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Hi, folks, this can be a busy time of year. Life speeds along. On top of normal hustle and bustle, I'm in for big changes in 2010. The biggest will be a relocation to down-home Texas from fair Washington. Pretty big stuff, so I'm facing a few months of working in the margins. In ideal life, you block a good 25 hours a week for writing, add on another 8 for marketing and finish everything off with blogging, networking, and arranging the office supplies. This is the ideal writing life.

In the real life, you have 40 hours of other business commitments each week and then another 20 to 40 hours on top of that for family commitments, and then you write your book in all that spare time left-over. You write from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. and crawl out of bed at 6:30 a.m. and try to squeeze in 30 more minutes of writing. You write 100 words as many times as you can in short bursts all day. You breathe. You are very kind to yourself and others around you. You fill up the margins with your writing life.

I hope that you all scribble in the margins some over the coming weeks.

I call this week's doodle, Funky Face.



Remember: ©Molly Blaisdell, all rights reserved. If you want to use my cool doodles, ask permission first. It is so wrong to take people's doodles without permission!

And the quote for the week. Something to think about.

I am a part of all that I have met; yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

It's really quite simple folks. After reading several agents' and editors' blogs and websites and checking out numerous submission guidelines, this seems to be the consensus.

Fiction and Picture Books:

First page: Should include name, address, telephone # , and email address at top left corner. Start each chapter a quarter of the way or halfway down the page. Center chapter # and chapter title (if your chapters have titles).

Font: Times New Roman (very few agents and editors prefer Courier anymore)

Margins: 1" all the way around.

Spacing: Double

Header: On the top right corner of each page (excluding first page), you should have a header that includes author's last name, Book title (or important word from title), and page #.

Example: Dahl / Chocolate Factory / 2

Now start typing!