The Writing Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

Despite a series of recent discouragements in my writing career, back in March I talked myself into starting a new chapter book, tentatively titled The Angel Tree. 

But I couldn’t get into the story. It was hard to get to know the characters. They felt like mannequins manipulated by me rather than real, live kids driving the action. My notes to myself (a representative few quoted verbatim here) went like this: “Maybe I no longer know how to write a book. Maybe I will never write a book again” – “I am not feeling good about this book! I think it’s b/c I am not believing in the story” – “I am just moving pieces on a chessboard” – “I can’t believe any kids today would like this book.” Frowny face emojis abounded. 

My favorite part of writing a longer work is the momentum you get partway through, where each event precipitates the next in a way both surprising and inevitable, where you finally know where the story is going (even if with only a vague idea of how it will get there) – the stage of the process where you wake up each morning eager to be swept away by the swirling waters carrying your story through dizzying rapids to the satisfying safety of shore.

This time, I wasn’t feeling any momentum on this project. None at all.

Was my book DOOMED?!

 Then I realized that, thanks to my current state of discouragement, my writing process had become as follows. Write a short chapter, convince myself it wasn’t very good, put the book aside for a week or two, pick it up and reread what I had so far, convince myself that, hey, it wasn’t THAT bad, write a bit more, and then let it languish again for days, even for weeks. This is NOT the way to get momentum going!! I had never given my poor little book a fair chance! I was the one who had doomed it!

 I returned to writing on the book for an hour each day, the lifelong practice I had let myself abandon here. I wrote in the darling writing nook in my little cottage. I wrote while off on a short trip to Crested Butte. I wrote on a family trip at Grand Lake. And guess what? As I steadily, faithfully, kept on writing, I started to like the book. I started to LOVE the book. That delicious, delightful momentum of writing was mine again! I finished a full draft two days ago.

 I learned (or learned again) what I had already known but somehow allowed myself to forget: writing goes SO MUCH BETTER when you actually DO IT. Bonus lesson: And stop saying terrible things about your book on a daily basis right there where the book can hear everything mean you are saying about it! Would you thrive and flourish as a book if your very own author did that to you?

Note: I wrote this originally at the invitation of the fabulous Carol Lynch Williams for the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers (WIFYR) community she created in Utah, but she told me I could share it here, too!

 

 

Writing Advice from L. M. Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables)

I’m back from a delightful biennial conference on the work and life of L. M. Montgomery, best-known as the author of Anne of Green Gables, hosted by the L. M. Montgomery Institute on Prince Edward Island.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Montgomery and Change.” I was on a panel with wonderful children’s lit scholars Dawn Sardella-Ayres and Ashley Reese. Our panel explored how changes in Montgomery’s life led to changes in her writing. Dawn: how Montgomery’s portrayal of ministers and ministers' wives changed once she married a minster! Ashley: how Montgomery’s portrayal of mothers changed once she became one! Me: how the volume of writing advice in the books exploded from the Anne of Green Gables series to the Emily of New Moon series, providing a defense by Montgomery of her own creative choices as a writer.

 So, I decided to share with you a small sample of this voluminous writing advice, much of it coming from Emily’s curmudgeonly teacher Mr. Carpenter, reinforced at times by other characters – or, in other writings, by Montgomery herself.

