BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers 2009

First personalized rejection!

Okay, I’m taking a quick break from the Final Fantasy 6 Werewolf tribute posts to mention some exciting news.

This might sound counterintuitive, but I got an encouraging rejection letter a couple of days ago from Krista Marino, one of the editors at the BYU Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers conference! This is what she said:

Thanks for giving me a look at Genesis Earth. You’ve got a great concept and storyline worked out. Unfortunately this just doesn’t feel like a book for teen readers. All best, Krista.

In publishing, from what I understand, personalized rejections are a significant step above the standard form rejections. Once you start getting personalized rejections, your writing is generally at or near publishable, and you’re not too far from breaking in.

What’s more, it seems that her reasons for rejecting the ms had more to do with audience, genre, and her personal tastes as an editor than problems with the story or my writing. That’s very encouraging–it tells me that when I find an editor/agent who’s a good fit for this kind of story, I have a decent chance.

Or I could be wrong and it’s generally standard for editors/agents to give personalized rejections to conference attendees; I’m not sure.

Regardless, it’s a step up from a form rejection. I should probably send a thank you postcard to her in the near future.

I also need to start looking for other places to submit Genesis Earth. So far, I’ve only got three partials out right now. I’ve been putting more effort into finishing the 4th draft, but I plan to finish that this week (one way or another, inshallah), so at some point in the near future I need to crack open Writer’s Market and just find a bunch of places to submit.

Also, just tonight I got a peek at the artwork for my story coming out in this month’s issue of Leading Edge. It looks REALLY good! I lucked out with some awesome art! I don’t yet know who did it, but I’ll be sure to post a link to the artist when I find out.

Also, once the issue goes to press, I’ll be sure to post a link where you can buy it. Currently, the only way to buy copies of Leading Edge is through a mail-in form that you print out (lame, I know), but they just got a new volunteer webmaster so that’s probably going to change in the near future.

(Man, somebody read my story and illustrated it! Drew pictures of it! And they’re good! I can’t get over that!)

🙂 🙂 🙂

Final polish

I mapped out all the major assignments for my capstone class for the next month on my calendar. Turns out I’ve got a lot more work than I thought I did. Because of that, I decided to start work on Genesis Earth 4.0 today.

This is the final polish before World Fantasy convention. Of all the stuff I’ve written, Genesis Earth is the only ms that I feel is ready for me to send to editors/agents. With this draft, I hope to smooth out the writing, make the text more readable–basically, make this book really shine. We’ll see if it succeeds.

It’s kind of nerve-wracking, in some ways, doing this final edit (inasmuch as any edit is “final”). Previously, whenever I did a revision, I knew that I had time to come back later and fix anything that I just couldn’t get to. Now, this is where it counts. The writing has to be perfect.

Imagine how horrible it was to find a grammatical mistake on page one. I’d forgotten to capitalize the first word of a sentence in the third or fourth paragraph. Thankfully, it was the only mistake I saw on that page, but it’s enough to make me nervous about those chapters I sent out to the editors from BYU’s Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers. I know how to write–really, I do! Please believe me!

So today, every hour of the day was jam packed with classes, work, homework, and obligatory social activities. I only had two hours to write, and in that time, I only wrote about 500 words for Genesis Earth (though, to be fair, I’m measuring it by comparing documents and only counting the words that changed). Ouch. Not sustainable, if I want to finish Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home (I need to change that title) before World Fantasy. I made up for it by writing for half an hour just now in Stella, but still…

And this is where I hope I don’t mess things up. Every time I’ve tried to juggle two projects at once, I’ve found it very hard to do so. It’s something I’ll probably have to learn, if I want to write professionally, but it’s still very hard. I hope my writing quality doesn’t suffer because of it.

If worst comes to worst, I’ll focus on Genesis Earth until it’s done to my satisfaction. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, even with school. But I’m still keeping my goal to finish Stella before World Fantasy.

In unrelated news, in my political philosophy class today, Professor Hancock mentioned Huntington and I said, under my breath, “that guy was so full of crap.” Well, it turns out that Professor Hancock is quite the admirer of Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory. This is going to make class…interesting, to say the least. After studying this stuff my entire college career, I really do believe that Huntington’s theories are utterly full of crap.

