everything old is new again

Last week I got my author copies of The Witch’s Apprentice. I had a moment of excitement and then I opened the book and the dedication to my cousin was missing and my Kenyan friend’s surname was misspelled in the Acknowledgments. I’m partly to blame because in all our rounds of revisions, I didn’t catch the error or the omission. Hopefully both can be fixed before the next print run but nothing can be changed at this point so I set the box aside and had a quiet Christmas. Yesterday I started reading the novel and, as always, it felt new. Publishing is so slow…I finished Book #4 in October and have to turn in edits on Monday; we’ll go through several rounds and I won’t hold that book in my hands until 2023! By then, I’ll have forgotten what I wrote. On Monday I turned in final edits for Moonwalking and at this point, I’m totally over that book. That’s generally how I feel after countless passes and changes. I don’t feel pride or a sense of achievement—just annoyance at those tedious but necessary tasks. So reading Book #3 now is a relief and a pleasure. It isn’t perfect but kids can hold this pretty, purple book in their hands and reunite with Jax and his friends.

Last week I didn’t work on a new novel as hoped but I did write an op-ed. I titled it, “Here Be Dragons: Critical Race Theory in Black Kid Lit” but it got changed to something much longer. I can’t seem to load the full article on my laptop but hopefully you can. The complete op-ed is over at Blavity. I also recorded a fun interview with Jed Doherty for the Reading with Your Kids podcast. That episode will go up in the new year but I taped another discussion with author/educator Kate Narita for her podcast Chalk + Ink and it’s available here.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time reflecting and setting goals for 2022. How should we assess the past year? We made it! Basic survival matters when you’re living through a pandemic. Did we thrive? Grow? Give to others? I didn’t have any books come out in 2021 and I didn’t take any trips; I wrote a lot but that’s starting to feel inadequate or redundant. My vision board remains incomplete so I’ll be thinking about my intentions going forward. This new variant makes me feel justified in staying home but with two books coming out next year, I need to stop hibernating and prepare to venture out into the world once more…here’s hoping we all take into 2022 the lessons we learned over the past year.