Another sale! After a disappointing rejection earlier this week and 2 failures to place in a children's poem contest (but a nice honorable mention for a story in a fiction contest), it was great to get an acceptance and check in the mail from ByLine magazine today! It's kind of like getting 2 sales out of 1, because what ByLine bought is an article about my first sale, called "Getting Goofy about Writing," for their First $ale column. Hooray!

I finished the rough draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, Chasing Monday, on November 17th! It's a whopping 58,466 word long. It feels a bit anti-climactic to be done, though "done" might not be the right word since it needs extensive revisions before I'd even consider it a decent draft. I also have plenty else to keep me busy, with a picture book manuscript I'm trying to do final revisions on & send out, my previously scheduled novel-in-progress I need to keep making headway on, and that chapter book (basically a short novel for about ages 7-10) that I mentioned before. But today I feel a bit sick. Kyle is sick now, too...yuck. Ryan had a similar illness earlier in the week, so I hope this will all end soon like Ryan's did.

I got my copies of the Winter issue of Once Upon a Time today, with my humor piece When the Muse Strikes Out in it. Looks like the editor didn't change a word, either, though she did take out a couple of commas and dashes. I know I use too many dashes, anyway!

I also wrote 3,300+ words on my NaNoWriMo novel while the kids were in Mother's Day Out today. Hooray for Mother's Day Out! (Or Mother's Day In, as the case may be....)

Wow. I wrote around 7,000 words yesterday (3,500 of them in the car on my PDA, while on a road trip...) & am up to nearly 29,000 words in my NaNoWriMo novel! I'm stunned that I did that in 9 days! And today I came up with yet a new idea, probably for an early chapter book. I wrote 300-400 words of it in the car on the way to church and then on the way to lunch. Ryan, my 4-year-old, saw me writing (on a small yellow notepad) when we got to the restaurant, and asked if I was writing a book. I said yes, and he wanted me to read it to him. I knew it would fly right over his head, but he was so insistent that I did. And as I predicted, he just looked confused. ;-) It was all about chewing gum, and he barely even knows what that is! But it is interesting that he just assumes I'm writing books! He also writes them himself. He wrote one called Shapes this past week, which he wants us to mail to his best friend.

I just read this quote in someone else's NaNoWriMo sig line...

"You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief." —Terry Pratchett

That is great for me to remember for my beet novel, which quite honestly started as a joke and has worked its way into a novel-in-progress that I hope has some real emotions. Meanwhile, my NaNoWriMo novel (13,881 words so far!) probably needs the opposite, and more traditional advice--some sort of humor or joy to break up the angst.