When I first started attending a writing group, one of the rules I learned was: Always have the child protagonist solve the problem. Why? Because children like to read about children solving their own problems. In order for a child to solve a problem in a book, the parents and adults must be absent from [...]

I'm looking forward to meeting Cheryl Klein from Scholastic. At the conference last year I met with Brian Farrey, the acquisitions editor for Flux. He said my book, A Kiss and a Curse, reminded him of A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizbeth C. Bunce. I read it and found out that the editor was [...]

I'm the conference coordinator for the annual SCBWI conference in Boise this fall. Join us for a great day. Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Writing With the Stars: A Conference for Readers, Writers, and Teachers of Children's Literature September 11, 2010, Saturday Boise State University 1910 University Dr Boise, ID 83725 Student Union [...]

There's an ongoing debate about e-books and self publishing and the growing number of ways to be published outside of traditional publishing. Part of me wants to dig in deep and resist these changes. Can't we go back to the old way? I write a pretty good book. I submit it to a few editors. [...]

One of the reasons I write and submit is to verify that I'm alive. Before e-mail submissions and queries, I'd check the mailbox every day for replies from editors. Of course, I wanted a positive letter of acceptance confirming my obvious writing talent and offering me loads of money. But even a rejection letter proved [...]

When querying an agent, I like the ease of the e-mail query. I can research agents, change my query letter to match the agent's taste and send out queries to a couple of agents a day. And I'm being environment-friendly: no paper for the query, no envelope for mailing, no SASE, no form rejection letter [...]

I finished the rough draft of my end of the world novel. Yea for me! Hurray! I wrote most of it out in long hand in three notebooks. And now the fun begins. When I write the first draft of a novel, I have to make myself sit down and write for an hour. When [...]

My language arts class is reading We Were Not Alone by Patricia Reece Roper and Karola Hilbert Reece. The students are writing stories from their lives containing symbolism and showing a time they were courageous. We are discussing the elements of story such as character, description using the five senses, and discovering the main character's [...]

I love to read what I want to read. My high school-aged daughter also loves to read books she chooses. But she dislikes analyzing literature and writing a literary analysis. I wrote a literary analysis for the language arts class I teach, and it was painful to write. So why do we study literature and [...]

Not like death and taxes. My husband has his own CPA business, so I'm loving this beautiful spring day after tax day. We went on a walk with our youngest child around the neighborhood after the rest of the children went to school and I smelled lilac and we found a bird's nest in the [...]