I tried the lyric-writing exercise, & actually came up with something! I started with a story I didn't think I knew enough about yet, & had no idea what a song for it could be like. The next thing I knew, I had lyrics to a song. The first verse goes, "Jill, Jill, who's the pretty one now? Jill, Jill, who's the smart one now? Who's getting the accolades? Just look at the mess you've made." I envisioned it being sung by a pop punk girl band, but the tune in my head was vaguely reminiscent of a song I finally recognized as the 70s song "Rock On" by David Essex (you know, "still looking for that blue jean, baby queen, prettiest girl I ever seen," etc.), but faster. Odd, but I was glad I managed to do it! I haven't attempted lyrics for my other stories yet, but I did compile a list of all of my novel ideas and ongoing projects, along with a summary for each, and then did the same for my picture book and short story ideas. It's the first time I've ever written up some of that information and definitely the first time I've had it in one place and easily accessible, so I felt really good about it.

I did not feel so good about not placing in the SmartWriters.com W.I.N. contest. I didn't expect to place so I didn't expect to be upset about it. And indeed I was not upset about my YA entry not being a finalist. In that case, though, I knew my approximately 1,000-word sample didn't fully represent the actual 2,500-word opening chapter, & I know the manuscript does need more work, & I've already had outside validation that the novel has promise. It was the picture book category that got to me, I think because the picture book runners-up and honorable mentions were all described as needing more work. If my submissions didn't even place, how much work must they need? Sigh. My guess is that most of my picture books are just too quiet or too ordinary to stand out, so rewriting probably won't be enough to save them.

I half-thought I just throw in the towel, thinking how bad my chances will be in the slush piles of the world. But today, I knew I really must be a writer. My husband and I were arguing and I felt quite horrible about the whole situation, but even in the midst of it I found myself wondering how I could use it in a story! And then made a note to use a related fight in my next YA novel! Crazy, huh? I also finally came up with a working title, This is the End, for the next YA, and a probable name, Jessie, for the main character. I'm still working on the names of the other major characters--or rather, which character should have which name! But of course, this is not the project I mean to be working on right now, so these are just notes!

Weird idea of the day: I was listening to an album (The Connells - Fun & Games), & started thinking about how albums are usually made up of a number of songs that each tell a different story (concept albums notwithstanding). I thought, I have so many stories to tell, I almost wish I could just make an album of them instead of having to write so many different books! As it is, I tend to be drawn more to character studies, moments of insight, & snapshots or glimpses of people's lives than in typical plots with a lot of action--action is possibly my weakest point as a writer (and, one might argue, as a person)! So then I thought, why not? The yet-unnamed protagonist of my next & yet-unnamed YA project is a lyricist, so it might be good practice, as a writing exercise, to write poems or lyrics to capture the essence of each of the stories I want to write. Besides, I have some extra time to kill while waiting for the winners of the 2005 SmartWriters.com W.I.N. contest to be announced! (Just don't follow up to see if I actually DO this exercise! Like I said, action is not my strong suit!)

I read an article today that questioned the purpose of children's novels on depressing subjects & made the common suggestion that such books are more popular with teachers or librarians than with kids. I realized that even though I adore humor and nearly always choose comedy movies over other types, some of the children's books that meant the most to me as a child, the ones that stayed with me over the years, were the ones on depressing or difficult subjects. There was Constance C. Greene's Beat the Turtle Drum, about a girl whose younger sister dies in an accident the same week she finally gets a horse for a week; Zibby Oneal's The Language of Goldfish, about a girl facing a mental breakdown as she enters her teens; my favorite novel from age 13 on, Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light, which deals with death, grief, and depression in a hopeful way; and Britt Singer's edgy YA The Petting Zoo, about a young woman trying to stop her boyfriend from killing himself. I still own all four of those today, even though I have very few other books from my childhood. Something about them resonated with me, not in a weird voyeuristic way, but in trying to make sense of the world. That makes me feel better about my own forays into darker material, although of course I love my fun stuff, too!

This article also suggested that kids need to know they don't have to solve their problems alone, unlike book characters who find themselves isolated with a great deal of trouble. While I think that's a valid point, & editors do insist that protagonists solve their own problems rather than being rescued by some deus ex machina solution, the characters in many children's books solve their problems with the help of others, whether it's a team of kid detectives working together, or a depressed character reaching out for help in the end instead of retreating further into herself or himself. Vicky in A Ring of Endless Light is helped by relationships with both people and dolphins! I think one way a character may solve his or her own problem is by choosing to request or accept help. My characters tend to get advice and insight from people around them, whether they solicit it or not (and I do worry editors will balk at this, if it happens too much!), but what each character must do alone, and what we all must do alone, is come to a point of decision. In my film classes, we were taught that the narrative arc of a traditional story is driven by the decisions the characters make. Others can advise us or give us a hand, but only we can decide which advice or path to take, and the choices we make can determine whether or not we live happily ever after! Sure, I think it's important for kids to know, for instance, that they don't have to suffer in silence when picked on by bullies, but many kids do deal with a lot alone, and I don't think literature would do them favors by ignoring problems, or assuming that everyone has the same resources. I also think that those of us who have hope, and believe that we do not have to suffer alone, need to try even harder to get our hopeful messages out there for those kids who are struggling with existential worries and drawn to books that deal with tough issues.

All that said, I agree it's often preposterous how many tragedies kids in books (and animal kids in Disney movies!) are sometimes confronted with, and how many ways writers and filmmakers concoct to get kids into situations where they're on their own. The Lemony Snicket books poke ironic fun at all that, and Louis Sachar also swipes at the depressing book phenomenon in one of his hilarious Wayside School books. I'd also recommend that folks sick of depressing stories read Gordan Korman's funny midgrade novel No More Dead Dogs! The protagonist of that one is sick of them, too.

Song in head: "Fixing a Hole" by The Beatles

Mood: Optimistic

Drinks I've won today: 1-liter Dr Pepper from Dr Pepper bottle cap, 2-liter Pepsi Lime from Call Upon Yoda contest online

I've been drinking a ton of Slurpees lately, for two reasons: (1) I love Slurpees, & (2) to get "free" iTunes downloads. Of course the code-laden Slurpees cost 40 cents more than just buying a download, but downloads alone aren't nearly as slushy and refreshing. I think I love Slurpees especially much for the nostalgia factor, because I grew up a block from a 7-11 and used to walk there all the time.

The iTunes are giving me a nostalgia fix, too. I recently came across a whole bunch of my old 45 rpm singles, some of which are embarrassing now. I realized my friends and I used to buy singles the way we used to buy...well, t-shirt transfers, if anyone else is old enough to remember flipping through all the transfer displays at the mall t-shirt stores! It wasn't that we found something we were crazy about and had to buy it; we would pick out something just to buy something, just because we were at the store. Hence my ownership of singles by artists such as Eddie Money and Donnie Iris! I've thought about music in terms of whole albums for years since then, but with the iTunes, I'm back to singles again and having a blast picking them out. Old songs, new songs, one-hit wonder songs, etc. I'm also trying to get most of my old music transferred to the right format for my iPod, so I'm listening to albums I've neglected for years...A Flock of Seagulls, anyone?!

