My humor article, "Fast Food for Thought," came out this week in the June 2003 issue of ByLine. They misspelled my name (Allison instead of Alison), but I was happy to see it in print, anyway! I haven't yet started that 40-day novel writing challenge I was talking about, but I may do it as a June challenge instead, with the hope of finishing my draft by the 4th of July.

I'm thinking of challenging myself to finish a draft of one of my novels by June 30th. That would be 40 days, starting tomorrow. It will already be 3 years in June that I've been working on it! But this June will be a difficult month to do that, with my kids' summer schedules. I may not have any daytime hours to write, so my family would have to be very supportive of my writing in the evenings! We'll see what happens. I seem to work better sometimes with a challenge and a deadline.

I went to the 2003 Austin SCBWI Editor Spring Thing conference today. It was another good conference and a positive experience for me all around. Helped me get back into a writing frame of mind, too!

Now I have a lot of thinking to do about my two very different novel projects, and I'm not sure which one I need to work on more! Ideally I'd like to have both ready for submission by the end of this year, but that may be unrealistic. And I'm even beginning to rethink the whole plot of the one I already have drafted! Eek.

I'm still alive! And I got amazing news today. Based on a few sample chapters, an editor at a major publishing house wants to see my whole YA novel! It's the novel I have a complete draft of, but the editor doesn't want to see it for a while due to her other obligations, so now I have to figure out whether to do the heavy revisions I was considering before sending it, or just to send her what I have! I've had major, major writer's block lately, so this certainly helps to jump start my interest in writing again! As should the conference I'll be attending this weekend. Anyway, I've been jumping up & down today!