A Novel Idea

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 [...]

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.) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]