Today, in preparation for NaNoWriMo, I created a working notebook for the 45,000 words I hope to write in the 30 days of November. Because I know that my best, first-draft work happens when I write longhand, I now have a 3-ring binder filled with 300 blank, college-ruled sheets of paper, for an average of… Read More
National Novel Writing Month starts in three hours, at 12:01 am on Thursday, November 1st—a little too late (or too early?) for me to start writing. But my alarm clock is set for 6 am, my coffee maker is set and ready to turn on, and my favorite coffee mug is waiting to be filled:… Read More
Last night I couldn’t sleep. I’d set my alarm for 6:00 am in order to begin my first day of participation in National Novel Writing Month 2018. Still wide awake at one o’clock in the morning, I tried to talk myself out of getting up to write a mere 5 hours later. But I did… Read More
In the “Write a Novel in a Month” class that I’m taking at the Loft, Abby Cooper spoke about writers riding the horse of self-doubt. And even though I’ve had two middle grade novels published, I finally realized that I’ve been ruled by self-doubt ever since December, 2016, when my agent turned down a major… Read More
Infinite possibilities … that’s the challenge of writing fiction. Face it: all fiction is made up; lies, in fact — fickle dalliances of an author’s imagination. In truth, sometimes infinite possibility is inspiring. Sometimes infinite possibility is overwhelming. This morning, near the end of my three-hour writing chunk, I found inspiration. A new scene visualized in… Read More
One thing I’ve realized while drafting my last three middle grade novels is that writing the first 30 pages is “easy.” I’ve heard other novelists say the same thing. And then, you run smack dab into a DEAD END. You realize that, at its deepest level, you don’t know what your story is about. You… Read More
Today I was thinking about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Written by Lewis Carroll and published in 1865, it was not a book that I read as a child. Recently I bought a copy of my own because, after all, it is a rabbit who sets the events of the plot in motion: “Alice started to… Read More
Does the world of children’s literature really need another tale about a rabbit? Or, another book by Eileen Beha? What do I have to say that hasn’t already been said before? What story can I tell that hasn’t already been told before? These were the kinds of questions I was asking myself on Day #12… Read More
So, why write a story for young readers about an Eastern cottontail rabbit rather than a tale about an animal that is far less common and may be more interesting? The reason is simple: I’ve had a love affair with rabbits ever since I saw the movie Bambi for the first time. Not only that,… Read More
What does a photo of myself at eight years of age … displayed on a plate from the set of dishes that my Great-Aunt Ida used daily on her farmhouse harvest table … have to do with the novel Watership Down … have to do with a bowl made by Malcolm Stanley, a well-known potter… Read More