Our super awesome SCBWI WWA regional meetings started up again on Wednesday ending a summer of bonbon eating and horse race watching for me. Back to work! And meeting an acquiring editor is a great kick in the pants to start getting dummies and portfolio pieces in top shape and ready for submission.

Sarah Cloots, Editorial Assistant at Greenwillow Books, spent two days with our group doing smart First Page readings, manuscript critiques, and a wonderful main session talk. I'm so sad she left! Well-spoken, well-read, bright and funny. Too bad she can't stay in Seattle. But all the better for Manhattan. It is thrilling to see young new editors that really know their stuff and can quote Ursula Nordstrom. Boo-ya!

And I came away with a great new exercise thanks to Sarah:

We all know about the importance of fleshing out characters in our manuscripts by knowing their extensive back stories. And I do character sketches--front, back, profile, three-quarter view--when I'm drawing my characters. But I've always contained my other practice sketches to what is happening in the manuscript.

Sarah gave us two 3 minute exercises during the meeting and one of them was to think of scenarios in which your character wouldn't be comfortable and envision their reactions. She asked us to write or draw this for three minutes. DRAW! Am I a thick thickie? Why didn't I ever think of that? We sort of did that in cartoon school, but it never occured to me to reach outside of my picture book story confines and draw my characters in a different situation.

So I thought of my character Tess, a Rosie-the-Riveter-esque big sister. She's very comfortable battling giants and rebuilding houses and wearing overalls. But stick her in a frilly frock and send her to a formal high tea and I'm sure she'd be completely out of her element. Add a snooty Chanel clad socialite requesting a tea refill and Tess would surely grab the entire samovar and lug it over instead of finding a demure tea pot or taking the tea cup TO the samovar as is (I assume) custom.

What fun! It is just a sketch, but this opens up lots of future plot possibilities to me and let's me know more about Tess. I owe Sarah a cupcake.