Dear Kim, Welcome to a new month. A new school year. And based on your last letter to me , a new start for you! Even though I have been out of the classroom for over a year, September still feels like the start of the year for me. New goals with a hint of autumn air just make sense to me. There are the writing goals. Organizational goals. And goals for the year's author events. This year I am adding a social media goal. For years, thanks to my good friend, Judy Pryzstup, I've kept a reading journal. I write down all of the books that I read with one quick line next to the title. Way back when Judy made the suggestion I was probably reading twelve titles a year. As my desire to write grew, so did the number of titles I would read each year. (I didn't include the books that I read for school or to my students, just my reading.) Now with my work at the Foundation , along with SCBWI, I want to read all of our faculty's books, and the books of fellow conferee...
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I met Kimberly Sabatini at the NY SCBWI Conference this year. She's fun, she's young, she loves life, and she's the author of the YA novel, Touching the Surface. You were a teacher, right? What came first, the teacher or the egg, er, I mean writer? The teacher came first, before the act of being a writer, but not before the desire to be one. The truth is, I never believed myself capable of being something so mysterious and wonderful as a legitimate writer. Contemplating a writing career was like asking if I wanted to grow up and be a unicorn tamer some day. It didn ’ t feel possible. But teaching was something very familiar—I’d spent my whole life in classrooms observing the job and the people who did it. I don’t mean it to sound as if I didn’t love being a teacher. I loved those kids like crazy and I was particularly good at working with kids with behavioral challenges, but I’m not sure I would have chosen that profession ...