It’s been a long time since I’ve offered this summary, so thanks to Tim for suggesting I get back to it. Here goes:

I’m doing very, very preliminary research for J.R., the next picture book biography I hope to write. “Preliminary” as in slowly reading a big ol’ academic history of the period in which he lived, a book with only a handful of mentions of J.R. himself. Once I’ve absorbed all that, I plan to move on to J.R.’s autobiography — but boy, is it hard keeping myself from jumping right to it.

I’ve revised S.V.T. and resubmitted it to my agent, but I’m still thinking of tweaks, so I’ll be storing those up over the weekend and passing those along.

My role in getting the Cybils off the ground — while extremely limited compared to the effort that others have been putting into it — has squeezed out the rest of my writing work and much of my blogging. But I think it’s for a good cause — I recently saw a writer/illustrator make what I call the “nonfiction face” when the conversation turned to books about real, true-life stuff. In shedding light on the best nonfiction picture books (among other types) out there, perhaps the Cybils can reduce the occurrence of nonfiction face: