It occurred to me a few years ago that if I detest winter, and I DO, that means I’m detesting a quarter of my life. Just like a pig parade, that’s a terrible idea.

So I asked those who liked winter what they liked about it:

Cozy blankets.

Warm drinks on a chilly day.

Hunkering down at home.

I prefer mojitos poolside, but yeah, okay. If there has to be winter, blankets and warm slippers and chai lattes could probably help.

Meanwhile, in the writing side of my life, I finished up my second novel, the first draft of which was written years ago. And while I wait to hear from my agent about whether I need to keep working on it or if it’s ready to go, I started work on a new novel.

Healthy, right?

But I realized that I’ve been feeling kind of wintery about first drafts. I dread writing them. My favorite part of the novel process is probably the last 20 percent—the cleaning, refining, drawing subtle connections between related parts. I LOVE that work. But the stuff that comes before? Not so much.

I’m not sure if it’s brilliant or inane to be writing a first draft in winter. But with my determination to be NOT dysfunctionl as my guiding force, it’s going pretty well.

I think the key to all of this may be the fact that I changed where I write. My first two books were written in the kitchen of my house. And then my husband started working from home. And using the kitchen more frequently than you’d think a person could.

I moved upstairs. I cleaned my office. Cleared everything off my desk.

Yet where I find myself most writing days is sitting the big arm chair in my bedroom. This is the key: I sit beneath an electric throw blanket. I’m toasty. In fact, one day last week, after meeting my goal of writing a thousand words, I decided I’d rather write a second thousand than get up and exercise, which had been the next scheduled act in my planned not-dysfunctional day.

Next year, I’ll figure out adding a healthy attitude about exercise into the first-drafting and winter plan. For now, being toasty in the corner of my bedroom is working pretty well.

I’m not sure I know the answer. But it might be that nothing in this world is as satisfying, to reader-me, as connecting with a novel. I love thinking about the book I’m reading all day, finding moments here and there to read five pages, curling up in that imagined world at night.

This year I came to the table determined to be a healthy writer. So far, so good. (And yes. I am well aware that it is the first double-digit day in the very first month of the year. Shhhh.)

I’m working on my third novel. The first one was, amazingly, published! The second one is awaiting a reading by my agent. Those two were written in the most half-assed way imaginable. I can’t even describe it. I don’t want to remember it.

Looking back, I wish I’d paid more attention in grad school. I believed then I’d always be a short story writer and didn’t listen closely enough on the day that my professors must have shared their magic words about how to write a novel. It goes a long way toward explaining my recurring dream about attending graduate school again.

I have one resolution this year: to not drive myself crazy when writing a novel. So far, so good. Which is not to say that each day’s writing is good writing. Far from it.

But I no longer have to come up with convoluted ways to get myself in that chair, writing. I used to send my family away and write eight thousand words a day for a three-day weekend (see earlier paragraph re/dysfunction). Now I’m working at an even pace, writing almost every weekday.

I always said outlines were not for me. But when I read about the Snowflake Method, I thought, some of that works for me. It makes more sense for me to think about the manuscript I’m writing in terms of sentences and paragraphs than Roman numerals. I’m not an outline girl (apologies to Mr. Scher, 9^th grade social studies teacher, who really, really loved outlines), but that doesn’t mean I can’t pre-plan in a different way.

It’s been so long since I started a novel—both my first and second sat in a drawer for years before undergoing intensive revision. I remember this driving, desperate feeling of MUST INCREASE WORD COUNT. I was unhappy about the pace of my progress until I reached what I thought would be the halfway mark.

But this time around, I’ve been enjoying some of the things that happen early in the process, like the way my story surprised me by not being entirely about what I thought it was entirely about. It makes me fall in love, a little bit, with my subconscious.

And I’m proud, so far, of being not dysfunctional.

Do you have any writing resolutions or goals?

So apparently you’re supposed to actually post on your blog every now and then.

I’ve finally finished (almost) working on my next middle-grade novel, which has the working title Screaming at the Ump. Goodness. I can’t tell you how good that feels. I’m now in a surprising and content little pocket of time, waiting to hear back from the brilliant writer-friends who are reading my manuscript.

In other words, there’s absolutely nothing I ought to be working on right now.

Of course, you’re never really done, right? Those readers will pick up on myriad oversights, writer-tics, if not downright big-old hard-to-solve problems. And then I’ll have to get right back to it. But not now! Shhh! Don’t even mention that! Right now I’m singing and I can’t hear you. Fa la la la la…..

