Finally some good news! My quirky story "Falling Through the Quacks" received an honorable mention in the Hidden Talents short story contest from Tall Tales Press (a Canadian contest, though I'm not Canadian), and will be published in their Tall Tales and Short Stories Vol. II anthology this September! I really like the story and it had gotten notice in a contest before, but I wondered how I'd find a home for it, considering that it's a romantic humor story involving a dancing duck! It's about adults, not kids, but is appropriate for a general audience. This will be my second fiction publication, so it's a nice confidence booster for my fiction writing!

Bummer. I had sent a short story to Seventeen magazine, hoping they might still publish occasional fiction (as mentioned in Writer's Market), even though I hadn't seen it in their pages recently. I just got a phone call from a very nice woman there, thanking me for my submission but letting me know they don't publish fiction anymore. A rejection by phone was a new one on me, but it actually seemed much friendlier than getting one by mail. Which I also got this week...my midgrade story came back to me so fast I can hardly believe they had time to read it! I don't think I'll be going out of my way to write more short stories soon, as there are so few markets for them anymore. I have no idea what to do with the midgrade story now, since even the newly edited version is too long for most relevant markets. Too bad, as I still like it!

Someone just told me about freecycle.org, where you can link up with other people in your area to give away useful items you no longer want or get items other people no longer want. We have a ton of stuff we no longer need, like baby furniture, an old couch, etc., so I'm thrilled to find a way to ensure it can get to just the person who actually wants or needs it, without them having to pay for it! I already signed up.

Hooray, I finally have that midgrade short story revised to my satisfaction! It involved throwing out pretty much all of the new stuff I'd added a couple of weeks ago, even though I'd thought that stuff strengthened the story at the time. But I do think this new version works better and just seems to have more purpose to it than the older versions. I'm submitting it to a magazine tomorrow, and also submitting it and a YA story to ByLine's Juvenile Short Story Contest.

A few weeks ago, my husband left an old pair of sneakers on the porch after wearing them to mow the lawn, and a toad took up residence in one of them. He was there most of the day for about a week and a half, and we grew rather attached to seeing him there. We named him, not surprisingly, Schubert, since he lived in a shoe. (There was an old toad who lived in a shoe...) Anyway, this week he disappeared. For 4 or 5 days in a row, there was no sign of him, and we assumed he'd just moved on. But this afternoon, there he was in the shoe again! The kids were thrilled and we hope he decides to hang around this time, though it does meaning leaving old shoes on the porch!

2,758 total words today on my novel, which isn't too shabby, even if it's not as many as I'd hoped for. Too bad they seem rather disjointed at the moment, but, as I have to keep reminding myself, that's what revisions are for.

And speaking of revisions, I also did a revision on that midgrade short story, but ended up adding 500 words to it! Which makes it at least 180 words too long for my target market, and up to 800 words too long for many other markets! Yikes. I'm not sure there will ever be a final and definitive version of this story!

I've had so little writing time lately that my goal for today was to hole up in our excuse for an office and write for 10 hours. My husband found ways to keep the kids busy, taking them out for haircuts and ice cream, etc., but I had a hard time getting started. I didn't manage to get into the office until 2:00 pm, and didn't write a word of my midgrade novel unil 4:00! However, I've made pretty good progress since, adding another 2,000 words to the novel so far. That brings the total word count up to nearly 13,000. It's hardly the finished product I had hoped to have by this point in the year, but at least it's going somewhere! And something just happened in it that I wasn't expecting, so we'll see where that leads.

Also on my "to write" list is yet another revision of the midgrade short story I just revised earlier this month! It needs a change of focus to fit the market I hope to send it to soon, though I'm not sure yet how that might work. And on my "to read" list are 2 novels I just bought from Amazon.com: The City of Ember by Jeanne duPrau, and Winchell Mink: The Misadventure Begins by Steve Young. They both look fantastic in completely different ways.

My poem "High Dive" is up at Guideposts for Kids now--it was actually one of their two featured cover stories last week!

This past weekend, I went to a novel writing workshop led by D. Anne Love, author of The Puppeteer's Apprentice and many other novels. I got a lot out of it! Much of it was about plotting, which is probably my weakest point as a writer. I was worried that learning yet another plotting technique would only confuse me more, as I've already got too much conflicting information about plotting swimming around in my head, but was thrilled to discover that the "Writer's Journey" plot structure she outlined (based on a book by Christopher Vogler) fits the middle-grade novel I'm writing very well. Comparing the ideas I have for the novel now against that structure, I was able to figure out more of how the novel should develop. The young adult novel I have submitted, on the other hand, can't fit into that structure by a long stretch, as far as I can see...which would be fine with me, except that I wish it had some plot structure! ;-) Seriously, I'm realizing more & more how plot-deprived it is, but want to wait for feedback on it before I start rethinking it too much.

I also had a couple of really good writing-related conversations with other writers this week, one over lunch and one at the novel writing workshop. As my writer friends shared their own struggles and asked some really good, pointed questions about my work, they helped me clarify my writing priorities and to think of ways I can deepen and strengthen the projects I'm working on. Between those conversations and the workshop, I have pages full of new notes about my writing projects, and I'm feeling pumped!

