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Thanks, Texas SCBWI!

What a great time in TX last weekend. Here’s some blog posts about the retreat from the participants.

• Vonna Carter
• Shelli Cornelison
• Janet Fox

Yes, I’m booking for next year and have lots of open dates. Email me at darcy at darcypattison dot com.

Here’s more from Facebook Photos: What a hard working crew!

I did some video there and plan to do a new video soon. Meanwhile, here’s the video from last year in San Francisco.

*|YouTube:SK4pf5yyy1c|*

It's Here.

After a doing a little shopping in New Orleans and visiting some of the uber-scary places we saw the night before,






Old Ursuline Convent


we hit the road for Cut and Shoot, TX to meet up with my brother and his family at my sis-in-law's family picnic celebrating the 60th anniversary of her Aunt and Uncle.



Awesome Elvis Impersonator



We had a great time. All her relatives were so sweet to us, so welcoming, and there were at least a hundred people there. Fun to catch up with all that's been going on with Mike and his family. It was Memorial Day weekend, and, in honor of our fallen soldiers, those assembled stood and sang, "Dixie." I only knew some of the words. Such an amazing moment. A Southern moment. Mx had to leave though, the emotion of the day brought tears to her eyes. Her cousin Cody and his good friend David had called a day or two before to let her know that they were being deployed to Afghanistan that weekend.

After the wedding we crashed in our beds in San Antonio, we stayed at The Omni San Antonio, but were barely there twelve hours because we were headed off to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next day. On our pillows were little oval wooden boxes with tiny dolls inside and a note that read:

"Legend has it that the Yanaguana Indians, a peace-loving tribe of native San Antonians, extended their hospitality to Spanish settlers by presenting them with these handcrafted worry dolls. According to tradition, by transferring one worry to each doll before bedtime, and placing them under your pillows your worries would disappear by dawn's light."

We were selling our our house at the time, so I transferred my worries about the sale and Cody's safety to my little dolls knowing full well that the Spaniards of long ago had similar concerns about shelter and survival. Timeless worries, I guess.

We spent Memorial Day in beautiful Austin, Texas at the Texas State Solo & Ensemble Contest at the University of Texas. There were hundreds and hundreds of high school kids from all over Texas there, giving up their holiday weekend to perform. Small ensembles dotted the benches and walls outside the music building. They were warming up and practicing. I got chills listening to a trumpet trio play Bugler's Holiday.

One of the benefits of an Austin excursion is fantastic food (yummm...Trudy's) and the opportunity to visit Book People Bookstore. We had acquired a friend of Entling no. 2 at the store and she cheerfully tagged along with me upstairs to the kids' section. (My own kids speed away from me in a bookstore as fast as their winged feet can fly them.) We were perusing the shelves when a Book People person came by to offer his help. He told us he had not read ALL the books ther but he had read a lot of them and if we had any questions, just ask.

Hey, I thought, that is MY usual line.

Then it hit me.

That was TOPHER!

I know about Topher Bradfield because Rockstar Rick Riordan raves about him on his blog. Topher was a force in the creation of Camp Half Blood and a children's book evangelist at local schools and literary events in our capital city and beyond.

I chased after him.

"Are you Topher?"
He agreed that he was and asked (probably nervously) who I was.

He must have decided I did not pose an overt threat because we then spent a splendid chunk of time talking books. We share a grand enthusiasm for all things Percy Jackson. He pointed us toward a table of his current picks and we were treated to a series of wonderful booktalks that had passers-by stopping in their tracks to listen (and then pick up the books to buy.)

Then he began to read the first chapter of Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing with Fire aloud to us. Wow! There is nothing like hearing a gifted reader share a book they love.
Topher performed the book with enthusiasm and a whiff of James Joyce in his delivery.

As I left the store with my new stack of books, I was reminded of the famous last words I had uttered an hour earlier, "I'm not getting any books today."

I did not know I was going to meet Topher.

Eighty years ago on this date, The New Yorker published this piece, still a classic (and longtime Farm School favorite), by James Thurber. A Visit from Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner) by James Thurber It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren't even any mice stirring. The