Jacqueline West, Author of the Books of Elsewhere » 2015

Cover Reveal: BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

March 10, 2015 Tags: Been There Done That, C. Alexander London, Short Stories

I promised some writing news, and here it is!

This is Book 1 of BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, a forthcoming collection for young readers. From the BEEN THERE, DONE THAT website:

Have you ever wondered where authors get their ideas? Or how those ideas become stories? Now you can find the answers with this collection of short stories, as authors reveal the real-life experiences that inspired them! Some stories imitate the events almost exactly. Others use just a detail to spark an idea. But all the stories in Been There, Done That prove one thing: that inspiration can come from anywhere.

Book 1’s theme is friends and family relationships, and it will be released on November 3rd (but you can pre-order it now!)My story will be included in Book 2, which has a school theme and will be coming out early next year. Here’s the amazing line-up of authors: http://www.beentheredonethatbooks.com/#!book-2-authors/c21zy. (Wendy Maas! Bruce Coville! My fellow Endangered Author C. Alexander London!)

Now back to staring at a baby.

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Quiet Time

Tags: personal

Things have been pretty quiet around this blog for a while, and for once it isn’t my fault — it’s this guy’s.

We had a baby last week. It still seems like a vaguely impossible, too-good-to-be-true thing. Every time I bend over his bassinet and discover that he’s really there, it’s a delightful surprise.

His name is Beren, from the legends woven into The Lord of the Rings, and we think he’s pretty much the greatest.

Ryan and I have fallen into Baby World, where time seems to zoom forward during the day and tick backward at night, where yoga pants are formal wear and a walk around the block requires as much preparation as a polar expedition, and our schedules are filled with items like “Take a shower” and “Eat a sandwich” and “Change the socks you’ve been wearing for three days,” and we end up skipping about half of them, because we’ve got better things to do. Anne Greenwood Brown, one of the wonderful writers in my critique group, says that babies are like campfires; you just sit and stare at them, hypnotized by every wriggle and flicker. She’s dead on. We can hardly stand to look away.

So…that’s where most of my time, energy, and brain power has been going for the past several weeks. Luckily, Beren arrived between rounds of revision on the YA novel, and I’ve pared down my travel and appearance commitments for the remainder of the spring, so I can just nestle down inside the house with this tiny new person. So far, I’m loving this quiet time.

Of course, things aren’t actually quiet. Friends and family drop in to shower us with food and gifts and stare at the campfire for a while. And then there are the noises Beren makes. Sometimes he sounds like a squeaky door hinge, and sometimes he sounds like a baby pterodactyl; sometimes he chirps like a bird, and sometimes he hums and smacks his lips like a greedy little gourmand.

There will be more writing news here in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, I’ll be here, in my wrinkly pajamas, staring at a baby.

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