For years, the idea of getting through another novel, start to finish, was hanging over me. It’s a heavy weight. And now it’s on vacation. Which means that in some ways, so am I!

Fa la la la la….

There are exciting projects ahead—an attempt to write a chapter book with a close friend and brilliant writer, developing the ideas generated during this and last year’s PiBoIdMo. I’m even excited about the next novel I want to write, which I started, just so I could take the abstract albeit giant and potentially-debilitating-if-you-think-about-it-too-much-without-actually-doing-it step from idea to actual word document.

But with a step like that comes the feeling that this little vacation I’m enjoying is about to come to an end. I think I shall step ever so slowly…at least until January.

Enjoy a merry December, all.

Video warning: this really doesn’t start until a minute and a half in. And the quality is bad. But once it starts…1978 Bruce Springsteen! Fake snow! Some beautiful vocals near the end. (See above: I have time for this now.)

With the power out, we all read a lot. When my son ran out of YA selections, I handed him Augusten Burroughs’ Possible Side Effects. And I was very alarmed when he said, “Now I understand why you like him so much. He’s just like you.” A lot to think about there.

Meanwhile, after the storm, I started, along with many, taking part in Picture Book Idea Month. This is my second year participating, and it’s another form of stockpiling. The thirty ideas I come up with this November will serve as the large supply gathered and held in reserve for use during a shortage.

I wrote about my own PiBoIdMo success story over on the PiBoIdMo blog last week. That post was also about how much I hated it when other writers bemoaned how there was no time for ALL the ideas they had. I had the opposite problem. But not anymore, reader! Because now I stockpile. I’m not done with last year’s list—there are some there I still want to develop. And some of my shiny new ideas are pretty exciting too.

Like I said, though, these are strange times. This post, sadly, is like the state of my mind. Regular life in our own house, and then, oh my goodness, the world right outside our door. Our neighbors, mostly to the east, up and down the coast, have lost so much. Many are still without power.

It’s that time of year when stockpiling seems like the natural thing to do, and yet so many had everything they owned, their own stockpiles, washed away. Things can change from good to bad awfully, awfully quickly.

Another storm’s heading this way. Be safe, everyone.

And here’s to better days.

As a writer, I’m more like a reluctant exerciser. I love having done it, but sometimes the prospect of having to do it makes me want to cry. The promise, however, of somehow muddling through and, in the end, having 30 spanking new story ideas,  was an irresistible lure. And I did it.

Some good came out of it too. I’ll be blogging about that on the PiBoIdMo blog next week. For now, if the idea sounds intriguing and you want to learn more, or sign up, visit Tara Lazar’s PiBoIdMo blog.

Until then, Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promise,” which features my favorite kind of circa-1978 gravelly vocal. It’s interesting, too, that the song ends with the words “throw it all away,” perhaps not the most apt or inspiring message for idea generation. But it’s a kickass song that I’ve loved for, oh dear, more than three decades. And the title is “The Promise.” Just saying.

But what stuns me more, as a generally well-rounded person, is the vast difference between sports highs and sports lows for the fan. I am familiar with this situation because I watched last night’s Yankee game. Losing, losing, losing, grumble, grumble, grumble, then unlikely scenario yields a tie, then absurd, impossible, ridiculous scenario leads to a win and I go to bed deliriously happy and perhaps a little Yankee-smug.

Bear with me here. When I’m reading fiction,  I’m always very put off by the moment of implausibility—that scene when the author knows he needs to raise the stakes, push the envelope, so he makes his character do something I don’t believe the character would do. That’s when I yell “No way!” and throw the book across the room.

Yet this is what keeps me loving baseball—I see the impossible happen. I can’t argue for a more plausible series of events. It is what it is. To quote the radio voice of the New York Yankees, that’s baseball, Suzyn.

Raul Ibanez, aka Yertle the Turtle*, did the same thing in the bottom of the 9^th and 12^th innings, tying and then winning the game.

Yertle didn’t get his first at bat of the game until the 9^th inning. He came up in place of the antihero, Alex Rodriguez, a Yankee reviled by many fans of the very team he plays for.

The hero got to replace the antihero and tie the game. Three heightened-stakes innings later, he won the game with a first-pitch home run. Absurd. And FANTASTIC.

This does not mean I will be more tolerant of unbelievable moments in fiction. They will still make me fling the book across the room. I only believe the unbelievable when it actually happens. I’m often the only one still awake, yelling at the TV, “NO WAY. NO WAY!”

If I had baby goats, I bet they’d stay up with me to watch.

