It's Happening!

GREAT stuff has happened on the writing front since my last post! I have an agent now, Amy Thrall Flynn from Rubin Pfeffer Content! Things fell into place in a way that completely snatched me by surprise and threw me into a whirlwind. I wish I could give more details on how it all unfolded, but that would give away the other big news, and since that official announcement hasn’t happened yet, I have to keep quiet.

So I’ll wait…

Speaking of waiting—looks like my blog reboot failed again, as evidenced by the gulf of space-time between my last post and this one. So without further ado, here’s some birds and stars stuff:

Project FeederWatch has officially begun! I haven’t started yet, but there’s no pressure since the event runs through April 30. This year I’ve got suet, Nyjer seed, and a no-frills mix. The birdseed market hasn’t escaped inflation, so the neighborhood birds will have make some sacrifices, too. No fancy deluxe blends, unless I can score some on the black market. Just kidding. (Although, if any of you know a guy…)

As for the stars, I got a thrill—and I mean, THRILL—watching that DART spacecraft hit the asteroid at the end of September. Just seeing the asteroid getting bigger and bigger as the spacecraft got closer and closer…and then bam! The picture cuts off. Which some people actually found anti-climactic. I guess I can see that, but the thing was torpedoing into the asteroid, so I didn’t expect it to film its own destruction. Those ultra close-ups of an asteroid millions of miles away was totally enough for me.

Dimorphos asteroid shortly before impact. Kind of looks like something breaded and fried. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Okay, that’s all for this post. I hope to be writing a new one in the next week or two with the big news. Until then, in the immortal words of Casey Kasem:

“Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars!”

Birds and Stars

Years ago I thought I'd be “musing” once, maybe twice a month. Didn’t seem all that ambitious. I mean, there’s stuff floating around in my head all the time. Just type it up. Well, it’s been over five months since my last blog post, so you see how that’s going. I could blame the pandemic or any number of modern day traumas, but I’m tired of that. Instead, I’m going to reboot my blog based on one of those floaty ideas.

From this point forward, “Musings” will be “Birds and Stars.” Why? Because birds and stars pop up in my writing on a regular basis. Also, I won't run out of stuff to talk about. By latest estimates there are over 10,000 bird species in the world, and when it comes to the universe, I've got light years' worth of material.

So let’s start with the birds. I just finished my Bird Nerd novel and took the big step of printing it out for its final fine-tuning before querying. What had begun as a short story, morphed into a novel, then morphed again into a rather different novel is finally done. I’m so thankful to my critique group and everyone else who had eyes on it (or parts of it) along the way.

Now to the stars (representing all of space—planets, nebulae, etcetera and so forth). I was pleased see my poem “City Girl Stargazing” published in the June issue of Spaceports & Spidersilk. Inspired by my childhood backyard stargazing in Philly, it tells the story of a girl who gets transported to the Andromeda galaxy. Since the earliest “wow” experience I remember was seeing Jupiter for the first time through my telescope, that’s how I opened the poem:

Last night I visited Jupiter—

a tiny, striped glowing bead that
grew into a monstrous world
that pulled me through its cloudy
swirls down, down to a secret core.

And there I met metallic giants
dancing on a molten sea.

I’ve also got more stars in my future, as I embark on another rewrite of my novel The Star of Moon Village. It’s been waiting in the wings for a couple of years now, and I’m chomping (champing?) at the bit to see what I can do with it to make it bigger and better. That should keep me busy well into 2023.

Okay, that’s enough for now. I’m already thinking of my next post, so that’s a good sign! Here’s to another attempt at blogging!

My Road to Timbuktu

I made it. I finally made it!

Not to imply that my other poems or stories were anything to sneeze at. Nor were the publications they appeared in. But I’d been submitting to Cricket magazine for so, SO long (like, honestly, I’ve lost track of how many pieces I’ve sent to them over the years). Now I’m happy to report that my poem and short article, “The Books of Timbuktu,” appears on its pages!

This journey started at my job, actually. I was writing video description for parts of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s docuseries Africa’s Great Civilizations, and was captivated by the part about Timbuktu and the Mali Empire. I had no idea that the place had been a center of learning and knew nothing about the books from those days and the efforts now to find and preserve them. I didn’t race home and write the poem, though. Just thought about it. For about two years or so, give or take a few months.

Then at some point, still in the time before Covid, I starting Googling around and hanging out at the library researching Timbuktu, particularly its golden years from around the 1300s to 1500s. I then labored over a poem, and on March 25, 2019, submitted it to Cricket—a respected literary magazine for children. I waited and waited, and was thrilled with an acceptance nearly seven months later. They even took me up on the offer to write an informational sidebar piece to go along with it. As elated as I initially was, I knew it would be a while before it appeared in print, so over time I tempered my joy. Then Covid came, and other stuff—including some pretty devastating rejections of two novels I’d been shopping around—and then the joy returned out of the blue. That was September 1, 2021, when I learned the piece would appear in the February 2022 issue.

And the publication came just at the right time, on the heels of another big blow to my novel-writing career. A YA novel that I’d revised based on feedback from a very interested agent ended up getting rejected by her after all. She said it was a great manuscript and it was hard for her to let it go, but different types of stories were speaking to her at the moment. Fair enough.

But back to the joy. I must say, I love the cover of this issue of Cricket and I love how they laid out my poem and sidebar info! I haven’t read through the other pieces, but from what I’ve seen they look fabulous and I’m thrilled to be alongside them.