Fairy Dust

I leave Wednesday for a blissful new year's getaway. First I fly to Newark and spend the night with my sister, Cheryl, who now lives in our childhood home on Malcolm Avenue in North Plainfield, NJ. We plan to spend the evening watching her Christmas present DVD of Season 1 of the Patty Duke Show.

On Thursday I'll head in to the city with Cheryl when she goes to work in the morning and at 8:30 present myself at the door of my publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, located in the famed Flatiron Building, to go over the galleys for my middle-grade novel scheduled for this coming fall, One Square Inch.

Then at 10:30 I'm meeting several other Manhattan-based children's book authors for tea and scones at Alice's Teacup, where they sprinkle you with actual fairy dust. From there, we'll all head to Penn Station to get a train to Morristown, NJ, to a monastery where we will be attending a weekend-long poetry retreat led by acclaimed poet Kathleen Driskell - three days of doing nothing but writing and reading poetry.

I'm aquiver with excitement! I can't decide if I should ask to have the fairy dust sprinkled all over me, or have it sprinkled just on one particular manuscript. I'm inclining toward the more targeted sprinkling. And yet, this probably will be my only chance for fairy dust for the foreseeable future, so maybe I should be more lavish with it? Fairy dust everywhere? Or would more concentrated application of fairy dust be more effective? I'll let you know!