Reading, Writing and Planning

So I feel it's time now to focus on other things and get back to living a normal life.  I had put a lot of things on a back burner because of the grieving process, but I know my mother would want me to live my life.

I have been trying to focus on my various writing projects.  After coming in fourth place in one of the contests on Absolute Write, I decided to send out that manuscript to a few publishers.  Now in the past I would only send a manuscript to one publisher at a time and wait an enormous amount of time for a reply before sending it to another.  Not anymore!  Life is too short for that.  I sent my children's picture book story to two publishers at once and have already heard back from one--a reject.  That's okay because another publisher still has the opportunity to review it and hopefully publish it.  This method also makes the sting of rejection hurt less.

My daughter and I are also planning to collaborate on another picture book.  I wrote Brenda and Blair--a story about two young sisters who are opposites--many years ago, but I know my daughter always liked it.  I wrote it for her when she was in elementary school having trouble pronouncing words with "bl" and "br".   She will draw the pictures to go with my story.  This will be a self-publishing project.

I also decided to get back to reading a bunch of books, one of my New Year's resolutions.  I have two novels to read, plus I've just purchased a fellow AWer's non-fiction book called The Unbreakable Child.  I've read about 60 pages so far and all I can say is "Wow".  Children are very precious to me and I cannot fathom ever hurting them.  In addition to the parents in this world who are clueless about raising/caring for children, there are "religious" figures who have no business being around kids.  Kimmi's opening chapter made me wince, made me cry.  I wanted to get that nun into a corner and teach her a lesson.  I kept thinking of that song The Carpenters sang in the 70's, "Bless The Beasts and the Children" and the line that goes, "for in this world they have no voice, they have no choice."  How does a child fight back when a much bigger, stronger adult is hitting, punching, abusing her?

I'm also considering writing a piece about Alzheimer's from the perspective of someone whose mother suffered from it for a number of years so that hopefully I could help others know what to expect and how to get through it.