Feeling Dumb

Okay, in my last post I said I hadn't heard of any of the award-winning books! Where did that come from? I majorly take that back. I had heard/read all of the Printz books, but not the Newbery's, although I knew some of the authors. Whew, feel better. You were probably wondering who is this author who knows NOTHING about what's going on in the publishing world? But I do read a lot of terrific authors who have never won any *big* award.

It's Saturday, hubby is out running errands, I've already done a load of laundry, vacuumed/mopped the kitchen, exercised and given attention to all 5 cats. Now I get to do some more rewriting on The Healing Spell. It was critiqued this past week by my good friend, Cindy-Rae, who grew up on a bayou in the south and gave me some wonderful advice about various minor tidbits in the story. Things that are going to help raise it another notch. At least that's the plan.

Goal: Tuesday I email editor who gave me the suggestion to change the 3rd person POV to 1st person POV and ask if I can resubmit. The viewpoint change has made a huge difference and it's taken me all month, but I'm closing in.

Feeling optimistic.

Award Time!

On Monday, the annual awards in children's and young adult literature were announced. You may know them best as the Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, etc.

There's a live feed from the convention hall so viewers can actually watch the announcements from anywhere in the country which is pretty cool. I did that last year. Lots of cheering and clapping and it was pretty exciting to see the books and the authors. Unfortunately this year I was at the dentist with my son so missed it.

Immediately I placed reservations for the Newbery and Printz award winners at my local library online. Love how easy that is to do, and I can't wait to read these new books. The weird thing is, I hadn't heard of any of them. Makes me feel out of the loop.

ALA Award Winners Here

(There's a link to click on the home page for the literary awards and it gives a full listing. Also, very cute picture of Orlando Bloom on his READ poster.)

Happy Reading and Congratulations to all the winners!

Boots to die for!

If you think Parisians or Americans wear chic boots, think again. Bulgarian boots are fab, fab, fab! Every girl over there wears them and they're tres adorable, with buckles and laces and different colors and styles. The shoe stores are tiny, you can hardly turn around in them, but when my son wanted to take home a pair of their sneakers (also very cute and not like what we have here) I decided to take the plunge even though purchasing boots wasn't in my budget - although the $$$ exchange from American to Bulgaria levas definitely works in our favor so my boots were only about $30 US dollars. I mean, how could I resist that?

My Bulgarian boots are one of my favorite souvenirs and all my girlfriends PLUS the high school girls at church think they're fantastic. Sooooo cute! I gotta get a picture posted here. I will. Soon. Promise.

Happy New Year 2007!

Some of you may be wondering if I got lost in Bulgaria - or fell off the planet. I did neither, but it's been such a whirlwind since we returned from Bulgaria that I haven't blogged a single word. Throw in visiting family, trip recovery, surgery for broken leg for youngest son, writing projects, Thanksgiving, Christmas, college apps, and here it is January.

Bulgaria was totally wonderful, emotional, inspiring, beautiful and fabulous. I could see immediately why my son loved it so much and why he didn't want to come home. We're all homesick now for that extraordinary little country and already planning our next trip. Hopefully pics will be up on my web site in the next few weeks if you want a peek. We also took side trips to Istanbul and England on the way home.

Favorite stops: castles, Stonehenge, small villages, dinners with my son's friends, he as Translator Extraordinaire, although we completely enjoyed being able to say our little bit of Bulgarian and delighting them, too!

Are you making your New Year goals? That's what I'm sitting down to do this week. I need to ponder where I'm at in my writing career, personally and professionally, decide where I'd like to be by the end of the year, and what projects I want to begin - or finish as the case may be with three novels needing some rewrites.

Mostly I want to continue to become a better writer. I'm constantly amazed at the wonderful writers that I discover with all the great books coming out every month. Sometimes the imps of jealousy get me to feeling like I haven't even *touched* that caliber of writing yet - and I desperately want to. But I'm working toward it and trying to remember that I have a voice, my own voice, one that nobody else has. And that's gotta count for something. Along with working hard and not giving up. That's the important thing. Never give up - and try to keep the joy every day.

Now I'm going to go eat some homemade, fresh out of the oven, zucchini bread. I do make a mean loaf.

