aamcnamara

Via sdn on facebook: Medallion to Publish YA Titles by YA Writers

They define 'YA' as 13-18. So if I revised this novel in the next two-or-so weeks and sent it in, I might be able to squeak by on a technicality. Maybe.

...unless anyone has a deeply compelling reason for why I should do that, I'm thinking I might pass on this one.

(I'm not eligible for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards any more, either. There's still the Dell Award, though! If I don't forget about it like I did last year.)

Sheesh. I have to be teenaged for another year, but apparently I don't get any of the benefits. Maybe I should write some angsty poetry before my birthday just in case 19-year-olds don't get a pass on that either. The world isn't fair, no one understands me?

I mean, I haven't seriously thought "I should get a novel published and then everyone will love me because I am young and brilliant (and I will be very rich)!" for, um, quite a while, but--I don't know, this summer makes me feel trapped and in stasis.

I want to be moving, doing something, accomplishing something^[1]. I just don't know what, or how to do it.

---
Through yesterday:
---
[1] Other than "writing a novel" and "revising the novel I wrote last summer". Those don't count. Clearly. (Allow me my moment of self-pity, okay?)

So I found the book that has the Murphy bed in it--whatwasthatbook helped me find it. It's Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer. The same place helped me find another book I'd been trying to think of while on vacation, which turned out to be The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline by Lois Lowry.

Earlier this year, at Wiscon, I was reminded of The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron.

What all of these things have to do with each other is that I remembered we had a box of children's books in the basement and that perhaps if I found that these books would be in there. I looked, but the box wasn't there.

My next theory was that this box got put in the storage unit during the years when my family used same, and might be in the garage still. Unfortunately, when I put this theory to my mother, I did not get "oh yes! We should go out and look tomorrow morning!".

I got, "no. There were some books that got ruined with water damage while we had the storage unit, though. They were warped and moldy, and I had to throw them out."

Even though it was years ago, and I didn't notice or care then (I was a Big Girl and much too old to read such books), and I certainly can't do anything about it now, I am still mourning them tonight. I just remembered about these books and how excellent they were, and now it turns out that they ended up in the garbage, moldy and warped and water-damaged and unloved. My mother didn't even remember us owning those books.

But, she said, she has Paypal credit from eBay and if I sent her a list of the books I remembered as being in that box, she would buy me replacements from eBay or Amazon.

Don't I have a good mother?

Of course it will never be the same--but still.