Time for me to feel disappointed in myself as the rewrite is taking so long.  I am only now typing up Chapter 3.  Enough of that.

In my defense, the first week of July was taken up with Anime Expo 2010.  AX is something we do every year, and this year was no exception.  Lots of driving from Orange County to the LA Convention Center.  Every day, plus Day Zero AND 1 extra trip on Friday so that we could take out the dog.  Still.  Worth it.  Picked up some cool Revoltech toys and a new anime.

Mary Kole over at Kidlit.com authored a potentially distressing blog post about how having a male main character in your YA book may make it harder (ha ha ha–impossible) to sell.

I have a male protagonist.  No major romance.

We’ll see.  Good thing I’m not the kind of writer who freaks out.

THE END

UPDATE!
I went to the SCBWI Agents Day Conference on May 15, 2010 in beautiful Newport Beach. The event was held at the Sea Base, and I got a little turned around trying to get there. Did I mention that I’ve lived in Orange County my entire life, and have been driving around  here for almost 30 years?  And that I still get lost?

TomTom did not help.  It didn’t have an entry for the Sea Base, not even by address.

Still, I wound up in the right place eventually and listened to some excellent speakers. But when lunchtime rolled around, I was feeling a little down.  I have a problem connecting quickly with others, and found that people rather easily decided to head off to lunch together.  I suppose I could have gone as well, but since I wasn’t involved in their conversations setting up, I felt awkward.

You never, ever get out of junior high/high school.

So I ate my sandwich by myself, watch the seagulls and pelicans, and felt like I had made a mistake going to the conference.  What was I doing there? Why did I think I could write anything anyone would be interested in reading–or buying?

I went back into the deserted meeting room and Lori Polydoros, one of the SCBWI volunteers and event organizers, came up to tell me that one of the agents wanted to talk to me after lunch.

To me.

I about lost my lunch.  I was excited and I didn’t want to blow it, so I tried all the deep breathing I could, and when that didn’t work, I just made myself sit still.  It was hard to get through the rest of the afternoon, and my meeting with the agent kept getting pushed back, until finally, I was to meet with her at the end of the day.

She was interested in my book, having done a critique of the first 10 pages, but thought the voice was ranging too much between MG and YA.  She wanted me to send her the whole manuscript, but I begged off since I was in the middle of a major rewrite to address the issues she had brought up.

And that’s what I’m doing right now.

The first two chapters have been completely revised and I’ve dumped one character and merged two others into one.  And it’s darker.  Much darker, I think.

I will keep posting here about my progress because maybe it will be one more point of pressure to get me to finish this and get it into the hands of someone who might want to see it published as much as I do.

THE END

There are a lot of friendly folks are out there in YA land,  and a ton of  great resources.  One such resource is SCBWI.  You don’t have to be published to join, and they host a lot of regional events designed to get writers to network with other writers, agents, and editors.

Another good place is Kidlit.com, a site that’s new to me.  It’s by by Mary Kole, an associate agent at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, one of the highest rated agencies for YA authors.  Right now, she’s running a first chapter contest.  I’ve added Kidlit to my blogroll, which will shortly swell with more links.

Keep writing, folks.  You know I will.

My house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac that itself butted up against a mostly empty field.  Every summer, tumbleweeds grew and turned brown and rolled down the street when the Santa Ana winds kicked up.  Every winter, the field turned into a muddy swamp and we dug foxholes and built fortresses out of cardboard boxes, waging war until our eyes and mouths were grimy with mud.

The Old Farmer owned the field.

His house sat on the far edge of the property.  A broken down fence surrounded it, sun faded planks that may once have been brown, splintered by time and ill use.  Huge trees towered over the fence, the trunks leaning in against the boards in a struggle the fence was losing.  Narrow, green leaves hung thick and dark with dirt in heavy bunches, making it impossible so see into the yard.

What was it like in there? It was a frequent topic of our conversation. We could walk through the field, skirting his house on the right, to a major street, and cross the street to the Alpha Beta supermarket. From there, between the cars whizzing by, The Old Farmer’s house was clearly visible, and looked different than any of our tract-home houses. It was bigger, older, had much more yard.  Just behind the house the trees grew in thick, hiding the majority of the property from view.

The ten-year-old mind is strange terrain.  Did we really imagine treasure?  A menagerie of exotic farm animals?  A secret still?  Was he some kind of monster?  We had never seen him ourselves.

This not knowing drove us, one early summer day amid the sticker patches and the still green tumbleweeds, to walk right up the rickety gate.  We waited for what seemed like hours, listening for any movement inside.  We heard nothing.  Maybe he wasn’t home.  Or maybe, that’s what he wanted us to think.

With the kind of logic only Tom Sawyer could work through, we picked up dirt clods and lobbed them at the fence.  If he’s inside, we reasoned, the racket of the exploding earth bombs we were chucking at his fence would rouse him.  But no, not a peep.

A recon party opened the gate and crept inside, about half of our group, the really fearless ones.  I stayed outside with the rest of the chickens, scratching the ground and wondering, What are they seeing?

With a roar, The Old Farmer appeared out of nowhere.  There must have been a side gate.  An old work shirt, jeans that he bought when they were still called dungarees, and a dirty cowboy hat, he was as round as a rolled up pill bug and browned by the sun.  He limped toward us.

“What you kids doing?”

Running. We were running like Odysseus from the Cyclops.