Archive for July 2009

ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

July 31, 2009

I dearly love the daily OM Leo horoscope that I signed up to receive ages ago. The email always comes as a surprise.  For whatever reason, the horoscope is far from “daily,” but that’s okay.  Yesterday it showed up and the subject heading alone was enough to keep me happy for weeks.  ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES, it [...]

MOSEYING THROUGH THE GRAVEYARD II

July 26, 2009

Okay, I admit I was a total mess, reading the names and messages on gravestones in the section they call Babyland.  (A tattered baseball sits beside one marker, its worn leather scribbled with love notes to a baby boy who will never have a catch, in this world, with the dad who left it there.) [...]

MOSEYING THROUGH THE GRAVEYARD

July 25, 2009

I spent one of the stranger Saturday mornings of my life wandering through Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, looking for a plot for a character in my manuscript.  I’m not talking “plot” as in story line, but plot as in gravesite.  The salesman at the counter in the administration building looked befuddled. I tried repeatedly to [...]

A HIGHER CALLING II

July 23, 2009

Madeleine L’Engle said,  “You have to write the book that wants to be written.  And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” More recently, Neil Gaiman, a best-selling writer for both adults and the young, admitted that, in his view,  “children’s fiction is the most important fiction [...]

A HIGHER CALLING

July 22, 2009

When it comes to literature for the young, my mantra has always been: “Not just any book will do.”  For years, I convinced all kinds of people of the transformative power of children’s books — board books to YA lit.  Persuaded more than a few to become downright passionate about them. I taught children’s literature [...]

RED-LETTER DAY

July 17, 2009

I’m surprised by the intensity of the happiness I feel  — Pete’s come upon me humming, singing today — but the manuscript, tweaked again and again, is ready for the advance readers I’ve handpicked to give me feedback.  I mean, it’s not as if the tweaking is now history.  Writing is all about rewriting.  Despite [...]


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