My random number generator, aka my firstborn, was asked to select a number from 1 to 27. If you knew that he was a big Don Mattingly fan, you’d have left the 23rd comment and you’d be the winner of a signed copy of Amy Hill Hearth‘s Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society. Well played, Ruth Horowitz.

(If you read this, please email me at audrey (at) audreyvernick (dot) com.)

Thank you all for the wonderful comments. It’s pretty clear to me that the books we loved as children are nothing short of literary comfort food.

For those of us who write for children, it’s a pretty heady thought: decades from now, you might be someone’s book equivalent of macaroni and cheese.

Yum.

When I moved to New Jersey sixteen years ago, I did not have a friend in the state–it was a slightly random move based on which post-grad-school job my husband chose. Not too long after we found ourselves here, I received an email sent by a local writer via the Authors Guild. This woman said she was looking for a community of writers and suggested a meeting in the near future. I checked her out (wouldn’t you?) and discovered she was the author of the perennial bestseller Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years. She is one of the founding members of my writing group, the Atomic Engineers (so named because we thought any mention of writers would attract unwanted attention, where this would surely repel it.)

Over the years, Amy has become a very good friend. And I am all kinds of excited for the world to read her fiction debut, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society. Be sure to check the end of this post for your chance to win a signed copy.

Without further ado….

I love when authors switch genres successfully. What made you decide to try your hand at fiction?

I never thought I’d write fiction. I was taking a breather from the publishing business, that’s all. I started what I thought might be a short story, but then something strange happened – I fell in love with my characters. I kept writing and writing, and I began to wonder, Could this be a novel? The title character was inspired by my late mother-in-law, a Boston beauty who was a very intelligent woman but also restless, flirty, and a bit vain. As a middle-aged wife and mother, circa 1962, she moved with her family to a sleepy town in Collier County, Florida. She managed to ruffle the feathers of the town fathers almost immediately. That was the springboard for the novel. It must have been a story I really wanted to tell, because it just poured out of me.

Amy in second grade

How many towns/cities can count you as their hometown girl? Please explain.

My dad is a retired executive at General Electric, which meant we moved every five or so years when I was growing up. What this means is that I have a bunch of places I call home and where I have maintained friendships for decades. In terms of the place that had the greatest impact on my life, I would say that was Columbia, South Carolina. I was six years old when we moved there from Schenectady, N.Y. in 1965. Oh, how I loved South Carolina. I thought I was Huckleberry Finn. I even tried to build a raft. On my first day of school, I came home and announced that I couldn’t understand my teacher, but within a week, because I was so young, I had acquired my teacher’s Southern accent. We lived in South Carolina for six years. To this day, I love the South, I love the North, and frankly I could live happily anywhere in the East, from Maine to Florida.

Were you a childhood reader? What books and characters did you love?

Let me tell you a story. (This is a Southern way of answering your question.) A few years ago my parents “downsized” and moved to an apartment. This was great for them but a crisis for me. My three older siblings had long since taken most of their stuff but somehow I had missed the memo. At the age of 47, I was summoned home one last time to clean my room (my mother actually used those words). I had to sort through all of my treasures. My dad started bringing down box after box from the attic with my name carefully written on the side in his handwriting. I would say 90 percent of those boxes contained books. And so I was reunited with books I hadn’t seen in years.

I think my favorite picture book was The Story About Ping, the little duck who lives on a boat on the Yangtze River in China. Another favorite was Blueberries for Sal, about a girl who goes berry picking, drifts away from her mother, and encounters a bear. My Dad read aloud to my sister and me every night before bedtime, and there were several books, like Ping and Blueberries, that we would beg him to read over and over again.

Most of my books were hand-me downs: Dad’s copy of Treasure Island and Mom’s Nancy Drew mysteries; my cousin’s copy of Cheaper by the Dozen; my grandmother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which I read the summer I was 13; an ancient copy of Little Women (I was named after the character, Amy) and much, much more. I was frantic, however, when I couldn’t find the old set of Little House books until I remembered that, some years earlier, they’d been passed along to my nieces.

I know you have a major publicity schedule for this book. Have you started yet to think about what’s next?

I’ll let the narrator of my novel, Dora, respond to that question.  Over the course of the novel, Dora learns that life should not be over-planned or lived too cautiously. “I could see the genius in allowing the future to evolve,” she says. “You could create momentum. You could launch something and see where it goes. You couldn’t line everything up, like so many dominoes, and make everything fall into place.”

Like Dora, I think it’s wise sometimes NOT to make future plans. Other than traveling to promote Miss Dreamsville and meet my readers, I will wait and see where the road takes me.

