Mildly Concussed (or A YA Novel Version of My Head Injury)

Tip of the Day: Megg's books are on sale for only .99 cents each!

The grass wasn't that long. Maybe only two or three inches. But it was the foot high weeds that got Mom yelling for the third time that morning, "Deena, will you please start on the lawn?"

I rolled out of bed where I'd comfortably been lounging under the ceiling fan while reading John Green's latest. "Fine," I called while throwing on socks and sneakers. The last time I'd mowed in my sandals and was stung on the toe by a bee. TJ, the college guy down the street, had caught me swearing and hopping around the yard while I clutched my foot like an idiot. I wasn't going to embarass myself like that again.

I grabbed the push-mower from the shed and headed for the front yard. It was sunny and hot, but not too hot. It was the perfect weather to have my friends over later tonight to play Kan Jam out back.

I pulled the power cord on the mower once. Twice. Third time was a charm. The mower roared to life and I plowed through the first strips of lawn with ease.

On my second pass toward the driveway, I caught sight of him. TJ. Shooting baskets in the hoop mounted over his garage. He was the guy who was two years older than me but hadn't acted like it until this past year when he basically stopped talking to me even in a neighborly way. But I couldn't stop looking at him or fantasizing that he'd come over and profess his love for me.

I shook my sweaty head at my ridiculous thoughts and turned the mower around. That was when things got messy. The trees that Dad continuously reminded the rest of the fam "provided much needed shade and oxygen" were hard to mow around with their long, knotty roots and low, thick branches. It took forever to run the square mower around the circular tree trunks without sending root chips into my eye or breaking Mom's expensive new mower. If I didn't do the job well enough, Mom wouldn't hesitate to send me back out to do it all again.

While I pulled the mower back and forth, TJ dribbled and shot his basketball. Then all at once two things happened: 1) TJ missed his shot and the basketball came bouncing down the street in my direction, and 2) I yanked the mower backwards and slammed the back of my head into a tree branch the size of a turkey leg. My vision went dark before speckling into focus again like a bad movie fade-in.

"Shit!" TJ and I yelled at the same time. Except as he came running for his ball, looking cool just the same, I was clutching the back of my head and hoping when I removed my hand there wouldn't be blood.

When TJ reached his ball just on the edge of my lawn, he stopped, said, "Hey," and dribbled back to his property.

There was no blood spouting from my head, but if there had been, it probably wouldn't have hurt as much as my pride.

I finished mowing the lawn with my head pounding, and after complaining about it for over an hour Mom called the doctor who informed her I was probably "mildly concussed," to keep an eye on me, and call back/come into the office if the headache didn't disipate in a week.

Some girls could've turned that story into something to flirt with, but for me, it was just more proof that I was incapable of simple tasks like mowing the lawn.

Perhaps I should switch to basketball.

Deena, Miss Subbing for Pubbing

Anthology Cover

Tip of the Day: Check out this great post about why we should be reading contemporary YA novels over at stackedbooks.org and then browse through the rest of the week of great posts on contemporary YA.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was talking about writing a short story? Well, I'm still working on it but it's going better (Yay!). And we just got the BEAUTIFUL cover so now I'm even more excited to finish and make it great. Isn't it cool?

The list of authors includes: Cyn Balog, Lauren Bjorkman, Leigh Brescia, Jennifer Brown, Kirstin Cronn-Mills, Janet Gurtler, Teri Hall, Cheryl Renee Herbsman, Stacey Jay, Heidi R. Kling, C. Lee McKenzie, Saundra Mitchell, Jenny Moss, Jackson Pearce, Shani Petroff, Carrie Ryan, Sydney Salter, Kurtis Scaletta, Jon Skovron, Kristina Springer, Rhonda Stapleton, Charity Tahmaseb, Jessica Verday, J.A. Yang, and Lara Zielin.

This will be an eBook only (available via Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords)--the tentative release date is October 2011.

Kristina, Miss Author in Action

Short Story Tips?

Tip of the Day: The largest free outdoor literary event in the Midwest is this weekend! Come out for the 2011 Printer's Row Lit Fest in Chicago. I'm doing a panel Saturday (6/4/) @12:30PM on the Mash Stage with a lot of really cool writers: Ellen Booraem, Ilene Cooper, Brenda Ferber, and C. Alexander London.

Writing short stories is HARD! Maybe it's not hard for everyone but when your used to writing books it's hard to get out what you want to say in few pages. I've written eight books now and they all tend to fall somewhere around 200 pages. I never go too far under that or too far over that. But now that I have a limited word count to work with I'm kinda freaking. I'm working on my short story for the Debs Anthology and the word count is 3000 to 6000 words. I'm rocking along writing my story and I hit 1000 words last night and freaked out. Uhoh. This story is not 1/3 of the way through. Not even 1/6. Darn. It kinda paralyzed me. I was afraid to keep going because I think I'm not going to be able to say everything in the allotted pages. I'm going to try of course, and hope that it doesn't get so out of control that I have to hack a bunch of it out at the end.

Are any of our readers short story writers? Have any tips for me?

Kristina, Miss Author in Action