Oh, and I had a great idea for a comic: Plato’s Republic, as a cartoon! Okay, maybe I’m just a geek, but seriously, if it were done well, it could be really, REALLY cool. Really cool.

Six weeks to World Fantasy

Holy cow! How is September halfway over? It seems like school started just a week ago. Only six and a half weeks before World Fantasy convention in San Jose, and I think I’m going to have to readjust some of my goals.

I’d wanted to finish Bringing Stella Home 2.0 by the 11th of October, but the way school and work is looking, I probably won’t be able to write 2k words every day in order to meet that goal. Besides, the story has several major issues that can only be fixed with a major overhaul, so there’s no way this novel is going to be ready for submission in time for the convention.

However, Genesis Earth is looking pretty good. So far as story issues go, I was very satisfied with the third draft–I think I fixed all the major issues and wrote something that’s pretty close to salable. Before the convention, I want to go through and make one final revision, one where I polish up the prose and fix the readability issues. That shouldn’t be too hard–I can probably do that in two to three weeks.

So here’s what I’m going to do in the next six weeks. I’m going to check out all of Robert Charles Wilson’s books and immerse myself in his prose–not to copy it, but to hopefully boost the quality of my own prose. The quality of his writing is fantastic, a beautiful mesh of literary prose and thriller pacing and rhythm. While I’m doing that, I’ll start the 4.0 draft of Genesis Earth and work hard at it, until I’ve polished that work as much as I can. That’s the work that I’ll try to sell when I’m at World Fantasy.

I’m a little worried, because I submitted the full manuscript to Krista Marino back in June and haven’t heard back. At the BYU Writers and Illustrators for Young Readers conference, she said she had a response time of 4 months, but I’m worried I won’t hear back from her before World Fantasy. Is it appropriate to send a polite note asking her to get back to me before the convention? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by sending out simultaneous submissions, and if an editor asks to see my ms, I want to be able to send it to them ASAP. Then again, I suppose I could just tell them that the full is currently with someone else, and that would demonstrate some professionalism…but I want to be able to send it if/when they ask for it.

Which reminds me: I need to do some HEAVY agent/editor research before this convention. I want to go to World Fantasy with a list of people to look for, so I know where to go to network, which panels to attend, who to look out for in the hallways and parties. I want to be very professional about this, and get the most out of those two/three days that I can.

As for Bringing Stella Home, my current WIP, I’m going to do my best to finish it before World Fantasy so that I can start November with something new. I need to finish that book before I can set it aside and let it percolate in my mind for the next revision. Besides, it’s been too long since I’ve worked on something completely new. After October, I’ll need to take a break from all these revisions.

So that’s the plan: Finish Genesis Earth 4.0 and Bringing Stella Home 3.0 before World Fantasy. Research all the editors and agents to look out for at the convention. Oh, and hold down 14 credit hours and 2 on-campus jobs at the same time, with some time left over for a dating/social life (INSHALLAH).

Hehe…these next six weeks are going to be packed!

Summer roundup

Alright, with the first week of school already over, I figure I should recap and evaluate my writing progress this summer.

When school ended in April, I was still waiting to hear back from Brandon Sanderson’s agent about an internship. My backup plan (which I started as soon as classes ended) was to stay in Provo and write full time.

Sanderson’s agent ended up taking on a different intern, which ended up being the best for both of us, since I get the sense that he was looking to mentor someone who would go on to become a professional agent. Me, I was just looking to network and develop some connections in the publishing world, which I did anyway (at least in the local Utah scene). Besides, Provo is WAY cheaper than New York!

From the beginning, I treated writing as a full-time job. I set project deadlines, daily and 7-day wordcount goals, and spent somewhere around 8 hours a day working on my various projects. I submitted a full to an editor from the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference and partials to the other two editors. I also submitted to the Writers of the Future contest and to the LDS Publisher Christmas story contest (much smaller, but geared toward a niche market).

I started keeping my stats on May 25th, using a spreadsheet to keep track of my daily wordcount for each of my projects, the daily total wordcount, the 7-day cumulative wordcount, and any writing I did for synopses or revision notes. Since BYU’s summer recess begins in April, I missed the stats for the first three weeks or so, but I kept consistent records since then until now.

