My Writing Process Blog Tour

Sometimes, in your writing life, you meet a fairy bookmother. I've been lucky enough to have several fairy bookmothers. One of them is middle grade author and playwright Joy McCullough Carranza.

If the fairy's hat were made of
a stack of books, this would be
Joy's perfect costume for Halloween 2014.

A few months ago, one of my critique partners insisted that I participate in Pitch Wars (read about the online contest at this post). I was thrilled when Joy selected my novel-in-verse -- and me -- to advise during the mentoring phase of Pitch Wars. 

After my book was *completely* ignored in the Pitch Wars agent round, Joy checked on me every few weeks, told me not to give up, and prodded me to keep sending my query to agents. Because she believed in my manuscript.

Lo and behold ... I signed with agent Stephen Barbara of Foundry Media earlier this month.

Joy tagged me in the "My Writing Process" blog tour. She just completed a new middle grade novel that I can't wait to hear about. Visit Joy's blog to read her  "My Writing Process" post. 

(P.S. Joy is an awesome critique partner/mentor/editor. I bet she keeps her fairy bookmother wand in her back pocket.)

Since my children have influenced my writing, I asked my daughter Julia to conduct the interview. Here are the mandatory questions:

a) What are you working on?

b) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

c) Why do you write what you do?

d) How does your writing process work?

I'm supposed to close this post by tagging the Writerly Friends who are next up in the blog tour, but I haven't had any takers yet. If you'd like to do a "My Writing Process" post, let me know in the comments.