Off to Bulgaria

Yep, hubby and I leave in two days for the former Eastern bloc country of Bulgaria with side trips to Istanbul and England. I'm just a packing, cleaning, blogging, emailing, bill-paying, list making woman right now. And still trying to draft a little every day on my current WIP, The Murder of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
Taking along my pillow, snacks, The Writer's Book of Hope, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and a couple light fiction romps for reading pleasure. Hope the inflight food and movie are good. 26 hours of flying and airports isn't exactly a good time is had by all situation.
My folder with hotel confirmations, maps, tour itineraries and phone numbers is *thick*.
Doveezhdenay! (Put that in Cyrillic letters and you get "Goodbye in Bulgarian. As if you hadn't already guessed.)
Kimberley

Ancient Egypt

Thebes, Malqata, Valley of the Kings, Ancient Egyptian gardens, the City of Aten, Egyptian medicinal practices, Amun the god of Kings . . . just a few things I've been researching like a mad woman the last couple of months.

I've got a stack of 15 books about Egypt and King Tut sitting practically under my feet that I read during the summer. I also keep having to refer to many of them as I'm drafting. Yes, I finally started writing the new book. Trying to get words to flow through my brain and out my fingers onto the keyboard is scary, daunting, and this time around even SLOWER than usual. Disconcerting, but I'm telling myself to enjoy the process. Some things can't be rushed. Even if it stinks and will have to be rewritten a dozen times.

I still have this crazy goal to finish the entire first draft no later than October 7th. Yes, two weeks from today. Yeah, right, you're thinking. Because I leave October 9th for Bulgaria to pick up my son from his mission. YAY!!! I'll be gone nearly three weeks so I'm going to start pushing myself.

Meanwhile, The Healing Spell went out to 5 houses. Another project done, and out the door with prayers, hopes, and some fairy dust sprinkled on the envelope. Think that will last until it gets to New York?

Bigger question: will it work? :-)

Under my skin

Oh, the joys and the banes of computers. My computer for online stuff with all my accounts and addresses crashed in March. And I mean CRASHED! Nothing is recoverable. Need to purchase a whole new system. Which hasn't happened yet because of college looming this fall.

So . . . that's why I disappered from my blog. Plus I've had some very stiff writing deadlines. I'm happy to report that I have two complete novels out making the rounds of publishers as of a month ago. With a third nearly finished and a proposal for a fourth and a synopsis for a fifth. Feels good.

I go back to research and begin character sketches end of this week for my ancient Egyptian novel based on the short story, The Mummy Tent, I recently sold to Cricket Magazine. I'm chomping at the bit to get going on it, but I need to keep my attention on this rewrite for The Healing Spell. As of Friday I am *done* rewriting this book. It's going to stay out until it sells. I know there is an editor out there just waiting for it. All I have to do is find her.

Other good news: Got our tickets to go to Bulgaria in October to pick up my son from his mission. We're also going to hit Istanbul, Turkey, and England to visit cousins on the way home. We'll be gone 18 days. But mostly I can't wait to hug my son. It will be 25 months since I'll have seen him - since September 2004. Pick-up day is October 11th at 9:00 a.m. in Sofia, Bulgaria. Needless to say, October will be a non-writing month this year.

It's hot in the house already. A quick shower and then it's time to hit the rewrites once more. The manuscript is lookin' good though. My almost twelve-year-old character, Livie Moulaison, is under my skin.

What's under yours today?

Happy Valentine's Day!

I got home from teaching my class this morning, peeled off my dress and the nylons and heels - and discovered two boxes of pecan/caramel turtles and chocolate truffles sitting on my desk chair waiting for me. And a beautiful card from my darling husband with a personal note that made me cry. He is so perfect! I'm feeling very blessed today. It's always a doubly special day, too, not only is it Sweetheart's Day, but it's my birthday as well.

So I'm forgetting about being another year older and thinking about being loved instead. Hope you are, too.

What's for Dinner?

Ah, the question that never goes away and must be answered EVERY SINGLE DAY! Sometimes feels like the bane of my life. Just got home with wet hair from Misty's Hair Salon and have been worrying this question all morning like a dog with a bone. So I checked out the fridge and discovered three dishes of leftovers. Italian chicken, meatballs with penne noodles and cheese and veggie lasagna. All of them created by *moi* in the past three days. Throw together a salad, warm up some bread and voila! Dinner is served.
Now I can get back to work . . .

