When you graduate from wanting to working, you say, 'I am going to flesh out this idea and write the whole thing down, and rewrite it, and rewrite it again, and rewrite it unendingly, and I'll have no real assurance of when it'll be good enough, but at some point I'll pitch it to someone who will decide if I'm delusional or not.' The optimism and the ego-bruising, unsexy work needed to follow through feels unending. But once Penelope dangled the carrot, I trotted stupidly forward, not thinking too much. That's what worked for me. ~ KI

I've sent the sequel manuscript to Penelope. It required a backhoe. It's a big one - The Dread Crew came in at just over 37,000 words. Flight of the Griffons, as a complete first (second, technically) draft: 56,925. We'll either have to chop almost half the story, or... maybe... I don't know. Could it be good enough to be two books, or does that wish make me the most self-indulgent author in the history of self-indulgent authors?

We'll see. For the next month or longer, I'm banned. No edits, no mulling, no additions, no tweaks. The story is in my editor's hands and from there, we'll figure out what to do with this heavyweight of a creature, perhaps set a deadline, and look forward to line editing and production.

More when I know more...

The sequel, and Missy... she's more comatose than waiting. I'd say 'poor love' about her but she'd find that tiresome. She'd slap my knee in that way that says I'm not poor and I'm not your love. Do something. 

I have been. Doing something. Not the right thing, but I've needed to wander.

I wrote a book, a little one, and I want to exist beyond all hope. I want it so badly. I need it to be set to paper and illustrated and bound. It's important. I've submitted it to the loveliest publisher, one insisted upon by a dear and illustrious friend, and I've gotten the loveliest postcard back with the loveliest Don't you dare call, write, email, or otherwise beg until at least six months are up and so I'm trying to forget I ever wrote it.

But it's hard. The Canada Post tracking slip is all balled up on my kitchen counter and I keep staring at it and thinking about voodoo and hitchhiking.

I can't tell you what it's about except to say that it's for younger kids, and for artists who struggle, and for younger kids who have an artist in them who's destined to struggle and wonder about things like worth and value and time well spent.

See? Therapy. Wishes. Shooting stars. Rocks etched up and skipped into the sea. Tossing and turning and yeah, I know. The wandering's up. Missy needs her end, and so I forget about the mail and get back to it.

Courtesy the remarkable Oliver Jeffers.

The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves. ~ Roald Dahl, The BFG

"Yeah. Me neither."

"Do you ever feel like you're not what you say you are?"

"Yeah."

"Like really, you're no good?"

"Yeah. I have no idea how to write a book."

"I have no idea how to draw."

We look at each other across his kitchen table and our beasts look at each other too. My robber-barons who spend all day whispering fraud, fraud, fraud into my ears, his into his.

He gets up to pour coffee and I watch absently, thinking He has no idea. I can't believe he has no idea. He's so gifted. He sits again with a mug and opens his sketchbook.

"I like this." He looks down at my pieces of paper, pieces of story. "Let's do it."

Some books are written to be read aloud to an audience of children, and The Dread Crew definitely fits into this category. A rollicking, rowdy hoot of a book ... there are identifiable characters for both boys and girls, and humor akin to Roald Dahl at his most satirically anti-establishment.

Illustrations are detailed and lovingly rendered, but the humorous, evocative language creates its own word pictures. The Dread Crew's very words echo Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Purchase multiple copies of this book because demand will be strong, and I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t end up in the round of honors books at the end of the year.

~ Lois Rubin Gross (Children's Literature)

I began inserting a card into each book, more calling card than business. A bookmark, whenever I had a stack at home. And then the rubber stamp.

Here's the new one. I love the ka-chunk of it, the unpredictable ink, sometimes thick and bleeding, other times faint and interrupted.

THIS IS NOT GRAFFITI.

DON'T TOUCH IT.

Two weeks since the manuscript and I've left it alone, as per Penelope's editorial direction. The first draft is in her hands but it's a first draft with holes and soft bits and looseness and dubious underpinnings and while I've obeyed in principle (nothing is less efficient than a writer and an editor working, unknowingly, in parallel) I've reorganized and rewritten the story fourteen times in my head.

I remember how it felt to present unpolished, untested words for assessment. Up to my neck in caveats and doubt. Skin on inside-out. Anticipating the vastness of differences between the first draft, which exists, and the second draft, which is yet another gulag away from where I stand.

I want so much to be good at this. At the writing, sure—but at everything else. At patience, discipline, detachment. Submission, humility. The belief that the book is its own entity, that profound re-writing is not at all failure, but the natural and good growth of creative infanthood. At waiting, leaving it be, at least for now.