might need for the post-conference book signing with Susan Dennard and Francesca Zappia is Wednesday, July 27.

Need books? You can order any of Susan and Francesca’s novels through our official conference retailer, the…

Here we go: the first of the many recap posts I’ve promised.

Let’s do this thing.

So, this past weekend my friend Melissa and I went on a road trip to the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania to attend this event called the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival.

Around this time every summer, a bunch of types of fireflies living in Allegheny go searching for ~love~, and it means that you get to see literally thousands of fireflies all sparkling and dancing out in the middle of the woods. It’s really nerdy (and really wonderful), so when Melissa asked me if I’d like to go with her, I jumped on the opportunity.

We left for the festival Saturday morning, drove all day (only making a quick stop at Dunkin’ Donuts for sustenance), and arrived at a campground in the afternoon. Unfortunately, it was not at all obvious what to do once…

Hey there! So, as you may have noticed, there was no Wordy Wednesday yesterday. This is partially because I kept putting off and putting off putting one up (then honestly forgot about it until I woke up this morning, oops). Partially because, for a while now, I’ve been debating shutting down the weekly Wordy Wednesday feature. And I’d kind of maybe settled on doing that. Aaand yesterday’s Wordy Wednesday, if I had written it, was going to explain what this post is, now, explaining instead.

I’ve been writing a Wordy Wednesday every week since I started blogging in December, 2011. That makes for 235 Wordy Wednesdays over the past four and a half years, if my very crappy math came out right. That’s a lot of blog posts focused primarily on sharing pieces of writing and lessons I’m learning about writing/revising/publishing.

And while Wordy Wednesdays used to feel like…

Hey there! As I mentioned in last week’s Wordy Wednesday, this is a pre-written post because, at the time of its posting, I will be (am?) out of town. However, I hope you’re having a great week and I’ll tell you all about what I was up to when I get back.

This week’s Wordy Wednesday is a poem.

**********
The sleepy drip of
sunlit rain against
windows and held-out palms,
the paradox of feeling as if
everything is happening at once
when really nothing is happening
at all,
and I love this, the way a rainstorm
can feel like silence
and sunlight
can be a blanket
and summer can be a
feeling, rooted deep in your restless heels
and your dancing fingertips
and the tug of your lips, reaching for
a smile–
I am so tired but
I am so awake
**********

Thanks for reading, and see you…

I have my laptop back!

It’s stupidly nice getting to type this post using the keyboard I’m used to.

Not much else has happened in the last week. I did some internship work. I did some novel work (I’m finally almost done outlining!) (and by “almost done” I mean “I have fifty-six pages of notes and if I have to do many more I will have a breakdown”). I did lots of family stuff. (We saw the new penguin exhibit at the Detroit Zoo! LOOK AT THIS CUTIE.) Aaand that’s just about it.

That’s kind of the nice part of summer, though, you know? My exhaustion from the school year has really caught up with me, so I’ve been sleeping a lot and watching lots of movies and generally ignoring the real world. And I’m so grateful for the time to detox this summer.

In honor of summer and…