SCBWI: Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in Mooresville, North Carolina, at the end of September 2024.

This is my first in-person SCBWI conference! I will be attending workshops on middle-grade writing and have a twenty-minute, one-on-one session with Kelly Delaney, senior editor with Crown Books which I am very excited about. We will be discussing my MG novel, Guardian of the Cordalian. Also, there will be first-page panel discussions where writers submit the first page of their novel to see if the agents/editors on the panel feel it would motivate them to keep reading more of the story. Finally, we get to pitch two novels using a one-sentence summary to see if any of the agents/editors are interested in reviewing our work for possible representation. 

In the spring of 2025, I attended the Writer's Conference in Raleigh. I did a live pitch for the first time and learnt a lot in the process. After some refinements, I will be querying my new adult thriller, Terror in Island Park.

In the meantime, I am building my catalogue of short stories, which is a welcome break from writing novels! That's it for now!-BL