Hope Springs Eternal

I don't know which is more important: hope or a thick skin. Sometimes I think that hope gets in the way of a thick skin. Or maybe hope is what spurs you on to the experiences that give you a thick skin. Anyway, even though just a couple weeks ago I was wondering where my ambition was, if it had finally died even though I said I had accepted it never would.

Then my baby started going to bed EARLIER and WITHOUT ME (key point). So last night I was able to get a query out and that just made me feel a million times better. And then, via Twitter, I heard about this.

You see, as an avid reader I always felt like I'd been dropped into a genre-less void after I graduated from high school. I went from reading children's and YA novels to mainstream fiction. I love authors like Maeve Binchy and Barbara Kingsolver, but rare was the book whose heroine wasn't already middle-aged with children. Even if their ages were closer, they weren't going through the same college and post-college issues that I was. Then chick lit came around, but even that didn't really fill the void for me. And I went to grad school in children's lit, where I learned that publishers defined YA as 12 - 25, but rare is the book that's really for anyone over the age of 17.

So two years ago I see about trying to rectify the situation by writing my own post-YA, pre-adult mystery novel. And the consensus from the people I workshopped with was that my heroine was in a No Man's Land: too old for YA, too young for a mainstream novel. I needed to either make sure 15 or 33 in stead of 23. Ugh. Talk about a major rewrite.

Now once again hope springs eternal. Nothing may come of this (that's the writer's creed), but maybe something will!