circular logic

...that i might as well do a full reset, get in the mental wayback machine and see how things go this time around.

there's no way to replicate "the moment," that time i was working in the newly created Young Adults section of the barnes & noble in berkeley when i was shelving this book called FEED by m.t. anderson. standing in the aisle, intrigued by the premise, i read fifty or so pages before i remembered that they didn't pay me to read at work. then, just before shelving i read the author bio and saw that he'd received an MFA in writing for children and young adults, and i remember thinking "that's a real thing?" 

that feeling, that sensation, that doesn't happen often, and it isn't replicated on demand.

if the internet had been what it is today -- or, heck, what it was seven years after the moment --i'd have blogged that book hard. not that it needed my evangelism then because FEED got plenty of attention and was/is now practically YA canon. 

by the time i got around to blogging -- well, after the brief flirtation with food blogging at least -- the first book i wrote up was road dahl's THE MAGIC FINGER, a book with an incredibly strong resonance to my childhood. sadly, dahl's personal life turned out to be one of those toxic soups of anti-semitism and misogyny and ugliness. he's not the first and likely own't be the last (joanne rowling is keeping the tradition alive) of writers for children with darkness in their soul. but that's not out topic here.

no, when i started, i was taking my former skills as a movie reviewer at a radio station (90.7 fm KALX) and switching over to kidlit. in 2008 kidlit was the name for the casual community of people sharing their love of books for children and young adults. librarians, teachers, writers, editors, and gung-ho wannabe novices like me just gushing over the things they'd discovered in this kidlitoverse. i made some friends who magnified my scribblings, i returned the favor, and in short order everything that was my writing life just snowballed. the blogging, the tweeting, the writing, four or five different jobs...

jump ahead a dozen years to 2020 and... covid, am i right?

new year, new me. new tech, new ideas. but where to start? that's when i got the idea...