Here's why I had to cancel my SCBWI Summer Conference Los Angeles trip at the last minute

Yeah, well. Since I have to miss the SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles this year, I figure I may as well get a comic strip out of it. 

I discovered that the antibiotic drops I was taking for pink eye made them much worse RIGHT before I was supposed to leave for LA. So I had a choice: to go anyway, or to cancel and see a doctor instead, just in case there was a more serious condition or at the very least to get other medication. I opted for the latter.

I'm relieved it's just pink eye and nothing serious, but a bit frustrated with timing.

For those who are curious, My Life In A Nutshell is my semi-autobiographic comic strip, infrequently updated and with wildly varying art throughout. I think of this strip as a combination of self-therapy and my creative petri dish. 

Lipstick doodles at the 2014 SCBWI Summer Conference

Click image to see a bigger version

Thanks to Kat Yeh, Joyce Wan, Amber Alvarez and Kelly Light for letting me doodle with their lipstick smooches at SCBWI-LA! You can see my photos from the 2014 SCBWI Summer Conference in LA on Flickr and Facebook.

Tour of my studio, a Dirty Dozen, NAKED! giveaway and heading off to SCBWI-LA

Thanks to Andrea Skyberg for including my creative studio in her Tuesday Studio Tour blog post series! My studio isn't nearly as beautiful or well-organized or sunlit as others I've seen posted online, but I love it nonetheless. :-)

Thanks to Open Book Toronto for asking me to contribute 12 Unexpected Facts about myself.

And thanks to WeeWelcome and Simon & Schuster Canada for putting together a NAKED! book giveaway. Just two weeks left to enter!

I'm off to the 2014 SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles tomorrow. I'll be livetweeting from @DebbieOhi (my personal chatty account, as opposed to @inkyelbows for my regular kidlit/YA posts), and will be back on Tuesday. Hope to see some of you there!

Inkygirl updated: SCBWI congrats & NYTimes review clipping

Received a nice note from the SCBWI head office while I was at the cottage, along with a copy of my I'M BORED New York Times review. Details here.

My illustration for the 2012 Tomie DePaola Challenge

Thanks to the SCBWI & Tomie DePaola for their annual illustration challenge every year; I love inspiration illustration prompts like this -- partly for my own motivation, of course, but also because it's so fun seeing how others interpret the prompt.

This year's theme was an excerpt Chicken Licken story by P.C. Asbjörnsen. If you have your illustration online anywhere, please do post the URL in the comments section! I posted my own illustration above.