About twenty years ago, my wife and I had the great good fortune to travel to New England to video-interview Jane Yolen, literary giant. I had met Jane previously at a Western Washington University summer school program that was directly responsible for my first paid, published fiction. So I've always remembered the experience fondly.
I was writing short stories then, in my spare time, while teaching jr. high as a day job. How that worked was a full week of teaching and late night writing sessions on Friday and Saturday nights, after my wife and the kids were asleep. We lived in a series of beach shacks and I remember often working into the early hours, under a single bare light bulb with a twisty switch, which hung from one of those old-time twisted fabric cords. My in-laws had given me some kind of small, portable, blue typewriter that wasn't wonderful but was mine and worked even when the power went out. A good thing at the time along the fringes of outer Puget Sound.
So I had–I think it was–a week with Jane Yolen in an intimate group of maybe twenty. I no longer remember the specifics of what we covered but I remember this: challenging myself to maximize every minute with this women who, even then was both advancing literary giant and industry powerhouse.
Seems like too much praise? Then you haven't read her.
Toward the end of the week, reading student manuscripts aloud and critiquing in class, Yolen would defer to me. I would evaluate and comment and she would finish out or expand with additional comments. It was during that time I first saw Cricket Magazine, recognizing in an instant the publishing pinnacle of that genre, even then. It looked wonderful. Real art and real artists. And I came to find out, in the days of magazines that paid pennies or maybe a nickel a word, Cricket paid a quarter!
I remember thinking ... if I could only publish in Cricket ...
Flashing forward to the interview ... and this is actually what I started out to tell you ... Yolen confided that she beats writer's block by always having several manuscripts in progress. If she gets stuck on one she simply moves to another and never loses the writing momentum.
What she may have been saying, for this is how it's come to work for me, is that I always have several works in progress. For example, I'm now at work on sequels to my two published novels, Cheechako and Indecent Exposure, while also pushing forward nicely in a 'mysterious island' kind of youth novel, plus another older youth fantasy project ... and of course my on-going series for NPR called "Who Died Today."
And how this works is, I walk every day and my mind settles on sections on one or another of the various possibilities, and I will often work on the one I've discovered myself thinking about. The one with a fresh scene imagined or fresh insight. And yes, after all these years, I still don't feel quite comfortable if I haven't written something everyday. Like I sometimes still feel about running.
At the end of my week with Jane Yolen, I went home and wrote a story called "The Day of the Golden Eagle," and submitted it to Cricket. It sold almost immediately. It was the first of a number of my stories they bought and paid me nicely for. And a number of those stories became Cheechako chapters later.
