Look who made the centerfold!

Guess who made the centerfold of Highlights for Children? Yes, me! (Get your mind out of the gutter, it's not that kind of centerfold; I write for children, people.)

Highlights for Children (Sept. 2012) used with permission.
Image copyright Michael Cameron, NOAA.

I can't show you the whole thing, but see that by-line? Off to the right there are staples (well, you can't see them, and since my son absconded with the magazine, I can't retake the image, but trust me, there are staples). Definitely staples... as in the staples that hold everything together and signify the center of the magazine. The staples that cause a magazine to fall open more often to the center spread than any other page (once the little subscription card thingies are torn out).

I am so, so thrilled to have my first Highlights article "drop" (I'm trying to pick up the lingo; still not sure I'm using it right). Doesn't that sound as though stacks upon stacks of the magazine, balanced precariously upon a hinged platform, suddenly find themselves in free-fall as the platform falls away? I imagine they plummet down long, windy Willy Wonka's factory-like chutes that divide and subdivide until each magazine plops into a kid's mailbox.

The kids race out to collect the mail, jump up and down when they see that lovely red Highlights banner, and speed inside to read it from cover to cover. Or maybe that's just my kids. And me. Not now (well, yes, now, but not ONLY now). I did it back when I was a kid, too. Highlights was my favorite magazine, and I never dreamed I would be published in it (well I did, but not way back then).

So that's my big news for the week. I'm still all smiley about it, and absolutely in love with the photos they chose, all taken by a friend of mine, Michael Cameron of the NOAA National Marine Mammals Laboratory Polar Ecosystems Program. The man's got some talent, no?

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