Guys Lit Wire is up.

This has been a very interesting process - the evolution from idea to actually seeing the site alive and active and having 23 scheduled contributors and even more occasional contributors all of whom are dedicated to providing new content on a ton of different sorts of books. Six months ago there was just some email exchanges and comments about why teenage boys don't read as much as teenage girls - and why they stop reading when they get older. And now there is a place they can go - where librarians can go and booksellers can go and parents can go as well - that will provide them with tons and tons of reading recommendations.

In some ways this does not seem real to me and honestly, I think it will take some time to really grasp just how amazing it is to have Guys Lit Wire.

Special thanks - huge thanks - on the design goes to a. fortis (otherwise known as Sarah Stevenson) who did the lion's share of work here. This site was co-created by both of us; please do not give me more credit than I deserve.

May has been a wildly busy month, only partly because of the final nuts and bolts for GLW though. There was also the Summer Blog Blast Tour, which continues to expand and develop with each incarnation (The WBBT will be up in mid-November). There was the crafting of a multi-pronged attack on politics for the month of August - a feature on titles of political importance for teens in Bookslut and a month-long look at those books here at Chasing Ray. There have been a few mentions of this elsewhere and I will expand on it more this summer, but overall I will be hosting any and all links to books on issues of importance in this year's election. Particularly on the following days I will be writing about the following subjects:

August 5th - Race in America
August 12th - The environment
August 19th - Class divisions in America
August 26th - US foreign policy

If you want to review books or post on authors that fit into those subjects then let me know and I'll do weekly round-ups. I will also run a Master Schedule for the entire month on any post of a political/literary nature that you run that month. Hopefully we will build a comprehensive reading list for children, teens and adults that will be useful for years to come.

And in May I also had some serious writing deadlines, one for the Journal of Mythic Arts and one for my agent. My essay on polar myths, specifically those in the John Franklin expedition, will appear in JOMA's final issue in July (I am so excited and pleased about this - you can not imagine). As to the fifty pages I needed to complete on The Map of My Dead Pilots for my agent - I didn't make it.

And that just is so annoying you can not imagine.

I will say that I have probably written more new content in May since I wrote my thesis several years ago; it's been a long time since I've written so much and made a point of writing so much. That is all significant. But I didn't get it done and I really really wanted to, not only because it was a deadline I set myself but also so I could focus on a ton of reviews and some short essays this summer. (And doing some rewrites on my Alaska flying novel.) I did write some stuff I hadn't expected to - I thought a chapter on hauling cargo would include a bit on sled dogs but it grew to include some historical content on what sled dogs used to be and how that has changed in AK (and why I hate anything to do with them other than saving their lives). I wrote about Antoine de St Exupery's Night Flight, his largely unknown novella on flying the mail in South America and I wrote a long chapter on a close friend who was a very good pilot and crashed anyway - proof that sometimes being good doesn't make up for all the things that can go wrong. (He survived; his career did not.)

I just finished a chapter "Ghost Roads" on getting lost in the north and started a short one on fire season. I still have to write a short one about the different kinds of folks we flew on charters (S. Dakota farmers, Athabaskan fiddlers, school kids and prisoners) and how airplanes fit into the wilderness ideal (this would be my "Chris McCandless was an idiot chapter") and I still have to tinker with the ending. That last chapter is not making me happy at all but I can't seem to pin it down yet. I know what I want it to be but need to make that happen; it just needs some more thinking.

So between what is written and will be revised, maybe 20 more complete pages. That will end up more than the 50 I had planned, but it's all good. I just wanted to be done though - I wanted to hand this in and be a professional who accomplishes what she sets out to do; what she promises to do.

It's frustrating to be human sometimes and to just not pull it all together.