Other than that, it's been so busy around here lately! Besides my writing workshop this weekend, my kids had 2 birthday parties to attend (one of which I also attended), we had a reunion of a graduate student reading group we were involved with in the mid-to-late 90s, and I'm currently taking a cake decorating class and also being dragged into scrapbooking by a couple of my writer friends. (I'm still iffy on the scrapbooking, but I like the company!) And as usual, the kids' summer activities (gymnastics, swimming, Vacation Bible School, etc.) are taking up lots of time and energy, as is the library's summer reading club. But it's all good!

Last weekend I went to another excellent SCBWI event, featuring Simon & Schuster editor Alyssa Eisner, author/writing instructor Kristi Holl, and author April Lurie, in a beautiful lakeside setting. The attendees were all writers, not illustrators, and as an icebreaker, we were asked to bring a sample of our writing, something to illustrate it, a true author bio, and a fake artist bio, with any sort of display we wanted. I went kind of nuts over all the cool paper choices at the craft stores, and ended up displaying my poem "Inside Out House" on a spiral-themed corkboard, with scenes from the switched inside and outside of the house depicted (thanks to what I termed my "gratuitous use of clipart") on either side of a tri-fold card. Everyone voted for their favorite display, and I ended up winning second prize, an autographed copy of Sid Fleischman's autobiography, The Abracadabra Kid. Cool! The event itself was, of course, informative and inspiring. Thanks to the writing exercises Kristi Holl shared, I also created a great new character while there, to go in another novel I want to write someday.

At the event, I bought April Lurie's novel Dancing in the Streets of Brooklyn. I started flipping through it the next day, and got so hooked I couldn't put it down until I'd read the whole thing! About the same thing happened to me a few days later, when I picked up Greg Leitich Smith's novel Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo at the bookstore and began to read it. I had to leave the store shortly afterwards, but felt compelled to buy the book so I could keep reading it. They're very different types of books, but both terrific!

Last week I finished a draft of a young adult short story I'd been stuck on for a couple of years--unfortunately, there's almost no market for YA short stories anymore, and this one is odd (as is typical for me...), so now I'm not sure what to do with it. But I guess I'll try sending it out this week. Meanwhile I'm starting to get antsy about the novel manuscript I sent out 3 months ago...& am thinking I need to focus on my midgrade novel again. Lately my kids have made it difficult for me to focus on anything! But I discovered when working on my "art" project for the SCBWI event last weekend that I worked really well in our "office." It's a spare bedroom/junk room that houses a desk but no computer at the moment (our only working computer is my laptop), and I've never actually written in there before (usually my laptop is truly on my lap, as it is while I'm typing this!), but I think I'll see about setting it up as my office. I need some change in perspective!

There's a photo from our January SCBWI retreat online at author Vivian Vande Velde's website. I'm second from the left in the back row.

I'm currently awaiting a packet of manuscripts from the San Gabriel Writer's League contest, as one of several judges in the children's writing category. This will be my first time to judge a contest. Should be interesting!

The retreat was great! It was indeed the energizing experience I was hoping for, and I'm newly excited about returning to some of my writing projects. The most rewarding moment of the weekend came when several critiquers, including two of the speakers at the retreat, gave me excellent and positive feedback on the midgrade manuscript I'd pretty much given up on after a negative critique at last year's retreat. Now I can't wait to jump back into it...as soon as I get my young adult novel-in-progress off my plate for a while, that is! My next writing goal is to get that novel in shape to submit, and then I'll focus on the midgrade manuscript for a while. At any rate, I enjoyed the retreat so much I've already printed out a registration form for a novel writing workshop in June!

I've just had a fantastic week and a half participating in a children's theatre production for the first time in about 20 years. I performed in a Creative Arts Theatre & School alumni production of the kids' show Free to Be...You and Me, which was truly a blast, despite a very hectic schedule with one week of rehearsals and three performances, all mixed in around the holidays and family visits out of town. (Kudos to my wonderful husband for playing Mr. Mom much of the time while I did this!) There's even a small picture of me with many other cast members in this week's Dallas Observer.

And now it's time to turn my sights back to "real life" and also to my writing. I think the theatrical experience will prove to rejuvenate my writing, as it got me directly involved in relating stories to kids (the real kids in the audience, including my own kids, who loved it), showed me how much children's theatre really did influence my writing, and also reminded me once again how it felt to be a kid! It also reminded me, at a time when things had begun to dry up for me creatively, how much more to life there can be than the dull daily grind, and gave me a fresh dose of the joy of creativity. Now I'm raring to go! Which is good, because I have a weekend writing conference/retreat coming up in less than 2 weeks! I'll be going to the Austin chapter of SCBWI's "Mind, Body, Pen" retreat, with editors, authors, and illustrators in attendance, and it promises to be another energizing experience (and thanks again to my husband for covering home base while I go!).