From May 25th to August 31st, I wrote 244,065 words in 8 projects (3 short stories and 5 novel drafts). I averaged 2,490 words per day. Adjusting for Sundays (I typically take Sundays off), I averaged 2,906 words per day.

My goals were to write 4k words per day, and to shoot for a constant 7-day total of 24k, but to never let that total dip below 12k words. In 98 days, the 7-day running total only went below 12k eleven times–on those particular days, I was either traveling, moving out, moving in, or extremely busy with back-to-school chores. For the two weeks I was on vacation, I still wrote more than 12k words each week.

Interestingly enough, out of the eight fiction projects, only one was a rough draft–a short story that I worked on for two days and never completed. The vast majority of my writing went into revising novels that I’d already written.

I completed the first draft of Bringing Stella Home in early June (my third complete novel rough draft). Later, in July, I began the second draft. I’m currently just over halfway through with the revisions and hope to finish by October 10th.

I started a revision of my first novel, Ashes of the Starry Sea, but decided midway through that I was running up against diminishing returns and decided to drop it (I completed the rough draft in April of 2008–it was my first finished novel and the reason I started this blog, waaaaay back in August 2007).

I started a new draft of Hero in Exile, making some drastic revisions, but found it difficult to juggle more than one writing project at a time and put it on the back burner. I may or may not pick it up again once Bringing Stella Home 2.0 is finished.

I completed the third draft of Genesis Earth and started to submit it. I will probably do one language/readability edit before the World Fantasy convention in late October and try to sell it while I’m there.

Overall, the summer was a practice run to see if I could write full time and survive the insanity. I always feared, as a child, that if writing became my full time job I would come to hate it. I found, however, that writing full time (8+ hrs/day, 6 days/wk) only made me enjoy it more. Now that school is back in session, I already wish I had more time and mental space to dedicate to my writing.

I miss the summer, but not because of the lazy days, or the parties, or the vacationing–I miss the opportunity to write full time! Provided I can find a way to support a family off of this, I can definitely see myself turning this into a career. In the meantime, I’ll keep honing my craft and start working on getting an agent.

Now, more than ever, I feel that breaking in is more of a question of ‘if’ than ‘when.’

🙂 🙂 🙂

Dragging behind a bit

My writing slowed down significantly during the Writing and Illustratin for Young Readers conference a week ago, and it hasn’t really picked up at all since then. For my seven day totals, I’ve only been averaging between 17k and 14k–that means, on average, I’m doing about half what I want to be doing. Blah.

While I haven’t been writing a whole lot, however, I have been doing a lot of outlining. It looks like I’m going to be throwing out a ton of scenes, putting other scenes in different chapters, and adding whole new scenes in places where I previously didn’t have any. Yikes.

In other words, I’m in the process of completely reconceptualizing the structure of this novel–taking a few steps back and looking at the entire project as a whole. It’s taking up a heck of a lot of time right now, but hopefully it will help the rewriting process to be more successful. After all, if I try to stumble through without a clear idea of what I want this story to be, it’s just going to be a waste of time.

But if I’m going to finish this draft before August 1st, I need to pick up the pace. If this draft runs up to 150k as expected (and at the current rate, it could easily go over), I need to do just under 22k per week. That means, if I do anything less than 3k per day over the next six weeks, I’m going to fall behind this deadline.

The deadline is entirely arbitrary and artificial, but still, I want to keep it. Keeping deadlines is a writing skill I want to train myself to do, and I think it will help me out tremendously down the road.

So the goal this week is to pick up the pace again and get the seven day totals back up to 24k by next Sunday. It’s going to be something of a psychological struggle to get the momentum up again, but it’s something I know I can do. Inshallah.

In the meantime, I’ve been putting together some awesome ideas for a steampunk novel. Things are starting to gel for my next big project, and I’m getting REALLY excited. I still have an enormous amount of research to do before I can begin (like, tons of research), so I won’t get started just yet, but man! The ideas in my head are hot, I can feel it!

I know I’m speaking in vagaries…but to make up for it, I’ll leave you with a link to this wicked awesome steampunk picture I found the other day. Seriously–how cool would it be to be this guy??

Steampunk Airship Pilot by ~homarusrex on deviant ART

Some updates

Just a few quick updates before I go to bed:

My short story, Decision LZ150207, is getting published in The Leading Edge! Hooray! This will be my first publication credit. It certainly won’t be my last!

