Greetings from Marin County, USA.  I’m here at a Zen Buddhist retreat center, with the local chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.  I’ve retreated from home and hearth and am sitting in a Japanese-style room looking out at lush greenery, trying to moderate my coffee intake and discern just what is here for me.  Children’s writing is a new world for me; one I entered last fall with enthusiasm and hope not unlike that I brought to adult literary fiction nearly a decade ago.  Last October, I wrote a story and sent it out.  It was rejected.  In April, I sent another story out and it, too, was rejected.  Now I’m here, with a slim but very real file of rejections, a laptop, a sketch pad, music, greenery, comfortable clothes, fellow writers and only the faintest clue as to what I want to accomplish over the next couple of days.   Enthusiasm and hope are playing hide and go seek and I’m leaning against a tree extending my count beyond fifty, beyond one hundred.  Truth is, I don’t feel like seeking them, and in this I feel like a little girl playing with kids much bigger, faster and craftier than she is.  Even if I manage to find them, they’ll just get away again.  No?

Yet, isn’t that what they say makes one a writer?   Persevering despite the rejections, the tedium, the wearing struggle to maintain a firm and authoritative grip on enthusiasm and hope?  It’s certainly something I’ve heard often enough.

So, here I go.