More New York

This massive stack of paper sitting on my editor's office floor is all the various stages of Blackbringer! He asked me if I wanted it and I said NO! What would I do with such a stack? I already have one of my own, though it's not quite as tall. Jim and I went into the Penguin Young Readers offices yesterday and it was so fun. We ended up spending hours there, probably preventing various people from getting their work done! What a wonderful group of book-lovers they all are. I met my publisher for the first time, and she was a real person, which was weird -- in the movies publishers are always scary and nonplussed. But she was so cool! She took us to a decadent lunch, with my editor Tim and an editor from the Penguin adult nonfiction division too. Prosecco at lunch, ooh la la.

It was really kind of momentous going into the office, because on our one previous trip to New York Jim and I did portfolio drop-offs at that exact same reception desk, with nary a peak down the long corridor to where the real action is. Getting to go through that door felt special. It was a moment. Little by little, it begins to seem real that I have written a book that someone is publishing.

Yesterday evening Jim and I took the subway down to the Lower East Side, and that was a fun glimpse of the city. We had sushi for dinner, then popped into a "cafe literaire" called The Pink Pony for port and tarte tatin (okay, okay, and flourless chocolate cake). Then we met our friend Robyn at a little Bulgarian bar we would never have noticed from the street, to hear gypsy music as played by a Greek, a Turk, a Macedonian, and a Philadelphian! The music was whimsical and wild, and the Macedonian's fingers flew so fast on the clarinet you couldn't even see them.

And today I met another blogger! Left-handed Trees came in from out of state and we met in Chelsea (which wasn't as cute as it sounded like it would be) for lunch and coffee and lots of talk about writing. It was so great to meet you, Delia!