It’s official, I’m a Seattle-based author again.

My birthday was last Thursday, and since I already had a little celebration planned, I rolled a going-away-party into it and then took off the next morning with my Dad, who graciously offered to come pick me up from Stanford and help me move. He’d been meaning to do a brief roadtrip down to California to see Grandpa and the rest of them anyways. It’s nice to be 22 and figuring your stuff out, knowing your parents can still lend a hand and a place to stay when you get out of your first major relationship and get kicked out by your boyfriend on a week’s notice. For the record, it was a very, very amicable split. If I weren’t so busy writing I’d be more ticked about it, but on the whole my life is moving too fast to worry about who does or doesn’t want to be a part of it.

So. Seattle.

I’m trying to make substantial revisions to The Neverland Wars right now, because the feedback I got from the two agents who rejected my first 30 pages was that there wasn’t enough action/tension/drama. The first 30 pages are still with another agent who theoretically might want to see a full manuscript, but I’m sure that individual will have the same criticism. Right now, I’m working on the assumption that I need to make deep revisions in a timely manner and get back to the agent who is still interested in seeing revised materials.

It’ll help to be back with my supportive friends, have a whole bedroom of my own to work in, be able to zip down to Third Place Books when I want to get away and write. The east side is a nice, sweet place for someone to tuck themselves away and write in.

Plus, I’ve got the best of both worlds: heartbreak-inspiration AND an ex-boyfriend/dear-friend who is still willing to help me tweak the plot and scenes we’ve been working on these past few weeks. For the first day in almost two weeks, I feel like I’m in a headspace to get work done, too. Editing is so much harder than creating, so much more analytical and less emotional. It’s hard to focus when you’re dealing with a metric ton of emotions. However, I’ve at least put my lethargic melancholy to good use and have been working on building my online “platform” these past few days…as opposed to, you know, just generally screwing around on those same social media websites I’m using.

The future is bright. Now if only I knew which one of these boxes my sunglasses are in…