Okey dokey! I have to get a 25K word middle school book together for my agent. I don't write fiction, and haven't written for children. So I'm freaking out, waaaayyyyyy out of my comfort zone, and have no idea what I'm doing. Wheeeeeee!!!

Yay!!!!! Do you need research help? There's a colony of flying foxes at the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens [link] , which is in downtown Sydney. When we saw them in the daytime, they were sleeping upside down, but would wake up and mutter at people who came to look at them. Of course, Billytea is really the answer.

Oooh, research help is always lovely!

I love those bats. I'm naming two after my niece and nephew, and they will be providing the Dorothy-in-Oz (heh) ephinany to my Sam to settle down somewhere and start his own family, instead of searching for an adoptive one.

I'm just so excited about your new project, Allyson. And please stop saying you're not a fiction writer. Basically, you write about people, and since you're purportedly telling the truth, you have restrictions about what you can write about these people.

All fiction is is writing about people without those restrictions. And although Sam is a bat, he's really a little boy. Although SGA is set in another galaxy, they're really talking about present society here on earth. They just have a little scope in the storytelling. You'll get the hang of fiction, it really isn't that different.

Bonny, one of my very favorite snippets ever is the second paragraph of Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic. Even though I don't think the lines were written into the script of the movie made from the book, my mental ear always hears them in Stockard Channing's voice:

Inside the house there were no clocks and no mirrors and three locks on each and every door. Mice lived under the floorboards and in the walls and often could be found in the dresser drawers, where they ate the embroidered tablecloths, as well as the lacy edges of the linen placemats. Fifteen different sorts of wood had been used for the window seats and the mantels, including golden oak, silver ash, and a peculiarly fragrant cherrywood that gave off the scent of ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing more than a leafless black stick.

I think that second sentence may be my favorite ever written, anywhere, in anything. If you put aside the meaning of the words and simply let the sound flow over and around you, the rhythm is compelling, amazing, beautiful. If you absorb what the words are saying, the visual, tactile, and scent impressions are dizzyingly rich, and then the sentence slows in cadence, each word falling with a certain weight, and the impressions feel chillier and finally cold and bleak--"ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing.more.than.a. leafless. black. stick."

And every time I try to quote that sentence, I substitute the words "lifeless dead stick", because that's the meaning I take from it. But "leafless black stick" is so much more visual, I think.

So that's my favorite, because it's so evocative for me, and those are the things and feelings it evokes.

Was that what you wanted?

I actually have Practical Magic on my shelf Beverly...and I love that passage. Thank you for pointing it out.

"ripe fruit even in the dead of winter, when every tree outside was nothing.more.than.a. leafless. black. stick."

Expertly evocative. And probably differently evocative for each reader. My dead of winter may vary from anyone else's...me being left coast raised.

Huh. Another interesting point for the workshop.

Double thanks!

snippets (1-3 sentences) of your favorite evocative literature.

What comes to mind is:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

I can still remember when I first heard that. I was eight, sick in bed, and Dad started reading this book to me.... It was the first time I can remember that a story unfolded in my mind like a movie. The second-growth North Carolina jungle in back of our house was my playground, and I knew exactly what "a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell" was like, and also "a dry, bare, sandy hole" (except he left out the stringy roots).

For sarameg's request in Natter-- snippet of something I've been playing around with.

• *

Once upon a time, I was an overweight, unhappy housewife with barely a high school education. Your basic cliché, right? But these days, I'm being hailed as one of the brightest literary voices of my generation. How'd that happen, you're no doubt wondering. There are days I sit and wonder the same thing, I swear. One day, I was trucking along, married to my grade school sweetheart (more of that cliché material) buying groceries, cooking big Cuban meals, cleaning the grout around the toilets with old discarded toothbrushes because I was that freakin' bored, the next, I was coming home from the Laundromat because the washer was broken again and Nardo, my husband, didn't have time to fix it. And wouldn't let me call anyone to fix it, because he could do it, so why should we waste the money? When I pointed out that I was paying that same money to wash clothes outside the house while I waited (and waited) for him to find time, he just laughed and waved me off, like "Silly Madalenita. You just don't understand."

Hey, you know, I do understand. I get that it's kind of hard to find time, not to mention the right position, to fix something as mundane as a washing machine when you're flat on your back with Gloria "I Was Homely in High School But I'm Hot Now" Fernandez perched on your little homeboy. Now, I'll admit, it could've been easy for me to deal, to settle for the scraps. After all, Nardo made all the noises about how he was a man, a Virile Man, (I swear, he said it just like that, capitals and all) and a man like that needs some variety after so much time… variety that apparently comes in the form of a firm liposuctioned ass and silicone boobs. And we both knew too many women who settled for that nonsense—Nardo's problem was he forgot how smart I am. Can't say as I blame him. I'd almost forgotten how smart I was.

So all things considered, I think I handled it fairly well. I mean, I did leave him with a clean house. Never told him I used his toothbrush to clean the toilets and his boxers to mop the floor.

It's all in the details.

Holy crap. I managed to get only 500 words of the first chapter on the page last night, went to bed at 11:30, and was too brain-tired to get up on time for the gym (which makes me feel awful, I hate missing a day).

I keep getting stuck on age-group, vocabulary, and oh-my-god is this hackish?

What do I do? Do I just write and write and let it hit the page as is and let my beta readers give me the whammy on the first chapter to set me on the right path regarding tone?

I keep thinking, "I could have understood this when i was 10." And then going with that. If I could get it when I was 10, it has to be okay. I was a readie mcreaderson when I was a kid, and would read whatever I could get my hands on. That's the kid I want to write for.

Ugh. Hard. I knew it would be, and it's not like pushing a boulder up hill, it's like taking my brain out, putting it back in backwards, and hoping for the best.

Do I just write and write and let it hit the page as is and let my beta readers give me the whammy on the first chapter to set me on the right path regarding tone?

Yes. Then, send it to Suzi and see if CJ likes it and Hec to see if Emmett likes it. They're both 12 and you're writing for middle school, so it should reach them, too.

I agree. I think you just write the story you want to tell, and afterwards you can check it for age appropriateness.