More quotes about seizing the day, which seems to be my theme o' the week:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." --Mark Twain

"Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living." --Jim Elliot

"Get busy living, or get busy dying." --The Shawshank Redemption

So it's the longest day of the year. Which ideally, would be a perfect day to seize, if I could figure out how to seize the day. If I can't Carpe Diem, I may have to just Carpe Dig'Em--seize the frog!



(And yes, I spent at least 15 minutes of the day I was supposed to be seizing making that little picture...but it's something I've joked about doing probably since Dead Poets Society came out in 1989 and made everyone say "Carpe Diem" all the time.)

Weirdness abounds. As does car trouble. I wrote a humor essay in...oh, 1992 or so, about our seemingly endless bouts of car trouble, but they amazingly did end. (Psst, want to publish it?? It got honorable mention in a contest, but I've never found a market for it.) So I hope we're not starting another story like that! We're having our car towed today from a store parking lot, for failure of the alternator belt we just got fixed. I assume it wasn't fixed right the first time around, considering that the brand new belt is now ripped, curled, & generally mangled!

I finally had a chance to read Storky last night. Subtitled: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl. At first I was happy with the ending. Then, pathetically, I found myself thinking, "So...why does a 9th grader need to get the girl, anyway?" I was jealous! OK, I got the guy between 9th & 10th grades, but it only lasted a week, and then he stood me up on my birthday. After that...let's just say it was a long time until I got the guy again. You see why I write YA fiction? I guess I haven't quite gotten over my teen years! But I liked them. Meanwhile, this whole grown-up thing is seeming like a raw deal to me. I'm feeling the need to change things. Not to stop writing, but to write more. To live more fully. To take the words I've been quoting to myself for years and make them mean something in my life. Like these words in Tennyson's poem Ulysses: "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life." And these: "Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world." (Easier said than done!)

Yesterday: 16 years since I met my husband. We met at a Jason's Deli, eating with mutual friends, so now we go to Jason's Deli every June 11th. Their broccoli cheese soup is very good.

Today: Church (good sermon on Narnia, C.S. Lewis, & not being alone with our pain), lunch at McDonald's (what, no broccoli?), saw The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D (poorly reviewed, but perfect for my 6-year-old).

Tomorrow: Too soon to know.

Been thinking about: Closure. It only recently occurred to me that we aren't guaranteed closure about anything. For some reason I'd always kind of assumed I'd eventually get closure about various incidents, relationships, etc., or that confusing things that have happened would start to make sense at some point...and suddenly realized that may never happen, and in most cases probably won't. Shouldn't be a revolutionary thought, but somehow it was. I may explore that a bit in my next YA novel. That is, if I ever get even the least bit of closure on my other novels-in-progress!

It's Summer Reading Club time at the library again, which means our house is even more filled with books than usual. We went to the library last night & came home with 22 children's books, 21 of which were mainly for my kids, and 1 of which is for me: M.T. Anderson's Whales on Stilts! It's truly hilarious--I think I'll have to buy it. Considering my love of wacky surrealism for kids, I'm surprised I don't write more of it. My beet and bubble gum novels lean that way, but always stop short of actual surrealism, and seem to get less wacky as they go. I wonder if I'm playing it too safe, or dull. Hmm.

What a freaky weird week it's been. After my husband filled out the paperwork for a new job on Tuesday, the job was eliminated on Thursday! It ended before it began, sending us from celebration and preparation to stunned disbelief. Saturday we went to my hometown for a night just to get away--and get some babysitting from my parents. (Got to see Star Wars Episode III, anyway.) Tonight we got home, where I found another rejection letter in the mailbox. Whee. Tomorrow our older son starts Magic Camp--maybe by the end of the week, he'll be able to wave a wand and make everything better! Well, at least I got my favorite foods this weekend.

I got a rejection yesterday on something I had high hopes for (though admittedly, my hopes had been dwindling). So I guess it's fitting that today we're celebrating Oscar the Grouch's birthday, which we learned about from Sesame Street Magazine last year. I have Oscar cups, streamers with Oscar (among others) on them, an ugly green tablecloth & napkins, green silly string, & Oscar goody bags I'll fill with sour gummi bugs, toy traschcans filled with candy trash, "Mean Green" blow pops, & Shrek/swamp-themed M&Ms. Last year we read a book about Oscar, made Oscar crafts (green pom-poms with googly eyes glued into film canister trashcans), played with "goop" (cornstarch and water--try it), and mixed up a dirt & worms snack (chocolate pudding with crushed Oreo "dirt" and gummi worms) in some toy-sized plastic trashcans I found. We also watched "I Love Trash" and danced to "Doin' the Grouch" on our Sesame Street videos, followed by a showing of Elmo in Grouchland. I assume we'll do something similar this year, but I hope we can skip the craft and do an Oscar game online instead. And in the past year I've gotten an Oscar shirt, socks, and fuzzy slippers for myself, as well as a stuffed Oscar toy! Last year my older son also wrapped up a box of trash to give Oscar as a gift...when Oscar didn't show, we dumped it in the trash where we hoped it would get to him! But really, we only love trash and grouchiness one day a year. I'm normally partial to Ernie (on Sesame Street, that is...for regular Muppets, it's Beaker all the way!).

So, which Muppet character are you? Today I came out as Elmo, which made me feel a bit ill, even if it did say I am cute and everyone loves me. Then I tried again with a few different (but still accurate) answers, and came out as Gonzo! At least that goes with my "inventive duck" and "freeform writer" answers from my May 7 entry. Might also explain why my 4-year-old thinks it's funny to call me "Big Nose," when I didn't think my nose was that big! (And re: "inventive duck," note that my 6-year-old just got an award for being the most "inventive" in kindergarten.)

Wow, the 26th was definitely memorable, and not just in the ways I expected! First, my husband accepted a new job that morning! Then, we had already planned to go to Galveston (on the Texas coast) for a short family vacation, but once we had our van all packed up and ready to go, it wouldn't start! We figured we'd just jump start it with our Mazda, but it didn't work. Not only that, but a belt broke on the Mazda while we were revving it, sending bits of rubber flying across the driveway! Eventually, we had the van towed to a car repair shop. We thought we might rent a car for our vacation (our hotel room was pre-paid and non-refundable), but the repair shop workers said they'd move us to the front of the line and get our van fixed & out of there within a couple of hours. Instead, my husband had to wait there for five hours before the van was fixed! We ended up leaving town in the early evening and not reaching Galveston until 11:30 pm! The kids woke up when we arrived there and we let them stay up a bit, even to 2 am or so...so it was definitely an unusual day all the way around! But the trip was a good one, and though storms were predicted for the whole weekend, it never rained or stormed until we were on our way home last night. (Of course, now we have to get the Mazda fixed!)

