Alison's Journal

Yesterday I woke up from a detailed and complex dream in which I was acting in a play about a teenage brother and sister. I had a line in my head I had to write down. As I continued drifting in & out of sleep, I kept waking up to write more and more. What I was writing was not what I had dreamed about, but was inspired by thoughts that came out of the dream. I ended up with 544 words towards what seems to be a somewhat edgy short story for an older YA audience. Right after I'd sworn to give up writing short stories, and one day after I'd decided maybe I should start writing more for the 10-14 age range than for older teens! Argh. A story like this seems almost completely unmarketable, but I feel compelled to at least finish it & see what I end up with. (I suppose it could be fodder for a novel if I added a lot of subplots, but that wasn't how it struck me, and I already have too many novels on the back burner!)

This week I finally bought the DVD of Where the Wild Things Are and Other Maurice Sendak Stories. Four of the stories have songs sung by Carole King that are positively infectious--we saw One Was Johnny at a library storytime a few years ago & the song has taken up residence in my brain ever since! My 4-year-old, Kyle, is particularly entranced with In the Night Kitchen, so we've been reading the book of that lately, also. It was also one of my favorites as a child and it makes hardly any sense at all--either that helps explain my love for absurd humor, or my love for absurd humor helps explain why I liked the book! One thing I've noticed is that 4 of the 6 stories on the Maurice Sendak video have characters threatening to eat (or at least cook) other characters, and in one case it actually happens. I'm not sure what to infer from that, but I found it interesting! (Now I don't feel so weird for telling my kids I'm going to gobble them up!)

I'm busy this week preparing writing contest entries and reading picture books for my picture book workshop. Once I'm done with all that, I've got two novels set aside to read: Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, & Crown Me! by Kathryn Lay. I'm eager to get to those!