You may have noticed that I dropped off the face of the blogosphere last week. If you didn’t, you were probably swamped by May, the month of school crescendos. Graduations, celebrations, parties. There is a whole lot of hoo-rah that comes in the month of May. Not complaining, mind you. Just a bit bobbled.

Image: Serene writer rowing along in her little rowboat. Nary a riffle in the water when wham, motorboats and water skiiers roar around the boat creating tsunami size riffles and a whole host of teens start playing water volleyball using the rowboat as the net. It’s been a bit chaotic over here.

So chaotic I didn’t get to tell you two amazing things that happened in my serene rowboat writer life.

I finished the revision of my young adult short story cycle The Pull-Out and got it out to a second round of readers. I have been working really hard on this manuscript and I am resting (sort of) so that I can respond to this next round of critiques before sending it out to the wider world of agents.

The other amazing thing that happened is the online issue of Hunger Mountain came out. Hunger Mountain is the literary journal of Vermont College of Fine Arts. This summer 2011 issue is called, The Varying Shades of Shadows. Guess what is featured in this issue?  The Proposal, one of the short stories from The Pull-Out. I am thrilled not just because Hunger Mountain is a fabulous, prestigious magazine but I am in some pretty fine company is this issue. Friend and award winning author Liz Garton Scanlon has written a special essay about Passion for the Picture Book. Fellow VCFA classmate and friend Janet Fox has written a very smart essay about the use of Elision: The Shadowy Landscape of Dreams where Writer and Reader Meet.

So find a quiet spot and tuck into some pretty great writing and thinking. You will not be sorry.