However, poking around the virtual world of children’s writers, editors and agents isn’t random. It’s work! And I’ve stumbled across a few interesting things recently which I will list here, just in case you’re part of that world:

Elana Roth and Caren Johnson are running a one-day pitch fest where you post a 100 word pitch on their forums and they will read them and will request materials as a result. Instructions are here: http://www.johnsonliterary.com/forum/post/982144

Mary Kole, an agent with Andrea Brown, who writes a wonderful blog about children’s books, writing for children and the world of agenting and publishing those books, is running a Novel Beginning contest for MG and YA.

I’m still a devote of www.misssnarksfirstvictim.blogspot.com, which, although I’m sure you know this, is the blog of (you guessed it) Miss Snark’s first victim. She runs monthly Secret Agent contests which are often kidlit in focus because she herself writes YA and they’re always useful and interesting. I did one late last year and found it terribly exciting.

The YARebels are a group of seven new YA writers who are doing weekly vlogs. They are quite entertaining and I have learned some neat stuff from them. You can catch them here on YouTube.

Casey McCormick’s blog has an Agent Spotlight feature with lots of very interesting, up-to-date agent bios, with a focus on children’s literature agents.

I’ll come back with more next week. Right now, though, I have to go polish an entry or two. Enjoy the NYC SCBWI conference if you’re going and if, like me, you’re not (alas) tune into the SCBWI team blog.

The point is that since I imported this blog to my own site (completely impressed by my own savvy) no one has commented and I admit I felt sad, lonely and abandoned (although admittedly, it’s no more than I deserve after such a monumental hiatus). However, it took one of my Twitter pals, Megin (who blogs here) to point out that it was impossible to comment as I had clearly not gone through all the 234 settings and made them friendly and welcoming. No. For a couple of weeks now this blog has been all: “Do I know you? Well, do I? No? Well, push off then, mate.” Whereas it should be all: “Hi! Hi! Come in! You want tea? Cake? Rum? No? That’s okay! Stay anyway! Happy to see you.” If there was a “leap-up-and-lick-you-like-adorable-puppy” setting to welcome commenters, I’d enable that.

Anyway, if you are at all inclined to comment, go right ahead! I’ll be thrilled to the tips of my dweeby shoes that you stopped by.

(Of course, now I must write very important and witty things at every turn which is not necessarily possible considering that my brain is currently full of phlegm and appointments that I forgot to write down so that now I only remember THAT I have things I need to be doing, but cannot remember what or when those things are supposed to be happening.)

I have lost ten pounds — doctor scale certified (although I was in the doctor’s for something else altogether). This is the ten pounds I put on since I found out we were moving. This is the unhappiness ten pounds. The moving ten pounds. The “I feel like misery warmed over and cookies help, they do, even if only while they’re in my mouth” ten pounds.

Thing is, now that I’ve lost it (hooray!) I feel like it should be a sort of Hallmark Movie moment when I realize that I’m not that unhappy after all and that I’ve shed the depression of the transition and I’m ready to go forward into my new life, cookie-induced flab-free. I’m not getting that though. I’m still in the struggle. I’m just back to where I fit into my summer clothes again. So while it’s good, it’s not a Sign.

Life isn’t tidy like that. I sometimes wish it were, but it’s not so I just have to go forward which means still trying not to eat every slice of cake in the house (metaphorical cake — there is no cake in the house right now) and dealing with my moodiness in somewhat healthier ways. Like by drinking. (That’s a joke. Mostly.)

Now I just have to lose the ten pounds of second child baby-weight that I’ve been hoarding all these long years. And when THAT’s gone, I will need me a Hallmark moment, though for what I’m not quite sure.

And until then, there is laundry.

This is almost another example of science telling us what we already know but in longer words, except that it’s always nice to have some corroboration of our instinctive understanding that blogging connects us.

And it’s easier to do than 50 sit-ups. Almost as easy as taking a few extra of those great gummy vitamins they make for children and which I pop like the candy they are, telling myself that they’re good for me. And so they are.

For a long while I thought that the intense sadness I felt about leaving Philadelphia was interfering with my blogging mojo — and all my other mojos for that matter. I tried to give myself space to be unhappy, to not blog if I couldn’t manage to face yet another day of writing about the slough of despond I felt myself in. I tried not to mind that the magic was gone. But it was. And I began to feel like a liar, struggling to write what had once come so easily.

Recently I’ve had another thought. I have, all my life long, cared far far too much about what other people think of me. In fact, especially at times of great stress or unhappiness, there is a voice in my head which is something like the omniscient third-person narrator of a book. That voice is the voice of the “audience,” the world out there watching me. It’s no good telling me not to be so bloody self-centered. I’m not really, not that way. But I judge the value of what I do and who I am via the reactions of other people. Which is why, I think, blogging has been so successful for me while journaling was not. The audience made it real.

