WELCOME TO MY MONDAY POSTS

First, I’m happy to announce the winners of Cheryl Klein’s Second Sight: An Editor's Talks on Writing, Revising, and Publishing Books for Children or Young Adults. Cheryl generously donated a copy of her book for the giveaway so there are two winners. The winners are:

PAULA and KANGAROOBEE

Congrats! E-mail me your address so that I can have your book mailed to you.

Today I’m starting my Monday posts. I’m so excited to be here. I thought I’d start by telling you a little bit about myself.

1. At my day job, I’m an attorney for a prepaid legal services plan for UAW workers. I practice in consumer litigation, including collection defense, bankruptcy, and mortgage foreclosure prevention. So with the economy lately, I keep plenty busy.

2. I have an awesome family—a 13 year old daughter we adopted from China who will be in high school next year (Yikes!) and a husband who has chronic, pretty serious lung problems. Thankfully his health is maintaining.

3. I squeeze my writing in when I can. My middle grade fantasy is about an adopted 13-year-old girl who must discover how her adopted mother’s love unlocks her magical powers or lose her best friend forever. I’ve been working on it since the summer before my daughter started first grade. So yeah, it’s taken me a long time. But I never wanted to be a writer as a kid. I’ve had to learn from lots of mistakes. But it’s almost done. Promise. And I’m even outlining a new YA fantasy.

Here’s what I’ll be blogging about. Once a month, I’ll talk about something related to writing. There will also be lots of author interviews. I can’t promise they’ll all include a book giveaway, but the ones I have lined up so far do. And I’m going to allow international participants for now. I’m interviewing many, but not all, debut and middle grade authors. I’ve noticed that middle grade authors don’t get as much attention as YA authors so I want to spotlight some of them. And I’ll start an Ask the Expert series where I interview kids between 5th and 12th grade about what they’re reading.

If you’re an author with a book coming out and would like to be interviewed, contact me. And if you’re on Facebook, friend me. I’m not on Twitter.

So what about you? Tell us what you write and blog about. And next week come back for an interview with Terry Johnson where we discuss her debut middle grade book, DOGSLED DREAMS.

Posted by Natalie