Life is But a Dream...(Teaser 3)

- In the center of my collage is a black-and-white photograph of a mother and young daughter hugging in the snow at night. They are wearing heavy winter coats and ribbons in their hair because the picture is supposed to be of a scene in the 1800s and that was the way most girls and women wore their hair, I suppose. Around the photography, I glued pictures of flowers I'd cut from the stacks of magazines Mrs. Weaver set out for us to use. The flowers are bright and colorful against the black-and-white snow. I painted the sky with watercolors, I used dark purples and blues and painted them really wet so that the colors ran together in interesting shapes. I used a little bit of pink paint on the girl's cheeks. - Life is But a Dream pages 71-72

It's now only two short months before my novel comes out. I'm still very excited about it. It seems most readers are responding positively. I enjoy that. It's not so much about wanting something you write to be adored, it's more about knowing that people out there really got what you trying to say. So far, I'm pretty happy about that.

One of the big subplots in the book is the main character's struggle to separate art from reality. In a way it mirrors my own struggle of doing that during my teenage years. That's a theme that runs throughout my books, this idea that we dream so hard for what we imagine that sometimes we get lost in what is truly around us.

* The quoted passage was inspired by a photo still of Meet me in St. Louis which I manipulated to look like the above picture.