I am writing this from the small town of Tecate, in Baja, California, where I am spending a week with three women friends...away from snowy New England.  Here's a photo of the view from the terrace of our little casita:

As you can see, the sky is very blue and the landscape quite rugged. Two mornings ago, looking out from this very spot, I watched a mountain lion move across the tall grass in the open space behind the small tree. When I mentioned it to the staff here, they said, "Must have been a stray dog." But I know a dog when I see one. This was a large CAT, moving in the sinuous way of cats...the size of a German Shepherd, tawny gold, and with muscles in its shoulders...completely different from a dog.  Later they acknowledged that there have been occasional sightings...and in fact there are signs at the entrances to hiking trails alerting hikers to the presence of mountain lions...so I feel quite certain that's what I saw.

It made me want to go back and re-read Jean Stafford's book "The Mountain Lion" which I loved in the past, and I can envision exactly where it is, in a bookcase in my Maine house.

We began our trip here with a mishap, when one of my friends fell and gashed her forehead on the corner of a chair...so there was an unplanned several-hour visit to a hospital ER in San Diego, and now she has a Frankenstein-looking stitched-up wound, but is doing fine...no concussion, no fracture.

Linda Sue Park and I have been having an e-mail conversation geared around the Newbery Medal, with this year's selection coming up; it will be published on Amazon at the time of the ALA (I'll have to find out how to get to it)... already I would like to re-write my half of it. She was more eloquent than I. Bummer. Story of my life.

And though newspapers are sporadic here and TV non-existent, someone has told me that Katherine Paterson is to be our next children's literature laureate, and they---whoever they are---could not have made a better choice.

I'll be back in Boston next weekend and  briefly at the Horn Book booth on Saturday the 16th during the ALA convention for an interview by Roger Sutton, who will be conducting a succession of interviews with authors.

I have brought work with me and will go back to it now...