Thank you so much, Amy, for taking the time to visit here.

Readers: All you need to do for a chance to win a signed copy of Miss Dreamsville is leave a comment here. The winner will be randomly selected on the book’s on-sale date,  October 2. Good luck! (And be sure to check back next week to see if you’ve won!)

See you tomorrow!

In THE GINGERBREAD MAN LOOSE IN THE SCHOOL you have combined two bookseller favorites–fractured fairy tale meets back-to-school story. Where and when did you get the idea?

The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School was inspired by two ideas colliding. One was when my three-year-old daughter proudly announced one day that she was “one smart cookie.” Her cute comment reminded me of another “smart cookie” I knew – the freshly baked gingerbread man that managed to escape from my kindergarten classroom at the beginning of every school year! Each time this happened, the class hung missing posters and searched the halls, discovering crumbs and dropped candies, as we asked school staff where he might be. But he always found his way back to our classroom on his own!

My students absolutely loved this unit and would come back years later asking if the Gingerbread Man had escaped yet. Even though we read many versions of the Gingerbread Man story during the unit, there was not one that mirrored the fun of our school Gingerbread Man chase. So, I decided to learn all that I could about writing for children and try to craft a new version.

I started wondering what adventures the Gingerbread Man might have had while he was out and about, and then I began to ask what if…? What if the story was set in a school? What if the story was told by the Gingerbread Man himself? What if he was trying to find the class who made him, instead of running away from them? Those “what if” questions helped me imagine a Gingerbread Man adventure that was sprinkled with fresh, funny twists to set it apart from the traditional tale.

This is your first book. What has the experience been like for you? Are you an obsessive Amazon-rank watcher? Do you check every bookstore and turn your book face out? Are you enjoying the ride?

I like to say this book was six years in the “baking.”  But the first two years were spent learning how to write for children and learning how to write in rhyme. I did that not only through books, but also joining and attending wonderful SCBWI (Society of Children’s Writers and Illustrators) conferences and critique groups. The story went through many, many revisions as I got feedback on how to make it the best it could be.

Eventually, I started to research and send my manuscript out to publishers who seemed to be a good fit. After many rejections, it was pulled from the slush pile by an editor at GP Putnam’s Sons and acquired. Needless to say I was giddy with happiness and still am!  After many more months, the illustrator, Mike Lowery came on board with a very fresh, endearing, child-friendly style to match the story. What a thrill it was to see the Gingerbread Man come to life through Mike’s illustrations. It is a bit like Christmas or your birthday when you first get sketches of your characters!

The journey has been incredible – literally – a dream come true. It takes patience, and persistence, but if you truly love to write, then it is worth the sometimes long wait it takes for a picture book to come out. I’ll never forget when the box of my advanced copies arrived at my door. I sat on my front steps and pulled one of the books out to smell it!  I know, you’re thinking – Weirdo! Who smells books?  But that is all part of the tactile experience of holding a brand new book for me – the sound as it cracks open for the first time, turning the crisp pages, smelling it…

The promotional aspect has been a different hat to have to wear, and not one that fits on my head very naturally. I just want to “spread the word” about it in a very genuine sort of way if I can, and then let it fly on its own.  And I have to say that I didn’t even know that Amazon ranked the books until someone told me. But I have been known to turn copies of it, and other books from authors I know, “face out” in a bookstore display.  I also LOVE doing school visits and talking with students! Kids crack me up, and they are just so much fun to be around. I guess that’s still the teacher in me.

What children’s book character would you have liked as your real-world best friend?

Harry Potter or Hermione Granger – I would have lived in those books if I could have. I love reading them with my kids now, and seeing the magic and wonder again through their eyes.

What are you working on now?

Well, we just finished revisions and illustrations for a sequel-of-sorts coming out summer 2013, called The Gingerbread Man Loose on the Fire Truck. The same dapper and determined smart cookie takes a field trip to the fire station with his class, and oh -   the adventures that ensue when he has to escape from the station’s crumb-snatching Dalmatian!

And I’m currently working on two more picture books and am in the middle of a middle-grade adventure/mystery as well.

A book trailer for The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School just came out as well, with the help of the wonderful children’s writer and motion graphic designer, Carter Higgins.  I hope to add it to my website along with lesson plan ideas on how to connect it with curriculum-linked skills. Plus, I just want it to be fun for kids to watch!

You can catch the Gingerbread Man and find fun activities, a curriculum-linked teacher’s guide, and extension ideas for The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School at Laura’s website.

Many thanks for stopping by, Laura!