Story picked for anthology/Author visit

I had some good news yesterday. My story "The Store Detective" was selected for a "Best of 2007" anthology by Stories for Children magazine. My critique partner, Rachel, also had a story chosen. Yay for us!

My daughter's school had an absolutely wonderful visit yesterday from Stacia Deutsch, co-author of the Blast to the Past series. I'd worked on arrangements for this visit since October, so was thrilled to find that she was such an energetic, engaged speaker. The older kids learned more about the writing/publishing/editing process. The younger kids played "Fact or Fiction Detectives" to try to figure out which was which in certain parts of her book about Abraham Lincoln. A smart kid figured out that Lincoln wouldn't actually have said, "Awesome!" when he received good news about the Civil War, as was originally written. The word was changed to "bully" in the book. The kids were interested to hear that "bully" had a completely different meaning many years ago. And they loved hearing facts about Lincoln that they didn't know (and neither did the adults). For example, Lincoln had a pet turkey and his son loved puppets so much that one room of the White House was made into a puppet theater. The White House, by the way, used to be called the Presidential Palace.