And more good news, besides the job! I submitted two pieces to Blooming Tree Press for their upcoming Summer Shorts anthology, and both were accepted! One is a reprint of my "High Dive" poem, and the other is my short story, "Owen Nolan's Square-Wheeled Bike." Hooray!

My datebook entry from 22 years ago today: History exam, School out 12:30, Tap recital, Musical Theatre recital, Saw Return of the Jedi with David, Kristin, Pat, & Chase.

Just ran across that old datebook last night & found it oddly relevant, since the Jedi have returned again! That was a pretty busy day, but today may be even busier or more memorable...will update later once I see if it is so!

What I'm Reading & Watching: I just got Daniel Pinkwater's The Artsy Smartsy Club and Alison McGhee's Mrs. Watson Wants Your Teeth. I have Debra Garfinkle's Storky: How I Lost My Nickname and Won the Girl on order, along with the Season 1 DVDs of The Adventures of Pete & Pete. I haven't seen many movies lately. We rented Chicken Run for a family movie night this week and Primer a couple of weeks ago (my first thought was that engineers in Dallas either dress much more formally than engineers in Austin, or the director just assumed that's how they would dress), but otherwise my husband & I have mainly been watching documentary-type shows. We watched the show Star Wars: Empire of Dreams (an odd title, I thought, given that the Empire is the bad guys), the Word Wars documentary about tournament Scrabble players, a show called Brainman about a man with savant skills in dealing with numbers, and a couple of episodes of Mythbusters. I've also been watching several end-of-the-year school programs, with at least one more to go!

I was looking at some old image files on my computer, and ran across this fortune I got in a cookie a year and a half ago, which I'd thought was worth taking a picture of:


Still waiting.... (Editors? Agents? Bueller? Anyone?)

Meanwhile, I can't believe there's a new character on Cyberchase (my kids' favorite show) named Creech. Creech was one of the names we joked about naming our child before we had kids! Ours was a boys' name, Creech Trantham, but this Creech is a girl with some lovely antennae. Other boys' names we claimed to be considering included Stranphthner, Tavist D (after the medication), Bruceville Eddy (from a highway sign), Dylan Bob (try this with Dellenbaugh), and the Biblical name Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. For girls, we rejected Abnera DeWaynette, Ornith Corinth, Clabbie Klempenstadt, Lacy Lakeview (another highway sign), Prunellabelle Stanielle, the Biblical name Oholibamah, and Onkaly Muldween. Think we need to have more kids so we can use them? Actually, one of our names, Pug DeMoss, has become a crucial character (or really, a family of characters--Pug DeMoss, Sr., Jr., III, and IV) in my Purple Panic novel! Guess I'd better hurry and finish the novel before a TV show uses that one, too.

Happy Mother's Day, whether you're a mother or not! Two cute things from my life as a mother:

My 6-year-old, Ryan, got to have his own crazy hair on Friday (see his brother's look in my April 26 entry). For Field Day at his school, all the kindergarteners made purple tie-dyed shirts and sprayed their hair purple. No spikes, though...darn!


And my 4-year-old, Kyle, had the sweetest thing planned for Mother's Day (which also made me sad because I hate to see him hope for something and be disappointed when it doesn't work). Knowing that popcorn is one of my favorite snacks, Kyle took it upon himself to plant a popcorn kernel in the backyard the other day, and has been watering & checking on it in hopes of growing a popcorn plant for me! That makes me teary-eyed just thinking about it! (Though never fear, he did get to give me some pretty flowers in a pot that he painted in preschool. Ryan gave me a box that he painted and decorated at school, and both kids made me cute pictures and cards.)

Someone just pointed to me this quiz about what type of rubber duck you are. I am apparently an:


Er...I think that's another way of saying I'm an "odd duck"! But I can live with that. And inventing stories (often odd ones) is indeed what I do. Along the same lines, the What's Your Writing Style? quiz told me:


"Individualistic with sense for the different and challenging, Walt Whitman and his poetry lacking meter and rhyme is just what the doctor ordered. You're quick to write something that the rest of the world doesn't accept as poetry, quick to separate yourself from the average joe.* An author with a true sense of self, you have confidence in your abilities and aren't afraid to show it." Again with the odd duck stuff! Not that that's news to me.

I have no writing news. No acceptances. No rejections. No new publications. No breakthroughs. One new submission, but that's not exactly news. Is no news good news? I don't know, but even if it is, I'd still rather have some more obvious good news!

* Note the blatant use of what my friend Joe Kissell calls "Joeism," as seen in discriminatory phrases such as average Joe, Joe Schmo, Joe Blow, etc. That example even puts "joe" in lower case, making the name so average it's generic. (And despite my individualism, I admit that my use of an asterisk in a blog entry is shamelessly stolen--er, I mean, flatteringly imitated--from Cynthia Leitich Smith. I'd love it if online help-style pop-ups were available for parenthetical remarks and links, but in their absence, a good old-fashioned footnote does the job!)

Typical bloggy stuff:

Mood: Frustrated...can't make any progress today on Purple Panic manuscript. Even chewing purple gum (Juicy Fruit grapermelon) didn't help. Brainstormed ideas for the next plot direction but couldn't wrap my head around it.

Song in head:"I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts" by X, oddly battling it out with "Down in the Lowlands" by Charlie Peacock. That's how confused my mind is right now!

Last person I spoke to: My 4-year-old

Last person I wrote an online message to: Jen, who just found out her forthcoming YA book Golden was mentioned as an exciting debut novel in the UK publication The Bookseller--wow!

Immediate plans: To take the kids to IHOP for dinner, so I won't have to hear them ask about it 7,342 more times in the next week. Don't ask me how IHOP became the most exciting restaurant in the world to them, but apparently it is. I guess they've never gotten over the time we all hopped to IHOP in Galveston, TX!

Last movie I saw: Holes on DVD two nights ago--my husband hadn't seen it yet

Next movie I will see: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which we're planning to see on opening night tomorrow. The advance reviews are only so-so (54% positive at the moment on Rotten Tomatoes, which they consider more rotten than fresh), so they probably ruined the story, but I still love the book too much not to see the movie.

I've already shared this elsewhere, but I just love this picture of my 4-year-old decked out for Crazy Hair Day at his preschool yesterday. We happened to have this book at home (we seem to have books for every occasion), so he took it to school and his teacher read it to the class. So what do you think--is he ready to join a band? Actually, I'm not sure the world is ready for him yet!

Does it count as a brush with fame if my brother is on TV? He does background extra parts all the time, but tomorrow, April 25, is the night he's a featured extra on NBC's Las Vegas (9pm/8pm central), and throws a wad of $100 bills with his picture on them to create a distraction. I don't think he has any lines, but he does have a character name (Vic "Vid Kid" Kenner), so that's cool! Note that it is rated TV-14 (parents strongly cautioned).

