A Novel Idea

Woke up this morning and wondered why I’m still planning to fly to New York City on Friday.  The original plan was to bring sample pages of the novel to the annual conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).  By the time I broke it to the hubster that I was [...]

Write what you think you can’t. M.T. Anderson Today, I am diving deep into a revision of the first 75 pages because a wonderful and well-known agent at a New York agency gave my manuscript a look.  I’m feeling really lucky, despite my awareness that children’s publishing can be a “bunny-eat-bunny-world.”   Here’s why: The agent [...]

Life is nothing more than a guided dream. Jorge Luis Borges I hadn’t intended to post a second part of  “Out of the Blue,” but how could I not, when an installment of Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, arrived via email this morning, reminding me of the significance of this day in Isabel Allende’s life?  [...]

The artist never entirely knows.  We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. Agnes De Mille He lifted the sardine sandwich to his lips.  She could see a couple of the fish tails, sticking out between the edges of the wheat bread.  Not silvery, like the fishes’ shiny [...]

Last spring, immersed in writing the final chapters of my tween novel, there were many afternoons when I’d briefly leave Claire’s and Mona’s world, hop in the car, and order take-out at the local Panera.  This was before they switched to those hand-held (germ-enriched) blinking monitors to indicate when individual orders are ready.  Instead, they [...]