Breakfast Musings

I'm sitting here eating my morning oatmeal, cruising email, websites, and my favorite blogs and trying to get my derriere in gear to start work on another project. (*Derriere* being the perfect word since the next project in the queue is partly set in Paris and has lots of fun French phrases sprinkled throughout. Title: IN A PARIS MINUTE.

This weird and aggravating place I'm in is not becuse I don't have plenty to work on. There are two completely drafted manuscripts waiting for rewrites, research, future ideas to outline, but I'm in this awful abyss after sending off one project and trying to get past the inertia to begin again.

This drives me crazy. I was determined last week that I would only take a day or two off and then get going again. I DO have a goal to get a couple more full novels subbed to publishers before spring hits. Never seems to work. It's like I mentally shut down. Just want to rent about five chick flicks and veg out in front of the TV.

I am easily intimidated by other's success and talent.
I am easily overwhelmed by the sheer mental and physical work writing is, especially because a couple of my critiques on the PARIS project are not particularly kind.( I mean I know there are problems but they could have been *nicer*, right?)
Maybe it's pure laziness.
Maybe it's fear.

Or all of the above.

So I make these lists of everything else I got accomplished while I wasn't writing just to make myself feel good. Visits, phone calls, bills, shopping, reading (got through about 10 books in the past week. Some good, some ho-hum), helping kids with homework, cleaning, knitting a blanket for the premie hospital project our church is doing, making homemade chicken soup.

I need to call my mother, too.
She probably thinks I've dropped off the planet.
I have.
It's called the writer's abyss. I'm at the bottom.
Wave if you can see me.

Notes From Your Long Lost Warrior Woman

Okay, okay, don't hit me . . . I know I've been incommunicado (sans blogging) for three months. Three months tomorrow to be exact now that I look at my handy dandy calendar. I'm baaaaack. I hope.

What have I been doing you may ask?

Right around Halloween I kicked my tail into high gear and finished a complete 95,000 word draft of Secret Rites of the Goddess just in time for turkey day and a week long trip to Arizona, our usual hot spot for Thanksgiving.

December was a mix of getting ready for the holidays, deciding to go visit family in Utah (my brothers) for a week, get plane reservations for mom to come back to my house for another week through New year's, cleaned house for company, direct play with the high school kids at church, Christmas shopping - lots of Amazon ordering!, revising the manuscript, college applications for son, Eagle Scout project for same son, trying to get to my desk for more revision work which ended up just giving me heart palpatations I was such a bundle of nerves!!! Having only a few minutes at a time and pages and pages of notes and changes to do does not make for happy revising.

No wonder I got sick on New Year's Day with flu and am just now recovered.

January: Once I sent mom back off to Arizona and spent a few days in bed, it was back to my desk at last.

I'm happy to report that the manuscript is IN THE MAIL! As of 5 p.m. yesterday. Barely made the post office closing. Fingers crossed that *interested* editor will receive it by Friday.

I'm whipped. Logged in about 100 hours the past 2.5 weeks.

Today it's gray skies and flakes of snow. Got son's driver's licence renewed this morning, did a load of laundry, managed an upper body weight workout, prescription pick-up for other son, grocery shopping, emails off to editor and agent and now I'm taking the rest of the day OFF!

ttfn. I promise.

Long Time No Blog

Hobbs was GREAT! Warm, wonderful, dedicated librarians, teachers, parents - and kids! Yay to all the great people I met and the fantastic writing the students did during The Creative Diary workshop! They wrote their darling hearts out while lunch was cooking in the background in the cafeteria kitchens and their stomachs were rumbling. A big thanks as well to the Powells who graciously hosted my husband and I in their home and then wrote about my visit on the teacher's listserve - which netted me a couple more school invites from other parts of the state. Fabulous.

Came home to a frenetic homelife and a funeral and a friend moving away and a story to revise for Cricket Magazine ("Rattlesnake Rain") as well as trying to get my head back into Secret Rites . . .

