All Just Glass

Read the previous post after this one, because I am curious to get some comments on it, but I wanted to announce-- I have just officially submitted All Just Glass, sequel to Shattered Mirror, to my editor at Random House.

This book has been something of a white whale for me since 2000, when I first made an attempt at writing it. Over the last nine years, I have played with the characters and concepts, struggling to bring it together to tell the story I want to tell. I have scrapped text and started over multiple times. But once I finished Persistence (started 1999), it seemed like this one finally needed to get out there. It's time to continue this story.

AJG, like Token of Darkness, owes its final first-draft completion to NaNoWriMo. I cheated a little. I threw out all my old files (well, I didn't look at them for months except a brief skim-over in August, and didn't refer to any of my old prose or notes during November) and wrote the entire first draft for NaNo, treating all my previous attempts as brainstorming. It was apparently the only way to get past my anxiety about the nearly ten-year-old concept and bring fresh life and inspiation into the text.

And now it's in my editor's mailbox.

Meanwhile, my agent is reading something else, something different, which is a pretty big deal to me. I'm nervous about that, too.

I hate the waiting part.

I've published 11 books. I'm still waiting for the day the waiting gets easier.

Internet Safety

The following is a post from one of my MAT courses (specifically, "behavior management"). We've been talking about whether or not teachers should be allowed to have social networking profiles (Facebook, MySpace, etc), and whether or not these kinds of media can or should be incorporated into the classroom. I responded to a classmate's post (a bit of it is quoted below), and realized I had some pretty strong opinions. I figured I would re-post here and see what kind of response I would get.

"I had a student flip me the bird last year and it was because it was not on school property that it went unmentioned. So what if a student writes an inappropriate posting on FB? ... One mentioned (in a comment on a YouTube video of the school's chorus concert) that her parents often left her home alone. We have to be very careful what applications we use and encourage students to use since putting ourselves and them out there is like opening a Pandora's box."

Isn't this actually *more* of a reason why we should teach the use of these resources in school? I'm not an elementary school teacher, but we still teach stuff like stranger-safety in the younger grades, right? We teach about drugs and alcohol and safer sex at later ages. We teach students the dangers of drinking at prom or graduation.

We all admit, the internet is not going to disappear. We are not going to stop kids from using social networking sites-- trust me, most kids can find their way even around blocks and firewalls very quickly. And no, we cannot control what they say or post on those sites when they are on their own.

So why aren't we teaching internet safety? Why don't we have classes where we say something like, "Write a blog post about you doing something (made up) really stupid, and then Google it six weeks later to see how many places it has been re-posted"? Why aren't we showing kids how to use privacy features to control who sees their information, showing them why not to post their real names or personally identifiable information... etc?

We teach stranger safety and sex ed because we know we can't stop kids from eventually leaving the house on their own. If we can't stop them from using the internet, isn't it reasonable to teach them how to do it safely, instead of pretending it doesn't exist?

Publishing updates...

So, someone on the message board made a comment about a boxed set, which reminded me that I have updates for you all...

First up: Token of Darkness has a release date, February 9, 2010. If you're the right kind of person and in a relationship, you can remind your sweetheart that books make great gifts. If you're not in a relationship, you can remind anyone you want to feel guilty that books are a great gifts to keep you from harassing them during their dates. ;)


Next up: Random House is in fact releasing an omnibus edition including the first four Den of Shadows books. It's called the Quartet, and should be on sale August 11, 2009.

Edit: Target has agreed to pick up the Omnibus to distribute!