1. “For heaven’s sake, girl, don’t try to write what you can’t understand yourself,” and similarly, “Don’t try to write anything you can’t feel.”  
2.  Avoid didacticism: “You’ve no right to try to teach until you’re old – and then you won’t want to.” Montgomery wrote of her creation of Anne: “I cast ‘moral’ and ‘Sunday School’ ideals to the winds and made my ‘Anne’ a real human girl.”
3.  Don’t put “cleverisms” into your writing, Mr. Carpenter scolds Emily. In a separate essay on writing, Montgomery elaborates: “When you find yourself getting more pleasure from the way a writer says a thing than from the thing itself, that writer has committed a grave error.”
4. Don’t try to imitate other writers. The one Mr. Carpenter mentions by name is Kipling, unlikely to be imitated much nowadays, but we certainly have own idols who exert undue influence on our style.
5. “Things aren’t convincing if they’re too true to life.” In a different piece, Montgomery explains, “Any artist knows that to write exactly from life is to give a false impression of the subject . . . The writer must create his characters, or they will not be lifelike.”
6. Treat your characters – all of them – with kindness. Mr. Carpenter rebukes Emily for a mocking portrait of a deceased neighbor: “Be merciful to the failures, Emily. Satirize wickedness if you must – but pity weakness.” Anne’s neighbor Mr. Harrison speaks up to Anne even for the wicked: “If I had to have villains [in a story] at all, I’d give them a chance, Anne. I’d give them a chance. . . Most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us.”
7. Don’t be seduced into thinking that “realism” commits you to writing only dark, disturbing stories. “Don’t be – led away – by those howls about realism. Remember – pine woods are just as real as – pigsties – and a darn sign pleasanter to be in.” (Montgomery repeats this point over and over in journal entries as well as published pieces.)
8. Write only to please yourself. On his deathbed, Mr. Carpenter tells Emily, “promise me – that you’ll never write – to please anybody – but yourself. . .  No use trying to please everybody. No use trying to please – critics. Live under your own hat.” Here, too, Montgomery elsewhere expresses this in her own voice, asking herself, “Does this story interest me as I write it – does it satisfy me? . . . As for the others, I couldn’t please them anyhow, so it is no use to try.”
9. Finally, persevere despite rejection. Montgomery shows both Anne and Emily achieving publication after failed tries. Emily’s first novel receives an editorial rejection noting that their readers “had found some merit in the story but not enough to warrant an acceptance”! This is word-for-word identical to one Montgomery herself received for Anne of Green Gables, the book that a hundred years later still has ardent fans from all around the world!

As a reader or writer, maybe one of these tidbits will especially resonate with you. At one time or another, they have all resonated with me.

 

Searching for My Next Book Idea

Well, I have been stuck, mired in discouragement about the current state of children's book publishing (like every other children's book author I know) and mildly disappointed in the world's reception to my beautiful new book, Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom, which has received lovely reviews, but not the kind of critical adoration we all secretly, or not so secretly, crave. 

I haven't been writing. I don't know what to write. I don't know what the world wants me to write. I don't know what I want me to write.

When I'm not writing, I'm not happy. And when I'm not happy, my sweet partner has a hard time being happy, too. 

Something needed to be done. And David took it upon himself to do it.

He told me I needed to start going to my writing nook again, early in the morning, for that sacred hour timed with my beloved hourglass. Of course, I knew that. But sometimes we hear it better when someone else says it. I needed just to START WRITING. Or as Anne Lamott says, I needed to STOP NOT WRITING.

"But WHAT should I write?" I wailed.

"Tomorrow morning you will find five sheets of paper waiting for you in the nook," he said mysteriously.

And so I did. 

On the top of each blank page, printed in his big capital letters, were words to start me brainstorming, words that showed his understanding of exactly the kind of book I, Claudia Mills, like to write.

LOW STAKES PROBLEMS FEEDING HIGH STAKES EMOTIONS

MORAL COMPLEXITY

COURAGE/PERSONAL GROWTH

BELONGING    LONELINESS   

SELF-DISCOVERY

Beside them on the table was a stout red candle and a book of matches. It was time to light that single candle rather than sit and curse the dark. It was time to start scribbling random little notes in my teensy-weensy writing. 

The words came pouring out.

Then came delicious hours of distilling dozens of possible ideas from those five sheets of paper. Then distilling those dozens down to the ten most promising. Then, almost blindly, willy-nilly choosing just ONE, or allowing just ONE to choose me.

I've now made almost 30 pages of notes for this idea and written three short chapters. As always happens, now I'm not sure it is the ONE. I am beset with self-doubt. But it feels so good to be writing! To be writing anything! Anything at all! 

Begone, self-doubt! I am going to continue to cover page after page with teensy-weensy writing. (I love teensy-weensy writing!). Whatever becomes of these pages, I am finding joy in writing them. So there!

A Real-Life Fairy Tale about Books, Friendship, and Our Interconnected World

Years ago, I received a message from a math teacher in Turkey, Feyza Demir, who wanted to know how she could get a copy of my third-grade-level chapter book, 7 x 9 = Trouble! 

So I bundled up a copy of the book, as well as its sequel, Fractions = Trouble!, and shipped them off to her in Istanbul, figuring out the customs form and carefully copying a long address onto my package of which I could read hardly any of the words.

