my co-author for The Queen of Water, Maria Virginia Farinango

Hello and Happy Valentine's Day to you!

It's been a while since I last wrote... I've been busy trying to finish The Queen of Water revisions for my editor. The deadline's Monday, and it looks like I'm going to make it! This morning I spent an hour on the phone with Maria Virginia (my collaborator) to go over small revision details. Whew! But finally, after six year (SIX YEARS!!!) of working on this book, the end is finally in sight. We're so excited.

Here she's dressed in clothes from another region of Ecuador, which she wore for one of the dances she did.

Here are some pics of Maria Virginia from the release party of THE INDIGO NOTEBOOK. She happened to be visiting Fort Collins at the time, and she offered to do some traditional dance performances at my party, which was perfect since Indigo is set in the Otavalo region, where she's from. (And of course, she's the whole reason I ended up going to Otavalo and getting inspired to write Indigo in the first place.)

Above we're preparing materials for a dance of gratitude-- I'm lighting incense here.

The dance involves offerings of fruit, potatoes, and corn. These are the clothes from her home in the Otavalo area. (She doesn't always wear these clothes-- in the U.S., she wears them for special occasions, and in Otavalo, she wears them whenever she feels like it, to go to parties or to the market or wherever.)

I hold my release parties in a big, wonderful coffee house called Everyday Joe's just a few blocks from my house in downtown Fort Collins. They have a big screen where I project photos of people and places who inspired the book (that's Maria Virginia and her husband, Tino, and me in a cornfield)-- it's a perfect set-up.

Maria Virginia's dancing is breath-taking. Everyone, especially the toddler crowd, was captivated. We can't wait for her story to be out in the wide world... and we can hardly believe that in one year, it finally will be!

Other news: I'm in the midst of planning some events for the Star in the Forest release this spring, so stay tuned for details. I found out that The Indigo Notebook paperback will come out in August of this year, which is sooner than I expected-- and they've designed a new cover for it (and for the whole series, actually). Voila...

What do you think? I think it's pretty-- I love the colors and the feeling the water gives me. Unfortunately, I don't have a higher resolution image yet, so I can't really tell what the girl looks like. My editor also gave me the cover for The Ruby Notebook, but I'll post that image as the release date draws closer...

So, there's your update on my writing life... and the rest of my life now is basically a desperate, seemingly endless attempt to potty-train Lil Dude. Argh! Hopefully this project won't take as long as The Queen of Water did... ;)

Thanks for reading!

xoxo,
Laura