What's the secret to my time travel dilemma? Meditation, a good night's sleep, and sticking my derriere in the desk chair!

Time Travel the Hard Way

Ergh - this is the hardest thing to do - STOP in the middle of drafting the second half of my delicious new historical novel, Secret Rites of the Goddess, and drive 300 miles to do a school visit. Three hundred miles for a school visit is hard enough! And not very usual actually, but my hubby is getting home from his business trip in Dallas tonight and going with me down to Hobbs. I'm visiting two schools and doing a talk and signing at the local community arts center. They're excited - I've got butterflies. No matter how many times I do a workshop or presentation I get nervous days in advance. Why??? I'm cursed.
So I'm leaving at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning. Will be back this weekend.
Going in and out of 1800 BC is tough time travel. My head is spinning.

A Taste of Bulgaria

Здравейте! как си? България е най-доброто място на света!

Translation: Hello, how are you? Bulgaria is the best place in the world!

I just wrote to my son serving in Bulgaria (our weekly email) and he sent me this phrase using the Cyrillic alphabet. So I had to try pasting it here and see if it worked. Looks like it does! Awesome. He's definitely on my mind all the time. And in my prayers.

We plan to fly to Sofia, Bulgaria (the capital) when his two years are finished next September and pick him up, travel around the country, see the cities where he served, meet the friends he made. So I better start learning some phrases myself . . . so I can at least say hello when I meet people.

I have a pack of homemade alphabet flash cards on my nightstand. My son and I learned it a year ago together before he left. We'd put up a few letters every week in the kitchen, and test each other, but I've forgotten many of them so I'm beginning to review them again.

Now I need to learn how to say "goodybe" . . . until next time.

Christmas in September

Yep, I'm Christmas shopping. Not because I'm an early shopper. I've never started before December - ever in my life. And not because I like to shop - I don't. With a passion.

I'm motivated this year because my middle son is in Bulgaria serving a church mission and if I don't get it in the mail soon he won't receive it in time to open Christmas morning. I would feel terrible if he didn't get a package from his family for Christmas so . . .

What do you buy a just-turned 21-year old who is not currently reading novels or magazines and not playing computer games or sports? And it has to fit into a large padded envelope and not weigh more than 4-5 pounds. Tough assignment!

Inspirational music CD's
Hot cocoa for those rainy, chilly Bulgarian winters
Christmas candy (he requested Hershey's strawberry nuggets and Cookies n'Creme candy bars)
Cards from all of us with news from home and jokes and drawings
A homemade tape with all of us being goofy and singing Christmas carols and talking since we only get to talk to him a couple times a year by phone
Extra vitamins and chewable Vitamin C
Beef jerky
A new journal
(He got wool socks last Christmas)

He had his birthday on 9/11 last week and hit his one year mark in Bulgaria on September 15. One year down. One to go. I sent him a birthday cake to bake and it exploded before it arrived dusting everything in cake mix. A curse of crossing the Atlantic. Turned out, the other missionaries and people he knows there (he's currently on the Black Sea coast) gave him a surprise birthday party with lots of great Bulgarian food. He was completely delighted.

And told me in his weekly email that I need to learn how to cook Bulgarian food. He says it's the best!

I think I know what I'm asking Santa for Christmas now.

Sunshine Anecdote

It’s 93 degrees here, way above the normal of about 83, and with a passive solar house that means it’s HOT! Lots of people ask me, "What is a passive solar house???"

Passive means we have no “active” solar panels or water pumping systems, etc. Every day you do nothing – and the sun warms the house.

Here's how it works: We built our house facing the south with lots of windows to catch the solar rays. Sunshine comes in - house heats up.

One key ingredient during building: Use adobe walls and tile floors to absorb the heat during the day’s sunshine hours. At nighttime, the adobe and tile slowly released the heat as the temperature falls, but it helps to keep the house at a fairly even temperature. No huge swings.

During the winter months (October – March basically) the sun’s angle is lower on the horizon which means the rays come directly through your windows. Perfect. Even in January when it’s in the low teens my house will be 75 degrees inside – without any heat on at all! It’s fabulous. I can sit on the adobe bench in my kitchen soaking up the sun and staying toasty warm.

