"Silly old bear!" is not gender-specific or even gender-inclined, surely?

I loved Pooh, too. I never saw the animals as gender-specific, and Christopher Robin was so young that he was just "kid" for me, too.

I suppose I shouldn't feel sexist, but yeah, if the only thing around to read had been (or still was) the Hardy Boys, I'd read it, but only grudgingly.

"Boys Book of Big Boyish Adsventures!"

Snerk.

That's a gift, not a moral failing.

Thanks you! That's a lovely way to think about it.

Hmm. Now I'm trying to think more thematically about what I read as a child and how it's influenced what I write, and it's not easy. I know I write about women learning to take power over their lives even when it'd be easier NOT to, but I think that's more to do with my life experiences of the last decade than anything I read growing up. And, I suppose I write about staying true to yourself and your beliefs and using them to transcend the apparent ordinariness and pettiness of life--at least, I try to--and that's pure Silver Chair. Which was my least favorite Narnia book as a child, but is my favorite of the lot now.

Wheee! I just got the galleys for the novel! It looks pretty good, too. Now to sit down and patiently scan it for typos, which I suck at with a capital S.

Sending line-editing ma to AmyLiz, and oh yes, YaY!

Woohoo! I just got my first definite yes from an agent for our conference! And not even one of the two who were all friendly-chatty because I knew one of their clients. Though I still think I'll get at least one if not both of them.

Now, to nail down those pesky editors.

And I'm realizing the real benefit of being an editor-agent chair, for an unpublished writer, is not so much the networking, though that's useful, but that it's helping me lose my fear of talking to these people.

Now to sit down and patiently scan it for typos, which I suck at with a capital S.

Try it when big chunks of the dialogue are in French.....

I hate passpage editing. But it has to happen, because otherwise? No one to blame but myself.

No one to blame but myself.

Don't I know it. And I hate typos. But I've got a copyeditign job to finish, progress to make on the new book (which is already -- sigh -- behind) and I feel like crap.

Still, I love seeing the galley pages. Makes it that much more real.

Most of the stuff I remember writing as a child was poetry, which is odd because I haven't even tried to write a poem since I was in high school. Beyond that, I basically tried to write like whoever was resonating in my head, which means my adolescent attempts at horror fiction sound a lot like Stephen King, and my stories for college creative writing classes owe rather too much to Margaret Atwood. I don't think I had any specific recurring motifs or themes, other than that all my main characters sounded like me -- which is probably still true.

*missing the real-time discussion, as usual*

Something to add though, I hope that that's alright:

Deb, I totally hear you (no pun intended) on children being infatuated with the rhythms (and sometimes the appearance of language) if working at Kindergarten pilot literacy program has taught me anything over the past few years, is that if a book rhymes, it's immediately more memorable.

Also if a word has a clunky or melodic sound, ie "lullaby" or any dinosaur name "diplodocus" the children seem to take much more pleasure in reading it/saying it and wanting to write it. I can get a child to write 10 lines of "iguana" before I can get them to practice the standards of "apple," "dog", or "cat." That Margaret Atwood book (about a Princess, the title escapes me) with all the "puh" consonance is another one they love. Complex language, "pernicious, perspicacios etc" but the sound seems to matter much more than their comprehension.

In my Stein class last week we were experimenting with language and one of the things we did was write the first word we remembered loving on the blackboard. Mine was "contraption" which I blurted out at two when my opa pointed a giant betamax camera at me "Get that contraption away from me!" (it's on video, most likely picked up from my opa who cared for me and used words like that). I'm not saying I made the connection that the word was onomatopeic, echoing the heaviness of the big clunky camera of course, that comes much later, but this sound idea is really fascinating. I mean the success of Robert Munsch seems to be as good proof as any.

Complex language, "pernicious, perspicacios etc" but the sound seems to matter much more than their comprehension.

When I was 10 or 11, I memorized the Wallace Stevens Poem, "the Emperor of Ice Cream," sheerly for love of the rhythm of the words. I still love the line about "in kitchen cups concupiscent curds," even now that I know what "concupiscent" means and that the line doesn't make much sense.