When I think of summer with my family, I think of the things we do every single year and how I love our traditions, especially our end-of-summer Long Beach Island week.

We’ve been going to LBI for a decade, and every single year, when we head to the family amusement park, I am nervous that the lizard man who gives his reptile presentation on stage every night won’t be there anymore. He is not young, and his voice sounds oily, his affectations so gelled over the years that he could talk about his reptiles in his sleep. But it’s so comforting to walk into the park and see him there again, with his beard and Hawaiian shirt, safari shorts . . . cause he’s made it through another long winter just like we have—cause he’s been doing this forever and he’s still so alive and so in love with his lizards. It’s the first thing I do when I get to the park, check for him.

We were in our LBI rental house when Hurricane Irene came along, watching the storekeepers getting ready, nailing up wooden window covers, spray-painting on the words, “Play Nice, Irene.” We locked up this house and left for home just ahead of the storm. And it was only a year later that we watched on tv as Hurricane Sandy came barreling through our LBI town, to our stores and restaurants and beaches, somehow sparing our house, which is just a few yards from where Sandy did her worst damage. As we rode our bikes down to the tip of the island the next year, there were so many lots with only their stilts left, the houses were gone. There used to be two trailer parks at the very end of the island—one of them disappeared that year. Even now, sand is being pumped onto shore, the beaches being restored.

I’ve watched my family grow up here, making the last wishes of summer year after year, getting a little bigger, a little older, and I’m more grateful each year that we can get to LBI again.

I’m really excited that my first middle-grade novel, Matylda, Bright & Tender, will be published by Candlewick Press in the spring of 2017.

For my middle-grade debut, I decided to use my given name, Holly M. McGhee, rather than my pen name—because the emotions I drew on for this story of two best friends and their leopard gecko came straight from my own life, and this felt like the right time finally to integrate my work life and my writing life.

Everything I’ve learned as an agent has helped me as a writer, and everything I’ve learned as a writer has helped me as an agent, and I’m so grateful for all of it.

xox

I like to call the Steuben Valley in upstate New York the Ancestral Homeland. My parents still live in the 200-plus-year old farmhouse where I grew up. My dad is the son of Arthur and Christine McGhee, who owned a beautiful dairy farm in Millerton, New York. My dad knows his cattle. In the past few years, this same Steuben Valley, still home to many working farms, has welcomed the Amish, who find the vast expanse of land there very inviting.

Last weekend, I headed up there with my husband and three children to spend a few days in the homeland. We dined at Chesterfields (my favorite Utica restaurant), and we had breakfast at Cindy’s Diner. We went north one afternoon and saw a wind farm and watched some Amish putting a new roof on a house.

But the highlight was the visit to the Lowville Cheese Store, where I purchased many fine cheeses:  http://lowvillecheesestore.blogspot.com/.

It was in this cheese shop that I spotted a wide leather belt, just the kind I like to wear. It beckoned me. I took it off the hook and held it around my waist. I liked it. Checked the price. $20. “What do you think of this, Dad?” I said. He nodded, his way of telling me it was a good buy. So I purchased it, along with the cheese. We got back in the car and were heading south again to the Steuben Valley. I pulled out the belt to admire my find. I looked at the tag. It said “neck strap.” I wondered why my belt was called a neck strap. And then it dawned on me; that special metal loop, which I quite admired, was for tethering a cow. My belt was a cow’s neck strap.

“Dad, I just purchased a cow’s neck strap,” I said. “It’s irrefutable. The tag says Neck Strap.” My dad and I laughed and laughed and laughed. We are country folk, but we didn’t know a cow’s neck strap from a thick leather belt. They didn’t use these when he farmed.

“It’s a damn fine belt,” he said. And I agreed. I’ll wear this neck strap with pride, remembering that glorious trip to Lowville, New York,  remembering the wind farm and the Amish, but more than anything, remembering my dad, his smile, his laugh, and how much he means to me.

I love you, Dad.

In the fall of 2013, I wrote a pep talk for NaNoWriMo titled Write for Your Life, and I talked about honoring your imagination and writing every day; I talked about how the words had to move through you and out into the world—that the world was at your fingertips, literally, and how when I wrote my first book, my fingers were on fire. What I didn’t say in that pep talk was that I had started a book in July of 2012 and that nothing was happening with it, that I was one of the ones who needed to hear those words. I was one of the ones who was avoiding my laptop and getting scared of it, and so I was writing that pep talk for all Wrimos, including myself.

But I still didn’t begin writing again . . .

Not until a month or so after I did that Pep Talk, when I had a dream; in my dream I was looking out the window of my bedroom, and my body temperature was low, and the end of the world was coming. My fingernails had turned blue, and they were beginning to flake off. I picked at them, and underneath the blue nails were lighter blue nails, nails that were getting a little more oxygen. This dream scared me. If I didn’t start writing again, a part of me would die; that was clear. I took this dream very seriously, and the very next day I booked a hotel room for a week to start to get my story out. And I promised myself I would write every day that I traveled on NJ Transit.

