First of all, some news: my book is now available in Kindle format! I couldn’t be more thrilled that the publisher decided to make it available for Kindle. If nothing else, it allows people who might be somewhat interested in reading the book the chance to read a sample before purchasing it. Plus, the Kindle price is much lower. Readers who might be hesitant about spending $17.95 on a book by an unknown author might be much more willing to take the gamble for $9.99.

Now on to what I want to talk about this week. It’s almost time for summer break here—summer break, for me, means one week between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter, during which time I have to prepare the Blackboard course for my summer class—and I’ve been excitedly planning my summer writing projects. I haven’t been able to get anywhere near as much writing done as I would have liked for the past year, but the older Amalie gets, the easier it is to get things done around her. On top of that, I’m only teaching one class over the summer, and it’s a creative writing class. I expect to have plenty of time in which to write, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Here are my goals for this summer:

1.      I’m going to complete the first draft of a middle grade children’s novel, of which I currently have about half written. This, I decided, is the main writing project I want to be focusing on right now. I talked a few weeks ago about how leapfrogging from project to project was preventing me from really getting anything done, and how I needed to pick one project to just finish, for cripe’s sake. Well this is the project I’ve settled on.

2.      Once I’ve finished the first draft of that novel, which will probably take me no more than a month, I want to write a first draft of the much shorter children’s book I’m collaborating on with my mom. My mom is a scratchboard artist, and she’s creating the illustrations for a children’s story that I’m going to write. We agreed on this a couple of years ago—but I’ve been slacking in my duties. She’s already completed several scratchboard paintings for the book. I’m going to use the paintings she’s already created as inspiration to write the story. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find a publisher for the book once it’s finished, but it’s an incredibly fun project and worth spending time on, nonetheless. Plus, I sort of think we might be able to do a show in a gallery even if it doesn’t end up getting published, or we can create copies of the book ourselves and sell them as art-chapbooks (I learned how to make those in a workshop while I was getting my MFA).

3.      In addition to those two main projects, I want to work on some stories. I have, at present, five stories I’m sending around. I have three more stories in draft form that I’d like to revise and start sending out, and three more half-written drafts of stories that I feel really excited about and would like to finish. I won’t set a concrete goal in terms of stories, but I will say that by the end of the summer I’d like to have a few more stories in circulation, and ideally, I’d like to have complete drafts of the three half-written stories I believe are so promising.