Playing (perpetual) catch up and new story

Sorry I've been absent from the blog lately. When that happens, most likely I'm writing. Sometimes I'm dealing with personal crap. Sometimes I'm trying to write and meet a deadline while dealing with stressful icky bad personal crap.... and that's pretty much what happened last week.

The good news is that a big hurdle was jumped in the stressful personal crap yesterday and over the weekend I sent the latest version of one of my works-in-progress to my agent. Hopefully my proposal is closer to where it needs to be to get shopped. And then she can shop it and while I'm waiting I can fix the other work-in-progress. And then my agent can shop that. And hopefully sell one or both of these projects. And I will feel like an employed writer again and you will have something new to read by me, maybe even next year (I really really hope next year). My fellow Teen Fiction Cafe blogger and author who I just adore, Kelly Parra, wrote a really great blog on Teen Fiction Cafe about how much work it is to *stay published* after you get published and what a mental toll it can take on you and what a creativity suck it can be. This is something I've been struggling with lately too, but Kelly said it much more eloquently than I could, so I urge you to read her entry. I personally bookmarked so I can reread it when I am feeling stuck.

While you are at Teen Fiction Cafe, there are a couple more things you should check out. For one, we are having a big ol' 2 week party there starting March 1 and the details are here. Also I blogged about bullying and mean girls on Teen Fiction Cafe after reading this very upsetting news story online a couple weeks ago. It's a topic that is close to my heart since I certainly dealt with my fair share of mean girls growing up and like with everything, I firmly believe that the more we talk about it, the more we can help people who are struggling with being bullied and let bullies know that it is not okay. For those of you wishing to read more about bullying--cyber-bullying in particular--this book was just brought to my attention, it is written by a judge and may be worth checking out.

Another quick catch up item that I forgot to tell you about. I did an interview with Every Girl Blog which was lots of fun and you can read it here.

Oh yes, today was all about catch up. I'm not sure I will ever find the balance in my life where I manage to blog a few times a week, keep up on my email, spend the majority of my day writing, work my night job, spend times with husband, friends, and family, eat, workout and sleep. I think I would need to double the day in order to do all of that. But if I ever come up with a system, I'll let ya know. For now it's the people I love come first when they need me, followed by writing and the essentials (ie job, food, sleep), and then I catch up with the rest when I can.

Sometimes I don't even know what to blog about because my life on a day to day basis is not all that exciting and I don't have a lot of news lately, not the kind of news I want to give you about a new book, at least. But I have to write that book in order for that to happen.

In the meantime I have something to tide you over though. In case you missed my twittering about it last week, a short story I wrote aired on a Chicago Public Radio station and you can listen to it here. It's an interesting collaborative project. My friend Matt, who runs the Reading List (which has me reading the first chapter of Ballads), has this ongoing project where he tracks down people with interesting true stories, interviews them about their true story and then finds a writer that he thinks is appropriate to write a version of the story. The writer's version is then read by an actor or actress on the radio. So he had this story about a woman who was living a rather crazy life in Los Angeles and had a nervous breakdown that ultimately led to her meeting her husband. He thought it was the perfect story for me to tell (gee, I wonder why... am I the queen of punishing her characters or what?), when I heard his interview, I was definitely inspired. I wrote the short story in a day, then revised it a bit per Matt's suggestions and now... well go listen to it and get your Stephanie fix... not quite fiction, definitely not YA, but hopefully you will enjoy it!