Tag: MGlit

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MG Book Club at Tombolo

Yesterday I had the opportunity to join the monthly MG book club at Tombolo books. It was a small but engaged group and the members (all girls) had great questions and observations about The Many Fortunes of Maya.

I loved teaching 4th grade and one of my favorite things to do was having conversations about books. I do wish I had the presence of mind to ask them more questions (they were asking plenty of me), but I loved the discussion.

Color flyer showing the author holding copies of her book, while standing in front of a
Here’s the flyer from Tombolo!

I especially enjoyed asking the girls if they knew what a people pleaser was (Maya has some of those tendencies) and who she most wanted to please. Many of them surprised me by saying she wanted to please Ginger. As the author, my focus was showing Maya as wanting to please her dad, so the best friend angle caught me off guard.

I want to read it again – it’s been a while, ha! – and see if I can find the clues that make readers think Maya wants to please her best friend.

Have you read the Many Fortunes of Maya? Shameless plug, yes. Did you notice Maya’s people pleasing tendencies? Who did she want to please the most? What about you? Are you a people pleaser? Who do you want to please the most?

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Close the Gap

I love a good beginning.

As far as I’m concerned, any reason is a great reason to start. Any time is a wonderful time.

Today is the first day of the year, the first day of the week and the first day of the month, but none of that really matters.

The important part is, today is the day I’m ready to begin.

It seems I spent most of 2017 dormant. I basically stopped blogging and limited my tweets to greetings and #templebuilding updates. But the truth is, I helped my cousin/big sister land our first federal contract. We also delivered two excellent projects for a corporate client (we’ll finish one last one this month).

The thing I’m most proud of is a creative victory. I took a short story I wrote years ago and transformed it into a chapter book manuscript. I love my book, AMANDA AND MISSY, and I’m looking to get it traditionally published.

I’ve gotten some encouraging passes (nos) from agents, so we’ll see if it finds a home in 2018. It won’t be my best book or my last, and it isn’t the book I wanted to write last year, but I needed to start somewhere to begin closing the gap.

Ira Glass refers to the gap between your taste and your creative ability when you’re first starting out. Some of your early pieces might anywhere from horrible to even good, but they may not live up to your own standards of excellence. Not due to self-disparagement, but because of an honest assessment of where you are vs. where you’d like to be.

The only way to bridge this gap is by doing the work. Learning, trying, producing. There’s no magic formula, there is only doing. And that’s what I’m about in 2018.

I’m actually about many things this year. I’m returning to some old tried and true productivity strategies and trying out a couple of new ones. I’ll tell you more about those, as well as my three mottoes for the winter quarter in future posts.

What are you about this year? What will you accomplish this year? What’s the work you have in store?