Evil Coffee and Ninja Mouse

(My internet is back and seems to want to stay! Woohoo!)

Each year, Carmen Chopp organizes a "Creative Writing and Illustrating Workshop" at Rosehill Elementary School in Lenexa, Kansas. This year, 9 authors and artists volunteered, including the incredible Kristi Bernard, who explains the whole concept better than I could ever do in this article.

This is how my day went:

I woke up way to early for comfort (at least for mine, since I hadn't seen a morning in far too long) after a night of nightmares. No surprise there. Since I was a teenager, I've had nightmares every time I was stressed out about the day ahead - and I am a very stressed person. They're basically a montage of everything that could go wrong.

It actually saved me a lot of trouble a couple of times when I had forgotten to pack my student ID for an exam. My subconscious remembers what I've forgotten and reminds me none-too-gently during the night.

 

I had little sleep and was a bit of a zombie myself when I arrived at Rosehill Elementary.
AND THERE WAS NO TEA. Don't get me wrong, we were welcomed warmly, with delicious food and buckets of coffee. And it would have been enough for normal (weird), coffee-drinking people, however I know the truth: COFFEE IS EVIL. It lures you in with a delicious smell of awesomeness, but when you drink it, it is bitter like HELL! (It is so evil I am caps-locking. I never caps-lock. OK, maybe I do. But only to highlight the most horrible things.) (Like coffee.)
I survived college on caffeinated soda (and lost teeth to prove it), and eventually surrendered to my family's tradition of drinking tea by the gallon. (And I'm talking about hot tea here, not the strange cold American one.) (I'll probably do a post about tea in the future, just so you know.) (And I should stop abusing parenthesis, even if they are fun.)

I feel like I've digressed somehow.

Carmen introduced me to my escort, Colin, and promised me tea for the break, the angel that she was.

Then it was time for the dreaded moment: class. Which wasn't dreadful by any means. At least not as the instructor. I visited three classrooms and met kids from 4th, 5th and 6th grade. I introduced the project of Princess Penelope and the Pickle Festival, and talked about character creation. We started with the basics of drawing a mouse and ended with them creating a character for that universe.
It was quite wonderful. They had awesome and hilarious ideas, like a 4000 years-old ninja mouse:

A mouse who plans to become the Empress of All Cheese:

An unemployed, overweight mouse who watches TV all day:

And Super Mouse, amongst others. And talking of super-powered mouse, did anyone else watch this?

One of the teachers did the tutorial along with her students and ended up drawing an awesome trendy French mouse that just might appear in the book. (With her permission.)

There was a break (with tea) after the second class, and a luncheon in the library after the third, where I met a pirate-hatted lady who represented NaNoWriMo. She told me it existed in France too - I didn't even know! Here goes my excuse for not doing it! Oh well, I'll just have to be honest now, and admit that words intimidate me.

All in all, I had an excellent morning. The kids were great, the organization was perfect. Where do I sign for next year?

Special thanks to:
1- All the students who made the lessons fun by having fun themselves.
2- Carmen, the godess of workshop organization and of emergency tea.
3- Colin, who had to sit through the same class three times, and got really good at drawing mice,
4- The 5th grader who told me that she liked my accent at the beginning of the first class, thus erasing my fear of not being understood by the students. (It was still touch-and-go sometimes, but I had a likable accent!)
5- The girl who drew the cutest mouse ever just for me, but didn't sign sign it, and now, for the life of me, I can't remember her name. But look how cute it is!