All Lauren Kieffer, All The Time

Kidding. But sheesh, the number of blog hits. It's like the adage that if you want teens to read your YA novel, stick a vampire in it. Clearly I should write about Lauren Kieffer a lot more often.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to post this. We had a storm last night that seems to have taken out the internet. I'm appalled by how much this has hampered my work. I'm supposed to be emailing my editor some last-minute corrections to The War That Saved My Life, but guess what? No email. I've typed the corrections and printed them out, and if I can get her to send me a fax number I'll fax them to her.

In the old days we used actual mail service for this sort of thing, and it was fast enough.

Meanwhile, my new laptop's trick of saving my new manuscript "on the cloud" is looking like a fairly stupid idea.

Speaking of stupid ideas, I had one the other day. I was writing a pretty funny scene in my new novel, and though I knew I'd gotten the basic idea from something I'd read elsewhere, I thought I'd gotten it from a Dorothy Sayers mystery novel written during WWII, so therefore practically research material, so therefore mostly legit. But I felt unsure about it, so I found myself recounting just that one scene to some of my book club members, who nodded and said, "Right. Like in The Guersney Literary and Sweet Potato Peel Pie Society."

Yikes. Busted. This is precisely why I try to stay away from all fiction pertaining to the setting or subject of my current novel. I read so much, and it all gets churned up in my head. Anyway, I think the humor of the scene was sort of leading the novel in the wrong direction anyway. I've been staying away from my keyboard in favor of surviving April doing a bit more research, and now I think it's time to move forward again. If only I could get my manuscript off the cloud.