But the package found its way across thousands of miles to her mailbox, and we become Facebook friends, corresponding now and then as the years passed. 

Then, during the pandemic, she invited me and G. Brian Karas, illustrator of both books, to do a ZOOM school visit with her class, which was a total joy, even though (because of the time change) it was in the middle of the night for both Brian and me. That made it feel even more like a wondrous fantasy.

Recently, I learned that both Fractions = Trouble! and my brand-new book, Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom, are going to be published in a Turkish edition by Beyaz Balina, which also at some time in the past did a Turkish edition of 7 x 9 = Trouble! Hmmm. Apparently, Feyza told them that the works of this important American author needed to reach a Turkish audience!

But the story gets better... the story is about to turn truly magical....

Feyza told Beyaz Balina that she would like to be the one to translate Calliope's story,  although she had never done any translation work before. Appropriately, they asked her to submit a sample translation of the opening chapters, which she did... and... drum roll.... they have offered her a contract to translate the book! She and I, two friends from afar, bonded through books, are now going to be co-creators of a book we make TOGETHER!

She is over the moon about this, and I am, too. Here is her exuberant Facebook post sharing this news with the world. The only thing I can read in it is my name, but the joy shines through.

Çok sevdiğim yazar Claudia Mills ile binlerce kilometre öteden kurduğumuz bağ, bugün onun son kitabının çevirmeni olacağım haberiyle taçlandı.

Ben ona bu sürprizi söylemeye hazırlanırken, onun bana imzalayıp gönderdiği kitabın kapımı çalması? İşte buna “evrenin göz kırpması” deniyor sanırım! Felsefe odaklı yoğun bir yaz şimdiden beni bekliyor. Belki kitabın çıkışını sonbaharda Claudia ile burada, İstanbul’da birlikte kutlarız? Kim bilir, bazı masallar belki de gerçektir!

Luckily, Facebook lets you click on the option for a translation:

The bond we have built with the author I love very much, Claudia Mills, has been crowned today by the news that I will be the translator of her last book.

As I was getting ready to tell her this surprise, the book she signed and sent to me knocked on my door? I guess this is called the "wink of the universe"! A busy summer focused on philosophy is already ahead. Maybe we will celebrate the book's release together with Claudia here in Istanbul in the fall? Who knows, maybe some fairy tales are true!

Yes, some fairy tales ARE true, indeed.

The world right now is not my favorite place... this terrible war... so many terrible things everywhere. But this is a beautiful thing.

The world has beautiful things in it, too.

And this is one of them.

Squeeze Out Every Possible Drop of Joy!

My new book, CALLIOPE CALLISTO CLARK AND THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM, comes out in ten days. 

Right now, I have NO next book under contract, NO next book in the pipeline to publication. I have other books I have written or soon will be writing. But there is no guarantee they will ever become published books for children to hold in their hands.

This might be my last book ever.

WAAHHH?

No! Instead of moping and whining (and I am actually very good at moping and whining!), I need to squeeze out every possible drop of joy from the birthday of this beloved book child on March 10. I need to celebrate with all my might and invite the whole entire world to celebrate with me. 

In the book, Callie (who wants a more extraordinary name for the extraordinary person she plans to be and so renames herself Calliope Callisto Clark) has a beloved dog whom she might lose forever if she doesn't become perfect enough to please her guardian grandparents who are threatening to take Archie away.

So, for my book launch at Boulder Bookstore on Thursday, March 12, at 6:30 (flyer below), I ordered three dozen of the MOST ADORABLE DOG COOKIES EVER from my former grad student in the Hollins University Graduate Programs of Children's Literature, Amy Glendinning, who happens to be an ASTONISHING COOKIE CREATOR. She shared some photos of the cookies today. Note that the purple scarves adorning each dog echo the purple scarf on the bust of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus on the book's cover.

I am so happy, so happy, so happy, with these cookies! I have very cute dog-themed prizes for the event, too. And the store made very cute postcards advertising it.

I'm also doing a virtual launch via ZOOM at Fallen Leaf Books, the delightful indie bookstore owned by my sister and brother-in-law in Nashville, Indiana. That event will be on Saturday, March 14, 12 ET, 11 CT, 10 MT, and 9 PT. Email me at cmills@colorado.edu for the ZOOM link if you want to attend. I even convinced the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado to let me give a talk there later this week. I will give a talk about this book to anyone anywhere! 