In other news, I got a wonderfully helpful critique on my YA novel from a published author this week. I've been stymied on revisions for it for 2+ years now. Lately I'd been thinking it might be dead in the water, or would at least require a complete overhaul to make it into a very different book. But this critiquer gave me some insights that were truly eye-opening, and now I have hope for the book again! I kind of expected her to tell me it was a nice try but not interesting enough to spend more time on, but to my surprise she volunteered that she thought it was a story worth telling, and her understanding of the heart of the story actually clarified it for me! Now I'm thinking that it doesn't need to be completely ripped to shreds, but rather strengthened and chiseled into shape throughout, and the critique gave me some great ideas for improving it. Considering that I'm 2/3 done with my midgrade novel, I'm thrilled to think that I may be able to have both of these novels completed by the end of the year!

And naturally, we went to Dairy Queen for Shakespeare's birthday yesterday (see the last part of my April 10 entry). I got a yummy banana split Blizzard, but the code on my cup didn't get me an instant win in their online scratch & win game, and horror of horrors, we didn't think to read any poetry.

According to my web visit counter, someone found my site today by searching for the phrase "bunnies are terrible pets." How odd! What they found was my article "Rabbit Fever," but I don't think my rabbit Pablo (the tan lump between the boys) would agree that bunnies are terrible pets.

I can't sleep lately. I keep staying up until 3 am. I aim to stop doing that, but meanwhile I blog.

An old friend sent me a link to a dryer lint page, saying he thought I'd appreciate it. Hmm...what does that say about me?! (Not that I don't enjoy removing the dryer lint from the lint screen, because I do.)

I thought of another favorite song, which I considered my theme song in the early 90s, while working at a brain-sucking data entry job and wishing to be a writer instead. At the time, I wrote, "She tried taking her notebook to work, but the ink curdled up on the page and ran off, spilling to the ground like so many teardrops." A little melodramatic, perhaps, but The Innocence Mission song "Notebook" captured my feelings perfectly. (You'll have to scroll down or search on that page to find it--and the lyrics are wrong there, but less wrong than on the other sites that purport to list them.) Coolly, I got to thank singer/songwriter Karen Peris for it in person when I saw the band play in Dallas once.

A few of the many favorites that didn't make it into my Blogger profile:

TV Show: The Adventures of Pete & Pete - it's a kid/teen show from the mid-90s, though I didn't see it until 2002 or 2003. It's surreal, brilliant, & hilarious. It also had some amazing guest stars. I was thrilled to discover today that they're finally releasing the first season on DVD next month. Another good Pete & Pete site is here.

Song: I can rarely name a favorite song, but the Flaming Lips song "Do You Realize?" stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it, and was the first song I downloaded from iTunes (even if it did later become part of a car commercial!). The first songs I downloaded were a rather odd, mostly moody collection...see a screenshot. Since then I've mainly been relying on my husband to convert our CDs to digital files.

Play: I already cheated and listed my favorite play (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead) under books. It's intelligent, witty, and shows Hamlet from a different perspective. My high school made it to the state one-act play competition with it my senior year. Unfortunately, I was only an alternate, but did get to play Ophelia in one performance, & got to go on all the trips as a crew member.

Musical: Merrily We Roll Along, a Sondheim musical that apparently bombed badly on Broadway, but blew me away when I saw it at UT in about 1988. The UT production had been brought back for a second run due to popular demand. I'm not sure it would resonate as much for people without theatre backgrounds, but the way it traveled backwards in time, with reprises occurring before the original songs and the characters growing less jaded and more hopeful as they got younger, amazed me, and the female lead did a particularly outstanding job. My favorite musical to perform in (a joke, since I can't sing!) has been Free to Be...You and Me, which I did in a repertory group as a teen and got to do again with some of the same people in 2004. (In the teeny tiny black & white picture on the lower ride side of this page, I'm the teeny tiny person seated at the bottom right.)

Color: Cobalt blue, blue violet, or other similar deep, rich shades of blue and purple. It kills me that Crayola retired the violet blue crayon a few years back. I recently ran across an old one and still thought it was gorgeous.

Restaurant: Don Juan's Romantic Mexican Food, a hole-in-the-wall fast food place in Grand Prairie, TX I've been going to since I was 2. Their bean burritos are possibly my favorite food on earth. Also Candlelite Inn in Arlington, TX, another place I've been going to that long. Many people think of it as a Mexican restaurant or steak place, but I mainly go there for spaghetti with meat sauce. (Check out their pralines, too.) I'd prefer either of these places to an upscale gourmet restaurant any day! In Austin, I'm fond of Chuy's and Kerbey Lane Cafe. (And I don't eat a lot of burgers, but the best are at Snuffer's in Dallas.)

Place: One of the best days in my life was a day I spent all alone in Cardiff, Wales in August 1988. The weather was perfect (odd for Wales, I know), the scenery was beautiful, and I didn't have a care in the world. I still want to "stand on some hillside in Wales" with my husband someday. I also love New Mexico. And Six Flags Over Texas! (And, though it's been a while, I also like being on stage, or backstage.)

I've decided to enable commenting in my journal, so people can leave comments, which scares me somewhat! So please play nice, so I don't have to delete comments or turn them off. And please try to keep any posts kid-friendly. Thanks!

Thursday I visited the Texas Library Association (TLA) conference exhibits with a friend who founded the Austin chapter of SCBWI. I bought a great new book on space (right up my older son's alley!) from Austin author Jane Ann Peddicord, and picked up way more publisher catalogs than I could reasonably carry (especially several blocks back to the car), and my hands and arms are still a bit sore from the bags!

It was interesting to see what's coming out from all the publishers this year, though I also found it daunting. Ever since I looked at all those books and started looking at the catalogs, I've been questioning what I write and whether I'm concentrating on the right things. My quirky stuff doesn't seem quirky enough; my realistic stuff doesn't seem edgy enough (nor do I want it to be edgy). I actually started thinking my best chance for a book contract would be a rhyming picture book, even though they're supposedly the hardest books to sell! I have had success with rhyme thus far. I'm not really giving up on my other stuff, though. In fact, I aim to be a prolific writer because there are so many stories I want to tell, so I need to get cracking!

By the way, I edited my second old journal entry from my last post to add a photo I just found that was taken the same week I wrote it, at a mini-party I threw for getting a decent grade. This has inspired me to write a list of Unusual Things I've Thrown Parties For:

· Getting a B+ when I expected an F
· Groundhog Day Eve
· Thanksgiving (not a turkey dinner, just a pre-holiday party)
· Advent
· Pre-Columbus Day
· Oscar the Grouch's Birthday (June 1)
· My kids' half-birthdays

We also go to Dairy Queen every year on Shakespeare's birthday (April 23). We celebrate both Shakespeare and his contemporary Spenser, whose exact birthdate is unknown and who wrote The Faerie Queene (well, where else would you celebrate a poet whose most famous poem title rhymes with Dairy Queen?!).

