Now that my contract for Spitfire is signed, sealed, and delivered (it should be there by tomorrow, I think), I decided I wanted to share the news with my 7th grade students at SMS.  Here’s how it went:

Me: (holding up the cd with the digital version of my manuscript on it)  Before we start class, I have some really exciting news.  Guess what’s on this disk?

Student A:  An ultrasound?

Student B: You’re pregnant?

Student C: She’s pregnant?

Student D: Whoa! She doesn’t even look fat yet.

Me: No, No, NOOOOOOO!!

Student A: It’s not an ultrasound?

Me: No.

Student C (ready to try a new idea):  Did you star in a music video?

Student B: Cool!

Student C: Wicked!

Student D: Awesome!

Me: No. No video.

Students A-D:  Oh.

Student B: Did you write a book or something?

Me: YES!!!

At this point, my students were friendly and kind enough to express various levels of joy at my news (even though it wasn’t a music video).  A couple classes clapped.  (Yay!) In every class, someone asked if I was going to make a lot of money.  (Well, no…) And in every class, at least one person wanted to know if they could come back next year to have their copy signed (Absolutely.)

Aside from being  a lifelong personal joy, writing has been great for me as a teacher.  I know how mad and lazy we can all feel when we have to revise something (“But I want to be DONE….), so I understand how my students feel on draft six.  I understand how much more fun it is to slog along through the revision bog when you’re not slogging alone (thanks to my online critique group and two local writer friends), and so my students often collaborate in class or through online forums to revise their writing as well.  We get by with a little help from our friends….

It’s been a week and a day since I got the news that Spitfire, my first middle grades novel, is going to be published by North Country Books.   Spitfire is a historical novel set on Lake Champlain during the Battle of Valcour Island in the American Revolution. It’s told in alternating chapters through the voices of 12-year-old boy whose stepfather brought him along to fight and a fictional young girl who disguises herself as a boy to join the fleet on the eve of the battle.  This battle on Lake Champlain is an incredible story, and I can’t get past the feeling of being overwhelmed that I’m the writer who will be sharing that story with kids.

This is the painting that my amazingly talented artist/mom did for a possible cover illustration.

It’s funny — I’ve heard published authors say countless times that being published for the first time is just surreal, and now I understand what they meant.  I keep waiting for someone to show up and tell me it was all a misunderstanding, or a joke, or maybe one of those reality tv shows.  Even as I sat in my lawyer’s office today going over the contract, I kept waiting for the guy with the camera to appear from behind a piece of furniture and announce the hoax (CJ was probably wondering why I kept glancing under the table while he was going through all those clauses).

I have hamster brain now. Hamsters on one of those noisy exercise wheels. When I was eight years old, I had a gerbil that lived in a cage in my room (until my brother pulled its tail off, but that’s another story), and every night after I went to sleep, it would hop onto its little yellow plastic exercise wheel and start the thing spinning and clickety-whirring for half the night.  I swear the tailless gerbil is back to haunt me now because every morning at about three, that wheel in my head starts spinning and I’m up for the night.  At least I’ve discovered the pleasures of writing in a quiet house at 3am.