Friends, whenever you have something in your lives to celebrate, fling yourselves into joy with all your might. The world is a troubled place right now. It's probably always been a troubled place and always will be. So every scrap, tidbit, and crumb of joy is needed. And if these come with cookies, all the better!

 

The Power of EXTREMELY Minimal Goals

I wouldn't say this was a "resolution" for the new year. It was more just "something that needs to start happening NOW or I am going to be very, very sorry later on."

I am talking, alas, about exercise. 

Luckily, I have always loved walking. Indeed, walking is one of my four "pillars of happiness," things that make any day a good day and my life as a whole a good life: writing, reading, walking, friends. From my cottage it's a lovely 30-minute walk each direction to the main branch of the Boulder Public Library, Boulder Bookstore, the cute shops of Pearl Street, and the university campus. I am all set for blissful walking everywhere! 

But sad but true, I have come to realize that walking isn't enough. What about strengthening my shriveled, shrunken arms, weakened still further after not one but two fractures the year before last? What about squats and lunges, whatever they were? I had heard these were things other people thought important to do. 

I envy friends who have found a form of vigorous, rigorous exercise they actually love, who come home glowing after zumba, yoga, jazzercise, Crossfit. But whenever I have made a feeble attempt to try something like that, I have come home from the first class feeling even worse about myself and how bad I am at all of this.

SO: I gave up on trying to find a form of exercise I would love. I decided just to suck it up and do exercises I DON'T love for ten measly minutes a day, timed to the second. Couldn't I force myself to spend ten minutes a day as an investment in my future fitness and functionality? 

Dumbbells one day.

Squats, lunges, and stairsteps the next day.

Alternating back and forth FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. 

I have done this for a whole month now - hooray for me - and I have to say I am amazed at how much easier it has gotten. I've graduated from 3-pound weights to 4. At the start I could barely stand to do 5 squats. Now I can do 20. I even tried flexing my bent arm the other day, and I swear I could feel a little bulge there that might even be a . . . muscle!

As if to validate my new system, The New York Times published an article two weeks ago titled "How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With?" Their advice: "Aim for the minimum." 

Because (this is me again, and not the NYT), here is the one ginormous wonderful thing about extremely minimal goals: YOU ACTUALLY DO THEM!!!!! Take it from me: it is SOOOO much better to do a small something every single day, faithfully, than to talk about doing some big, daunting thing, and end up doing nothing at all. 

This is true for exercise. It's true for writing. It's true, period. 

In Praise of Rejection Slips

Despite its being the new year, the year I vowed that Everything Is Going to Be Different This Time, I am back in my same old listless lethargy of limbo, waiting to hear the fate of certain writing projects, utterly paralyzed until I do.

Here’s the worst thing: I may NEVER hear.

Once upon a time, there was such a thing as the “rejection slip,” an actual letter you would receive in the actual U.S. Postal Service mail, rejecting your work. It was often a letter typed by an actual human being.

I was once one of those human beings. When I worked for Scholastic’s Four Winds press as an editorial secretary, some 40 years ago, it was part of my job to type those rejection letters. When I submitted one of my own manuscripts to Scholastic under a pseudonym (a story for another occasion!), I had the dubious honor of typing a rejection letter TO MYSELF.

It became a bragging point to amass rejection letters. People would say things like, “Every rejection letter is bringing you closer to that first acceptance!” Published authors doing school visits would bring their bulging folder of rejections to show the students. “These are all the rejections I received just on THIS BOOK!” The students would gasp obligingly. One writing teacher I knew would give a prize to the student who received the class’s first rejection.

 Ah, those were the days!

Nowadays, publishers don’t bother sending rejection letters. On their website they say something like, “If you don’t hear from us within six months, assume we aren’t interested.” But it sounds a lot like, “We already know we aren’t interested! We will never even take a glance at your work! But go ahead and send it anyway, ha, ha!”

 Of course, this is partly our fault. Back then, professional etiquette forbade “simultaneous submissions.” You were supposed to submit to one publisher at a time, wait for your rejection, and THEN submit to the next one. And you had to mail in your bulky manuscript with a SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope) for its return. Nowadays, authors can – and do – submit all the livelong day, just clicking SEND over and over again. So editors are drowning under a flood of submissions.