As you can see from the progress bar to the right, I’ve started work on draft 2.2 of Ashes of the Starry Sea, the novel that I finished back in April of 2008 (my first “finished” novel–and the project that spawned this blog). My goal is to finish this draft by August 1st, 2009.

It is a beast of a novel–I’m predicting it will be at least 150,000 words. The draft is currently at 158,000 words, but I’m going to have to add several scenes as well as vigorously trim out the bad writing.

And boy, is there a lot of bad writing in this draft! I knew, when I wrote it, that I wasn’t that good, but holy cow! Way too much introspection, way too much “tell”-iness, not nearly enough concrete details. Too many adverbs, too much wordiness, especially in the scenes with the action. This is going to be a deep revision.

BYU’s writing conference was a blast! I’ll try to post more about it in the near future, hopefully tomorrow if I can get around to it. The three editors who attended are open to submissions from the conference, and one of them prefers full manuscripts to partials, so on Saturday I printed up the full 2.0 draft of Genesis Earth.

Holding the full manuscript in my hands was surreal. It’s one thing to write it out digitally and see it on your screen, but it is something else entirely to hold the tangible, physical thing in your hands. I just…keep wanting to hold it. It feels so real.

But yeah, I’m kind of uneasy sending the full manuscript off to this editor, especially since she hasn’t asked me for it specifically (she just told all the conference-goers that she prefers full manuscripts). I don’t want to get in trouble sending my full ms out to multiple places, so my game plan is to send this to her ASAP so it can get rejected within the next 1-4 months (what she claimed was her turnaround time).

Because of that, I’m sending her a draft which could be more polished, but oh well. Anything could be more polished–eventually, you just have to send your stuff out. Besides, as pessimistic as this might sound, I do think that my mss has a fighting chance. We’ll see what comes of this.

Heaven’s library

2,943 words today, even though today was the first day of Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers. I’ve reached the major climax of the book–the moment I’ve been replaying over and over in my head. Perhaps this novel is not as bad as I’d thought–perhaps I can pull this off. The current incarnation is terrible, but I can see in my mind how good it can be in its second or third incarnation. Inshallah, I’ll pull it off.

Today was the first day of BYU’s writing conference, and it was great! The speaker in the last workshop I attended, Dandi Mackall, was exceptional. I don’t have my notes with me and the BYU library closes in twenty minutes, so I’ll recap the best part of her presentation, the story she told in the last five minutes.

She said that once she had a dream where she died and went to heaven (thank goodness!). When she got there, the angel who greeted her offered to show her around, and asked what she wanted to see first. Her answer? The library, of course!

In heaven’s library, she found shelves stretching as far as she could see, full of the very best books. She picked out a few and recognized some of her favorites, the ones that had impacted and changed her life.

After a while, though, she started to get a little disappointed: all of the books in heaven’s library were books we already had down on Earth. Why was that? Didn’t heaven have anything new–anything we hadn’t already seen down below?

“But all these books were here first,” said the angel.

Still, she couldn’t accept that as an answer, so the angel took her down a long, winding, narrow corridor. The deeper she went, the narrower and dustier it became, until she started to feel uneasily. This part of the library was dark and dirty. It was clear that hardly anybody every came down here

Finally, the angel led her to a door covered in cobwebs. He brushed them aside and opened the door, leading her inside. Here was a room many times larger than the first, with old, dusty bookshelves stretching higher than she could see.

She picked out a book and started reading through it. It was one she’d never heard of, but it grabbed her. She could tell that it was really good. She picked up another one, and realized that it was just the kind of book that one of her friends would have loved to read. She picked up another one, and realized that this one could have helped out another friend when she’d gone through a terrible life crisis.

All of this made her angry. “Why didn’t we have these books?” she asked the angel. “They are just as good as the ones in the other room. Why didn’t they make it down?”

“These are all the books that remain unwritten,” said the angel. “Each one of these is a book that a writer, somewhere below, has in them but fails to write down.

“This one is by a writer who just won’t let anyone touch her writing and give her the criticism she needs to improve her craft. This one is by a writer who doesn’t have the discipline to write consistently and finish what he starts. This one is by a writer who doubts her story and doesn’t think she can ever get it to work.”

