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Laurie Ann Thompson

2013

Cycles, balance, and making plans

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[Note: This was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Emu’s Debuts, but it seemed to res­onate with peo­ple, so I decid­ed to reblog it here in case you missed it. Sor­ry if you’re see­ing it twice!]
Late­ly, I’ve become some­what obsessed with the idea of cycles in our lives. Cycles in nature—life cycles, the water cycle, sea­sons, etc.—keep our phys­i­cal world in bal­ance. Man-made cycles keep the gov­ern­ment run­ning (usu­al­ly), pre­vent mechan­i­cal fail­ures and med­ical mis­takes (hope­ful­ly), even wash our clothes and dish­es for us. If you’re an author, you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with the cre­ativ­i­ty cycle (see below). And as I’ve men­tioned before, one of my all-time favorite Emu’s Debuts post was Melanie Crowder’s The Run/Rest Cycle, about sus­tain­ing bal­ance as a writer. As cre­ative types, we often have some lee­way about how we choose to spend our time each day, so hav­ing a cycle in mind can help us man­age our activ­i­ties and main­tain bal­ance in our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives.

The Creativity Cycle
The Cre­ativ­i­ty Cycle

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2013: What a year!

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EMLA Client Retreat group photo

I haven’t post­ed here for way too long, but 2013 turned out to be quite a year. I did man­age to squeeze in a few posts over at Emu’s Debuts, so I thought I’d share them here as a sort of roundup (and to par­tial­ly explain where I’ve been since the last post)…
In July, I had the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence of attend­ing my sec­ond Erin Mur­phy Lit­er­ary Agency client retreat, this time in Big Sky Mon­tana. Words can’t real­ly describe how won­der­ful these retreats are, but I post­ed a bit about it here.

EMLA Client Retreat group photo
The whole EMLA retreat gang (except me!)

Aside from that trip, I spent the sum­mer writ­ing, research­ing, writ­ing, inter­view­ing, writ­ing, revis­ing, writ­ing, revis­ing, revis­ing, and revis­ing to deliv­er the final man­u­script for BE A CHANGEMAKER. I wrote a bit about the process here.
A screen shot of the developmental edit
Tracked changes in the devel­op­men­tal edit stage

Despite the mad race to the fin­ish line, I feel real­ly good about how it all came togeth­er. And here’s a post about how it felt to get to THE END.
Done!
Then there was the dread­ed author pho­to, which actu­al­ly turned out to be sort of fun (and decent enough to share with the world, thank goodness!).

Laurie Thompson head shot

 
Oth­er news and high­lights from the year?

  • I got to see an ear­ly study for a scene from the pic­ture-book biog­ra­phy of Emmanuel Ofo­su Yeboah, illus­trat­ed by Sean Qualls.
  • The above book also FINALLY has a title, EMMANUEL’S DREAM!
  • I also got to see pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es for MY DOG IS THE BEST (sor­ry, I can’t share them here, but Paul Schmid’s illus­tra­tions are ADORABLE!).
  • I fin­ished anoth­er fic­tion pic­ture book man­u­script and it will soon be going out on sub­mis­sion (fin­gers crossed!).
  • I par­tic­i­pat­ed in and fin­ished PiBoId­Mo 2013.

Stay tuned for my next post on how I plan to tack­le 2014. 🙂

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