I finished a draft of the Sage novel! Oh my God, I actually have a draft! It only took... four years to complete, oh wow, but I wasn't actively working on it for most of those four years so that's not as bad as it sounds ( Read more... )

Yet again I am trying to rewrite the novel about Sage and her three best friends in their senior year of high school as they apply to college, bake snickerdoodles, study calculus, and discuss whether or not niceness is for suckers ( Read more... )

I have been toying with the idea of trying to write a novel, again, because apparently I am a glutton for punishment and didn’t learn any lessons at all from the last four I tried to write. And I ought to add a fifth in there: Sage also, my magnum opus of last spring, collapsed in an ashen heap ( Read more... )

I read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Libby on Wednesday at two formative periods in my life: first, when I was eleven or twelve, and reading all the Zilpha Keatley Snyder because her books spoke so strongly both to who I was and who I wanted to be; and again, when I was at the University of York for a term and signally failing to make any kind of social ( Read more... )

As you may or may not recall, I've been working on a teen novel about a high school senior named Sage.

Well, "novel" is possibly a little strong. It's more than long enough to be a novel, but it's more like a series of loosely connected vignettes featuring a rotating constellation of characters, some of whom have what a generous person might term ( Read more... )

1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your current ms ( Read more... )

I think the makers of Get Smart intended Steve Carrell to seem charmingly awkward rather than totally obnoxious, but, uh, they missed. And why are he and Anne Hathaway together at the end? Were the moviemakers under the impression that they had sparkling banter, in which animosity only thinly covers an undercurrent of attraction? Because I see no ( Read more... )

Another reason why I haven't been posting much recently: I'm working on a novel.

I hit 50,000 words yesterday.

(I promised myself I wouldn't post about it till I got that many. Do you know how hard it was keeping that promise?)