Looking ahead and around

Wet here in London tonight - is the rain over Europe?
Anne-Marie and I will have some places to hole up with coffee close by.
Now I need to find my favourite pen.  It's somewhere in one of the boxes I stuffed into our little car when I drove from France last Friday.
The scrawl crawl is for me a perfect way to greet London.  Most of my adult life I've lived in France.  Now I'm going to spend a lot more of my working time here.  It's a perfect way to settle in and take note.

I've been helping with illustrator events ever since Erzsi Deak started the first SCBWI group in Europe by holding a little party in Paris...way back in, was it 1996 or 7?   By that time my first 3 picture books I'd written and illustrated,  had been published in the US and UK. But to me,  every book, like every sketch book, is like beginning again.  You can see some of what I do and access my own blog too, via www.bridgetstrevens.com
I helped with the first international conferences - in France, Madrid, Greece...and continue to be involved in SCBWI Bologna.  So I became the first International Illustrator Coordinator - by a kind of osmosis.
Someone should write the history of SCBWI international one day.
We are adding to that history now.  This is the first time we'll be in sync across Europe and beyond - creatively and technologically.  
How wonderful of you Kirsten  to get this going!   It was only in May as I recall, when we were all on the Britanny SCBWI retreat, that you and Tioka discussed the seed of an idea.  Now it's planted and growing.
Can't wait to see what blooms!