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The last four or five times that I attended the SCBWI Mid-Atlantic Fall Conference , I was an esteemed MOTA. (Member of the Audience) I warmed my hard plastic chair to the best of my ability, and listened with my whole body to keynote speeches by such greats as Katherine Paterson and the late David Wisniewski. (This year, Bruce Coville had the honor, and next year it's going to be Jane Yolen!) I had no idea that my presence was noted by anyone other than my writing group. This year, I found out how wrong I was.

This year, I was up on stage. Only for an hour, as part of the Editor and First-time Author Panel, but that was enough to find out how important MOTA's are. Whenever I thought about being nervous, I would look out at them. Contrary to popular movies, the whole room was not a blur. I could see individual faces. I most definitely saw Anne Marie Pace's lovely face (and silently thanked her not only for her rapt attention but for her earlier labor, hauling all those hard plastic chairs for all those MOTA's.) I saw members of my writing group that had supported me for years. (Doris! Linda! Barbara! I'll say it again: You saved my life.) And I saw lots and lots of MOTA's I didn't know, but whose faces were just as important to me because MOTA's, fellow writers, lovers of children's books: You are my tribe. And I need you.

You are the reason I didn't write out my answers to the panel questions. I noticed that all the editors did. They came ultra-prepared, with detailed notes, carefully typed. (And that's exactly how I want editors to be, by the way. No vagueness from them, please.) But as for me, I wanted to be able to speak from the heart. To tell the story of how a MOTA became a MOTF. (Member of the Faculty) I wanted to trust you to hear my unpolished words, and to encourage you, and to give you hope. I wanted you to see that I had doubted, and struggled, and failed, and it was only by the grace of other MOTA's that I was able to keep going.

And I really, really want a MOTA from this recent conference to get up on the stage at another conference four or five years down the road and tell the same story. By the way, if it's you, it's okay if you write out your answers. I won't be checking. I'll be applauding.

UPDATE: By the way, when did this happen? No longer required? Why didn't they send out an email?

■Although the apostrophe is no longer required to form the plural of letters and numbers such as two Ph.D.s and the 1980s, use it when needed for clarity: four I’s and p’s and q’s.

So, I guess I could've used MOTAs. You wouldn't have been confused. Oh, wait. Audience IS already plural. Drat. Plural must be MsOTA. Or just MOTA. Pardon my utter confusion.

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This weekend, I learned how swinging on a trapeze can make you a better writer. I was listening to Australian author Jen McVeity give her hour-and-a-half audience participation workshop on writing when she put up a picture of herself high on a trapeze platform.*

With her, we brainstormed everything a novice trapeze artist might be experiencing up there on that tiny platform, from the smooth white chalk on her hands to the pungent smell of her own sweat to the rising noise of the crowd to the blinding lights in her eyes. Then Jen played back to us, in words, the scene we had brainstormed, until each of us, too, felt we were up there on that platform with a bone-dry mouth, quaking hands, and a stomach filled with thousands of caterpillars. Then, in very slow motion, we jumped...and swung...and reached...and reached...and reached...and caught the hands on the other side.

The take-away was that even though the jump itself, and the ensuing swing through the air, and the exhilarating catch at the other side take just seconds, if we're going to experience it as readers, then the writer needs to SLOW DOWN.

Now, this is a technique Jen uses in the writing classes she offers to kids and teachers, but my mind immediately flew to the climax scene in my novel under revision. HUP! The first time I wrote it, I had jumped, swung over the chasm and caught on to the next chapter without so much as looking down. Uh-oh. In my revision, I had to add six pages to cover what I'd tried to swing by. And I'm pretty sure that I'll add even more.

I told Jen later that I had tried the art of the trapeze at a Club Med circus school. I had tried it three times. But when the third jump felt just as terrifying as the first one, and not one bit more fun, I had stopped asking myself to go back up the ladder. I even admitted to her that climbing the ladder was the worst part. I felt like gravity was trying to tear my body away from each rung, and that it pulled harder the higher I climbed.

The interesting thing is that although I quit the trapeze right then and there, the feeling of inching up that ladder didn't leave me. When my main character in Letters From Rapunzel had to fight her way up a concrete pylon on a bridge and realizes half-way up that she should not be doing this, I'm proud to say that I wouldn't let her quit, and I did not let her back down, and I calmly and deliberately stopped time.

*Jen also loves rock-climbing, water-skiing, volleyball and snow-skiing.

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