When my oldest daughter was just finishing kindergarten, we joined a new pool called Fairview, and she joined the swim team. Her first coach was Coach Jane, a sweetheart of a young lady and an excellent teacher. Coach Jane was one of four kids; her younger brother was a kid named Will.

I didn't know Will that well, but our pool, especially the swim team, is like a big family. You know the parents because you talk to them poolside and volunteer together at swim meets; you know the kids, if not by name, at least by face; and you watch them grow from little kids to gangly preteens to strong young men and women who are missed when they head off to college.

Anyway, Will grew, as they do. He went off to college, as they do. I saw his mom sometimes and waved hello; saw his sister sometimes and stopped to reminisce about her days coaching my now-teenager. But we're not really friend-friends, just friendly, so I didn't know what Will's been up to for the last few years. Apparently, he's been up to great things.

Will and some high school and college friends formed a band. A really good band. Good things are happening with their band. They signed with Mercury Records. One of their songs has been used on a Nivea commercial. They've had music on ONE TREE HILL and 90210. One of their songs was the free download on iTunes recently.

Their first CD was released this past week. My oldest daughter went to her favorite music store yesterday for a kind of launch party for them, bought their CD, got autographs, and talked to Will about Fairview. We listened to the CD on a longish car ride today, and I thought it was really great. So anyway, since maybe you would like it, too, I thought I'd give you a heads-up.

Here's their website:

http://weareparachute.com/home.aspx

Here's an article:

http://www.flymagazine.net/archive_bands_article.cfm?id=578ef1a9

And here's a link to a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghhivSh1hSc

9 year old girl: "all the Kevin Henkes books from the shelf and the books we made at school and SOMEBODY LOVES YOU, MR. HATCH"

11 year old boy:
"Finished BRISINGR
Reading HEIR APPARENT
Next? THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING"

13 year old girl:
GRACELING

15 year old girl:
Manga

Mom:
Finished NATION, THE LINCOLNS and GRACELING
Reading the Twyla Tharp book lurban recommended
Next? Something from the library stack

kristydempsey is having a contest. And it's easy-peasy. You want to go to the bookstore anyway, right? It's a good excuse.

http://kristydempsey.livejournal.com/64413.html

1. WRITING.This week I wrote about 715 words on a revision of the first novel I ever wrote. They are still not right, but maybe they're heading in the right direction. Pretty much all I'm keeping of the old version are the title, characters and theme. The premise, plot, conflicts--all new. It feels like drafting again, obviously. I'm a different writer now than I was and I'm not satisfied with what I did back in 2002 or in 2005, but there are things I really love about this book and I want to find a way to get some of it out in the world again.

2. PUPPY.The puppy follows me from room to room. I don't mind, but I feel bad that sometimes I'm just getting up for a minute or so; and I know that my movement will wake him from his puppy nap; so I just don't get up at all, which is fine if I was thinking about changing over laundry or filling the dishwasher, but not so fine in some other circumstances, like when my leg is cramping from sitting too long. He also eats his dog biscuits when they are broken up; but hides them in cushions when they are whole. Is this strange?

3. EXCITING EVENT.Tonight I'm going to a birthday potluck with a group of women I've been lucky enough to call friends for four or five years; we used to be an interdenominational Bible study group, but life got in the way for everybody and now we just meet periodically for socializing at birthday times. I'm bringing a cheese plate with some kind of gorgonzola, mahon, brie, and some plain old Gouda, with some rice crackers and some crostini. I am strangely excited about the mahon.

4. CONFERENCES. I am so very, very envious of all the people who are at NESCBWI this weekend. Some of my dearest friends are presenting and/or attending. I hope they have a fabulous time. I am in need of some conferencing, but I fear it will have to wait until November for Mid-Atlantic SCBWI. Ah well. I like having things to look forward to.

5. READING. I have a wonderful stack of library books and books I've bought and seem to have no time to read in the last few weeks. Could it be the puppy? Could it be the Food Network? I think it is both. Must. Stop. TV. Must. Delegate. PuppyDuty.

Happy Friday, everybody!