 And we are suffocating in their silence.

 WAAHHH!!! Oh, for an old-fashioned rejection slip coming in the mail today!

 But maybe I’ll get an email today that someone DOES want one of my books? I will perk up instantly and lamentation will become celebration. 

Until then, limbo continues… and may continue for the rest of my days….

 

What Is the Difference Between "Contentment" and "Settling"?

Happy new year, everybody!

Poet Molly Fisk suggests that instead of making new year's resolutions, we choose a word to reflect on throughout the year - or rather, that we allow a word to choose us. I've been doing this for four years now. For 2023: "closure." For 2024: "trust." For 2025, "openness." And now for 2026 - ta-dah! - "contentment." As the poet she is, Molly urges us to research our word - its etymology, its allusions, its literary richness.

For "contentment," I have a problem. The noun "contentment" is defined as "peaceful satisfaction." But the verb "content" has less pleasing associations. As a transitive verb, "content" means, according to Merriam Webster, "to appease the desires of" and "to limit (oneself) in requirements, desires, or actions." That is to say, to content ourselves with less than we had hoped to get.

There is something undeniably SMALL about contentment. When we talk about contentment, we are not talking about how we feel after a successful ascent on Mount Everest or winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. We are talking about sitting by a fire cozily reading a good book. We are talking about looking at gently falling snow outside a cottage window. And this IS the kind of contentment I want for myself in the new year, contentment in life's little things. 

So my question for myself - and for anyone else who wants to ponder it - is: when is this kind of smallness TOO small? We don't want to be the fisherman's wife asking the wish-granting flounder for more, more, MORE. But we don't want to settle for second-best, either. I love these lines by Pulitzer-prize winning poet Kay Ryan:

However carved up/ or pared down we get/ we keep on making/ the best of it as though/ it doesn't matter that/ our acre's down to/ a square foot. As/ though our garden/ could be one bean/ and we'd rejoice if/ it flourishes, as/ though one bean/ could nourish us. 

So, again, when is less too little? When is small too shriveled and shrunken?

Maybe it has to do with how much we are truly contented - peacefully satisfied - with what we have, as opposed to forcing ourselves to put on a smiley face in response to undeniable disappointment. And maybe it has to do with the size of our expectations - reasonable or ridiculous?

I love my small, somewhat shabby rental cottage and wouldn't trade it for a palace. (Note: this is a real photo! Not photo-shopped! Not AI-generated!)

I love my small, definitely shabby 14-year-old Honda Fit that I bought used from Boulder CarShare and still has their logo visible through its cheery turquoise paint. I would drive the same car if I won the lottery tomorrow. 

It's in regard to my writing career that I'm struggling a bit. I wrote two books last year; I'm awaiting word from the publishing gods on the fate of both of them. Hopes are dimming for the first one; I should hear about the other one very soon, and I want good news about it VERY MUCH. But publishing is getting more and more competitive. There are more and more new writers out there writing wonderful books. It may be that the book I have coming out in March, Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom, will be my last published book.

It's already gotten some nice accolades: it's a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and received a glowing, starred review from often-curmudgeonly Kirkus. But maybe that's all it's going to get. And I so want this book, which may be my last book, to be THE ONE the world fawns over, the one that will secure my place in the pantheon of children's literature creators, the one that will make me immortal. Is that too much to ask?

Well, of course it is! If I think it's not enough that I've had a wonderful 40-year-long career, with this my 64th published book, AND get to live in a cottage I love with a man I love, with quiet peaceful happiness just about every single day, then the greedy fisherman's wife has nothing on me! So, yes, I am vowing to center my life in the year 2026 on contentment. I don't have just one bean to nourish me. I have whole steaming tureens overflowing with beans! 

My goal for 2026 is to remember this with a heart full of gratitude. 

One of the Happiest Days of My Long and Happy Life

This post is going to be stuffed full of love and joy and bliss and gratitude as I come down to Earth after my younger son's wedding earlier this month. I was too overwhelmed from the experience even to write about it until now, which is saying a lot! 

When Gergory was in fifth grade at Mesa Elementary School, he was one of eight students selected to take part in the school's foreign exchange program. The country chosen for that year was Peru. Now two-plus decades later, he was marrying his long-time love, Natalie, who is Peruvian American. It all felt meant to be! 

