Route 19 Writers: A Blog for Writers, Readers and Anyone Who Loves Kidlit

I know it seems crazy, since I haven't exactly posted regularly (okay, hardly at all) this past year, but I'm also writing now for another blog. The Route 19 Writers are a motley crew of mostly children's book writers who live along Route 19 South in the Pittsburgh, PA area. I've known most of them for years and am in awe of them as both writers and all-around-great people.

We take turns posting (at least three times a week), usually on a different theme each month. For this first month, we chose the theme "Novels" - but we allow lots of leeway in what to write about. You can see my first post on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and other  motivational writing "tools" here.

It even has the super easy directions for making this charming button chair (get it? Butt-in-Chair? That's the main tool you need to get your novel done.)

Of course, there's lots of other great stuff to find there too. A report on the great Katherine Patterson and her recent talk in Pittsburgh, a piece on finding your voice, a fabulous tutorial on twisting folktales to turn them into novels, new picture book stories, or tall tales, and even an interesting and funny discussion on figuring out what teens like to read (complete with very, very tasty recipe for Cornflake Chicken - yum.) I hope you'll check the blog out! Here!

Next month's topic is Giving and Receiving. I'm still noodling what I'll write about when it's my turn - but I'm already promising some kind of a nice giveaway. (Let me know if there's something you'd like me to write about.)

Oh, the new picture of the frog in my header is one I took this summer of one of the residents of my family's newish pond. I'll leave you with some images of flora and fauna around the pond this summer. (Can you tell I'm already feeling nostalgic for warm weather? Even though I really do love fall too.)

 This deer visited daily to clean up all the fallen apples from the tree that's the base for my tree house. She was very considerate and didn't eat any of my landscaping plants.

 The fish - mostly just the 12-for-a-dollar feeder goldfish - were prolific breeders this summer. It was so exciting! We rescued a few babies (which seemed to be a popular menu item for the adult fish and the frogs) and a number of them grew quite large by the end of the summer.

A view of the whole pond and new deck (before I did a lot of the planting around the pond). 

So great to be back blogging! I didn't realize how much I missed it until I started up again. Thanks for your patience with me.