Enjoy

Good week. I hope you are running out to grab Ellen Hopkins' new book Identical. There is probably no author with a bigger heart for teens and her writing is fantastic. I had a chance to hang out with cool writer peeps this Friday, including Ellen and a few others, Randy Powell, Kevan Atteberry, Allyson Schrier, Cathy Benson, Megan Bilder and Conrad Wesselhoeft. We went to Salty's, a beautiful restaurant on Alki Point in West Seattle. The ambiance is perfect. Thank you, Holly, for suggesting it. Everyone shared a bit of their story. It was heartening to find we are all in the same boat really.

I was really struck by something that was said, something that dug into my heart. The question: Do you enjoy the writing you are doing? I do write lots of work for hire. And I do enjoy some of it but not all. It's basically a job, but it's in the neighborhood of what I like to do. I hunger to see my own creative stories in the hands of readers. Inside me it feels like great worlds spinning. It seems like they should spin out of me and who knows what will be drawn into the gravity well created and then what will spring out of it? I really do ache to have children connect with the heart of what I have to say.

I remember once a long time ago, I put out out one of the novels that I've written to a few blind readers -- i.e. some children I didn't know. A few months after I had gotten the manuscripts back, one of the children who had read my book came up to me at a social function. It was a boy about 9 maybe 10. I didn't know him. He hugged me out of nowhere and then looked up at with this big smile and said, "You're the author who wrote the best book I've ever read. Thank you, thank you for writing it."

The chance that there might be more than one child out there that feels that way about my writing; that keeps me going. That's why I have hope. I knew some deep joy in that moment. I find lot of writing is that -- what I enjoy about writing has not happened yet. But inside me those spinnning worlds whisper to me. "There's a force inside you, trust it like you trust gravity, a force of attraction between all masses in the universe; the force within you is going to attract the force in children, and what's next; well, that the glue that holds everything together."

On a last note, we have important work. Get to it, folks.

Here is a doodle I call Girl Under Shooting Stars.

Remember: ©Molly Blaisdell, all rights reserved. If you want to use my cool doodles, ask permission first. It is so wrong to take people's doodles without permission!

Some of the mutations will be good ones--wonderful things beyond our dreams--and I believe this, I believe this with all my heart, THE DAY WILL COME WHEN MANKIND WILL THANK GOD FOR THE STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL ENERGY FROM AN ATOM.
from The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds, Paul Zindel