Well, it occurs to me that I am in the fix I am in (in short, that I am not sure where my life is in the midst of the lives around me) because I care more what and who are outside me, rather than what is inside. So I end up moving away from where I really wanted to be, because I had never managed to stand up and say — not to myself, not to anyone — this is what I want. Because I don’t know what I want. I know far better what other people want from me.

So. As this new year comes and I emerge slowly from the cracking shell of unhappiness I have been in, I think it’s time to try and change that. I will find out what I want. I will find out what my own voice says.

And to that end I have started keeping a journal. In a book. With a pen. I carry it around. I write weird things in it that I wouldn’t write here. And things that I would. But then I can’t check back to hear the love. To see my reflection in the mirror of this community. I have to be all right with there being no mirror. Only with myself. The book is quiet. It doesn’t praise me, judge me, agree with me or pat my hand. It doesn’t challenge me or push me. It waits for me to do all that for myself. Which considering how old I am, it’s about time I did.

So I suppose what I’m saying is that, for now at least, I’m going away. I’d rather say that outright than just drift away. What I am going to regret most are the connections I have here. I will miss you very much. And you should email or, you know, visit! Or you can come over to the knitting blog (Two Sharp Sticks) which I share with a friend and which I have also been neglecting. I will be contributing over there a few times a week, because (I hope) that’s a different type of blogging, one that won’t twist its fingers into my hair and pull me away from what I need to be doing right now. I’m also Twittering every so often (link in the side bar: twitter. com and I’m stuntmother) which means if you’re really keen to know where I’m at, you can check in on my 140 character summations of existence.

We’ll see. I know other bloggers who have said sayonara and almost immediately come back. And I have this idea that maybe once a week I’ll scan the weirdest page from my journal and post it here. Although isn’t that frankly just the love-hungry faded star in me, longing for acknowledgment?

And since I don’t exactly know how to close, I’m just going to fade to black.

She turns away from the camera (and now we can see she’s wearing a snazzy new pink hat she just knitted because man, the house is cold). She opens a still new looking black book , thinks for a moment, then takes a pen and starts to write. The light fades.

This too shall pass, my mother used to say. This too shall pass. Sunny weather and rain, good times and bad. At first I found it a sterile saying. A platitude. And then I realized its power for hope and held it to myself when I felt lost and afraid. Much later I learned that it also holds within it a warning not to rely on the good moments remaining forever. They too are fleeting. This thought holds within it both halves of all possibility. All this shall pass. Someday, it will be different. Not good, not bad. Not worse, not better. Just different.

Things are so different now then they have ever been before that I am truly, for the first time in my life, fearing the future. I never did. The future always held promise and potential. Now I am scared of it, fearing it holds sadness and loss. Part of this is the slow evaporation of my mother. To watch her dying by infinitely small degrees (because Alzheimer’s is a disease — and one that will kill her eventually) and to not yet be free to talk about it, to look ahead and know that before this mourning can possibly end there will be terrible, terrible times, makes the future seem bleak beyond all description.

Yet this too shall pass. All things will. And I am both hopeful and afraid.

So it’s 8:30 and I decided I would not try and work, but would instead go off to bed. Then I realized that because of NaBloPoMo, I had to blog first. Oy.

So I’m not complaining, but nor am I doing more than this little sneeze at the computer. I’m going to make tea, drink it (standing up, perhaps?) and go to bed.

Last year, I was ranting at and on the radio.

Remember NaBloPoMo last year? The crazy fun thing where you post once a day? Well, I’m doing it again. Along with NaNoWriMo. And everything else. It sounds crazy. Indeed it is. But it’s MY kind of crazy and there needs to be a bit more of that around here.

So stay tuned. Not only can you read a new post every day for the month of November (including post-Halloween fall out, Thanksgiving, in-laws visiting, my parents and aunt descending, a quilt in the works and more coffee than can reasonably be produced by a small organic farmer) but I’ll link to all of LAST year’s posts as well! Two for the price of one! Holy cow!

And if anyone has a good idea about what I should write this year’s novel about, I’d appreciate it. I’ve got nothing yet. Hoping that a deadline will prove as inspirational as it did in college!

Like these:

James H. Boren – “When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.”
Luc de Clapier de Vauvanargues – “The maxims of men reveal their characters.”
Henry Youngman – “If at first you don’t succeed… so much for skydiving.”
Michael Crichton – “I am certain there is too much certainy in the world.”
Michelangelo – “Genius is eternal patience.”
Babe Ruth – “Don’t let the fear of striking out hold you back.”
Dick Cavett – “If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.”
Paul Engle – “Wisdom is knowing when you can’t be wise.”
Jimmy Buffett – “Indecision may or may not be my problem.”

After all these I felt so inspired, even uplifted that I thought I would write the blog post to end all posts, filled with wit, wisdom and observations about life, parenthood and aging that would reduce all readers to tears of passionate understanding. But then I got this quote:

Abigail Van Buren – “The less you talk, the more you’re listened to.”

Ah, I thought.

The rest is silence.