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This just in from the home office: The Junior Library Guild will be offering A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers to its members next year. Perhaps you recall that it's already offering A Girl, a Boy, and a Monster Cat.

What's that you're hearing? Me sighing with satisfaction.

Speaking of things to look forward to, I received my copy of the Penguin Young Readers Group May through August, 2008 catalog yesterday. For those of you who will be receiving it, I'm on page 40 with A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers.

Sometime before spring, we're hoping to do a Hannah and Brandon mini-page at my website for this series.

Look to the left of this post, and you'll see the cover for A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers, which will be published in July. It is Book Two in what I'm calling the Hannah and Brandon Series, though there isn't an official series' title yet. Hmmm. How many books does a series need before it rates an overall title?

My computer guy is delighted with this cover because now we have eight covers on the homepage. He is seriously into symmetry, and he is so happy now that he feels the page is balanced. Order has been restored to his universe.

I thought of making him drop one of the out-of-print covers, just to mess with his head. But I decided a more positive way of doing that would be to finish the book I'm working on and find someone to publish it. Then instead of getting rid of an old cover, we could add another new one. The page will be asymmetrical but in a much more satisfying way for me.

My computer guy says my posts on my daily stats are dull and boring. Yeah, I know. This coming from a computer guy. I laugh. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

My daily stats posts were all about my excitement about entering some kind of weird zenny state where the work was all there was for a couple of hours each day, and just by working I could work. The work created work.

I can't remember the last time this happened to me, so I thought that perhaps I was evolving into a higher lifeform. It was about time. I was hopeful, at least, but in my heart of hearts, I knew it wouldn't last.

Today I received what's known at the home office as the first pass of the galleys for A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers (with art!), which needed to be looked at right away so they could go off to be printed into arcs. Thursday is one of my half days, anyway, and between the galleys, and e-mailing my editor, and getting an e-mail from her, and e-mailing her again, well, I wrote maybe three paragraphs on The Durand Cousins.

Galleys are wonderful because the book is pretty much done as far as the author is concerned, and soon it will be another notch on your pistol grip. But by this point, you've written that freaking book so many times, and seen it so many times that it no longer seems original and brilliant to you and you worry that this will be the book that makes clear to everyone that you have no business publishing. How did she find a publisher? Did she have incriminating pictures? Did she hold someone's child hostage?

You really want to be working on the new book, which you haven't seen too much of yet, so you still think it is original and brilliant and could be your masterpiece, the work you will be remembered for a hundred years after your death. Assuming you don't die too soon. You've got to get that masterwork written fast and you've got to find a publisher for it and get a contract signed before the new book comes out because once the new book comes out no one will want you anymore.

But then working on the old book destroys the flow you finally created for working on the new book, and you know you'll never get it back and all is lost. Lost.

The design work and art for A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers looks really good. And soon there will be arcs! Yippee!

Look who has a book coming out next year. Me. Amazon says so, so it must be true. Can't wait until I have a cover to go with it.

Bologna, the sausage, appears in the second Girl/Boy book. I wanted to call it baloney because I don't know anyone, myself, who pronounces it bologna, and this is a book for first through third graders. I didn't know if they'd even be familiar with the word "bologna." I don't know many adults among my acquaintances who would know how to pronounce that word if they saw it in print. Though that may just be the company I keep.

Well, I looked up baloney in a couple of dictionaries. Both of them described it as a variant of bologna. Good enough, I thought. I should be able to use it.

When the book came back from copy editing, my favorite copy editor had replaced baloney with bologna. So when I responded to the copy editing changes, I asked if there was a compelling reason why we couldn't stick with baloney. It wasn't a make or break issue for me, by any means, but I wondered if it wasn't a case of being realistic vs. being excruciatingly correct. Given a choice, I'll always go with being realistic.

Between the time I sent off my responses and the time I talked with my editor, I read Melvin Beederman Superhero, Terror in Tights. Bologna, the sausage, figures prominently in that story, and the word appears as bologna, not baloney. This gave me pause, since the Beederman books are written for the same age group as the Girl/Boy books.

So my editor and I discussed this over the phone this past week. By that point, I was no longer confident that I wanted to stick with baloney, but I still wanted to run it past everyone. My main editor (think conceptual/content editor) got together with my copy editor (think grammar and usage editor), who felt quite strongly that bologna is the sausage and baloney is foolishness.

My concept editors and I have always had a policy of deferring to the copy editor on lines, words, punctuation, etc. Given that she wanted to go with bologna and Melvin Beederman went with bologna, I am now going with bologna. And I'm very satisfied with that decision.

It took three of us to resolve this dilemma, and it only related to one word. This is why I like editing and editors. I don't want the burden of making these decisions by myself.

This morning I remembered that desire, as in desiring to be like others, does nothing but cause suffering. Oh, yes. I'm feeling better now.

My lightness of mood comes in part because I mailed off the seventh draft of A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers this morning. Right now that's the title of the book coming out in the summer of 2008. And I'm very close to being finished with my portion of the work.