On Thursday I had a lovely outing to Denver to connect with my dear writer friend Mary Downing Hahn, who was in town from Maryland to collect her zillionth readers' choice award at the CC-IRA conference. She was staying at the Marriott at the Denver Tech Center but was able to take light rail to meet me in Denver; I took the fabulous express bus in from Denver. We met at the Tattered Cover in LoDo.
I got to the bookstore an hour or so before Mary, by my choice, and got myself a cup of tea in the cafe and sat curled up in a comfy overstuffed chair. There I figured out exactly what I have to do in my new book. I am no longer writing in complete ignorance of where I am going. I now have a plan!
It feels so good to have a plan. For some reason, it was much easier to make a plan in an unfamiliar setting, rather than lying on the little couch in my sweet upstairs office/studio at home. What is it about a new and different place that unsticks our stuckness? I remember being with the boys a few years ago, in Green River, Utah, and looking out the window from our hotel room as I wrote the very first sentence of How Oliver Olson Changed the World: "Oliver Olson looked up at the moon." I still love that first sentence, and I love remembering where I was when I wrote it.
Now I love the plan for my new book, and I love remembering that I made it while waiting for Mary in that wonderful bookstore, before we went together to the Denver Art Museum to look at western landscape paintings, and had lunch at Dozen's, and shared so many stories.
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Oh, Claudia, I love the first sentence of How Oliver Olson Changed the World, too. How wonderful that your book plan came together when you were waiting for Mary Downing Hahn! It does have a certain symmetry, doesn't it?
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