A "Moving Forward Summer"

As I write this summer winds down, much too rapidly. I spent all of July and the first week of August at my home in West Virginia, escaping the Florida heat, but missing my friends here. Despite much outside yard work, I managed to do a major re-write of my middle grade novel The Whispering Chimney. Following advice given in a critique session in the June SCBWI conference in Orlando, I chopped off the first thirty pages and got the story started when my character Bethany first hears voices from the ruins of a pioneer chimney. I did weave in some of the back story after the story was cranking, and it all seemed to work. One of my "test readers" was a ten-year-old girl in my WV neighborhood. She and her mother came for a discussion after she had finished. I've been out of the classroom for a few years and it was refreshing to hear her talk about the book. In short, she loved it, identified with the main character, found her "likable" and "kid like" and enjoyed the story's up-beat ending. Needless to say, I continue to be pumped up from her review. She's exactly the type of reader I had in mind for my book. It was also interesting for me to hear her say she liked stories "told by the author" (third person) better than first person stories. I'm sending The Whispering Chimney to the same editor who gave me the critique. Hopefully, this story will be published and in the hands of many more ten or eleven-year-olds.