Today's word of the day is: Twenty

The 22nd Annual New England SCBWI conference is in full swing and, in fact, I'm blogging on my phone from Laurie Halse Anderson's keynote (and she's very funny and inspiring, of course).

John Bell, Debby Garfinkle, and I arrived here yesterday afternoon by way of visiting the baby--who was thankfully well behaved for her visitors. I brought a photo album with me to Nashua, and conference critique registrar Valarie Giogas had her baby's pictures as well, so it felt more like a baby conference than a writing conference. The Honorable Carrie Jones (D-Ellsworth hopeful) said the pictures were "made of awesome" which goes to demonstrate her cool sense of language, wonderful sense of humor, and great taste in babies.

But getting back to the topic of writing, a disturbing moment... I had a discussion with someone who "read somewhere" a general rule that it takes 20 rejection letters before a first book publication. This statistic might be a general average, and I probably had almost that many myself, but this author was multiple-submitting unpolished manuscripts as quickly as possible to get her 20 rejections out of the way. Please, please, please don't do this! There are so many paths to publication that there's a different one for every author and every book. Collecting rejection letters like they're bottle-caps that can be turned in for "Pepsi stuff" is not the way!

Meanwhile, Laurie is still speaking. She's taken a picture of the audience for her blog--I'll add a link later as well as a photo of the view from the back of the room. You won't believe how many creative, talented, and committed folks that have gathered together in a single place.

Update: