Yes, Stephen Mooser, the president and co-founder of SCBWI, is stepping down. He and co- founder Lin Oliver negotiated with me in 2012 for close to a year before I contracted with them to sell my Blueboard to SCBWI.
I'm not getting any younger and was worried about all of you who had come to rely so heavily on the Blueboard. When the day came and I became incapacitated or died, (we all die, sooner or later) what was going to happen to the Blueboard and to all of you? My website would be closed down, and the Blueboard would instantly cease to exist! This was simply not acceptable. I'd worked too hard for ten years creating this community, to allow that to happen.
Enter SCBWI, Steve Mooser and Lin Oliver. SCBWI's website had a message board, too, but THE go-to message board on the internet was Verla Kay's Blueboard -- and they knew it. So in 2013 "my" message board became SCBWI's new message board. It was a WIN-WIN situation for all of us.
Everything continued to be run the same as it always had when it was Verla Kay's Blueboard. But now SCBWI paid all the expenses of running the board, instead of it coming out of my pocket. WIN!
Because SCBWI is an organization, the death or disappearance of one person wouldn't mean the end of the Blueboard and now this helpful resource for children's writers and illustrators would become a resource for this wonderful international organization. WIN!
My incredibly wonderful, talented, dependable and devoted team of Administrators and Moderators moved over to SCBWI's website with the Blueboard and together we have all continued to run the message board just like we used to. WIN!
All of the basic rules and restrictions that I originally put in place that made the Blueboard such a friendly and welcoming place - such as no politics, no religious discussions, no flaming allowed - moved over to SCBWI's website and they continue to be the cornerstone of the Blueboard. WIN!
But none of this would have happened if Steve had not reached out to me. Together, he and I talked, and talked and talked about the future of the Blueboard. We hashed out the difficulties of transferring the board over to SCBWI's site. We discussed the incredibly complicated integration of the Blueboard with SCBWI's membership database - an integration that would enable SCBWI members to instantly gain access to the Blueboard - without having to go through the Blueboard's normal (and sometimes lengthy) registration process. And yes, at first there were bugs in the system. But through it all, Steve was there by my side, giving me moral support as we negotiated our way through this complicated process.
And during the past five years, Steve has always been just an email away, answering sticky questions for the Blueboard Management Team, helping us traverse through complicated situations, and supporting our decisions when they were questioned by disgruntled people who didn't like the way the Blueboard was being run.
We are glad that Steve is going to have more time to devote to his writing, but we're even more glad that he is still going to keep a little finger in the Blueboard pie. He told me that in person.
Thank you, Stephen Mooser, for all you have done to help keep the Blueboard what it is today - a message board community of loving, caring, sharing children's writer's and illustrators that will live on as long as SCBWI continues to exist. May your retirement be everything you hope for in the years to come!
