Back...for now.

First of all, before you do anything, please read about YA author Maureen Johnson's trials and tribulations with the Bartlesville, OK school district and its attempts to ban her book. Then, if you feel so inclined, please sign the petition to stop this.

Well, that was an interesting little hiatus. I spent several days at my mom's house, helping her through a difficult time as best as I could. I took a nice long bike ride (8 miles, baby!) with The Husband, during which we discovered an amazing Abandoned Mine Drainage project. And I did very little writing.

Everything's been going so crazy lately that I just haven't even had the will to write. I did do about six pages, handwritten, night before last, so that was good. I felt like I was finally getting back into the story, and maybe falling back in love with it a little bit. My mind is, ever-so-slowly, getting back to where it needs to be.

Then there's the whole querying thing. What with our upcoming move, I feel it would be stupid to start querying now. What if, my writerly brain says, an agent wants me to mail them a partial or a full, and we don't have the printer and everything set up yet, and my office supplies are still in a box somewhere because they aren't quite as vital as pots and pans and clothes, and then I'll have to go to Staples or something to print it out and get MORE supplies, and that'll just be a waste of money? That is, you see, how the writerly brain works. So, as soon as the upheaval is over and everything has settled a bit, I will begin querying.

Trust me, I'm not procrastinating on it. While I hate hate hate writing query letters and synopses and such, I enjoy querying. I really do. Every time I click "send" on a query email or drop a letter in the mailbox--and yes, even when I get a rejection--I feel like I'm actually being a writer. Somehow, even more so than when I'm actually, yanno, writing. I think that's because dropping a letter in the mail takes so little time, while writing a book takes...forever. So I feel like I'm making more progress with my career when I'm querying than when I'm writing...even though I know that the writing is truly the most important part of it. That's, yanno, why I became a writer. To write.

Okay, now that I'm done rambling, I'm gonna go off and...yanno...write something.

-Kristin