I had to pull this out for your general amusement:

"Words, shmerds. It's the angst that makes you a writer." :)

--macaronipants, whom I know from Chautauqua and Rutgers and Verla's, but she's new to LJ and I'm glad she's here

Does staring at two different versions of one opening paragraph for an hour and deciding they both suck count as a good day's work?

While overall the training has been going well, the puppy does have accidents every day. That's to be expected at 13 weeks, and I'm fine with it. But this morning, in about two hours, he had seven--three poops and four pees-- and that was not so fine.

He's sleeping on the couch right now. He's not supposed to be on the couch. But he didn't see me see him, so I left him.

I'm writing until he wakes up. Wish me twenty minutes of quiet, please. Twenty minutes isn't much but it's more than I had last week.

Today is truly a manic Monday now that I have a rather frisky companion to keep me on my toes.

Meet Harry, a twelve-week-old beagle-ish puppy. He came home on Saturday. He is such a good baby--slept through the night two nights in a row, uses his paper, and has already learned "off the furniture." The children are ecstatic.

I've mentioned that about a year and a half ago we lost our 17-year-old cat and last month we lost our 16-year-old cat. We had both of these kitties since they were old enough to leave their mothers and they were both loving, affectionate, and sweet-natured. When we heard people talking about aloof and distant cats, we just didn't get it. These cats slept with us, they greeted us when we came home, they followed us on walks--they were dog-like, I guess you could say.

The cat we have left, Penny, is different from the other two. We got her as a young adult (probably about a year old) from the SPCA; and we're not sure about her history. She knows we're her people--she comes home, for one, and she knows to ask us for her food or to be let out. But it's obvious that she merely tolerates our affection, and only occasionally does she hop up on the couch to rest beside one of us, and when she does, it usually lasts about five minutes. She's the kind of cat people complain about, I guess, when they say they don't like cats.

Both my husband and I are deeply missing our connections to animal companions and we're not sure what to do at this point. For a good while, the kids have been talking about getting a dog, but we didn't want to inflict a puppy on our old cat, who was frail and ill. But now that Lilly Kitty has passed, we have a lot of options open to us, and I'm wondering what you all think.

First, we could just keep Penny. She's three now; is her personality pretty set? (I would assume so.) Lilly's only been gone a short while; is it even possible Penny could warm up now that she's the only cat in the house? Or is the fact that we didn't raise her from kittenhood (either that or her personality) mean she's pretty much the way she's always going to be?

Second, we could get another cat. We love cats; cats are fairly easy; and we would enjoy another kitten. I'm sure Penny would fuss about it; but would that matter? If she's not going to change, what difference would it make? I'm sure she'd assert herself as the Alpha Cat, which she would probably like (Lilly Kitty was definitely the boss around here while they were together).

Third, we could get a puppy or a young dog. I haven't been much of a dog person in recent years, but I had one as a kid, and I know it's a lot of fun for kids to have a dog. I also know that dogs are a huge responsibility since you can't just leave them the way you can cats, but I *think* I'm willing to take it on, since the kids are old enough to help (yes, I know I'd have to nag them, but heck, I nag them about everything anyway). My husband had many dogs growing up, too, so it's not foreign to him. Anyway, I started contacting some local SPCA-type groups to fill out just-in-case applications, but nothing is definite. Thinking of Penny, a dog in the house would freak her out; but once again, would it really matter if she's destined to be distant?

I know every pet is an individual, but these are the things I'm thinking about. Any experiences or advice you share would be much appreciated.

My critique group pal and all-around lovely person Fran Cannon Slayton is giving away an ARC of her upcoming middle-grade WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS.

Check out her video and leave a comment and hope your name is drawn; it's that simple.

http://franslayton.livejournal.com/11575.html

I missed the Friday Five (several times, in fact), but five is such a lovely number that I'm going to do it today.

1. There is news on the horizon. It may be good news. It may be yet another disappointment. Either way, it's supposed to come in April. (We shall see if it turns out to be May or July or September. We all know editor time is -- well -- editor time.)

2. There are many things I don't do well, but one thing I do very well indeed is bake chocolate chip cookies. I have six dozen, still mostly warm. I would love to share them with you, if only you were not in places like Vermont and Maine and Missouri and Brazil and California. Come here. I will bake you some cookies and we will sit and drink tea.

