Still stuffed
Happy holiday weekend to all those who celebrate Thanksgiving, and to the rest, please use this as an excuse to eat a huge meal and get ridiculously full, wherever in the world you may be.
Two bits of news: book of a thousand days was selected as a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year! Huzzah! I've never made one of these lists before. The editors of this review publication chose (from among some 17,000 books) their top sixty-or-so choices. It's incredibly flattering, and I've been thrilled for Dashti. Also....(drum roll please)...I finished a first draft of the fourth Bayern book! An incredibly horrific first draft! An abomination, if you will. But no matter--it's finished! The first draft anyway. But at least now I have the sludge from where to mold a work of...art? I hope so. I feel so relieved to have it done, over a year after I began it. It's a bad one, maybe as bad as princess academy's first draft. But it's here, baby, it's here!
So this past month, I didn't read a book for three weeks. I don't know what happened--I got busy, my husband and I would watch an hour show each night or I would work on the book, and I did some useful reading (research, instructional, etc.). And I really felt the lack. A serious lack. My writing didn't go as well. Life just didn't seem as magical. I wasn't as excited as I usually am to just live day to day. Then I was like, duh! Read a book! So I picked up Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison, the first collected comic books of that series he did in 1989. It was crazy interesting fun. Then on to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Dang. Funny, interesting, sad, great. (Note: this is an upper YA) This just won the National Book Award, and with reason. (While I was reading it, one line sparked an idea for how I could make my own book better in the next draft. I swear, reading good books really does help your own writing. Be not afraid, intrepid writers!) Then my husband gave me the latest Runaways, so I dove into that. And I sigh with relief. Three weeks was way too long to go without a good story. I love being a reader!