WIP Friday: Quiet Edition

I meant to have a giveway this week -- I got some beautiful swag and wanted to share it with you -- but things got away from me. I've been deep in preparations for the classes I'm teaching at the Midwest Writers Workshop next week. (It's a great conference, and there are still spots open. I'll be teaching a bunch of classes on YA, as well as work/life balance and critiquing, but there are also workshop tracks for other genres, and some incredible agents, like this lady.)

Then I was going to post the giveaway today, but I woke up this morning, got the kids off to camp, and settled down for my daily blog-reading...and then caught the news about the theatre shooting in Colorado. And now I find that I have very little to say, because it's just so awful. I'm angry and sad and feel like I've been scraped raw in places, which is generally a sign I am unfit for society.

So I'm going to go downstairs and wrestle Powerpoint into submission, and then I'm going to pick Big Marshmallow up from camp and have a tea party, and play board games with the big girls, and let those raw places heal back up.

In the meantime, it is worth your time to read Libba Bray's beautiful post about the need for compassion and kindness in the face of awful insensible things. Have a good, quiet weekend, all.