After breaking for five months, I've decided to start blogging again. Maybe my ego is just too big and I have to have some space to let it out, or maybe it's more like the desire to write letters to the world -- or to my friends, whom I have felt woefully out of touch with for the five months I have not been blogging. Or maybe it's just to keep track of my writing a bit more. Legally, I have to keep a homeschool log/journal, which gives me something of a record of what we do every day around the house. But keeping track of my writing life has been rather haphazard lately, and I find I miss that.

So here I am again. It's a new place. I like the color schemes, and journalscape is easier to use than my outdated version of Microsoft Frontpage. Maybe I'll be able to put up an entry every now and then, depending on how much E. sleeps or if he doesn't crawl underneath the desk and pull out all the wires. That's the same as it's always been, except that we are waiting breathlessly for E. to start walking. He's making everyone wait a little too long. (He'll be eighteen months at the end of October.)

What else did I do over my five month vacation? I started writing (and submitting) nonfiction essays and am learning to think of myself more as a *writer* instead of merely (*merely*, she says) a "novelist". Anyway, I've branched out. And I've gotten at least five more rejections for "Maenad", which I am still --aparently against the odds, although I've gotten a lot of "glowing rejections" as A. calls them -- trying to sell. Right now I'm working on a short story called "Evergreen", a fantasy set in the Pacific Northwest. I want to send it to the Cascadia anthology, which has a November 1 deadline. This could be very foolish of me, but I figure it can't hurt (much) to try.

The novel has been at TOR for 16 1/2 months now. I'm looking for an agent -- chalk up two rejections on that quest, and two queries currently still out.

The particulars of my life are still much the same. Still homeschooling, and deeply embroiled in reading right now as A. and I try to firm up our own educational philosophy in response to some new needs around here, as G. becomes a "second-grader" and K. enters "kindergarten". Grades are really superfluous around here, but it helps to have an answer when kind old ladies in the grocery store ask the kids what grades they're in. Really, what we're doing is dinosaurs and insects and Ancient Egypt and Rome and Greece and knights and drawing sphinxes and listening to a lot of Junie B. Jones. This is good for me, too, because I am finding out about a lot of things I probably never would have hunted down on my own. Also, my kids like watching Nova, and that is a good thing. :-)