What happens during April/May through September you might wonder – those hot summer months? Well, the sun begins to move higher on the horizon, reaching its full zenith overhead in June. By late May the sun does not shine directly through the windows at all, hence no solar “gain”.

You can observe the patch of the sun’s light movement on the tile floor – literally – as it changes during the weeks of May and September. A few inches, a foot, two feet, three feet, etc. as the sun is changing into it’s winter position - or out of it - as the case may be.

We’re roasting at the moment because I’ve been watching the inches of sun grow to three feet coming in now across my floors (it will eventually grow to about ten feet in December/January!) and yet our temperatures are way above normal. Hence, a very warm house. And the swamp cooler broke yesterday. Sigh.

Native American tribes used the sun to heat their adobe houses and cave dwellings a thousand years ago here in the Southwest. Very smart people!

The Southwest is the perfect climate to a solar home because we have more sunny days than cloudy days. It can be 12 degrees outside in January and even blustery, but the sun will be shining. I love it! Why wouldn’t everyone build a solar house like this? It didn’t cost us more to build. You just direct the main rooms of your house facing south, put in lots of big windows and let the sun pour in.

When we moved to New Mexico and heard about this type of house we thought it was foolish NOT to build a house like this. But very few people actually do. We save a lot of money on our electric bill plus I have a warmer house than most other people do. Cool!

Advice from my Son

So I showed my new blog to my 23-year-old son, and he had lots of advice for me. He also showed me the dozens of blogs he keeps up with. He is a D&D addict! So he likes to read the usual gaming sites, personal opinions and advice columns on gaming, but in this family we also like to read political opinions and columnists like from TownHall.com and talk about them. My son says "flame wars" can be fun. Yikes. Too stressful. He just laughed.

Son's advice:
Give your readers something more than a journal or a diary.
Give your readers something to think about, something to chew on.
Be controversial.
Express opinions.
Invite dialogue.
Be relevant to other people's lives and interests.

Sounds like good advice for a blogger. And good advice for a writer of children's books, too.

Sixteen years ago in November, 1989, I heard Richard Peck, the Newbery winning novelist, give a talk at a writing conference in Santa Fe (before he was a Newbery winning novelist). The conference was called, "The Courage To Write For Children." Peck said that the book you are attempting to write should not be about you. Your story should be about your reader. Kids don't want to read about you - the boring *old* grown-up. (There's that word *old* again - sheesh!). Kids want to read about themselves - or they want to read about their friends. Their life is the interesting one, the one they care about the most. You're just the author, some name on the jacket cover. A nobody to a teenager.

There you go , all you bloggers and writers. Good advice - from my son and Richard. Take it or leave it. And have a good one.

I'm off to finish rewriting, The Healing Spell, one of my latest projects, and eat some chocolate.

Teenagers Old and New

Oh my gosh, I'm blogging! I think I'll welcome myself to the 21st century. I'm sort of feeling like a teenager today. Who'd have thought I'd be writing an online journal? I've come a long way from scribbling each night in my cloth-covered flowered little diary with the gold lock in 5th grade. (Which I still have!) When I was a kid, personal computers were something far in the future and the internet - who could have imagined? Heck, we didn't even have calculators back then. My dad was a civil engineer and used a slide rule. They used slide rules to go to the moon! Isn't that a scary thought? The 60s and 70s are starting to feel like the Dark Ages. Gulp. No, I did NOT say that! I'm not getting older! I REFUSE to get older . . .(stamps foot). Is it obvious I'm a 40-something fighting middle age? I think I read that middle age has been pushed to 60 now. Sounds good to me.

Yes, I do still feel like a teenager, even with teenage kids of my own. And it becomes even more apparent to me when I'm with the 14-16 year olds in my class in the early morning hour. They're funny, sometimes goofy, shy, extroverted, smart, silly, sleepy, grumpy, sometimes annoying, but mostly great kids. Inside, they're just like teenagers were thirty years ago. The angst. The uncertainty. The hopefulness. The girls giggling with the boys in the hall and coming to class late. (This morning, ahem.) The basic problems with friends and family and schoolwork and schedules. Some things never change. The outside appearance does, but what's on the inside - I don't think so.

And I like that.