RIP VAN WINKLE & ME

Being absorbed in a work-in-progress is a bit like becoming Rip Van Winkle. I feel as if I've been asleep for the last four years. I've traveled back in time to 1941, spent 24/7  in 1952, seen UFOs over the White House, gone through portals in forests, been abducted my aliens, followed by men in black, and soared through other dimensions. Why? I'm writing a novel!

Rip Van Winkle took a nap and slept for years. When he awoke, he was an old man with a long white beard and the world around him had changed.

Well, I must finally admit I'm an old woman, and while I've been "away" —so to speak—the world has definitely changed. Certainly publishing. And marketing. And how people read books. And what books they read.

Today there's a plethora of books and blogs and words.

But it seems a lot of people are good-book-deprived and a lot of people pass off a blog post or a rough draft as an actual book and sell it online.

Oh, well, things change.

Why has it taken me so long to write this particular book? 

After all, I have a dozen real books you can pick up and feel pages and set on a shelf to my name. I've taught writing for years, facilitate critique groups, and peer coach writers. This should be a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, piece-of-cake walk in the park for someone like me. Why can't I produce something review-worthly in a matter of months?

First of all, I've gotten really, really  picky about story structure, character development, and words—they have to be just right—words with the right connotation, words set exactly right in a sentence, words that fit into the puzzle correctly.

Second-rate, fly-by-night, run-of-the-mill, seat-of-the-pants sort of writing simply isn't good enough.

Secondly, while my other YA books are also set back in time, this book is Sci-fi/fantasy based on factual UFO events and that takes a lot of research. The story is told by a sixteen-year-old unreliable narrator, and it's not easy to write from the point of view of someone who is mentally unstable. And make her likable. 

So if you've been wondering where I've been lately and what I've been doing, or if you find me wandering about in sort of a haze, bewildered by current trends, and behind on the news, I have an excuse, I'm not senile or ready to be hauled off to some facility. I'm an author.

And I've been with sixteen-year-old Allana Odette Blair, aka, Allie-cat, an isolated girl who does get locked up in a facility and is still grieving a decade after killing her twin brother on December 7, 1941. Yes, the date the Japanese dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, the day that will live in infamy. 

See what I mean? It's complicated! 

I just sent the first eleven chapters to my teen Beta readers. The book at 55 chapters is finished, but it simply won't let me go. I'm caught in Allana's post-war world, living on Oak Street where nothing is as it seems. At least I know there's a portal because I put that in, and did I mention other dimensions and parallel worlds? 

And trying to get the science right?

More about that later.