The Librarian Writer

There are lots and lots of great blogs about the conference, but definitely check the Official Conference Blog . I can't chew gum and blog at the same time, so I left it to these speedy bloggers to give the play-by-play action. What I do better is ruminate and then sum up. So here's an overview at my time at the 2011 SCBWI Summer Conference. Day One: Friday I live in the area, so I skipped all the early morning sessions and showed up in time for the first keynote. Bruce Coville is all kinds of awesome, and I loved his speech about why what we do matters and how what we do affect others in ways we can never know. Jerry Pinkney's keynote was accompanied by personal photos and drawings and how to bring a sense of place to your work. Awe. Some. My first breakout session was Donna Jo Napoli's "Sources of Tension and How to Use Them." She did a very interactive session, taking suggestions from the audience how what were the elements of tension. But les...

The big day is tomorrow! Yeah, yeah, there's some kind of shindig going on at Westminster Abbey, but I'm talking about the screening of Royal Wedding at the TCM Classic Film Festival . Royal Wedding is a little gem, often overlooked as one Fred Astaire's best movies. Directed by Stanley Donen, the 1951 film stars Fred and Jane Powell as a brother/sister dancing team going to London for the royal nuptials of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Of course there's romance and hijinks and plenty of dancing. One of the highlights of the film is the sequence where Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling. It is flat-out awesome and a remarkable achievement of choreography, filmmaking, and ingenuity. See for yourself: Once you've picked your jaw up off the floor, you may want to know how that was done. A revolving room was created and a camera mounted to follow the room. Someone on YouTube was kind enough to deconstruct the scene. Even though Fred Astaire makes eve...