Author Linda Joy Singleton has been including some of her high school journal entries in her blog--from the same day of the year but many years earlier. I thought it was such a fun idea I decided to see if I could find anything of my own to post. I found very little that was actually from April of any year, and most of what I did find was too long-winded (pages long!), too boring, too personal or embarrassing, or some combination of those. But I found one from 22 years ago today that is kind of amusing, and slightly embarrassing but not TOO embarrassing. (I promise I didn't always use that many exclamation points.) The most potentially embarrassing thing about it is that all these years later, I'm currently on an e-mail list with 2 of the people mentioned in the entry! But I assume they'd find it humorous.

It seems like I wrote much more in the fall than I ever did in the spring. So, in light of what I wrote yesterday about autobiographical writing, I thought I'd share this entry I found from October 1985. (I don't believe I ever really wanted to write an autobiography, though! I was probably being slightly facetious.)

I've heard that most first novels are autobiographical. So far, none of mine have been. It would be difficult to find many traces of my life in any of the three novels I've written significant portions of so far, or most of the others I've jotted ideas for. However, the one I've been contemplating lately (the YA that would involve a death) would include incidents inspired by events in my own life. I don't want to write about the actual events from my life, or the actual people I knew, partly because that would be weird and seems dangerous, and partly because the actual events were too bizarre and convoluted to be believed in fiction (Greg Leitich Smith has a great blog entry about this). But it's still a very difficult thing to approach, and it's hard to figure out how much of real life I would need to include, or what the most important elements of the story are. I want to include some things I actually wrote back then, because I don't think I could do a better job now of getting those raw, powerful emotions onto paper, especially in the voice of a teenager. But that makes it tricky, because then the character would have to face situations that are somewhat similar to mine without being the same. I also have to think of an ending to it all, and that's hard, too. So, for now I just have ideas swirling in my head, and am leaving most of the writing until later. I definitely need to finish my midgrade novel first in any case!

I recently wrote a crucial scene for the midgrade, though I'm not too happy with the way it turned out. I'm trying to write the book without major revising, just making notes for future revision as I go along, but in this case I may rewrite the scene before moving on. I'm pleased today, though, because I thought of yet another twist I might add that could tie several loose threads from the story together. If it works, it could solve some of the logistical problems I've been having with the story, as well as adding a bit more quirky fun to the manuscript. Here's hoping it does!

This weekend I went to Dallas/Fort Worth to hear award-winning YA author Amanda (A.M.) Jenkins speak on rewriting and revising at an SCBWI meeting there. Her talk was fantastic! I took away a ton of useful insights and information, some of which I can start applying right away. I was a bit amazed to hear such a great talk at a free meeting instead of a paid conference! Before the meeting, I had a nice lunch with Kathryn Lay, author of the new middle grade novel Crown Me!, as well as more than 1,000 (!) short stories and articles. I'm always amazed I've been able to meet so many great writers and learn from them!

Hooray, I wrote 2,460 new words on my stalled middle grade novel today--2 new chapters! I have to stop now (and considering that it's late afternoon, it might be good to finally have some lunch!), but I'm so happy to have gotten past my block on this book, and I know what needs to happen next. I also came up with another idea for the book that will explain a little better why the main character's seemingly goofy problem is such a big deal to her. That will involve some rewriting later, but I'm thrilled to have made a small breakthrough!

I just saw in Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog that she's proudly announcing her first published story "featuring in part a romantic relationship in which no one dies." I had to laugh out loud at that. Especially because I've spent much of this afternoon contemplating (and writing part of) a new novel idea featuring in part a romantic relationship in which someone does die. Yikes!

Speaking of which, today I read Sonya Sones' whole free verse novel One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies while standing in front of the library shelf when I was supposed to be hurrying home so my husband could go to the post office! Oops. I didn't mean to read it...I was just going to look at it, and got so engrossed that I kept reading until I was done. Anyway, I thought it was well done and it gave me hope for my own new idea. I don't think mine would be free verse but it would include poetry and possibly be told in a choppy, somewhat verselike style, and I had also been worrying that it wouldn't be possible to start a book with a death but then go on to other things (like romance), not focusing on the death all that much later on, without seeming callous. But Sones does exactly that and it works great. There were also a couple of passages in the book that I strongly related to on a personal level. Actually, at one point the main character is on a plane, dreaming that her boyfriend comes down the aisle and saves her, and my semi-completed YA novel has a scene with my main character on a bus, daydreaming the same thing! I guess it's a common fantasy. I wrote that because I used to daydream that my crush of the moment would suddenly appear to rescue me from whatever boring class I was stuck in!

I was surprised to find Daniel Pinkwater, a regular NPR commentator & author of about 100 (!) books, in a writers' chat room I popped into last night. He writes the kind of absurd, humorous children's books I especially love, and the books he reviews on the radio become bestsellers. Another writer and I chatted with him for more than 3 hours! It was absolutely fascinating, not to mention entertaining--I felt like I'd gone to a private writing conference. He shared lots of stories and advice, and I found it heartening that even after 35 years as a children's writer and plenty of ups and downs, he was still interested enough in writing to want to discuss it in the middle of the night. One statement he made resonated with me enough that I asked if I could quote him on it, which he said I could: "Seeing your name on a book gets old really fast, but trying to make one that sings all the way through can be endlessly interesting." Now that is something I look forward to, and it also reminds me to keep raising the bar on my own expectations for my writing! Be sure to keep an eye out for his next novel, The Artsy Smartsy Club, which he thinks is possibly his best work yet.

In other news, my 6-year-old, Ryan, created his own little vanity press the other night. He set up a "writing stand" in our living room. The rest of us were supposed to come there and write stories with the pens, pencils, & paper he provided. Then he would make a cover, illustrate the stories, & bind them with staples. (Amazingly he decided not to charge for that service, though he charged 5 cents apiece for sharpening pencils, and managed to need 4 of them sharpened for his illustrations.) It was challenging to write a story on demand while he waited, especially one that would be very short and easy to illustrate, but I wrote an extremely low-conflict story about a pig's journey to Jupiter, with too many pages, and he patiently illustrated the whole thing and made a color cover with the title written in a "fancy font". Too funny! (And knowing Ryan, within a few years he may have invented his own printing press to do the job right!)

Also, my brother in Hollywood is a "featured extra" in an upcoming episode of the TV show Las Vegas. He plays a crook who gets chased through a casino, and he creates a diversion by throwing a stack of $100 bills in the air. Only they aren't ordinary $100 bills--they have his picture on them, and they actually made up fake bills with my brother's picture on them! If my brother ever comes up with a list of 10 things he's done that most people haven't, it would put any list of mine to shame.

The day before yesterday, I went to a picture book workshop given by Lisa Wheeler. It was excellent! I got helpful tips and information out of every bit of it. (And if I may be permitted to brag a little, she used my manuscript as a good example twice, and also told me I can rhyme well! That's big praise coming from one of the queens of rhyme! That's not to say that my manuscript doesn't need plenty of work...but her critique gave me helpful advice for revision.)

