COUNTDOWN TO PUBLICATION

I can’t believe we are finally in the eve of Santiago’s Dinosaurios Publication Day! 🎉🎉🎉

To celebrate, Udayana Lugo, the book’s illustrator, shared one dinosaur a day on her Instagram for the past week and she also created this wonderful postcard with the collection of dinos present in the story, which we have shared today in our social media.

The long wait is over!

Tomorrow Santiago’s Dinosaurios will be out in the world, and soon it will get to the hands of little readers. I signed the contract for this book in March 2021 and on October 27th, 2022 is when it will be hitting the shelves. A real dream come true!

Right now I feel happy, excited, proud and grateful. The journey has been full of excitement, surprises, challenges, lessons, and many reasons to be thankful for.

I’m forever grateful to my wonderful editors Andrea Hall and Nivair Gabriel, for believing in me and this story, and for helping me to make it shine and be the best it could be.

Many thanks to Udayana for creating these wonderful characters. I can’t imagine Santiago, his friends and dinos being any other way. I love them! She really added more warmth and soul to the pages. I feel very lucky to have had her on this team.

I’m also thankful for the amazing marketing and design teams in Albert Whitman & Company, for all their support and assistance through this journey.

To my husband, my kids, my family, friends, critique partners, and members of the amazing kidlit writing community, thank you so much for being there for me, for your support and encouragement which kept me going through the ups and downs of the path to publication.

It’s done! And now another chapter starts for me and Santiago’s Dinosaurios. I can’t wait to see how far we’ll go. 🦖🦕

I want to end with this quote I really like and which is fitting to the way I feel right now. 🙏🏻

“She believed she could, so she did.” – R.S. Grey

Cover photo by rovenimagescom