belated and looking forward

Merry Christmas as well as anything else you may celebrate.

The year is winding down, and the way much of this one has gone, I’m glad to put 2012 in the rearview mirror: too many losses among friends and family, a lot of hard knocks. While I muddled through, I did remain grateful and had a lot of fun, too.

My dear old college friend, BJ Timoner is back on the road, on foot, to walk across America for Pancreatic Cancer Research. This is his second trek,  he had a heart event in the middle of the heat of Texas, and got back on the road east in 2011. You can imagine just how important this is to him, that he is willing to risk his very life to raise awareness and funds again.

Please click on his link at top right to learn more and to donate. This is one of the lowest rates of early detection and one of the highest death rates of all cancers.

You likely know someone besides Steve Jobs, who has passed quickly from this disease.

Please help BJ’s efforts and donate and pass the word.

Thank you, and have a stupendous 2013!

13 has always been a lucky number in my book. 🙂

 

sandy hook and simon’s rock

Most of my posts are rather light, focusing on the humor of raising my family and on managing to find blocks of time to write or edit what I have already written in the hopes it will one day be published.

Friday was a horrible day for us all. I know many parents hugged their children a little more, and called adult children who live far from them to tell them they love them.

For some of us, Friday was already a terrible 20th anniversary of a similar event at our small, bucolic college, where a beloved professor was taken and so was an equally wonderful student. We were memorializing  Ñacuñán Sáez and Galen Gibson when Sandy Hook left us reeling.

I am not going to to get into a gun debate here, or a mental healthcare debate, I just want to acknowledge that we all are grieving with the community that is seventy one miles south of that other campus, and under thirty miles from my parents’ home, the house where I grew up.

I hold Newtown, Ct in my heart, for a long time to come.

the next big thing

An old friend who is also a writer and small publisher asked me to answer some questions about what my Next Big Thing is.

Thanks, Cherie Noel of Tales from the Writing Cave (psa: adult content) for thinking of me and giving me another way hold myself accountable. I need a lot of accountability to keep me going.

Following is a little ten question self- interview re: my latest work in progress. She is doing the same on her blog and rounding up several other authors to do the same and link to the other blogs. Go check hers out!

10 questions about my WIP:

What is the working title of your book?

I started this project in Nanowrimo this year on a whim, and the working title is Nanowrimo 2012. Really clues a reader in, doesn’t it?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I think I have spent a lot of my writing fiction striving to make stories that are incredibly realistic with an imaginative twist, rather than bursting at the seams with imagination like so many fantastical stories that I love to read, or the stuff that just goes on in my head, which is pretty out there. So for this project, I decided to have fun leaping around in fairy tale  land and bringing it into a modern context. What would happen if a couple of 7th graders came across the stuff of their imagination and fears in the real world?
What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy for middle readers to young adult target audience.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Twelve year old best friends, Clementine and George open a book one week before Halloween, coincidentally, Clementine’s thirteenth birthday, and strange things begin to happen.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

No idea as of yet.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Don’t know yet, still in the beginning stages…

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Something vaguely Neil Gaimanesque, like Coraline or Stardust, or The Neverending Story in reverse. Kind of. Many tales exist where kids go into a book for adventures, but this is the book coming out and wreaking havoc on their world, and constant changes according to who is ‘reading’ it.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

A lot of reading since I began to read. I’ve always loved otherworldly tales.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It’s a coming of age story, where the kids in the town can ‘see’ the weird things happening, but the adults can’t, except for the destructive results. I am going to weave some kind of apocalyptic ending with children against the monsters of their imaginations in a huge battle of good against evil. It’s going to be terribly important that the imaginary world is returned to the magic book before midnight on Halloween, and before Clementine is completely thirteen, since she won’t be able to to see the imaginary beings, etc anymore when the clock strikes twelve.

Also, it explores a completely platonic best friendship between a boy and a girl. I always had friends who were boys and that seems to be a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp.

Who would you have play (what actor/actress) your characters in a movie?

The fun thing about my characters’ age is some of the actors I am thinking of are already too old, so it would have to be the next up and coming spunky girl to play Clementine, and George could possibly be played by Rico Rodriguez, or another newcomer. Rico may be getting a little old for the role, too.

Fellow Writers, please add a comment below posting a link your Next Big Thing and I will happily point the way to you blog in a future post. If you can point the way to some of your writer friends as well, that is part of the package deal here. Please link back to me when you post, so that we can promote each other. First handful to comment will be part of the my links post. Thanks for playing! Let’s keep it going.