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My seven-year-old daughter had been waiting and waiting and WAITING to read the draft of my second MARTY MCGUIRE chapter book, so a few weeks ago, I printed it out for her.  She settled in next to the fireplace with the big folder of papers, and I started making dinner. Pretty soon, she appeared in the kitchen.

"Do you have a pen I can use?"

"For what?" I asked her.

"I just want to make some notes on here for you, okay?"

I gave her the pen...and the next day got back a manuscript that looked like this.





And the best part?   When I asked her what the E was for, she said, "You know, so you know those corrections are from me and not the person at Scholastic."  

I don't save all the printed drafts of my books. But this is one I'll be holding onto for a long, long time.

I left home just after 4:30 yesterday morning to catch a train into Manhattan on one of the muggiest, steamiest days of the year. 

Whatever would possess me to leave the lake on such a day?



I had a noon lunch date and editorial meeting with my editor for Marty McGuire, Frog Princess.  I was an hour early because I fully expected to get lost  and end up wandering around Brooklyn when I changed trains on the subway.  I didn't, though, which left me some time to explore the neighborhood and the Scholastic Store.  I'm sure the sales people thought I was a little crazy because I couldn't stop smiling, looking at so many of my favorite books and imagining Marty among them in 2010.



I recognized my new editor as soon as she came into the lobby (Google Image Search is a many splendored thing).  She is as marvelous in person as I knew she'd be, and she has great ideas for how to make Marty a stronger, funnier story.  We agreed on all the most important issues -- character development, plot elements, and dessert.



They called this gooey wonder S'mores.  It was a graham cracker with a brownie on top and a torched marshmallow on top of that.  That's homemade chocolate malt ice cream on the side.  I traveled home high on sugar and book talk and arrived back on Lake Champlain well after midnight a very tired but very happy writer.

Last month, I posted some photos after a family trip to Washington, DC.  But there was one I couldn't share at the time.  



Okay, I guess I could have shared it with a caption that said "Here I am outside the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian." 

But that would have led to comments like "Who's on the phone?" and "Why do you look so awestruck and goofy?" 

And I would have had to give one of those cagey, secretive, I'm-not-allowed-to-tell-you-yet answers that frustrate blog readers so much.  So I kept quiet, mostly.  But agent-goddess literaticat says I can spill the beans now.  It was her on the phone, telling me about the news that hit Publishers Marketplace today.

		June 21, 2008
		Children's: Middle grade		Kate Messner's MARTY MCGUIRE, FROG PRINCESS, an illustrated chapter book about a second-grade tomboy who would much rather be a scientist than a floofy pink ballerina; she is cast as the reluctant lead princess in the class play, with wildly unexpected and comic results, to Kara LaReau at Scholastic, in a two-book deal, for publication in Summer 2010, by Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

jbknowles

By Kirsty OUP-UK

“Nae man can tether time or tide,” said Robert Burns in Tam o’Shanter. Over the 200 years since the Scottish Bard’s death in July 1796 his poetry has been celebrated the world over through a network of Burns Clubs. Since tomorrow is Burns Night, I though today would be the ideal time to post this entry from The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, which tells us all about Burns Clubs and how they came into being.

Burns clubs are societies devoted to the life and work of Robert Burns. The earliest meeting of devotees of Burns took place in the summer of 1801, only five years after the poet’s death. Nine gentlemen of Ayr, friends and admirers of Burns, held a dinner in the poet’s birthplace (then a tavern). Haggis formed a part of the fare and Burns’s Address to a Haggis was recited. The Revd Hamilton Paul delivered the toast to the ‘Immortal Memory’ of Burns in verses of his own composition. Thus was established the essential form of the Burns supper. Before breaking up, the company resolved to celebrate the birthday of Burns the following January. Out of these informal gatherings the Alloway Club developed, later dinners being held at the King’s Arms, Ayr, in midsummer. This early club ceased to exist in 1819 and was not revived until 1908.

The Greenock Burns Club owed its genesis to a much older body called the Greenock Ayrshire Society, which appears to have held Burns suppers from 1802 and by 1811 had metamorphosed into the Greenock Burns Club. Greenock have had a continuous existence down to the present day, whereas the rival Paisley Burns Club (1805) was in abeyance from 1836 till 1874.

The Kilmarnock Burns Club first met at the Angel Inn (formerly Begbie’s Tavern) in January 1808, but was dormant from 1814 to 1841. The Dunfermline United Burns Club (1812) likewise had a lengthy period of suspended animation, being revived in 1870. Though a relative latecomer, the Dumfries Burns Club (1820) has flourished ever since its foundation. It arose out of the campaign (1813–19) to erect a mausoleum over the poet’s grave.

By 1810 Burns suppers were being held on an ad hoc basis in many parts of the country. The first in England was held at Oxford in 1806 and Burns Night celebrations were taking place in London by 1810. The idea spread to India in 1812, and thereafter to Canada, the USA and the Australian colonies. The Burns movement received enormous stimulus from the celebrations of the centenary of the poet’s birth in January 1859; out of the many hundreds of dinners and concerts around the world developed some of the oldest clubs in existence today. Nothing was done to bring them together until February 1885, when Burnsians met in London for the unveiling of the monument in the Thames Embankment Gardens. A meeting in Kilmarnock on 17 July formally instituted the Burns Federation, with its international headquarters in the town where the poet’s works first saw the light of day in printed form.

In its inaugural year the Federation had ten members: eight clubs in Scotland and two in England. A further 23 joined in 1886, including ten in Scotland, six in England, one in Ireland, two each in Australia and the USA, and one each in Canada and New Zealand. Progress was slow in the early years, but the launch of the Burns Chronicle in September 1891 gave the Federation fresh impetus and in the run-up to the centenary of the poet’s death in 1896 it grew dramatically.

By 1925 the number of affiliated clubs had grown to 350, at which level it has remained remarkably constant ever since, although many of the older clubs have disappeared and new ones continually take their place. Annual conferences were confined to Kilmarnock until 1894 when Glasgow was the venue. In 1907 it went south of the Border for the first time, to Sunderland. By the 1930s, the custom of holding the conference alternately in Scotland and England was well established. Since 1978, when London, Ontario, was the venue, the conference has taken place in Canada or the USA on several occasions. The current number of members affiliated to active clubs worldwide is estimated at 80,000.

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