Highlights Foundation  Writers Workshop at Chautauqua

Today I am honored to be invited on a blog tour by fellow writer, Gretchen Griffith, who will be a guest on this blog next week.  Writers (and hopefully our readers) can gain from exchanging ideas and walking through both the successes and the challenges of the writing world.  The above picture was taken a few years ago at an invaluable workshop where, after an intense week, my debut book got the work-over it needed to finally become publishable.  It’s that kind of exchange of ideas that really make a difference in a writer’s world.

If you’ve dropped in before, you know that I am ever-so-patiently (right!?) awaiting the release of my debut book, CRAZY, about a year from now.  It’s a YA novel written in free verse, about a teenage girl coming to terms with her mother’s bipolar disorder.  While it is fiction it is semi-autobiographical, having evolved into a novel from a loose group of twenty poems written mostly out of my own cathartic need to deal with those unresolved issues.

At this point in the game, I don’t have a cover to share, or a trailer, or an exact release date, but if you hang around, I will most certainly blast you with all of that information and more in the forthcoming months.

In the meantime, I am trudging away on my second book, not written in verse, not Middle Grade but YA, not a female but a male protagonist.  This time around I am mining my past in a different way.  I taught learning disabled elementary and middle graders for many of my teaching years, and out of that is emerging a character who has ADHD and dyslexia.  I love Jack Gantos’s character Joey Pigza and Joan Bauer’s Foster, and Patricia Reilly Giff’s Sam, all of whom I have reviewed here (see blog references) and who have some form of learning disability. I hope my book and my protagonist will depict the world of the learning disabled half as ably as any of these books.

Along the writing trail I have discovered that I am more a panster than a plotter. That is, I fly by the seat of my pants more often than not. Check this article out for a complete discussion of these two methods.  https://www.samhainpublishing.com/2009/04/plotter-vs-panster/

Most of the time charts, diagrams and outlines make me feel like I’ve been chained to the fence on a hot afternoon. I suspect that comes from having written mostly poetry earlier in my writing career.  I tend to write in bursts and splurts and can go on for hours when the juice is flowing.  But the catch is, the juice machine tends to dry up intermittently or run on a sporadic schedule.  Lately I’ve been thinking maybe a little more “plotting” might be in order, and so might a little more discipline in the management of my free-wheeling life of retirement! But I AM determined and my second book WILL get written.

I hope you will follow this blog tour to fellow writer Joyce Moyer Hostetters’s site at joycemoyerhostetter.blogspot.com where I know you will be both enlightened and impressed by her work.  Thanks for dropping in to see me and do come back again!