WFMAD

While I was at the beach, I read Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. It is a great book for the beach if you don't mind your 8 year-old looking at you sideways when she asks you for a Popsicle and you are weeping openly. I'm not much of a book reviewer so I'll just say that I have yet to read anything by Ms. Anderson that I didn't really enjoy, and I was relieved to see that the story will be continued in another book due out in October (which I have pre-ordered).

In the acknowledgments, I found out she has a blog, which I seeked once I got home (oh, jeez! "seeked" is not a word. I'm leaving it in, though, because it's such a ridiculous mistake and you should laugh at me). For the month of August she has challenged us to write 15 minutes each day. You should check it out.

I started a week late (because I was at the beach last week, remember?), but it turns out it's not really all that hard to spend 15 minutes at a minimum on the prompt she gives each day. The one today about research made me realize how much I need to learn about one of the main themes of my book, which has been getting dusty, seeing how it had fallen behind the back of the to-do bookshelf in my brain. I dusted it off, gave it about 25 minutes of consideration (way more than it's gotten in the past zillion months), and now am totally terrified. But also excited. In a terrified way. Like when you go over the top of that first hill on a roller coaster and realize you've made a mistake and should never have gotten on in the first place but it's too late and you have to keep going until it's done.

WFMAD is a great thing. Here I was, tooling along, shopping for thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries and counting down the days until school starts and I can officially start "being a writer." Sure, it's hard to find time during summer vacation to write every day when you are (apparently) the sole, non-TV source of entertainment (to hear them tell it), but even I, with my kiddos and their big personalities can find 15 minutes! Right?