Just a short post today. I'm in the midst of digging my way out from under an avalanche of final papers--and grades are due TODAY at my college. But this week I'm going to break my regular posting once a week on Sundays schedule to post on Wednesday, instead. I've been tagged in a blog project called "The Next Big Thing," which asks writers to answer questions about their next book project. I was tagged by Jenni Moody, my novel-goal buddy.

Check out Jenni's answers to the questions on her blog. I'll be answering the questions on my blog this Wedensday.

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.

I’ve been busy, busy, busy this week trying to catch up on grading in preparation for AWP, at which, by the way, I’ll be doing an off-site reading (Friday, March 2^nd at 6:00 PM at The Hideout in Chicago) and will probably be doing a book signing at the book fair (date and time TBA). Maybe I’ll see you there?

Anyway, I’ve just got a quick post, then, this week, to drum up some anticipation (I hope) for the interview series I’ll be posting on my blog during the entire month of March. I’ve learned a lot about the publication game through these interviews, which detail four very different writers’ very different experiences publishing their books.

The schedule for this interview series is as follows:

Sunday, March 4^th: Ken Brosky, a self-published author who has implemented some interesting and successful strategies to market his short story collection, The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (and other stories).

Sunday, March 11^th: Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, whose memoir, My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself, was published through a small press (Press 53) and has been selling phenomenally well in the few months since it’s been out.

Sunday, March 18^th: Kathryn Nuernberger, author of the award winning poetry collection Rag & Bone, which was published through Elixir Press after winning the press’s Antivenom prize.

Sunday, March 25^th: J. T. Dutton, who published her two novels, Freaked and Stranded, through HarperTeen. Dutton, needless to say, secured an agent prior to signing contracts with such a major publishing house.

I hope you’ll check these interviews out, and please, if you know any fellow writers who might be interested, point them in my blog’s direction during the month of March.

I have all kinds of things I want to talk to you about in the coming weeks. I want to tell you about my oddly regressive reaction to a recent rejection and what I learned from it. I want to tell you about my friend Kelly’s new book, how good it is, and how inspired it makes me to get to work myself. I want to tell you about my strange compulsion to look up jobs on AWP’s job list.

But first, I want to tell you about an exciting new blog project I’ve got in the works. To keep things from getting stale here, I’ve decided to line up some interviews with published authors to post on my blog. My idea is to post interviews with authors who published their books in different ways: I’ve got a self-published author lined up, an author whose book was published through a small press, and I plan to get an author who won a book contest and an author whose book was sold by an agent, too. These interviews, which I’m thinking I’ll post over the course of the entire month of March, should provide some interesting insight into the range of publishing options available.

Posting them in March, by the way, will be a nice break for me. Between AWP and another reading in Pittsburgh and final papers to grade and family visiting during spring break, March is going to be a very busy month for me. It’ll be nice to have the interviews all done and ready to post, and basically take a month off from blogging.

If it goes well, I’m thinking I might continue doing interviews now and then on the blog in the future. Let me know if you have any suggested topics or interviewees, and let me know, too—after I post them, of course—what you think of the interviews I’ll be posting in March.

Busy week between work (I collected my first batch of papers for the quarter on Friday) and trying to soothe Amalie, who I’m beginning to think might have colic and who also has her days and nights mixed up, so this is going to be a short, “just wanted to say hi” sort of post.

A few bits of news worth sharing:

I found out this week that Autumn House nominated my story “8 Stories I’ll Never Tell” for a Pushcart. This is my second ever Pushcart nomination—here’s hoping, right?

I’ve been excitedly getting ready for a couple of readings that I’ll be doing in Pittsburgh this coming week. I haven’t done a reading in months. This should be fun!

This week I got a cool personal rejection from a journal called Echo Ink Review, so cool I want to encourage YOU to submit there or, even better, buy a copy. Why, you ask? Because they actually pay you—okay, only $3, but it’s not the amount that matters but the gesture—if they reject a piece but they think you’re a good writer and want to encourage you. I think that’s pretty hardcore awesomeness. It goes a step farther than “Send us something else,” (which they also said, of course) or “We enjoyed this piece; however . . .” A journal that makes such an effort to encourage and support writers deserves to be encouraged and supported back.

I'm excited to announe that my baby, Amalie Beatrix Cowger, was born this past Tuesday morning at 9:22 AM. She's adorable and healthy and perfect in every other way. Due to some post-delivery complications (problems with me, not the baby), I've been trapped at the hospital all week. I'm back home now and recovering, slowly, but am taking a week off from the blog.