At this, she nodded and let the angel lead her back out to the main room. As she left, she saw one final book near the door. It had her name on it.

What a great, encouraging story. I didn’t do nearly as good a job retelling it as Dandi did the first time, but it had a tremendous impact on me. I hope sharing it with you, it does something of the same.

For some reason I don’t understand, fate, God, or genetics (or some malicious combination of the three) conspired to turn me into a writer. I don’t write for fame or fortune; I write because I can’t not write. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m making a mistake trying to turn this into a career, into something that will feed myself and my future family. Looking at the millions of other floundering writers like myself, it’s easy to feel anxious. After all, only a tiny fraction of us will ever get published, let alone make a professional career out of this. Do I even have a fighting chance?

But then I hear a story like this one and I remember why it is that I write. Not for fame, fortune, publication, personal gratification, or even just because I can’t not do it. It’s because storytelling itself is important. It helps us connect with the world around us, to see its beauty and wonder. It helps us to appreciate ourselves and understand others. It stimulates our imaginations and, by so doing, helps us to life our eyes from the ground and see the divine potential that is all around us. It helps us to grow through vicarious experience–it helps us to live and to love.

Writing, at its best, is a sacred act, an important act, and if by grace we have been touched by inspiration and given a story to write, we should consider it noble and honorable to bring that story incarnate into the world, to touch the lives of others and lead them to what is good and true.

Things to do before June 8th

BYU’s Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference is coming up in less than a week, and I’m pretty excited for it! I’m signed up for the afternoon sessions only, but it should still be a great experience. From what I’ve heard, this conference is several steps up from CONduit and LTUE in terms of professionalism, and I want to be ready. Here’s my list of things to do to prepare:

Spot edit Genesis Earth for the really major stuff that I can reasonably fix in the next few days–especially the first three chapters. A lot of the feedback I’m getting suggests that this novel might comfortably fit in the YA genre, which means that I’ve actually got something I can market to these agents and editors. I want it to be ready (or, barring perfection, at least as ready as I can make it).
Work out a good elevator pitch for Genesis Earth. I’m not going to ambush anyone with it, but I want to be ready in case I get into a conversation with an agent/editor and they ask about it.
Research all of the agents/editors/authors coming. The list is here.
Polish shoes.
Do laundry.
Iron shirts.
Shave. Probably every day of this thing.
Get business cards? I’m not entirely sure about this. I suppose it couldn’t hurt. Anyone know where I could get a few dozen cheap/free ones on short notice?
Brush up on recommended conference etiquette. Miss Snark has several great posts on this in the archives of her blog.
Buy/reuse a cheap notebook and get ready to take lots and lots of notes. Sorry, guys, I probably won’t be recording or posting mp3s of this conference. It’s not a fan event, after all, and I don’t want to do anything that would get me in trouble.

Anything else I’m leaving out?

4k a day

It’s late, but I really need to write something of my recent thoughts on this blog, so this is going to be a stream-of-consciousness word-vomit sort of post. But please keep reading, it probably won’t be uninteresting.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog recently, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing recently–specifically, the practicalities of trying to make this my career, getting serious about it, etc.

In fact, for the past three weeks, it’s been just about the only thing on my mind. I’ve been listening and re-listening to just about every episode of writing excuses, the LTUE mp3s that I recorded, the old English 318 mp3s from last year, and various other talks and speeches on the subject of writing as a career.

I don’t have the time to really explain all my thoughts on the subject, but to sum it up, I’ve been angsting over it quite a bit. Will I be able to break into publishing in the relatively near future, or does my writing need years and years more work? Am I making a mistake to spend my summer just working on my writing? Am I making a mistake to be pursuing this so vigorously as my primary career path? and a whole lot of irrational angsting besides all that. You get the picture.

Well, I’ve gotten sick of doing all this thinking and now I think it’s time to just do it. I heard back last week from the agency in New York–turns out they already have someone, so I won’t be going there for the internship–but that’s actually alright, because it means I can take the summer to really focus on improving my writing.

Of course, if I’m not doing anything else, I need to be treating this like my full time career. The standard thing I keep hearing, at least from the professionals in the local scene, is that the average per-day wordcount is 4k. Depending on deadlines and other projects, that may increase, but the average daily wordcount is 4k. Since I plan on making writing my focus this summer, that’s my goal: 4k a day.