When I left the hotel, I had fifteen new pages, in a new voice, and I began to write on every train ride. I had to explain to my friends that I had committed to writing; I had to go public because I wouldn’t be talking to anyone on the train anymore, and in a way that also helped me commit. I’d read in Brainpickings that it can take fifty days to form a new habit, and it was hard at first. But then I’d remember the dream and it was easy, because I didn’t want to die.

It’s over a year later now, and I’m on the third revision of that story. I just got new notes from my agent, complete with pretty red ribbon.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to my story, and in a lot of ways it doesn’t matter. Because I have it now; I have it because I wrote every day. I have it because I was afraid and I had to be brave. And I am full of wonder when I see my pile of pages; I am full of wonder that I got the words out.

I believe in dreams, the scary ones and the not scary ones. And I believe in the magic of this world.

Twenty-three years ago, when I started working at HarperCollins (as Holly McGhee) I was given a plant by one of my first bosses, William Shinker. The plant was a dinner-plate Ming Aurelia, and it represented a new beginning to me—I’d left a job that didn’t challenge me anymore, fallen in love with James Marshall’s Old Mother Hubbard and her Wonderful Dog,  and dived into children’s books, with no experience whatsoever—I was facing a big unknown.

The plant had five stalks, each one about a foot tall, and I set it next to me on the desk. Slowly but surely the leaves began to turn yellow and die, and the stalks went next, until I was down to just one survivor. At this point I was very attached to the plant, and I was worried; it had begun to represent my future—and I refused to let that last stalk die as it sat there next to me. So I asked my cousin Linda Yang, a gardening expert, for help. She came to my office and she pulled the florist’s mulch off the top, and she said the plant needed air, the mulch was suffocating it. Then she took a fork and started digging around through the soil, aerating it.

Not too long later, her job done, she packed up her things and left. Over the next month, my surviving stalk began to grow and thrive. I don’t know if it missed the other four stalks it had shared the pot with, but I know it was happy to be alive. And my Ming is still happy to be alive, having moved to larger pots many times over the years.

She is a survivor, and I still like to wash her leaves with milk water and aerate her soil. My Ming is older by far than my oldest child; and she is a living, breathing reminder of how fragile life is and how important it is to show the ones we love that we love them.

That’s what Christmastime is for me, a time to remember those we love and honor them with gifts; a time to think about those who have been along on the journey, for the light parts and the dark parts—a time to remember those we’ve lost and those we’ve nearly lost, and to cherish those who are with us.

M E R R Y  C H R I S T M A S!

Well, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I boarded the American Eagle flight from Newark on Wednesday, September 10. I’m not a big traveller for one thing, and I’d never been to Kalamazoo, or even to Michigan for that matter. I’d never been on a book tour either. I landed in Chicago and quickly realized things are a little different there—we were told that  we couldn’t deplane because the airline terminal workers were at lunch (like the eat-your-sandwich kind of lunch)! We sat on the plane, at the gate, waiting . . . hoping they would eat fast. And when we finally were able to get off the plane, I ran as fast as I could to get to the connecting flight to Kalamazoo.

I was met by my collaborator, David Small, and his wife (and also his collaborator) Sarah Stewart, and they gave me a tour of lovely Kalamazoo. We had a wonderful event at the most gorgeous library I’ve ever seen that night, the Kalamazoo Public Library, hosted by the one-and-only Kevin A. R. King. The next day was a packed event at one of the most pleasing stores I’ve seen, the http://www.bookbugkalamazoo.com/, with the charming and witty owners, Joanna and Derek Parzakonis. By the way, this store is not just a children’s store, they have a wonderful selection of adult titles as well so I’m trying to help spread the word here.

I also enjoyed an incredible couple of days in Mendon with David and Sarah, complete with a tour of Sarah’s wonderful garden and a lunch at the Fisher Lake Inn, where David began the journey that ended with the publication of his graphic memoir STITCHES. On Friday David and I flew back to Maplewood, NJ, my home, and we celebrated our book for the next three days straight. Thanks to the magnanimous Mrs. Gray and Mrs. Illingworth (both of http://www.morrowpreschool.org/, the indomitable and charming Mrs. Jane Folger of www.maplewoodlibrary.org and the terrific Jonah Zimiles of http://wordsbookstore.com/, as well as the cool and crazy chicks Marcy Thompson and Jenny Turner Hall of http://www.studiobmaplewood.org/about.php. By the way, none of this would have been as tasty without the best baker in the USA: http://www.theablebaker.com/bakery.html.

Here is David at [words]:

And here we are at the Bookbug, the Maplewood Library, and [words] again, with the live rogue cookie!

And here, with the Able Baker herself!

And then, to cap off a perfect launch week, we received this wonderful review by Maria Russo in The New York Times Book Review!

I’m looking forward to hanging around town for a bit now, and getting to work on my next project.