3. I have done something reckless and impulsive. I will let you know if it works out. Okay, there were several months of thought behind it, so it wasn't entirely impulsive, but the act itself seemed spur of the moment. We'll see.

4. I think I am going to revise my first novel. I had sort of considered it a practice novel, but I skimmed over parts of it on Friday and there are parts I just don't want to shelve. I figure about half of it is useful and half of it will go. The fact that I'm even considering this is a very good thing. I've been very, very down on my novel-writing self for several months now. So I feel a little lighter just because I've gotten close enough to think about it.

5. My children are very loud. You don't even want to know what the youngest just hollered down the stairs at me. I am ignoring . . . I'm ignoring . . . oh for Pete's sake, she's yelling it again. Bye!

This weekend, I moderated a panel at VABook. franslayton invited a group of Class of 2K9 authors to come to Charlottesville to talk about group marketing.

I have to admit that the idea of moderating made me a little nervous in a way I haven't been in the past. This was the first year I haven't put the panel together myself; in past years, even if I hadn't met the authors, I'd had significant interaction with them over the phone or in email while we hammered out the details. This year, I just showed up.

I shouldn't have worried. Children's writers are the best people in the world. Here they are in all their authorial loveliness:



From L to R: Ellen Jensen Abbott (Watersmeet), Edith Hemingway (Road to Tater Hill), Fran Slayton (When the Whistle Blows), Lisa Greenwald (My Life in Pink and Green, and Ann Haywood Leal (Also Known as Harper)

Some random observations:

1. Gravity Lounge is an intimate music venue with book-lined walls. It used to be a coffin warehouse. In the bathroom, I found poster for my high school friend Robbie Schaefer's upcoming gig. Such a small world.

2. I didn't get nearly enough time to visit with saralholmes but being able to peek out of the corner of my eye and see her sitting in the front with kathyerskine made me smile again and again.

3. I know some purists complain about the impersonal feeling of social networking like Facebook, but Facebook has allowed me to make several "real"-world/writer-world connections. One is that Wendy Shang, a writer I cyber-knew from Verla's and Facebook, is married to a high school classmate. Wendy also went to law school with franslayton and is in a critique group with a big bunch of my SCBWI buddies. Facebook allowed me to figure all that out. Wendy traveled down 29 from NoVa to see Fran's panel, so I finally got to shake her hand and say hi. And that was cool.

4. I'm used to knowing a lot of people in the audience through SCBWI; so it totally freaked me out when my second daughter's kindergarten teacher walked in. It only took a few seconds to make the connection to Fran (after all, the three of us go to the same church) but during those few seconds, I felt completely discombobulated, like the kindergartner who sees her teacher at the grocery store and refuses to say hi. (Not that I refused to say hi--it was just the context thing.)

5. Chocolate and nutmeg together? Blech. But now I know.

1. My agent really liked the picture book I've been telling you about lately; I guess it's ready to submit. I'll keep you posted.

2. The new picture book is not going so well. But it's early. I had the idea a couple of years ago, got a signed statement from Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen that she wouldn't steal it (ha!), then put it away. I pulled it out last week. The idea is pretty good, I think. The execution is far from there. But I will just look at it every day, add a word or two, and eventually it will work. I hope.

3. My nine-year-old (the Iron Chef) is so hilarious. She does something funny every day. I would love to make her into a book character. I'm not sure that would go over well, especially since she doesn't realize how funny half the stuff she does really is. I am trying to figure out if she's quirkier (in a good way) than my other kids or if I just have more time to enjoy what it means to be nine because there aren't any younger ones the way there were for the older ones. I know my other kids did funny things, too. Maybe it's that I didn't take time to write them down.

4. We've had a tummy bug going around the family and a bit ago, I felt pretty nauseated. I drank a glass of water and a huge handful of the really expensive milk chocolate feves I bought to make cookies with. Amazingly the nausea is gone. Remember that.