Last week, my wordcount was above 10k, but that’s actually a bit misleading. I wasn’t writing 10k words of new material each day, I was doing a quick mid-draft revision to add in a few crucial characters and scenes that I didn’t know I needed until I got midway through the book. It wasn’t even much of a revision; when I saw places where my writing really needed work, I made a note for later and kept on skimming. I only stopped to rewrite the sections that needed major changes in order to set things up correctly for later.

As a result, I feel that I’ve lost a degree of momentum. Now that I’m through all the old stuff, I’m writing entirely new material, and it’s very hard. I’ve only been skimming the last few chapters and scenes; as a result, when I picked things up this morning, I had difficulty getting into the story again.

I did 3,248 words today–that’s 3.2k words of new material–and by the end, I felt like the momentum was building and I was starting to get back into the story. A couple of weeks ago, when I was still angsting uselessly over the whole writing career thing, I kept feeling like this novel I’m writing is just crap. Now, however, I’m starting to see my faith in it return.

Writing is like that sometimes: the further you are from your story, the worse it seems, while the more you get into the story, the more faith you’re able to have in it. If you don’t have faith in the story you’re trying to tell, you just won’t be able to write it.

I could say more about what I’ve learned from my experience these past few weeks, but this post is getting long. To sum it up, that’s my new goal for this summer: 4k a day, as if I’m doing this full time.

At that rate, I’ll probably finish this novel sometime before the BYU writer’s conference (which I will be attending, at least the afternoon sessions–just registered yesterday). The personal deadline I set was June 15th, after the conference, but I think I can get it in early.

Okay, enough word vomiting. Time to get some sleep.

New directions

This past week, I’ve been going through Bringing Stella Home at quite a good clip. I’m going through the rough draft as I had it at the end of April, making some major revisions that hopefully are going to make it easier to write the middle section.

I’ve been going along at a good clip, getting through as many as seven thousand words a day (it helps that I’m not taking classes or working right now), but today I hit something of a wall and realized I couldn’t go forward if I didn’t have some serious backstory worked out. So, instead of writing much in the book itself, I went through each of the characters in this mercenary unit and wrote out ALL of their backstories.

It was fun, and took a lot more time than I was expecting. It also surprised me how much it fleshed them out, made them all real people. I could go through and write a prequel to this novel now, where the viewpoint alternates between all of these characters and tells how they got together and formed the unit that they are now. I won’t do that, since it would take too much time, but now I can do it, and that’s going to help out a ton in figuring out what has to happen next.

For this project, one of my goals is to experiment with the three act structure and see if I can strengthen my writing by strictly following that story format. Well…when I say strictly, I don’t mean that I’ll make the characters do stupid things just to move the plot where it needs to go. At least, I’m going to try not to end up doing that–we’ll see how it ends up. The first draft is probably going to be horrendous.

Speaking of horrendous, I’ve been surprisingly discouraged with this story in the past few days. I mean, it’s probably just me, but it seems that this novel is really just a piece of crap. Of course, it’s a rough draft, so it’s supposed to be crap, but it’s just frustrating. Then again, my writing group in English 318 seemed to be really into this story–sometimes, it seemed that they struggled to find things to critique about it–but I wonder if a lot of the positive stuff they said wasn’t just because they were being nice.

Meh. It doesn’t matter. Of course this draft is going to need a lot of work–it’s a rough draft, for crying out loud. If I didn’t think it needed some serious work, something would be wrong with me.

The cool thing is that part I ends at about the 30k mark–right smack at 25%, assuming this novel ends up being about 120k. That’s exactly where it should be, according to the three act structure. Encouraging!

I mapped things out on my calendar, and I’ve figured that if I do 3,00 words a day, I can finish this draft by the 15th of June. 3,000 words a day shouldn’t be too hard to manage–I’ve got another 40k of stuff from the previous unfinished draft, and while much of that needs some deep revisions, I can probably recycle at least two thirds of it without making too many changes. I’ve got a couple of conventions coming up here–CONduit and BYU Writers for Young Readers–but I think I can still make things average out quite nicely.

15th of June. It’s a good target. It also gives me practically the entire summer to revise and re-revise my other novels, perhaps even start a completely new project. Huzzah!

(image courtesy photo researchers)