I’m currently enjoying a “refilling the well” episode, while the folks who volunteered to read my CIRCUS GALACTICUS draft do so. I’ve been reading, mostly, and puttering around with several different ideas for new projects.

I also received the page proofs for PRUNELLA, which I’ve now gone over. This was one of those times when it was a bit hard for me to re-read the book for the umpteenth time. It wasn’t that I disliked it, but I really wanted to be working on something new (aka CIRCUS). Thankfully I made myself do it, though, as I found a handful of typos that would have embarrassed me if they made it to the final book! So I am calling that a victory!

My reward is that I’ve printed out the draft of CIRCUS and will be diving back into that soon. I’m really (unusually) excited! It may just be a weirdly long-lasting writer’s high, but I feel like I reached a different sort of level with CIRCUS than I have with my previous books. With FF, the action centered very much around a single driving plot and small set of characters. With PRUNELLA, the world got richer, but the story still focuses very much on the two main characters.

Then in CIRCUS the world kind of exploded with details and for the first time I found myself tempted to write little vignettes about what the side characters are doing when they are “off screen”. I want to keep exploring the lives of my characters and their world. In some way, the book just feels “bigger” in my brain. Sometimes it can be easy to get so wrapped up in worrying about marketability and second-guessing yourself that you lose the part of writing that is fun. But CIRCUS was really, really fun for me to work on. Hopefully that means it will be fun for other people too.

Oh, and last but not least, I spent an excellent evening earlier this week talking with some of the students in the Upward Bound program at the University of Maine at Farmington. It seems like an excellent program (to assist promising kids in preparing for college) and both the students and the staff were great. I mostly talked about my “journey to publication”, complete with props. But then during BOTH question and answer sessions, I got a question I hadn’t expected: a request to read a little of the book. OUT LOUD. Yes, in front of real people.

I had (somewhat stupidly) never thought to practice for such an occasion, but I think it went reasonably well. I didn’t fall over or cluck like a chicken, and I tried to keep it lively. Thankfully there were no recordings so I can happily imagine it was a stunning performance without proof to the contrary. But I guess I had better start practicing!