Yesterday, I spent much of the day preparing, printing, collating, stapling, correcting, reprinting, and restapling entries for the SmartWriters.com W.I.N. competition and the SCBWI Work-in-Progress Grant competition. I got those out in the mail this morning so that is a lot off my plate! Now let's see if I can put them out of my mind until July (for SmartWriters) and September (for SCBWI), when they announce the winners.

Today I had lunch with a writer friend who should by all rights be the Next Big Thing in children's writing. She's supposed to get back to me next month with a critique of my YA novel that needs revision. I also plan to attend the NC/NE Texas SCBWI chapter meeting later this month to hear noted YA author A.M. Jenkins speak on rewriting & revising the YA novel.

My goals for the rest of this week are to do my taxes and to read the books I mentioned in my previous post. Then I plan to choose one of my unfinished writing projects and tackle it head-on. I also have a poem I'm looking for a home for. I'm trying to decide whether to submit it to a magazine, save it to use in a poetry collection someday, or find some other use for it.

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!

A lot of writers blogging on LiveJournal have been putting up lists of "10 Things I've Done That Most People Haven't." I've been a bit alarmed reading their lists, because their lives sound much more interesting than mine! In brainstorming about what I might have to put on such a list, I noticed that most of the things coming to mind had to do with forms of transportation. So, without further ado, here are 10 Things I've Ridden On/In That Most People Haven't:

1. A camel


2. An elephant


3. The Judge Roy Scream roller coaster 23 times in a row


4. A train on a boat


5. A bus on a boat


6. The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (you knew that was coming)


7. A hovercraft


8. A parade float (note: wearing a long-sleeved leotard & long pants outside in Texas in July is less than ideal, even if you do get to play a kazoo)


9. Two ocean liners (the Queen Elizabeth 2 & the France, both at age six)


10. An Oscar nominee's limousine on Oscar night (unbeknownst to the nominee, who was busy attending the ceremony!)

Runner-up was riding in a gondola ride over fireworks. I also rode to school on the back of a motorcycle fairly often at age 6 or 7...not quite up to today's safety standards! I have ridden many other forms of transportation, but I have not yet ridden in a helicopter, blimp, or hot air balloon, and I haven't ridden in a tank, though I've been inside of an old one. I also haven't ridden a Zamboni, but two of my characters do!

I really didn't need to see this new TV promo. It sounds way too much like the novel I've had semi-underway for the past, um, 5 years. Two guys and a girl, lack of ambition, food on sticks in ridiculous uniforms at the food court... I can't decide whether to hope the show fizzles & dies before I finish my book, or whether its fizzling & dying would only foreshadow the eventual fizzling & dying of my own story. I was going to say that at least my story doesn't have any precocious young kids in it, but then I remembered that it does! (Maybe not precocious, but at least young.) Argh.

Of course, I know there is nothing new under the sun (least of all that phrase!). I was at the library reading picture books tonight, and just happened to read not one, but two, stories about parents who eventually learn to love playing in the mud, as their children do (The Piggy in the Puddle by Charlotte Pomerantz and Mrs. Potter's Pig by Phyllis Root). That also happens to be the approximate plot of my rhyming story Holly McPolly McDolly McBean, published in Half-Price Books' Say Good Night to Illiteracy anthology in 2001. Though my story is about grass, not mud, and doesn't have any pigs in it... (Or any other animals, though I actually pictured Holly as a rabbit, since I had a rabbit named Holly!) Still, I had hoped to have this food-on-a-stick novel finished and submitted years ago (even had an invitation to submit it in 2002), so it drives me crazy to see this show coming out now, while my novel is still far from done. As it is, I've been toying with changing the whole tone of the novel before I continue writing.

Earlier today I decided to change the format of my journal archives from weekly to monthly, and to put them in reverse chronological order instead of chronological (not a standard Blogger option). Simple, right? For some reason it took hours to get all the formatting right. I'm starting to think I could use an update of the basic HTML skills I learned in 1995! I created my writing site with Netscape Composer the first time, but ever since I've kept it updated just by editing the HTML, and I don't think I've even learned any new HTML since HTML 1.0. I'm surprised it still works at all anymore! Today I had to tweak Javascript and it would have been nice if I'd had a halfway decent idea of what I was doing. But it oddly seems easier to me to just edit the HTML than to have to learn a web design program.

Lack of focus: I keep thinking of the Rolling Stones song "Shattered," but with the word "Scattered" instead. Describing myself. Scattered, scattered...shadoobie. I feel soooo scattered lately and am having trouble focusing on one writing project. I have bits and pieces of many, many projects floating around in my head, yet haven't sat down lately to work on any of them. (Being sick on & off for a month hasn't helped.) My goal for the rest of the month is to get some contest entries prepared and sent in, but haven't even managed to concentrate on that. (Completely unrelated, but in a similar fashion, I always found myself thinking of the Cure song "Fascination Street" while filling out "pagination sheets" in my tech writing job--note the rhyme. I could no more stop that song from getting into my head than I could stop from yawning when someone mentions it. How about you...are you yawning now?)

I've had so much distress floating around my head this week that I thought about writing a list called 50 Reasons to Give Up on Writing. Over the weekend, I've probably had close to that many different thoughts, some related to the market or writing in general (most recently, reading bad reviews that led me to believe my own would be worse), and some related to me and my quirks, leading me to think, "In that case, I might as well just give up." But then, I can't really give up because I have a few insistent reasons to go on--namely: Lydia, Lainie, Dan, Whitney, Miranda, and friends--characters whose stories I feel compelled to tell, even if no one else cares to hear them. Sounds silly but it's true. I will be really unhappy with myself if I never get all these stories out of my head and onto paper. I have to think they're in my head for a reason!

Today I read a midgrade novel called While You Were Out by J. Irvin Kuns. I hadn't heard of it before; it just caught my eye in the library. I thought it was pretty good. Though I really need to be reading picture books in preparation for the picture book workshop I'm going to in 2 weeks!

This morning I went to an SCBWI meeting to hear author/illustrator Janie Bynum talk about book promotion. It was a bit daunting to hear how much authors have to sell themselves. I don't think I'd be nearly as nervous about actually doing a school visit or book signing as I would about having to get visits lined up in the first place!

I finished a new short story last month, but it's already been rejected and I'm not sure there's anywhere else to send it! I meant to stop spending time on short stories, anyway, but it just spilled out. I guess I should be glad none of my other manuscripts has come back recently. I submitted one manuscript in January that I've since decided wasn't quite ready to submit, so I'm feeling a bit uneasy about that. At least I think it was probably 80 or 90% ready...and if the editor doesn't like what I sent, I don't think she'd like an improved version, either.

