Why I joined the 12 x 12 and a Giveaway!

Last year I jumped into several writing challenges with both feet. Two great ones are targeted to picture book writers.

In November, I completed Tara Lazar’s PiBoIdMo challenge. But if you write picture books and you want someone nudging and inspiring you All Year Long, that would be Julie Hedlund. Her challenge is the 12 x 12.

Coming up with picture book ideas is hard. Completing the manuscripts. HARD. Sometimes I found myself abandoning a great idea, because more great ideas came along. The competing voices in my head were a tough audience to ignore.

But to complete the 12x12, you had to stick with it. If I had the time, I could work on a hundred manuscripts at once, but I don’t think many of us have that sort of time (or energy!). I had to learn to pick and choose.

Like PiBoIdMo, the 12x12 has great posts on craft and inspiration. In fact, reading (and re-reading) the posts was often the best way to get “unstuck.” My writing problems aren’t new--they're just new to me! The “ah-ha” moments from reading about craft were priceless.

The one twist for me this year is—I’m not dead set on “winning” the challenge. I know, how can I admit that, the horror! But hear me out.
After last year’s 12x12 I have a stack of completed manuscripts, begging for time and attention. And as much as I want to keep writing more—and I certainly plan to keep writing more new manuscripts, and I’m hopeful that I will complete at least twelve—I also believe that my primary goal for 2013 is to separate the wheat from the chaff and get the wheat out to market! That means I need to focus on polishing, revising and submitting.

A completed 12x12 manuscript isn’t necessarily a polished, ready-for-submission manuscript. This became abundantly clear to me as the last year progressed and I went back and re-read the manuscripts from earlier in the year. And it wasn’t just that I am (hopefully!) becoming a better writer all the time. Nope. Manuscripts just need to sit and steep awhile. Getting a critique is great, but it's often only with time that I can really "get" what the critiquers meant. Coming back with fresh eyes is invaluable to me.

If I'm still working on revising last year's manuscripts, why did I re-join the 12x12?
This year, it's BIGGER and BETTER. In addition to the Facebook community there are manuscript critiques and special submission windows to agents who accept picture book manuscripts! Critiquing other writers and having my work critiqued is just what I need this year.

So, with the help of the writing community there, no matter how many new manuscripts I write in 2013, the year’s going to be a success. Hope to see you there!

To celebrate all the help I’ve received on my writing journey, I’m giving away a copy of one of my first publications!

For a chance to win Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul, you'll need to do two things:

 1. Be a follower of my blog
2. Leave a comment with your contact information so I can contact you to  get a "real" address if you win. Remember you can use (at) and (dot) instead of @ and . so the internet gremlin bots can't read your information.

Pretty easy, huh? Don't look back, just do it!
I'll pick a random entry one week from today, on January 18th. Good luck!

When a Picture IS Better than a Thousand Words: My Gift

The best part of the holidays is relaxing with family and friends. Hands down, no contest. But for most people, gift-giving and receiving is also a part of it and my family is no exception. This year, my husband gave me a gift that brought me to tears, so I thought I’d share the story of my gift.  

Over the years, our family has had three four-legged family members. Now just so you know, I’m not the kind of person who dresses her dogs up or thinks they’re human. I know they’re dogs. But I also know that from the moment they came through the door, they were part of the family. They were living, breathing family members, not furniture or play toys.

Warning! The next part of the story is sad, but then it gets happy again.

Our “last” dog died shortly before Christmas. Frisbee was a black lab Rottweiler mix who became part of our family when I volunteered for Twyla's Friends, a dog rescue group in Texas. We fostered a litter of puppies and Frisbee had not yet been adopted when we took on another canine family member, a severely epileptic cattle dog Weimeraner mix named Angel. We decided to keep Frisbee, too. 

Angel and Frisbee’s full story is in Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul: Stories of Canine Companionship, Comedy and Courage, which is being re-issued by the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise sometime in 2013. But here’s the short version:

Angel had multiple seizures every day. And not the relatively calm petit mal staring off into space kind of seizures. If no one was there to hold her she had the ‘bash her head on the floor, run full speed into walls during seizure blindness, jump through the kitchen window’ kind. She was on phenobarbitol, potassium bromide, and Keppra. We found a series of incredibly valuable websites that talked about how to help seizure dogs. But the one thing that was guaranteed to help Angel was if someone put an arm under her head and spoke calmly to her as the seizure came on. Instead of being upset by our presence, she came out of it quicker and without damage. The only problem was—not knowing when a seizure was coming, someone would have to be with her 24/7. Tough to do. Even the most devoted pet lovers have to go to work and school and grocery stores and...you get the picture. It was tough.

One day I was at the other end of the house and heard Frisbee making a strange noise. I ran to find her lying partly across Angel, holding her down. Somehow, she knew that Angel was starting to have a seizure and since I wasn’t in the room, Frisbee stepped in. From then on, she held Angel for us until someone got there. The vet initially said Angel wouldn’t live more than two years, but she died last year at the age of fourteen years, one month.

Frisbee died at home, in my arms, shortly before Christmas this year. Painfully, achingly tough. 

Even though dogs’ muzzles get white, and in our heads we know they are aging, dogs have an uncanny ability to stay young at heart and to live each day to the fullest. Maybe it’s because of this that their death is such a shock. 

Without my knowing, my husband took a stack of family photos with our dogs in them and sent them to the incredibly talented Wendy Trommer in New Hampshire (another Wendy!). He had met Wendy while they were both volunteering for the FIRST robotics program that one of our sons was a team member of, and knew she was also is an artist.

All I can say is WOW!

Wendy Trommer never saw our dogs. But from a series of pencil sketches that she had my husband approve, she created an amazing oil painting. She brought Angel and Frisbee to life on canvas for us. For me.

If the house was on fire, it’s get the family out—then the painting. It means more than any other “thing” in the house. If you get a chance, I’m sure Wendy would love for you to stop by her website and tell her how great the painting is!

Hope you all received what you were hoping for—or in my case what you needed but didn’t know you did.