Now that the publication of my debut picture book is less than a year away, I’m starting to think about school visits. I love talking to kids about writing. I’ve talked about this before, but when I was a kid, I thought all my favorite authors lived in mansions with butlers, but were now dead. If I had known authors were living, ordinary people, I think I would have pursued writing seriously as a career twenty years sooner. Author visits are important.

I am working this summer on developing a program/presentation for school visits, and I have been thinking a lot about this great Nerdy Book Club post by Polly Holyoke: Teachers, Librarians, and Authors: Let’s Work Together to Make More Author Visits Happen. So, not to steal this concept too directly from Polly Holyoke, but: tell me what you need. I would love to come to your school and talk to your students, but I’d love it even more if I knew that the program I was presenting was helping you too.

If you are a teacher or school librarian, would you consider filling out this four-question survey for me? It’ll help me develop an author visit program that fits in best with school needs. To show my thanks, if you fill out the survey by July 31, 2015, I will do a 30-minute Skype with your class sometime during the 2015-2016 school year.

So far, teachers I’ve talked to seem to want real examples of how writing and revising work for a grown-up author. I could talk about this all day, so if that’s what most of you want, then that’s awesome. But I also want to know if there’s a specific curriculum need (especially in Maine, where I live) that you think I could help with. Do students need to be able to write plots? Vivid characters? Stories about bunnies? I can help.