5. Tomorrow is the panel I'm moderating at the Virginia Festival of the Book. I am so excited to see my fabulous SCBWI RA, Ellen Braaf, and I just got an email from saralholmes is coming to hang out with kathyerskine (and me, whenever I can get away). It should be a fun day. One problem: I am not kidding when I say I have nothing to wear. I have the fewest clothes of anyone I know. I have to look professional in front of a decent-sized audience tomorrow. If it were cold, I could manage; but it is sunny and springish. I'm so screwed.

Today my sick-at-home nine-year-old was well enough to get bored, if not well enough to go to school, and she said this to me: "If I wash my hands reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreally well, can we play Iron Chef America and make each other lunch?"

What was I going to say to that? Of course, YES!

Instead of having a secret ingredient, we used things from the refrigerator.

My lunch was a grilled lemon pepper chicken breast on a bed of romaine, sprinkled with feta and served with a light honey-mustard dressing accompanied by mandarin oranges and carrots.


Her lunch was boiled pierogies, homemade apple sauce and carrot sticks, with a drizzle of ranch dressing and tomato catsup.



On taste, originality and appearance, I think she bested me, no question. I definitely need to work on my plating.

This year, I handed my organizer duties over to franslayton, but Fran graciously allowed me to keep my moderator hat (or did she beg me? I forget). Fran put together a bang-up panel made up of members of the Class of 2K9, who'll be discussing group marketing among whatever other things I throw at them without warning. (Okay, I won't really do that. I'm a nice moderator.)

Anyhow, if you're within driving distance, I hope you'll come on by.

Here's the scoop:

Group Marketing: How Joining Forces Can Increase Book Sales

Sat. March 21st, 2009 4:00 PM
Gravity Lounge
103 S. First Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902

Debut young adult and middle grade authors Fran Slayton (author of When the Whistle Blows), Lisa Greenwald (author of My Life in Pink and Green, Ellen Jensen Abbott (author of Watersmeet, Edith Hemingway (author of Road to Tater Hill)and Ann Haywood Leal (author of Also Known as Harper) share how 25 authors pooled resources and expertise to increase visibility and sales for their books with mutual market strategies.

I've had the opportunity to read four of the five books; they're all beautifully-crafted, intriguing novels. I'm sure the panel will have a lot to offer the audience.

If you want more information about this event or about the Virginia Festival of the Book, HERE is the Festival website.

As a middle-schooler, I generally spent St. Patrick's Day in pubs. Seriously. Back in the late 1970s, in the pre-Riverdance days, long before it was cool, I took Irish dancing; and my St. Patrick's Days were spent rushing from one gig to another with my classmates, across the Washington, D.C. map, dancing in way-too-crowded rooms for a bunch of old guys getting drunk on green beer. What were our mothers thinking? :)

We wore the old-style costume of black tights, white dress and green and gold jacket, not the richly-embroidered $4000 deals you see today. Our hair was fixed in a neat version of our regular hairstyle, not the fabulous ringleted wigs of recent years. We still wore our medals on our chests, and they jangled and clanged when we leaped. (Or, actually, when we did just about anything. And the safety pins left marks on the cloth so you had to be sure to repin in exactly the same spots.)

There are better videos of Irish dancing on YouTube, but I felt disloyal showing anything but my own school, The O'Neill-James School of Irish Dancing, so here is one I found of the girls dancing in the Washington, D.C. St. Patrick's Day parade, which I also danced in every year.



Oh, and here's a quick snippet of some of the school's champions on a float (much easier on the feet than the macadam, I'm thinking, though dancing on a moving float would seem to require a lot more balance than I ever could have mustered):



Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day!

June, 1992 - March 13, 2009

In spite of the fact that my novel-writing mojo is completely shot, I'm going to open up a file and at least look at it.

I can't promise to work on it.

But I can open it.

It was fun being finished-for-now.

But my agent is fast.

And finished-for-now is once again not-yet-finished.

Back to work . . .

Sorry, there's been too much ZACH AND CODY around here lately.

But seriously--yay, me! I finished a revision of a picture book, based on notes my agent sent me last week; and I emailed it back to her this afternoon.

"Finished" is a relative term, of course. Chances are good she'll find something. And even if she didn't, you know the routine.

So "finished-for-now" is more accurate.

But I'm finally starting to believe you've got to celebrate the little things, so yay, me!! I'm finished-for-now.