Adios School Year, Helloooo Summer (Reading)

This is it. Final days of school before my kids are released for the summer. Tonight my son has his 2nd Grade program and tomorrow night my daughter graduates from kindergarten. That second one really hurts. As unbelievable as it is to realize my son's getting older, the fact my baby is hitting these milestones is what hits me the hardest. It's knowing there won't be another kindergarten graduation after this. That we've shed our last 5-year-old.

That my kids are truly no longer babies anymore.

Excuse me while I go weep a bit.

Ok, better now.

Anyway, with the end of school comes summer vacation. I'm lucky enough to have kids who LOVE being outside as much as possible. And parents with a pool. The pool thing during the summer? Total life and sanity saver.

The real problem over the summer comes when the weather outside doesn't want to cooperate and let my kids run around and get all their energy out. Now comes the question of what to do to keep them from driving me crazy while I'm working. This is were our local library comes in. (Yay for local libraries!!)

Our library, along with most public libraries in the country, host a summer reading program. They have a theme for the year (this year it's Fizz, Boom, Read - science-based) and prizes for completing the program. Typically the rules are to read six books, at least two dealing with the year's theme, and write about them in a special journal. The kids get credit for every book read (our library gives them raffle tickets to enter for different prizes for each book) and they get entered for a grand prize when they finish all their books. Last year this included entry into a raffle for tickets to a special baseball game with the added bonus of a chance to win a trip to Disney. Talk about incentive.

Along with keeping the kids busy reading during rainy days, the programs usually include special events. To kick-off our summer program, the library has a Magic Scientist (Scientific Magician?) coming in. They also have star-gazing and other events throughout the summer.

Even better? They have and ADULT summer reading program. That's right, I get extra rewards for doing what I always do --- read. Upon inspection of the calendar, I discovered part of our program includes a CSI-style event to learn about forensics. (Guess where I'll be that day.)

So, I know it's tough to keep kids reading once the final school bell rings, but programs like these make it easier. Plus, when they head back to school in the fall getting them back into homework routine will be marginally easier. Who knows? Maybe after a while they'll prefer picking up a book to picking up a remote...at least part of the time. 

A Hint of Things to Come

I'm back! After nearly a month of being computerless, I have returned.

Mostly.

Now I'm playing catch-up on critiques and on my own writing, because of course while I didn't have the ability to type, my brain decided it was the perfect time to start churning out new ideas. My bedside table and the glove compartment of my car are full of random notes I jotted down over the course of the last few weeks. Now to determine which are actually useful.

I'm also attempting to finish off S.A.M., the YA Sci-fi ms I started working on over CampNaNo in April. It's still about 10k words short of the ending, but I'm hoping to fix that this week. Oh, and rename it since S.A.M. no longer fits the book as a whole.

With all these new ideas and a backlog of old, my hard drive is getting pretty full. Querying-wise, I'm focused on THE SOLUTION, which means my other work is being pushed to the back. It's impossible to give all of them attention, especially at the querying stage.

Now comes the semi-good news. Since WHAT THE WHOLE TOWN KNEW is going to be a hard sell traditionally (it has too many strikes against it --- biggest being the fact it's written in second person) I've been tossing around the idea of self-publishing it. I know I asked you all about this a few years ago, but then shelved it for a bit while my attention turned to other projects. This summer, I think it's ready.

What this means is all traces of past blog posts containing chapters of WHAT THE WHOLE TOWN KNEW will disappear. I'll be saving them for me because I love all your comments, but I don't want the story up here in its raw form.

Once I get everything figured out, I'll release more information, including expected publication date. This will hopefully be available in both e-book format as well as paperback. Again, I'm still figuring out what I'm going to do with it.

It will go through at least one more editor before anything else is decided. It's already going through several rounds of edits and revisions since the original posts, so I'm hoping one more professional set of eyes will catch anything still missed.

So, what do all of you think? Good idea or bad? Let me know!