Laurel Snyder

(nice example of a “Penny Dreadful”)

So, I’m in the throes of NaNoWriMo, and I have to say… I’m really nervous about what I’ve written so far on “Penny”.  Can I really put copious vomiting, neurotic parent spoofs,  and a child taxidermist in the same book?

Right now everything feels off kilter and fluffy. Everything feels messy.  I know this is only a first draft, but I’m scared.

I wonder if others are NaNoWriMoing books under contract? I wonder if this was a mistake.  If the “serious” nature of work that’s been sold and the zany/spontaneous nature of slamming out 1500 words a day are incompatible.

I console myself with the fact that I always have time to do-over if this is a miserable failure. I also console myself with the fact that I’m a much better rewriter than I am a writer.  Something learned in all those years of poetry workshop makes me a very tight tinkerer, and terrible at just throwing words onto a page.

But right now I’m nervous.

One other, unrelated, note… I’ve been re-reading Gone Away Lake, because there are things I need to learn from it to write this… and I’m struck by the (Joe and Beth Krush) art in the book.  It looks SO MUCH like the (LeUyen Pham) art for Any Which Wall.  Which is AWESOME. But weird.

Okay… so it’s officially official. I’m now an actual children’s author.  I stopped in at two local bookstores, and saw Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains face-out at both.

(here it is, at Little Shop of Stories!)

Then, in an odd coincidence, on Publisher’s Marketplace today, there was this…

Laurel Snyder’s PENNY DREADFUL, about a young girl who moves to a strange little town in the country  and has trouble making new friends amongst her rather odd neighbors, to Mallory Loehr at Random  House Children’s, by Tina Wexler at ICM (World).

So now I can shout about it. I’ve sold my third novel to my  awesome editor at Random House!!!

And to top it all off, Slidy Diner comes out in October!!!

I’m over, over, over the MOOOOOOOOOON!