Manuscript into copy editor!!

It's a sheer pleasure to turn in a manuscript and have it go to copy editing. I know I've wrung every creative drop out of myself that I can, and it is someone else's turn to buff it up. Now I'm working on gathering photos with the designer. I just keep sending the amazing, wonderful photos I find, knowing he will be able to make sense of them, culling out the ones that aren't the best, alighting on ones I'd casually included, but thought were unimportant. (Note the theme here: someone else is hard at work on "my" book! This is actually true all the way along -- the editor has been hard at work, especially the last few months as we passed versions back and forth via email.)

I just had one of those lovely "ah-ha" moments where I discovered a great theme that I can weave into the book, mostly via the images. This makes me very excited. Because images can be so evocative, kids will get a feeling for this theme, a gut level reaction, and it will give them something to think/feel about. More on the details anon.

Meanwhile, I'm home with my cats, who want to lay across the keyboard, and be fed, not necessarily in that order. That's Coyote, un-creatively named for the coyote trap that caught her by the back leg and skinned off her fur when she was a barn cat long ago, before she was rescued by my sister, taken in by me, and mended by her own resilience. (The skin grew back, top to bottom, then the fur came in, top to bottom, except for a thin band around her ankle of shiny scar tissue where she just couldn't make fur anymore). She's a very sweet cat, big on eye contact with her tall, clumsy human companions, and not above an occasional swat at Blackberry, her neer-do-well son, whose tail you see above.