I’ve received a few more reviews since the ABNA Top 100 were announced, and I’m grateful. It’s been a nice surprise after the disappointment. I’m up to 197, and I would love to get a few more before this thing is over.

I’m going to go into “Review Withdrawal” once the excerpts are ultimately removed. I’ve really appreciated the steady steam of comments in the last month. It’s wonderful when your work finally finds an audience and touches people. (200 would be a nice number to end with; so if anyone out there still wants to review The Silence of Trees, I welcome the review!)

Now that the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition is behind me, I look toward the future with new stories in the works, and I’m excited to get back to writing. I have one novel I need to complete, and a Middle School book (in the vein of Gaiman’s Coraline or Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) that I’d like to work on.

Now that I’m no longer preoccupied with getting reviews, generating publicity, and so on; I have the awareness and space for characters to crawl out of the woodwork of my imagination, dust themselves off, and clamor for my attention. It is most definitely a clamor! I’m not sure which set of characters is going to win out.

I’m jotting down notes and outlines, trying to keep up with the rush of information. I’ll give it a few days. In the meantime, these bits of stories continue to reveal themselves as I wash dishes, nurse the baby, play with the kids, and drift off to sleep.