Conversation Of The Day

[I'm working in July as a substitute assistant teacher in a pre-school where my mother does physical therapy. Today was my first day. With about an hour left to the day, the music teacher came.]

Teacher: This is [my mom's name]'s daughter.

Music Teacher: Oh...you're the writer?

Me: Heh, yeah.

Music Teacher: Yeah, I had a whole conversation with your mom after graduation.* You know, soon after that I got an email from the father of one of the kids who thought I did such a good job with the graduation, and I saw that on the bottom of the email there was a link to a website. I clicked on it and saw that this boy's father is an author! A really big one.

Me: Oh, cool.

Music Teacher: Yeah, I thought of you. I don't know if you've heard of him or not...Gordon Korman?

Me: [thinking: did I hear that correctly?] Gordon Korman?! I used to read his books! Oh my gosh! That's so cool!

Music Teacher: Yeah! So I wrote him back and we're going out for coffee so I can pick his brain because I'm thinking about writing kids' books also. I'll mention it to your mom.

Me: ::starry-eyed:: Reeeaaally???

Gordon Korman...Jerry Spinelli...Louis Sachar...ah, childhood.

But how cool is that?!

*I went to the pre-school graduation a few weeks ago.

Things begin to look up

Wow. This week was a tough one. It started off amazingly - Sunday was the day I went to the children's book read at Columbia. That was incredible. But Wednesday was the day where I got unjustly berated on behalf of a number of different students for talking in class. That put me in a sour mood for the rest of the evening, as can probably be seen by the post just below this one. Thursday was alright, except for the fact that I missed my train home and had to take the next one, which I thought meant I would be late for this thing at my library my dad and I were going to together. You see, my community had a really, really, really, really, really crummy library. And I mean - really. The YA "section" was one bookcase. The children's room was teeny. Even the adult books had a really small selection. Basically, it was like a toy library. Not a real one. So finally, finally we got a real library built. It's been a bit frustrating this past month when they were moving all the books because we couldn't take anything out so we didn't really have use of a library at all. But soon the new one will open. Last night was their... I guess you could call it an induction ceremony of sorts. But what my dad pushed me to go for (because I wasn't originally going to go at all) was the fact that there were 12 authors invited, as well. Most of them weren't the sort of authors I was interested in. Some wrote cookbooks, some wrote books like "52 ways to stay happy," some wrote other sorts of things I just wasn't interested in. But there were two children's book authors. Well, three, really. One set of twins who wrote a series called "The teacher who wouldn't retire." It looked really cute (agh! not "cute!" Um...?). The other wrote another story about bunnies. So I got to talk to them and ask them about how they published their books, etc. It was very interesting. And someone else from the neighborhood said she has a contact at Simon and Schuster, just for the future if I ever needed one. So that was awesome. So basically, it was very, very helpful and good.

Anyway, I have to go finish getting ready for shabbat but we haven't had internet for the past two days (actually, my whole community doesn't have wireless internet right now) but we discovered that, for some reason, we get it on this computer. I'm not sure why. So I just felt like I should write something positive before Shabbat so that my negative post below this wouldn't be sitting there at the top for too long.

Shabbat shalom everyone! And may we all have brighter weeks next week (for those of us who weren't too pleased with our weeks until now)!