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Hello Readers,

It’s been, oh, about a month since I have posted here, so I thought I’d just give you all a quick update.

Here’s what Peter and I have been up to.

Earlier this week we (along with the help of some improviser friends in town) did a One Page Salon reading from the upcoming sequel. If you missed the reading, then you missed the sneak peak at book two. But here’s a hint: a child’s Batman mask was involved. And someone said the word “and.”

We (okay, mostly just me), have been in talks with schools state-wide about implementing the books into book lists and doing some author visits.

In December, I’ll be participating in a Typewriter Rodeo event here in Austin (I’ll post details under events).

And finally, baking. No, of course I’m not baking – if you know me, you know the extent of my culinary patience (I can make eggs.) But Peter has been baking up a storm. I think he’s a bit sad about the end of book two, to be honest, and trying to go into a sort of cookie coma until I start book three.

Which won’t be long. Yes, in between the poetry practicing for Typewriter Rodeo, the school visits, the readings, the auditions (did I mention the auditions?), and the cleaning up after Peter, there will come a day soon when I start writing book three.

BUT IT IS NOT. THIS. DAY!

– Natalie
and Peter

P.S. – Contact me if you or someone you know might be interested in implementing the Fantastic Fable of Peter Able into school booklists. Or if you’d like a cookie.

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What’s this? You want me to elaborate? I thought the message was pretty clear in the title of the post, but okay, large and empty box…

Book Two is done.

I’d been putting it off for the past two months, since I got back from my summer in London. Why? Probably because not having finished editing it kept it going for me – tied me, in an odd way, to the UK, where I wrote the bulk of it. Because once the edits are done, that means it’s no longer a work in progress, but a complete work – and then what?

What to do when a child leaves the house for good? When the wolf I’ve been raising since he was a puppy must go back into the wild? What, Jack London, WHAT?!

Well, I could do what many newly set-free parents (or wolf caretakers) do – take up some sort of new addiction to fill the time: shopping, drinking, making long distance prank phone calls to China.

Or I could simply write a new book*. After all, there’s one more in this trilogy, and infinite possibilities beyond that.

*This is where the metaphor must end, because while you can just write a new book when the other ends, you really shouldn’t just pop out a new baby every time your other child grows up, or buy a wolf pup when White Fang gets older. Because it’s illegal. Don’t buy a wolf.

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I’m going to ask that you forgive this post ahead of time- there may be typepos, there may be sentences that just sort of…

And there may be some things that just plain make don’t sense.

I’ve been writing all morning, not working on the edits two book too, like I told myself I wood; but working on a short story for an upcoming writing competition.

If you’re unfamiliar, a writing competition is a little something that writers do from time to time when they A) Need some quick money, B) Need some inspiration to get the writing juices flowing, C) are avoiding working on what they’ve actually said they would work on, or D) All of the above.

I’d say I’m pulling a solid D right about now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Tangent: Recently I read a book, and somewhere in there, the author told me that this kind of behavior is okay. That there is no perfect plan or schedule for creativity, and that it will just unfold as it wants to. She’s a published author, this lady, so I know she must be right. (Fact: Published authors are always right. So take these words as infallible.)

(Actual Fact: I’m also a Fiction writer, and my line between reality and fiction is fuzzy at best. Take these words as signposts to a truth somewhere very far off in the distance.)

Anyway, if I am to believe this other author, who is NOT a fiction writer, and so must, as a rule, be correct (right?), flitting from one project to the next, from writing, to painting, to teaching, to blogging… well, it’s just all a part of the process.

The only thing you really have to go on is the feeling you get during and after you’re doing what you’re doing. NOT before – we all know how much we dread the things we love before we do them. Who knows why, but I’ve often put off writing, painting, and yes, when I was little, sleeping and bathing, for as long as I could, only to find that when I did, I was much better off. (Except for that one time I got shampoo in my nose. I still don’t know how this happened.)

If you find yourself in that magical, creative, nothing-else-exists zone doing – what – gardening? Painting? Writing? Programming a computer? Whatever it is that gets you there, follow that. It doesn’t matter how it comes to be – whether you’re flitting from one project to the next, or seeing one through until the end. That’s that “bliss” that people are always talking about following.

And in a very meandering way, I’m just trying to say that for me, writing is that place, be it a short story competition, a book, a comic, or a blog post, that reading back probably won’t make much sense. But you know what? It feels good. So here we are.

Follow your bliss. Write, read, create, discuss, play… Do it for the sheer joy of doing it. Do it because you love it.

It’s not a contest.

Unless, of course, it’s a contest.