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In an oddly appropriate coda to my bizarrely good fortune these past several months, I felt genuine relief today when I received an editor's rejection of Arbor, my last remaining active submission.

Don't get me wrong. I want to see Arbor published. I would dearly love to work with the editor and the mouse house that employs her. And years of conditioning have left me with an instinctive yearning when I get home each day to check the mail and see if it contains something that is not a rejection.

But even the possibility of having an editor-requested revision of Arbor sitting on my to-do list for months or even years before I could get to it was making me fidgety. And I've begun feeling a little self-conscious about the fact that each of my four books will be with a different publisher -- being on the roster of a fifth one right now wasn't going to make me feel more at ease. (I'm also concerned that my health is too good, that my children are too smart, and that my complaints are not insufferable enough.)

So, yes, it's good news that Arbor still does not have a taker. Now I can relax a little, focus on the work I've already got... and trust that my subconscious will get on the case as soon as I fall asleep tonight, trying to figure out how Arbor can be fixed.

News from editors on Pasta, James, Smith and P.O.

Submission (or revision) news on J.R. and Arbor.

Word on whether, where and when I'll be traveling to do some on-site research for one project or another.

The Cybils post-mortem. Get your comments in now.

The receipt through Interlibrary Loan of an obscure figure's autobiography -- a book that might well be a crushing bore but might also inspire yet another research project. The two are not mutually exclusive, you know.

Official confirmation on a couple of fun pieces of news that I can share with you all.

The arrival of my very first issue of Horn Book, which I ordered over the weekend. It seems like it wasn't very long ago, when I was first getting started in this business, that subscribing to Horn Book seemed like a total cart-before-the-horse extravagance.

Satchel Paige once said, "Don't look back: Something may be gaining on you." For me these days, it's more like, "Don't look back: A pair of old manuscripts may still be sitting there waiting for you."

With J.R. out the door and Pasta still making the rounds, I've recently turned my attention to Arbor, a middle grade novel that's been in the works for about a dozen years. Half of that time, it existed only in my head, but that still leaves a long history of development on paper. I've been happy with Arbor for a long time, too, but parts of it still aren't clicking with editors, so I've gone back and worked some more on the first few chapters, where I think the problem lies.

Then there's James, a biography I began researching about five years ago. On Monday, I read four "final" drafts of considerably different tellings I've tried along the way in attempts to make the story resonate enough with editors for them to want to help me shape it further. The most recent draft, which I last touched a year ago, I like very much. Still, I may be on the verge of yet another approach to James' story.

The thing is, I don't mind. I feel like my writing has come a long way over the years, but I really want these old projects to come with me.

At the moment, not so much:

The ending of J.R., still. I'm now on the third version, since version 2 -- dashed off Friday evening while waiting for my takeout order of cheese enchiladas -- turned out not quite as brilliantly as it seemed to at the time.

Arbor, again. I've been working on this middle-grade novel for years, and the latest round of editorial feedback showed that it's still not quite where it needs to me. What's funny, though, is that the main thing I need to work on is something that hardly of the editors mentioned at all -- my main character. I figure that when your main character doesn't seem to register with editors one way or another, that's not such a good thing.