I had established this really great trend of posting monthly and then summer vacation happened. As of today, both my kids are back in school in person for the first time since March 13, 2020. Here's hoping that will give me more time to write. Of course, I'm also mildly terrified since Covid cases are at their highest level in Kentucky since January, but masks are required in schools, they're spacing students out as much as they can, and doing a lot of cleaning and handwashing and sanitizing, so I'm hoping it will be enough.
Summer trips got in the way of me blogging in July, but they did not get in the way of me reading. Our family drove to Colorado and back as our big family trip a couple weeks ago, which meant about 22 hours in the car each way, divided over two days. Since my husband prefers to drive on long trips, partly because he thinks he's a better driver (he really is) and partly because he's prone to carsickness if he's not driving, I had a lot of time to read. I made it through my entire To Be Read pile, which had been languishing because my daughter was demanding a lot of my attention since school ended. We're still being really careful about playdates and didn't send her to any day camps, so she wanted me to play with her all the time. As an aside, parenting an extraverted kid during a pandemic is really hard.
Some of my favorites were two other books I could have recommended in my last post about MG books with queer rep had I known they existed when I wrote that post. George by Alex Gino. The book follows ten year old George, who knows she is a girl even though everyone else believes she is a boy, on her journey to find the courage to speak out about her gender identity. I also read a companion book to this, Rick, in which we see the MC from the first book two years later, starting middle school as a girl named Melissa, but through the eyes of Rick, a boy who was a bully in the first book, but is beginning to asks questions of his own about gender and sexuality and beginning to wonder, as his peers starts to get crushes and he doesn't, if he is on the asexual spectrum. Rick's metamorphosis from reluctant bully to embracing his own possibly queer identity was so great to read. I'm glad books like this exist, both for kids who can relate to them and for kids who can't.
I also read the first book in a new Rick Riordan presents series, The Last Fallen Star by Graci Kim. This book is based on Korean mythology and is so delightful. I especially love that the deities at the center of the magical Korean community are goddesses.
I could go on about the books I've read, but I'll also catch up on the writing things I've done. I've sent out a few more queries for Anna Otto, including one from a late coming agent request after a Twitter pitch party that happened back in June. I've revised my query yet again since the first six queries haven't gotten me a request, and I think it might actually be really good this time. I'm hoping that, if nothing else, this books gets me a respectable number of full requests. When even your writing friends who aren't getting agent offers seem to be getting full requests left and right it can be discouraging.
I'm still plugging away on Harbor Lightkeep, and hoping to make much more progress now that both my kids will be out of the house for six hours five days a week. My summer trip to Colorado gave me an idea for a picture book and a middle grade book, so I have yet more things waiting in line for whenever Harbor Lightkeep is out with beta readers, or if I need a break from it.
It's now been about a year and a half since I started taking my writing seriously and querying the first MG book I wrote (in retrospect, it was not ready). I was sure at that point that I would have an agent by now, probably even an offer. It turns out writing is much more of a waiting game for most people than I realized, but I'm still glad I decided to take the plunge and pursue traditional publication. I've met an amazing community of fellow writers, discovered resources to refine my craft, and found friends to lean on when it feels like it will never by my turn. I desperately want it to be my turn not just someday, but soon. But in the meantime I'm trying to find the beauty on the winding path I'm on.
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