The Month to REALLY Try Something New?

The book I've been writing for six months now, the one set in my sweet cottage on the street where I live, the street filled with wonder and whimsy, is now DONE. Currently titled The Cottage on Fox Hollow Lane, it has been revised after extensive comments from my writing group and sent off to my agent, who emailed me the next day with this lovely response: "It's wonderful! You created something truly magical. It might be your best book." 

Now, I do have to say that he is generally an extremely encouraging person. He even created a grant through the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) intended precisely to encourage people! I'm not joking! "Each year, the SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund selects three wonderful children's book creators in need of encouragement and gives them each a $2,000 grant, no strings attached, supported by the incomparable and generous literary agent Stephen Fraser."

But still. His encouraging words were most pleasant to hear. 

So now the book is off to my editor, awaiting its fate. And now I am thinking about MY fate, my fate and future as an author. I pledged this year to try writing something NEW AND DIFFERENT. I promised myself this would be the year of joy and PLAY. But I have I actually tried something new? No, I have not, at least in any serious way.

But now, I think - I THINK - I am almost ready to do this. Current plan: literary short stories! For grownups!! Loosely based on my seven decades crammed full of material! Eagerly, I trotted down on foot to the wonderful indie Boulder Bookstore and came back with an appealing harvest of recent short story collections to read as "mentor texts" and for inspiration.

I unearthed the journal I kept on my honeymoon in the hill towns of Tuscany, which is very funny and scathing, from the first page written in the early morning on the flight to Rome: "Rich is mad at me because I let the flight attendant take my tray, on which he, unbeknownst to me, had laid the special foil-wrapped Earl Grey teabag that he was planning to reuse." Doesn't this already say an awful lot about this marriage and what it is going to be like? And what about the woman writing this? Doesn't she already seem to KNOW this? And yet is doing this ANYWAY? I'm already intrigued! Yes, I am!

So trying to make a short story out of this journal is my plan - hope? dream? - for May. We shall see!