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.