Summer break's over, time to get back to work

It's Labor Day. And I've just now realized I haven't posted in almost 2 months. Consider it my "summer off" blogging, even if it didn't start out that way.

So what have I been up to for the past two months, you ask. Best answer: Not much. I have been reading and hanging out at our pool club (it's not as chi-chi as it sounds) and I finally, in the past couple weeks, have started writing something new. So I guess you can say I took the summer off from writing as well as blogging.

The new book is another young adult novel. It's sort of a crime novel mixed up with a coming of age story. I haven't gotten very far yet, but I did have my 14 year old daughter and her friend read the first 10 pages a few days ago and they both liked it, in fact, they were a little annoyed that there wasn't more and that I'd ended in mid-sentence.

This is a good sign.

I hadn't been sure of the direction of this book, which is why it took so long to really get started. I knew the basic story, but I wasn't quite sure how to tell it. I ended up taking what I'd initially wrote and cutting it and moving things around and turning it into more of a prologue and then jumping into what happened "before" the prologue, to see where the characters had started and how they end up where they end up.

I still don't have all the details worked out, and I'm sure I'll have more fits and starts, but it's finally starting to gain momentum and I'm beginning to be at the point where I'm feeling that I need to write every day again.

It's been a while since I've felt that way. But after writing a dark crime novel for adults about teenagers doing dangerous things, I needed a little break from writing about teenagers. Fortunately I'm getting over that now.

So what have you all been doing while I've been absent? Did you have a nice summer? Any nice vacations? Anyone starting a new book, reading or writing one?