Officially crawling into cave

Yesterday was amazing: our Number One Son qualified for the New York State boy’s swimming meet by taking third place in the 100-meter breast in the preliminary heat at yesterday’s Section III championships.

That is a mouthful for an early-morning post. Boiled down to its essence, it translates into: My kid is going to States!!!! Yeah, we are just a wee bit excited about this here.

Good thing we did all of the hooting and hollering yesterday. Today marks the beginning of the period known as Laurie Is Crawling Into Her Cave To Work on Her Book. I won’t be posted much, if any, over the next two weeks. I will be writing, writing, throwing out the pages that don’t work, then writing some more.

This is the part of revision that I love the most. It’s like going crazy studying for finals – very long, intense days (and sometimes nights) spent wrapped in all the story threads. In college, my fuel of choice was late-night doughnuts and very bad coffee. I’ve exchanged the doughnuts for salads and the bad coffee for wonderful coffee, but the game is the same: work to exhaustion, sleep, eat, work some more, exercise, eat, work to exhaustion, start again the next morning. I hit this phase with all of my books. Remember the scary scene in TWISTED with the gun? That came to me during this phase. These intense days and nights bring the characters to life – they truly incarnate for me. This is a Good Thing.

Before I grab my pens and scuttle deep into the cave, let me give a last shout out to the 28 Days Later project. Today’s featured author is one of my favorite guys in the whole world, Walter Dean Myers. I think Walter should get his own month. He was born in August. Let’s rename it as “The Month of Walter.”

Thanks to my friend Jerry from high school, and my fellow author buddy Ellen, I am 88% of the way to my fundraising goal for the Lymphoma & Leukemia Society’s Team in Training Half marathon. I am still offering a free audio version of TWISTED to the nice person who puts me over the top. You can donate here. If you want to cheer on my husband (who has to put up with my craziness for the next two weeks) donate to him – he’s logging just as many training miles as I am, and he keeps the coffee hot for me.

ETA I didn’t watch any news yesterday, so I am just catching the news about the horrible campus shooting at Northern Illinois University. This is the fourth school shooting in America this week. Dear God in heaven, how do we keep all of our kids whole in body and mind?

13 Replies to “Officially crawling into cave”

  1. congratulations to your son!

    fourth school shooting this week? i only heard about the one at NIU. although, i was a bit distracted by the news that some kid i actually knew took a gun to my old high school yesterday. thank god he told someone who turned him in.

  2. Good luck in the cave and have fun!

    School shootings are sad and tragic. Multiple school shootings are alarmingly upsetting… let’s hope this is the end of this trend, or at least the beginning of the end.

  3. I hear you about the cost of hardcovers. I can’t afford them either.

    TWISTED will be out in paperback in early May.

    Dang, that is just a couple of months from now. Whay do I feel like I lost a year when my back was turned?

  4. Twisted

    My brother, 13 years old, is a very reluctant reader. He was assigned a book report from his teacher, so today he was scanning my book shelves looking for the shortest book he could find when he stopped, and to my surprise, pulled out a lengthier book, Twisted. The cover must have caught his attention, and so he asks me what it’s about. And I start on this long summary and when I finish he says, “Cool, I’ll read this one.” And I kind of pause because right on the first or second page I remember that message, “This is not a book for Children” and I’m not sure if he’s mature enough to read and understand the book but I don’t want to pull the one book he’s actually interested in away from him. I don’t know, I was just wondering if maybe you could provide some insight as to whether he should read the book or not. Thanks.
    P.S. Many congratulations to Number One Son!

  5. Re: Twisted

    I wouldn’t hesitate to hand it to a 13-year-old.

    I would not hand it to a ten-year-old – not because it would scar him for life, but because he wouldn’t get the most out of the story because he is still in childhood.

    Most 13-year-olds are being shoved into the confusing world of adolescence/adulthood and are looking for stories to help them make sense of it all.

    What do you think? Will you let me know if he finishes it, and what he thinks?

  6. Hurrah for you and BH and #1Son! All Hail the Month of Walter!

    I’m glad I survived college intact. I’m thinking happy thoughts for the victims and their families.

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