Interesting grammar tidbit: While writing the paragraph above, I wondered whether to say "none of my other manuscripts HAS come back" or "none of my other manuscripts HAVE come back." I did a little research online and, although a couple of sites said emphatically that "none" must take the singular "has," I also came across this article about that very issue. According to this, the rule is that there is no rule! A Merriam Webster usage guide apparently even says it depends on what the author thinks it should be! In this case I figured it was safer to go with "has," anyway, since "none has" is more widely accepted among people who are likely to nitpick such things. Sorry to bore those who find grammar tedious--but in my former job as a technical writer & editor, I saw fierce battles waged over grammar and usage issues! Somewhere I have a fun book called Mrs. Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, which debunks a lot of supposed grammar "rules." I'd also recommend Woe is I and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire as amusing grammar-related reads.

My Wienermobile article just came out in the January-February 2005 issue of the SCBWI Bulletin! Better yet, the Bulletin has been newly redesigned, with full-color cover art by Tomie dePaola on this issue, so it's a really sharp-looking publication to appear in. My 6-year-old son was also thrilled to find his photo in the magazine!

I also got 2 rejections in the past 2 days, and wow, were they quick! They were both from e-mail submissions I made on January 16th. One rejection came on the 17th and one on the 18th! But both were friendly and helpful, and I thanked both editors for their quick responses. At least they didn't leave me hanging for months. (My rejection last week came 8 months after the initial submission.) One of the editors also mentioned that my writing was "spot-on" (unlike the topic), and they both said I am welcome to try them again, so that is heartening.

Finally, I finished drafting a new poem last night. I'm not sure if it's a poem or an attempt at a picture book, but I hope to figure that out as I polish it!

The only resolutions I've made for 2005 are: (1) to get rid of at least 1,000 things, and (2) to finish my novel, Purple Panic. With any luck (or rather, discipline...), I'll knock both of those things out in the first half of the year and move on from there!

Unfortunately, I got a rejection yesterday for a short story. I like the story a lot, but can't think of another place to send it. So, I have to brainstorm about a new market for that one, and meanwhile, I sent a status request about another short story submission yesterday, and submitted a picture book manuscript.

I'm looking forward to a picture book workshop with Lisa Wheeler in March. I know it's going to be a lot of fun, not to mention helpful! I submitted my manuscript The Zoo That Grew for her to critique, since she's known for rhyme and it's a rhyming manuscript. I already know some of the problems with the manuscript, but haven't figured out how to solve them, so I'm hoping her critique will give me some insight. In the meantime, she's assigned us a lot of "homework" of picture books to read in preparation for the workshop, so I need to get going with that!

In other news, the youngest of my 2 sons is turning 4 this week. I would have sworn I had a baby just yesterday...this age is a lot of fun, though! We're celebrating Friday with Spider-Man cupcakes in his preschool class, followed by a Lion King party. He's been counting down to his birthday for a couple of weeks now! (And with the help of his new Spider-Man watch, he's also telling us the time every, oh...half-minute or so!)

I made a sale today! Last week I queried the SCBWI Bulletin to see if they'd be interested in a short article about my "Wienerbookmobile" experience. After getting a go-ahead, I emailed my article to them yesterday, and they said yes! Hooray! (And remember how I once had an article in ByLine about how much of my writing has been inspired by fast food? I had to chuckle to myself thinking of how the Wienermobile is the ultimate fast food...a hot dog going 65 mph!)

I can proudly say that I have now ridden in a large rolling hot dog. It was an absolute blast, we gave away nearly 300 books, and the jingle "Oh I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener," which both of my kids had the opportunity to belt out over the loudspeaker, will probably be in my head forever! While they're still online, check out these sausage...I mean, links:

Austin American-Statesman article
Suburban newspaper article (we made the front page of this one!)Short article/transcript from local TV news station

What a day, what a week! And what a day it will be tomorrow. This celebrity lifestyle is so tiring. By celebrity, of course, I mean my moment of local fame as a winner of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile for a day. First off, I found out there was a press release about me on the Austin library's web site today. And this morning the local Fox news channel, KTBC, and the Wienermobile came to my house by 6:15 am so they could tape a segment on my win for their live morning broadcast. I survived it! My kids even got on TV, and my kindergartener had a good excuse as to why he was late for school! But tomorrow, instead of just relaxing until the Wienermobile picks us up at 9:30, I have to drive to the NBC station, KXAN, around 7:00 am or earlier to be there for an early morning interview on their morning news. Then it's off for a full day of riding in a chauffered Wienermobile and distributing books, with more news stations and newspapers slated to attend. (Who knew?!) We have about 300 books for our book giveaways, everything from board books to young adult novels, and I hope it's enough... If it ends up being way more than enough, we'll find someplace good to donate the rest. I have spent much of the week shopping for books, taking price tags off, boxing them up, etc. But now, after 2 nights in a row of about 4 hours sleep, I must get some rest before having to get up early again!

Oh, and speaking of the Wienermobile chauffers, they are actually called "hotdoggers" and are basically goodwill ambassadors for Oscar Mayer, which means they have to be very friendly and personable, and to enjoy making wiener puns such as "Have a bunderful day." Since our hotdogger team was going to be here all weekend, we offered to take them to dinner tonight at The Oasis, an Austin restaurant legendary for its view. We did all meet for dinner there and had nice food and conversation, but one of our kids started feeling sick and the other turned into a maniac by the end of dinner, so I hope our hotdoggers aren't scared to be stuck with us all day tomorrow!

So much to report! Where to start? Hmm...

Writing: I got my copies of The First Line with my story in it, and was very impressed with the whole publication! I felt honored to be included.

Reading: In a strange turn of events for me, I've been reading some fiction written for adults instead of kids. I read The Nanny Diaries last weekend and greatly enjoyed it--laughed out loud a lot, but also cried at the end. (As pure fiction it wouldn't have moved me so much, but I assumed much of it was a fictionalized composite of real experiences, and in that light it made me sad for the children whose eventual therapy will scarcely be able to undo their fear of forming attachments.) Right now I'm reading something completely different--Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which Salon described as "Harry Potter meets Jane Austen." I'm 317 pages into it and still less than halfway through! It has 782 pages of fairly small type. I'm finding it quite delightful, though, and haven't had trouble staying engaged with it (in fact, I'm anxious to get back to it right now). Oh, and on the subject of fiction for kids, Austin writer Greg Leitich Smith's novel, Ninjas, Piranhas, and Galileo, mentioned earlier in this journal, just won the Teddy Children's Book Award for Long Works from the Writers' League of Texas. Congrats, Greg, and for everyone else, check it out if you haven't read it yet!

Music: Speaking of winning, my husband recently won concert tickets to a Sting/Annie Lennox concert, including passes for a meet & greet with Sting before the show. We went to the concert in Dallas this past Sunday night. I had always thought that if I met someone really famous they would just seem like an ordinary person, but Sting really did seem like a rock star to me! (He was nice, though.) It was the first "big" concert my husband and I had ever been to together, so it was a fun way to celebrate our (gasp) 13th anniversary last week!

