Saturday was Vermont's 33rd Annual Odyssey of the Mind Competition.

If you don't know about OotM, you can catch the local coverage here:

The guy in the orange T-shirt at 1:20 is BH, who was head judge for the Transportation Problem. I was a long-term problem judge for the Theater Problem, for the middle school division. We saw our first team at 9:30 ( Read more... )

Even as my heart breaks for a family in town, who lost their only daughter in a bike-auto collision in Tennessee, I have much to be thankful for this week:

1. My daughter, who went to school from preschool to high school with Kate Richardson--bringing Kate's death that much closer to home--now has a paid writing gig! At age 22 to be paid to write ( Read more... )

Random Thing 1

saraharonson  says to "Celebrate Everything!" Sarah knows what she's talking about, so when I finished my first draft of StT, I celebrated. The celebration included ordering some photos of the person who inspired this novel.

The  photos arrived in Monday's mail and I turned at least momentarily into a squeegirl:


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Today I wrote 1800 words in the morning and then almost doubled that in an afternoon/evening session. That's 11 pages in one day. I don't know that I have ever done that with fiction before. Some of that volume can be explained by the fact that these pages incorporated two scenes I had scribbled into my notebook. I was not, in fact, making it all ( Read more... )

For someone who spent decades trying to figure out what she wanted to write--seriously, people--I am suddenly deluged with more book ideas than I can count.

Usually they're a lot like this:


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Those of you who teach know how many creative kids are out there. I spent Saturday surrounded by about 650 excited students in grades K-12, not to mention their friends, families, teachers and coaches, at Vermont's Odyssey of the Mind contest, (102 teams, approximately 7 members per team, minus a few teams who dropped out).


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I am so  happy this isn't the last day of February, because I'm on a roll. I drafted the feature I need to write, so that's ready to revise tomorrow. Cutting 50 words from it isn't going to be a bad thing, plus I need one more small piece of information that needs to come from my editor. That didn't completely fill the day, but left me with just ( Read more... )