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.

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!

What a lovely surprise--I got my first piece of "fan mail" today! It was actually from someone I know slightly, an old high school & college friend of my husband's who now lives in another state and saw my essay in Welcome Home (she must've gotten her copy before I got mine!). Anyway, that was a fun piece of mail.

I also got a certificate in the mail saying my "Mom's Chair" essay--the one that recently sold to Chocolate for Women--had won First Honorable Mention in the short nonfiction category of the San Gabriel Writers' League writing contest. The category is quite broad, so it's good to get any notice at all! I was rather nervous to read my judging sheets for the other pieces I'd entered, but they were pretty good overall. I cringed that someone had tried to edit my rhyming manuscript--messing up the rhythm that I know scanned well--so that actually made me feel better about not placing in that category! I was also pleased that a judge wrote on my YA chapter that it was a "bright spot" in their stack of manuscripts!

I was pleasantly surprised today to get 5 copies of the April issue of Welcome Home in the mail, featuring my humor essay, "By Any Other Name." I hadn't known when it would be published. The funny thing is that they published it along with a photo of two young boys who are about the same ages as my sons...and the older one has glasses, just like my older son, but of course they aren't my sons & it'll probably confuse the relatives! :-) They did change a couple of sentences slightly in ways that sound awkward to me, but oh well...it's mostly just as I wrote it, and it's always great to see something I wrote in print!

I got a frustrating rejection today on an adult fiction story... I'm quite sick today & barely managed to change out of my pajamas at 3:15 to trudge out to the mailbox, & seeing my SASE in there didn't make me feel much better! ;-) The rejection said, "too short for us," which bugged me because they say they take stories of 2,000+ words, and this one was 1,993 words, which to me is approximately 2,000 words. True, I wasn't really thinking about word count when I mailed it, or else I would have fleshed it out a bit first--this was a second sub to the magazine after my first was returned with a request that I send more, and I just sent the best story I had ready--but if I'd added 7 or 10 or 25 words before sending it, would that really have made a difference? It probably wouldn't even take up more room in the magazine if I had. (In truth, I had just cut a few hundred words from it earlier to get it short enough to enter in a contest, though I don't think I kept the wordier draft!) Oh well, whatever. Now back to resting! Being sick is no fun, especially when you have preschoolers underfoot!

I finally filed my taxes yesterday, over a month after starting them, because I was debating whether or not to call my writing a business. I eventually decided to take the plunge, which hopefully won't send up too many red flags!

I also finished two of my book projects this week and got a contract for a third. Ha...I doubt I even have to say "April Fool" for you to see through that one! I only wish any of that were true!

After finding out yesterday that my essay is a finalist in a contest, I was empowered to try again to find a market for it (the contest prizes don't include publication). There is an anthology series called Chocolate for Woman (Chocolate for a Woman's Soul, etc.), and I decided it couldn't hurt to submit my essay, even though I wasn't sure it would be quite what they wanted. I e-mailed it to the editor last night, and got an acceptance for it this morning!! That's got to be my fastest acceptance ever. If all goes well, my essay will appear in the next edition of the anthology, to be published in 2004. Hooray!