"These are the Good Old Days"
I had a seriously good weekend. Actually, everything started to be seriously good even before the weekend. On Thursday evening, I went to Simon & Schuster to drop off my first pass, and my editor showed me this:
It is the most beautiful book cover I have ever seen. I think this is what it must feel like to have a baby, sort of. I just look at it and think it is the most special, lovely, amazing book cover ever in the world, and I can’t believe it is mine. I love the girl they picked for Leah, and I love the colors, and I love the way my name looks across the front. MY NAME! ON A BOOK JACKET! My editor gave me a printed out version of the cover mounted on black poster board. I propped it up on the shelf next to my bed. I wanted to stay home and stare at it for a few days, maybe a week or so.
But I had to go out, and on Friday, after work, I met up with some of the members of the Class of 2k8, who were in town for the SCBWI conference. (It is one of my goals to meet all my fellow members of 2k8 - I had previously met Daphne Grab, Liz Gallagher, and Zu Vincent.) Here’s a picture from Friday night, from left to right: Kristin O'Donnell Tubb, Donna Freitas, me, Marissa Doyle and N.A. Nelson.
We had such a wonderful dinner, and it was cool to get four people closer to my goal of meeting everyone. Marissa gave me a button with the 2k8 logo on it, which I pinned onto my purse. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, I got to spend Saturday morning with this little guy.
He’s my godson, Brody, and he just turned nine months old. I played with him, fed him some gross peas, and ate a cupcake that he is too young to know he should insist I share with him. Then I went home, packed up, and met three of my closest friends for a kind of reunion/retreat weekend. One of them is Brody’s mom, Amy, who I love dearly and thankfully get to see all the time. The other two are our friends Lindsay and Melissa. We love them too, but they live outside New York City, so we don’t see each other as much as we want to. We met in law school, and ever since our graduation in 2002, we’ve talked about taking some kind of trip all together. We just never got around to it. So finally we decided to check into a hotel in New York for a night, go to a really great restaurant for dinner, and just hang out like we used to. Lindsay took this picture of Melissa and me at Nobu last night. We pretended it was my birthday. (I don’t know why, but it got us free dessert.)
So now I just got home, and I’m exhausted but very, very happy. I keep thinking about that Carly Simon song, when she sings, "These are the good old days."