Next stop: the January 2004 Austin SCBWI retreat. I have to get a writing sample out for critique by tomorrow and am still going back and forth about what to send. I've had so much critiqued already that nothing stands out--I'm not sure whether to send my best work or something I'm really stuck on and need help with. I'm also not even sure what type of manuscript to send--a picture book, novel excerpt, or even my previously lambasted chapter book manuscript (I still keep hoping it can be salvaged!). In any case, the retreat should be great, with Harper Collins editor Rosemary Brosnan, novelist Vivian Vande Velde, and picture book author Marsha Hayles. I can't wait! And in completely unrelated news, last week I won a really cool Panasonic electronics package valued at over $1,000...I can't wait for that to come, either!

I sent my short story "Ending Some of It" to another contest today. Meanwhile, I have one day to figure out whether or not to do NaNoWriMo this year. It was great for me last year, but so far this year, I don't have a well-formed idea to take off running with on Saturday. The complicating factor is the rule that you must create a new novel project for NaNoWriMo, rather than working on something you've already started. I have plenty of projects I've already started that I'd like to work more on, but nothing new that's really calling my name. I have a few backburner ideas that would require too much research, back story, or whatever to blast through a quick draft of. I had one other idea I thought I could do, but so far I have too many conflicting ideas for it, and can't settle on the main character, and without a clear idea of my main character, there is no story! So, we'll see. I want to participate because it's so much fun and so energizing, but I don't think I'd be energized by working daily on an idea I didn't care about.

My light verse writing has paid off again... Yesterday I found out I won the grand prize--a $100 gift certificate to Savers thrift stores--in the Savers.com haiku and limerick contest. Too funny! I submitted 2 haikus & 5 limericks, but it was one of the limericks that won. I was shocked when they told me they'd received 500 entries!
(My winning limerick was:
My boyfriend is cool as can be,
and awfully smart as you'll see.
He does me great favors
by shopping at Savers,
so he can spend more bucks on me!)

I returned from vacation last night & was thrilled to find another envelope from Guideposts for Kids in my mailbox, with a bright yellow "YES!" sticker on it. This one was an acceptance for my poem "High Dive." I'm thrilled to get some good news after a dry spell--I guess this is a good way to, er..., dive back in (groan)!

Whew! I read 4 books this week--the 3 mentioned in my last post, and also If I Live to Be 100: Lessons from the Centenarians by Neenah Ellis (based on an NPR radio series), which gave me a lot of food for thought. Between all of those books and the ones I've read to my kids, I finished 2 more 400-minute reading logs for the library summer reading club, which ends tomorrow. I also subbed one of my short stories for adults yesterday. So now I have very little hanging over my head to keep me from working on my novel(s)! I did read through nearly all of my Chasing Monday novel this week and was a bit horrified by its remaining need for plot development...which may be why I buried my nose in other books all week! But now I must get back to it.

I got a couple of submissions out this week--a picture book manuscript and a short story. Now I'm trying to revise one other picture book and a YA novel, and neither one is going as smoothly as I'd wish! It's so hard to know how to change a story to make it better, especially when it's not a matter of just polishing or tightening the words, but really requies a plot makeover. In both cases I have some idea what's wrong and what kinds of things to work on, but can't figure out the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how to work on those things. Any little change starts a chain reaction that affects the rest of the book, so I'm trying to think everything through thoroughly first, and that's easier said than done!

Meanwhile, I've also been trying to do some reading, especially with the library's summer reading club still in full swing. I read Gail Giles' Dead Girls Don't Write Letters a couple of days ago, and today I checked out Linda Sue Park's When My Name Was Keoko and Stephanie S. Tolan's Surviving the Applewhites, as well as James McBride's memoir The Color of Water. I read fast, usually a book in a day, but how I'm going to read all these while also writing a couple of books and watching 2 small and very active children all day, I'm not quite sure!

I finally got the "Mom's Chair" essay revised and sent back out to Welcome Home tonight. I hope they'll like the revision! It feels so good to get it done, and also to possibly make two sales from one article! Now I need to get back to the books I'm working on writing, though I've also got a lot going on at home right now. Including, unfortunately, a broken air conditioner that's been leaking through the downstairs ceiling, so we had to turn it off for tonight, which is quite unpleasant in July in Texas!

I was surprised last week when Welcome Home magazine contacted me about publishing my "Mom's Chair" essay, which I'd submitted to them 17 months ago! I had eventually assumed they weren't interested, and recently sold it to a Chocolate for a Woman's Soul anthology. However, the anthology guidelines allow me to sell it elsewhere as long as I don't sell it to a competing anthology, so this should work out. Welcome Home wants it revised with a somewhat different focus, and they need it fairly soon to get it into the issue where it will be most relevant, so I have a lot of work to do! And not much time to do it, with summer keeping me incredibly busy. But it's neat that I may get an unexpected sale! I have some other pieces I need to get circulating again, too.

My silly poem, "Inside Out House," is up on the Guideposts for Kids site! I sold it to them nine months ago, and while it was my sixth acceptance, it was my first sale for actual money instead of just copies or gift certificates. And since I sold that one, I've sold six other pieces for pay (and one more for copies and a gift certificate)! The funny thing is, without knowing they were about to publish the poem this week, I was just polishing up a new poem to submit to them today or Monday! We'll see how that goes.