Their wedding, both ceremony and reception, was held on the rooftop of a traditional Peruvian restaurant called Tanta in the River North district of Chicago. But first the photographer took a lot of pictures on a patio by the Chicago River with the city's storied skyscrapers as a backdrop. 

So here is our little family: me, my sweetheart David, my older son Christopher, groom Gregory, and bride (and beloved new daughter) Natalie.

I was the officiant at the ceremony, and a bit nervous about my role, but I did fine. My dress was shorter and more sparkly than I'm used to, but felt festive for the occasion.

The heart of the ceremony was their exchange of “vows,” which really weren’t “vows” per se, but outpourings of love from Gregory to Natalie and from Natalie to Gregory. They hadn’t shared these with each other ahead of time, or with me, and it was deeply moving to hear them spoken for the first time here. Gregory is SO quiet (thank goodness there was a microphone, as his voice is also SO soft), and SO private, and SO outwardly unemotional, that it was something I could never have imagined for him to speak such beautiful words of love aloud, and in public. (Both my sister and one of his close friends told me afterward they had never even heard him say that MANY words at one time!). Natalie had told me earlier that she had come up with a metaphor she was especially proud of, and it was easy to see which one it was. As he is a jazz saxophonist, it was, appropriately, a jazz metaphor. I don’t have the exact words but the basic idea was: she may sometimes play the wrong note, or sing offkey, but he improvises something beautiful out of everything. Christopher was enlisted to be the ring bearer, or at least the ring keeper, and offer them to Gregory and Natalie at the needed moment. Natalie’s mother gave a blessing at the end.

Jazz musician friends of Gregory’s played gathering music and Indigenous Peruvian dancers had been enlisted to dance for us. Natalie and her mother continued the opening dance when the costumed artists finished their first piece (mother and daughter are both accomplished dancers), and then Gregory was pulled in (Gregory, whom I have never ever seen dance, who hates to be conspicuous or look awkward), there he was, dancing with Natalie, unrehearsed, twirling a handkerchief in the air to follow her motions, beaming, gracefully rising to the occasion, showing how fully he has welcomed her Peruvian culture into his life, its music, its dances, and most of all, its openness to emotional expression. 

Later on, after people were seated at tables decorated with flowers arranged by Gregory and Natalie and helper friends the day before, and little stuffed llamas brought back with them from their recent trip to Peru, endless platters of scrumptious Peruvian food were produced. There was more dancing, and once again, Gregory and Natalie had a featured role (me still marveling at Gregory for doing this with such poise and good will!) and many others joined in, including David and me (who also never dance!). 

The vows and those two dances were the high point of the wedding, and the trip, and my life!!! I don’t think I’ve ever had a happier evening. I will remember it forever.

The Best Gift from the Muses: A New Book Idea

Some of my writer friends have zillions of ideas, more than they could write about in a lifetime. I heard a talk from one children's book author years ago, who said he wrote 200 picture books a year - and (of course) only succeeded in publishing three or four of them (itself a most impressive feat). But for him, ideas were everywhere, springing up from the soil, tumbling down from the sky, a Niagara of ideas cascading through his life every single day.

I am not like that. (Imagine photo of one tiny drop of water dripping from the world's slowest faucet.)

It takes a long time for me to get a book idea. I have NO extra book ideas lying around, languishing for want of my attention. For me, a book idea is a rare and wondrous thing.

But I got one last week. It just popped into my head during a brainstorming session with my sweetheart, and there it was, an actual, bona fide, EXCITING (at least to me) book idea.

No, I'm not going to share it here. It's too new, too fragile, to speak aloud at this embryonic stage. But I'm obsessed with it. I spend my hour-a-day of writing time covering pages with handwritten notes about it. I Google things that have to do with it on my phone. I sat in church last Sunday, and something in the sermon resonated with the idea, so I had to grab the church bulletin and write it down.

It feels so wonderful to have a new book idea!!

