One of the amazing benefits of becoming part of the Twitter community as a writer is hearing the latest news about contests and other opportunities to connect with agents and publishers.  I’ve quickly become a fan of “Twitter Pitch” fests such as #PBPitch and #PitMad and will post about them another time. Through contests like those, one has a relatively risk-free way to get your ideas out there and potentially attract the interest of an agent or editor.  While I do get requests from those occasionally, I also generally make several new Twitter connections (both people I follow and new followers) on a Twitter pitch day, connections through which I learn even more about the industry and about more upcoming events. It’s a great cycle.

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My boys came home from school on Friday talking about voting for their favorite books. I learned that both of their schools were collecting votes for the “Chickadee Award,” a picture book award voted on by Maine K-4 students.  All 10 nominees for the 2015/16 award are picture books published in 2014 and my boys were eager to tell me about their favorites. Since my school district was having a library fundraiser at the Portsmouth Barnes & Noble this past Sunday anyway, I figured it would be a perfect time for us to go check out all the Chickadee nominees.   Sadly, they only had one of the books on the shelf, so we weren’t able to look at all of them. They didn’t seem to mind, though, since the high school’s robotics team was on hand for demos and the kids were thrilled to see the robots at work and even get to drive them!

Since we couldn’t get all the Chickadee nominees at the bookstore, we read a few others too, and I ordered their favorite Chickadee nominee, “A Boy and A Jaguar” for our Kindle. (I think it’s my favorite of the day, though Iggy comes close). Read on for the results of our afternoon!

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