First, a pretty picture. The Dutch translation of The Cabinet of Wonders:

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been posting blog entries very frequently lately. Part of this is due to my almost eight month old son, who is absolutely adorable and increasingly mobile. He’s now at that stage where I have to watch him constantly to make certain he isn’t chewing on cables or doing something else equally dangerous. And if I try to use a computer in front of him? Forget it. He’ll bang delightedly on my laptop like it’s a percussive instrument (which, I guess, it is). 

I’m also working on two book projects. I know, baby-chasing and trying to write two books seems crazy and masochistic. I might as well be chewing on electric cables. But while I should have been working solely on Book 3 of the Kronos Chronicles, I also had an idea for a stand-alone young adult novel. My idea was shiny and sparkly and new, so I just had to play with it. And so now I find myself trying to mix writing and taking care of a small creature who has learned how to snort like a little piggy to get laughs. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

1. I’m not reading very much. I don’t have time. This is traumatizing.

2. I keep hoping that technology will help me have more time to write and read. So I have a Kindle, even though I don’t really like the Kindle. The theory behind the Kindle’s construction is to make it disappear so that you only have the reading experience. The problem is, this works too well, and I always feel unmoored while Kindling. I’m lost without the heft of a book and the feel of a page. As far as I’m concerned, a Kindle is only good for traveling AND (this is a big AND) being able to look at my manuscripts whenever, wherever I may be. So a Kindle doesn’t give me more reading time, but it does help me edit, because I can glance over my manuscripts and think, “Hmm. What’s wrong with that dialogue? Something’s not working.”

3. It really, really helps that I have a writing group. I exchange work with several children’s/young adult writers in New York, and they have been the key to my survival as a writer with a baby.

Are there any writers out there? Passionate readers? How do you balance having a life and reading or writing books?   

P.S. If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Oh, God, I can’t write. I am going to cut my manuscript pages into a thousand paper snowflakes,” don’t give up. Instead, read this from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol:

“Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.”

What? A bad lobster in a dark cellar? Charles Dickens, WTF? This is the weirdest metaphor I have ever read by a crack writer. Of course, it may be that a “lobster” wasn’t always a red crustacean. Maybe a lobster used to mean a big pot, and the crustaceans were called lobsters because they were cooked in a big pot? But, even if so, comparing a face to a big pot in a dark cellar just doesn’t seem right. So, A) What is a “lobster”? and B) writers of the world, take heart! Even literary geniuses produce bad writing now and then.  

P.P.S. Here are a couple of photos from BEA.

Me and Laini Taylor.

Me and Sarah Beth Durst.

P.P.P.S. John Green has started an interesting conversation about the questionable merits of getting a big advance for your book. Check it out.