Still in writer's hell awaiting word on the book manuscript I finished two months ago, I was too paralyzed with mingled anticipation and dread even to try groping toward writing something new. Despite my cheerfully claiming in this blog space that I was doing that, I was just lying to myself, or, more kindly put, pretending to myself. I avoided my beloved writing nook, tucked under the eaves in our darling cottage, because I wasn't worthy of a writing nook if I wasn't actually writing. (Thing I saw on Facebook: "You don't have to write every day to be a writer. You just have to feel guilty every day that you aren't writing.") Instead of writing, I got up freakishly early as usual and did New York Times puzzles on my laptop in the dark. How pitiful!

But now, I am back in the nook, with the light on, scribbling, dreaming, drinking tea from my special writing teapot, burning my special Betsy-Tacy writing candles. 

Right this moment, I am NOT thinking about the last book and what its fate will be. I have a NEW IDEA! Hooray for a NEW IDEA! Writing gods, thank you! 

And please, writing gods, help me be worthy of it.

The Worst Part of Being a Writer: Waiting to Hear

My new book (working title: The Cottage on Fox Hollow Lane) was sent to my editor partway through April. At the start of May, my agent followed up with a gentle nudge, asking if they were interested in the book. Their reply had one extremely encouraging sentence followed by two extremely terrifying sentences:

"Yes, we are very interested. (ENCOURAGING SENTENCE!) However (EVEN THAT WORD IS TERRIFYING!), we are in a bit of a transition here. Our new publisher has been here a week and is adjusting our acquisitions (WHAT ARE THE ODDS THAT THIS ADJUSTMENT WILL WORK TO THE FAVOR OF MIDLIST AUTHORS LIKE ME?). If you could give us a bit longer, I would be grateful."

A "bit" longer will be four weeks tomorrow. 

I have been handling the delay in the worst possible way - NOT writing on the new project I thought I was so interested in, NOT reading from a delectable stack of library books, NOT doing anything but check my phone every few minutes in an agony of dread. (To be fair, we also had a delightful extended visit from David's niece, followed immediately by a week-long visit from two granddaughters, a welcome distraction from fretting).

I WANT THIS SO MUCH! As every author in the history of the world feels about the fate of their creations. But this time I want it not just for me, but for my cottage, my sweet cottage on my street filled with wonder and whimsy, which is really the main character in this middle-grade novel. I made use of so many features of my street, working them into the story with staggering cleverness: the purple house, the peace sign house, the mailbox that offers free seeds, the fairy garden, the tiny park at the end of a beckoning path. I love them so - they deserve literary immortality! 

For some reason, it's been helpful for me to remember that I didn't love the cottage at first. David and I decided to rent it after a hasty fifteen-minute tour, and once we signed the lease, I actually hated it on our second visit. In my journal I wrote:

 "Can I really be happy there? The house is some 100 years old... the built-in bureau in our bedroom has drawers that will tip out and crash to the floor if you open them too far. The upstairs nook that was supposed to be my writing refuge has sloping ceilings so low there is no room for bookcases, so it's really a strange and almost unusable space. Most of the windows look out on the neighbor's house two feet away or on a bare board fence. I can't even imagine being happy there with no beauty at all as a balm for my soul. I would be ashamed to have anyone visit. They'd feel so sorry for me! I feel so sorry for myself right now!"

THIS is what I once wrote about the cottage I now adore!!! The writing nook I once reviled is a paradise! 

I used to hate to entertain and now I seek out any opportunity to invite friends to share this enchanted space. One of my writing groups met here and even named themselves "The Cottage Coven" in its honor. 

I don't know why this thought is such a helpful one.... that I was initially so wrong about the cottage - that my emotions shifted from shame and despair to pride and joy... Maybe it's just knowing that things all the time can turn out differently from what you think they will and sometimes turn out (vastly!) better. Maybe it's a faith in the magic of the cottage, which changed my heart, translating into the sale of the book about it. (Magic, and the value of believing in magic, is the book's central theme.)

Whatever happens, whether my book will ever be published or not, I'm glad I wrote it. I'm glad I gave the cottage the honor of starring in a story about itself. I can't help believing that the world WILL want this book. Doesn't it HAVE to want this book?

Well, no, it doesn't. The world has been quite clear in the past about refusing to love what I insist that it should. But I love my cottage. My cottage BELONGS in a book. The cottage is IN a book right now, my as yet-unpublished book, every page of which was written in love. 

So there, world!

And maybe I'll get some news of its fate (oh, please let it be good news) tomorrow? 

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!