Wieners: Speaking even more of winning, Oscar Mayer recently held an "Oh, I Wish" essay contest, in which 50 people nationwide would win a day in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, based on what they said they would do with it. I said that as an aspiring children's writer, I have a passion for literacy and would like to use it as a bookmobile, to pass out free books to kids. And I won!! On Saturday, October 9th, my family and I will be riding around town in the Wienermobile! I'm nervous about the publicity, but I adore the Wienermobile (that's for you, Jason) so I'll deal with it! As plans currently stand, we'll visit two local libraries to donate new children's books both to the libraries and to kids in the parking lots, though it's still possible we could end up going to other locations. I'm also hoping to get some of my writing/SCBWI friends involved. If you are near the Austin area, stay tuned for more info & turn out to support the causes of wiener vehicles and literacy! ;-)

Good news, bad news, and randomness--> Good: My 3-year-old survived his dental surgery today and seemed back to his normal self by bedtime (can't be too out of sorts if he's jumping on the bed, huh?!), and Once Upon A Time is going to publish another of my articles. Hooray! Bad: I got a rejection today on a manuscript I had high hopes for. (But Good: the editor complimented my writing and said she'd be happy to look at my next manuscript.) Random: I won an iPod! I wanted one really badly, so I'm thrilled.

Another sale! And oddly, it's a short story for adults again, which isn't something I write very often. That makes two this summer! A few months back, I saw a blurb about a literary journal called The First Line. They provide an opening sentence for each issue, and writers must submit stories that all begin with that sentence. That sounded like a fascinating writing exercise (as well as a cool read!), especially because the sentence for this fall's issue was so specific and interesting: "I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-Eighties I legally changed my name to Eve." I wrote a story beginning with that line, submitted it shortly before the August 1 deadline, and got an acceptance on August 13! Wow. The editor also emailed me today to ask if I'd like to submit my young adult novel for consideration by a new publishing company they are starting. That is very intriguing, of course, and I will probably take him up on it. I am admittedly not sure how I'd feel about being published by a brand new press...but it's certainly nice to be asked!

I survived my son's birthday party and we've gotten through the first week of kindergarten, my other son's first dental appointment (but he needs dental surgery--eek!), and even a call for federal jury duty this week (I wasn't assigned to a jury, but it was a wild case involving multiple bank robberies!). I'm happy to say that my son's castle cake turned out very well, which is good since I was up until 3:30 am the morning of the party, working on the cake!

I have a new manuscript and I'm not even sure what it is--picture book or magazine story--though I'm hoping it could be a picture book. And I have no idea what to do with it. I went to the bookstore last night and spent at least an hour looking through the picture books, but found it all pretty disheartening. I couldn't find many that were similar to my picture book manuscripts at all, and also couldn't find many books by the particular publishers I was interested in, other than some classics and a few other books that were completely different from mine in tone and style. The ones that appealed to me most were mostly from publishers that don't take unsolicited submissions. And I didn't see any books from my local or online writer friends who have published picture books. Yet there are, quite frankly, a great many books on the shelves that I'd have no interest in buying for my own young kids. I did find one that cracked me up, Alison McGhee's Countdown to Kindergarten (maybe I just liked the author's name, LOL!), and got that for my son who's starting kindergarten in 11 days. Most books for soon-to-be-kindergarteners don't apply well to a child who has been in preschool for years, can already read & do math, etc., but this hilarious story of a girl who is panicked because she can't tie her shoes seemed like a good match for him. (He cracked up about the line "shoes are not canoes," and I find the art by Harry Bliss to be hysterical!) Anyway, maybe I should just stick to longer fiction, but I have these stories that come to me, so I'd like to do something with them!

And speaking of longer fiction, I also had a new idea for a novel while lying in bed the other night trying to fall asleep. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like getting up to write down the great opening lines I came up with (I normally keep paper and a light-up pen on my nightstand, but alas, they were not to be found...), and the lines are gone now. I recall the title and the vague idea for the novel, but I think I'd developed it a bit further in my head and now I don't have much to go on. I'll have to brainstorm some more, as I think it could be kind of powerful, but it would be more experimental and difficult than most of the novels I've tried writing! It's not like I need another novel idea when I already have about 8 on the back burner waiting to be written (or completed), but there it is. Maybe I'll save it for National Novel Writing Month this November, assuming I'll be able to participate this year!

Patience certainly helps in the writing business.... I've had a novel out to a publisher for more than 6 months now, a short story out to a magazine for more than 3 months, and a picture book out for just under 3 months (not to mention the story I sent to a magazine a year ago & have given up hearing back about!). I try to keep busy writing other things while I'm waiting, but still can't help but check the calendar occasionally!

I got quite a bit done yesterday. I spent way too long dealing with printer problems, but finally got the invitations and envelopes printed for my son's upcoming 6th birthday party, and got those mailed out. The theme is "Knights, Princesses, and Bouncy Castles!" I designed the invitations on the computer to save money, but ended up spending tons of time on them, and just as much money (with the inkjet greeting card paper and all the ink I must have used for the many failed printing attempts) as I would have spent to buy professionally printed ones! At any rate, I also wrote a bio for the Tall Tales Press anthology and sent that off, and finished polishing a story I'm submitting to a small literary magazine, and submitted that in the evening, along with another bio I had to write for that one. Then later at night, I started making some revisions on a children's story I've never been able to find a market for, but soon decided it was a lost cause--I decided I didn't even like it much! I still may rework the idea, but I'd want to start nearly from scratch. And last of all, I submitted an entry in a contest to win a day in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile! The Wienermobile has to be one of the coolest vehicles ever. I said I'd like to use it as a bookmobile, to distribute free books to kids.

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.

I've been so busy (and harried!) lately that I haven't been working on my novel after all, but I am working on a new poem. I'm a bit stuck on it right now, but my mind is mulling it over... and mulling over some novel-related stuff, too, even though I haven't been actively working on it. I'm still trying to get my new computer all set up, and in the meantime I've hardly been online at all (especially with e-mail, since I don't have a mail program configured on the new PC yet and I can barely get the other PC to start). At least I've been reading a bunch of children's books, as my kids are enrolled in summer reading clubs and I'm reading them tons of books for that! (My 4.75-year-old is also trying to read 15 books on his own--reading simple picture books and easy readers aloud to me--for one of the clubs, and he's read 5 so far! I'm proud of him!)



My 4-year-old reading to his 2-year-old brother (upside down, even!)

Woo hoo! I finally got my new computer yesterday! My old one has been dying a painful death for a long time. Both computers are laptops, and the screen of the old one is literally hanging on by one thread (or rather, cable)! Not to mention the many other problems it has, including shutting off accidentally several times a day. Having a laptop that can actually stay on when it's moved will be great for my writing. Now if I can just get all my old stuff transferred over to the new one & organized...not too fun, but worth it!

Cool, I sold a poem! When I got back from vacation tonight, I was a bit disheartened to find one of my SASEs in the mailbox, from a submission to Purpose magazine. But instead of finding a rejection inside, as I expected, I found a check! I wrote the original version of the poem, "Supplication," probably ten years ago, though the version that sold is slightly different. I've had several rhyming poems accepted in the past, but this is my first sale of a non-rhyming poem.