It’s been a very exciting week around here… I have some great news coming up, and I can’t wait to tell you.
I’ve been slacking off on my reading in favor of other important to-do items. Such as the class I’m taking which I really really love, and then rereading and polishing up Intended for a submission. Spending time with the charactes made me really jazzed up to work on the series. While I was walking on my break today, I even brainstormed a new subplot for it. I might see if I can bang out a proposal on that one day soon.
My kids have been begging me to go to the library lately. I’m ashamed to say that the local public librarans probably shudder to see me coming, because I have this nasty habit of keeping books looooong overdue. And then returning them on a Fine Free Monday 😉 (No, they are really nice to me, but I have a guilty conscience!) My eldest son is a voracious reader. He read all the Harry Potter series in first grade much to my surprise and delight. His greatest love is epic fantasy like Eragon, PenDragon, and Percy Jackson. His school librarian confessed to me that he is a challenge to keep happy, but she loves to see him coming because he knows exactly what he likes. He’s always looking for harder books – and their school only goes to the fifth grade, so what they have in his reading level is limited. I expected these trips to the public library to result in him picking out some more challenging books, but he surprised me again. They have the ENTIRE Warriors series (cat warriors) and he has decided it’s his mission to read every single book in rapid succession. He got four of them tonight. I asked if that was two weeks worth and he looked at me funny. No, he said, I don’t want to end up with nothing to read on Sunday again. So Kung Fu kitties it is! But what really made me smile was he and his brother were talking in the back seat on the way there. My youngest was saying to him – “there’s a girl in my class that’s read those books” – translation: you aren’t so special! na-na-na-boo-boo! My youngest then said the girls name and that’s when I smiled. I clarified if it was the little girl I was thinking of, and he said yes. I told him that made sense to me because this little girl’s mom is a writer – unpublished as far as I know, but with that spark of hope I recognize in myself. We’ve chatted many times about the brutal process of submissions. It didn’t surprise me a bit that her daughter was a voracious reader 🙂 I was that voracious reader when I was a little kid. I grew up in a small town with one school for K-8 and I will never forget that by eighth grade, I had read every single YP (young person, I think) novel that graced the shelves there. My mom had to sign me up for an adult library card just to keep me out of trouble! I went off to high school reading VC Andrews and Stephen King. It’s nice to know there are plenty of middle grade novels nowadays that are more age-appropriate. And that before my kiddo heads off to get his adult library card, he will have an entire section of YA to plow through. But more than that, I’m grateful that my kids actually want to go to the library WITH me. They want to show me the books they are interested in, and often times want me to read with them. I hope that continues.
