My agent is made of awesome. Just saying.

So, once again I've been a bad, absentee blogger. Other than the typical life things (mother's day, school ending, summer plans etc.) I've been finishing my wip, and determining which project to submit for the face to face crit at Pacific Coast Childrens Writers Workshop.

This stage of a project is always both stressful and amazing. I imagine it to be a bit like riding a chemical high, though I can't say from personal experience.

I don't sleep much, and when I do it is a light doze filled with dreams of scenes and mini-revelations and epiphanies.

I barely eat, and then only what I can grab and gulp, or consume at the computer.

(the extreme heat 102 degrees forecast for the next several days, doesn't help at all)

I tend to zone out and have to have people repeat themselves, because I am totally focused on the story and its culmination on paper.

I can't type fast enough, unable to keep up with my brain, which has been finished with and waiting to tell this story for a rather long time. And it goes on like this until I type the end.

So that's the agony, such as it is.

The ecstasy is that beautiful siren song calling to me as I finish, of the next project (the beginnings of which I've already begun), the story itself playing out in the recesses of my mind even as I complete its predecessor.

This weekend I will type The End on The Brown Shoe Diaries. I will pack it off to my cps, who will tear it apart, and then I will revise it to my own standards, feast on their feedback before implementing it, and send it off to Secret Agent Man.

And we shall see.

Meanwhile, I fully intend to document my journey through the next novel. Starting today.

What is your favorite non-character element in kidlit?

Several of Mine:

Senor Saguaro (Stargirl)
the Welsh countryside (The Dark is Rising Sequence)
Hogwarts (Harry Potter)