These are the other projects I am working on (or not working on as the case may be). I will update this often I hope; that will mean I am actually working!
**The Guardians of Ben Q. Flanders: This is a funny middle-grade story about a 13-year-old who is mostly at peace with his uncool status but still holds out a shred of hope that one day something really, really awesome will happen to him and thrust him into coolness. When something finally does happen, it is not the super-powers he had been hoping for, but a series of attempts on his life by an unknown group who is trying to prevent something Ben will do in the future. Luckily he has his neighbor and former lab partner around to protect him. I submitted a short story version of this work to the Writer's Digest Annual Competition on May 20, 2011. Shortly thereafter I started on the full-length novel.
**An Uncertain Destiny: this is the sequel to An Unexpected Kingdom and I have written a one-page synopsis (this will change of course) and sketched out the first few scenes.
** The Fifth Grade Detective Agency: I have started this as both a full-length novel and a short story. I like it better as a longer piece but I had wanted to enter it into a writing competition and the maximum word length meant that I would have to shorten it considerably. I envision it as a middle-grade series featuring best friends and business partners Winter Flynn and Des Brown who are the best thing to happen to youth detection services since Veronica Mars.
**Marian: This YA novel haunts me! I started it right after I finished my first draft of An Unexpected Kingdom and every so often I pick it up and think I am ready to really get back into it, but I just can't. I think about it all the time and jot down notes but this project is stalled and I hate that. This is a contemporary fiction novel (or will be when I write it) that is a modern take on the Robin Hood story set at a ritzy boarding school in New England.
