This weekend is the SCWBI Winter Conference in New York City.

I will be there. I will try to look like I fit in. I will try and act natural.

I will be squealing on the inside.

You see, I feel like Alice. I am a little late to the party.

I like to think of the 25 years I spent doing other things as the time I spent getting ready for what I am doing now.

But the truth is I see all these amazingly talented, younger authors debuting the most wonderful books this year and I am utterly gob-smacked. I can’t help but wonder where I might be now had I kept at it in my early 20s.

Oscar Wilde once famously said “One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.”

Writing and writing conferences fall into that category for me.

So here I am, off to my first children’s writer’s conference in the same year my first book will be published. It’s heady stuff.

But it’s also kind of unnerving. For years I would hear about the SCWBI conferences and imagine myself sitting there, soaking up all that knowledge, meeting writers with similar interests to mine.

In my mind there was always a golden haze around it – it was Oz, and I had closed the gates on myself as I had given up on my writing.

What a DIFFERENCE three years make! I am going! And so if you see someone gawking, looking a little too excited, a little too happy, kind of goofy, that’ll be me. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.