It’s a young-adult novel called Wondermelt.

Copies have been sent out to some extremely talented and tasteful friends, and I’ll be going into rewrite in a few weeks. After that, it’s pitch time! I’m less familiar with the YA landscape in the publishing world, so any friendly connections y’all feel like making would be greatly appreciated.

And as always, thank you for reading. More to come! A great amount more, and soon.

I’m not going to be posting here very frequently because I’m focusing all my attention on finding an agent. If any of you fine folks have inside info — having gotten your own agent or worked with an agent or perhaps being married to one? — please share your story.

And though that’s all very dry and boring, I want to also officially announce here that I’m working on a new project. It’s called Wondermelt and that’s all I’m going to tell you about it. For now.

Sending happy holiday vibes out to all of y’all. Thanks for reading.

Buy the book from Amazon here: http://amzn.to/kgbzx3 or by emailing alldownhillbook@gmail.com. Copies are $15 and I’ll sign yours for free, if you ask!

An alternate website, www.alldownhillbook.com, is in the works and should be up and running soon. As always, thank you for reading.

Saturday, May 28 at 6 p.m.
At The Bubble Lounge in Tribeca, NY
Cocktail attire

Please rsvp to Molly.Seltzer@gmail.com

The good news is that it really is the final stages, and I should have a date set for a reading/launch party within a few weeks.

The less good news is I’ve been abandoning you here and elsewhere and for that I’m very sorry. And also very excited. Things are happening! Stick with me…

For now — we have 30 days to finish raising funds on kickstarter. If we don’t make the $2,000 goal, no money is distributed, so please spread the word. The project is listed here.

And finally, here’s one publicity photo from my recent session shooting for the back cover of the book. Life has suddenly become so strange.

I’ve never had much luck with water pressure. (Or men.) (And wouldn’t that be a great first line to a novel?) I grew up on a farm. We were fed our water from a spring across the road. I spent many a summer day padding barefoot through the dark, musty springhouse and feeling girlishly apprehensive about the silt settled at the bottom of our water tanks. I spent many a summer night standing impatiently under a dribbling shower waiting for enough precipitation to clean my dusty feet.

My nervousness about country water was only furthered by what happened many years ago, while I was away at summer camp. I was told all this later, but it’s never left my consciousness and serves both to prove our family’s rurality and my father’s age.  One year — I imagine in early June, when the grass was still cool in the mornings and the snakes hadn’t yet come down the mountains — my mother noticed that our water tasted funny. She mentioned it to my father, who flagrantly brushed aside this comment, along with others like ‘We should get a lock for the front door’ and ‘I’m not sure spinach quiche is supposed to have mandarin oranges in it.’

A few weeks later, she found the water tasted more strongly. Not bad, exactly, just off. Maybe a little metallic? Maybe it was cloudier than usual? Again, a pooh-pooh from the peanut gallery. A few weeks more, and my father comes into the living room and asks my mother if the water seems funny. They investigated and found a large (dead, bloated, rotting) salamander stuck in the water pipe. My parents had been drinking dead-amphibian water for nearly two months. They had, literally, lizard in their gizzards.

This is what runs through my head as I stand over my white sink in Queens, willing the drain to suck. I pray for the underwater tornado to appear. I fret, I wring my hands, I read the back of the Drano bottle obsessively.

Eventually, I call my mother.

“Hey, sugar, how are things in the big city?”

“Stagnant.”

“Don’t worry. You’re a tough country girl, you can fight off whatever’s bothering you.”

“It’s more of an unseen enemy.”

“Well there’s always MeeMaw’s old cure-all.”

“Which is?”

“Give it a good slug of bleach. That’ll fix anything.”

And that’s exactly what I did. I poured half a bottle of bleach into the bright green ooze in my porcelain sink and closed the door so the cat couldn’t get anywhere near the muck. Two hours later, I donned goggles (to help my eyes with the burn) and a swim cap (can’t hurt to put another layer around my brain, I figured) and entered the chlorine sauna.

Lo and behold, the water was gone.  I’d eliminated yet another problem and filled in the gap with a small sense of loneliness. I found myself quieted again –  just a city girl, standing in a bathroom.

I’m planning to spend the month of September working from my home in the mountains of Appalachia. This is a source of great joy and great stress. It’s also causing me to look too far forward; I find myself buying one orange, thinking I won’t eat more than that before I have to leave. I should say that I’m the kind of girl who can eat an orange per hour, so this is quite a cutback, since I have a full three weeks before departing.

Along with my trip home, I’ve been feeling the urge to travel abroad.

Last year I visited a friend living in the Netherlands. I came away with an appreciation for canals, a slight fear of Belgium and knowing the Dutch word for garlic. (Knoflook.) What I remember most, though, was my first night there. I arrived about 6 a.m. in Den Haag, having been up about 24 hours. She deposited me at her house and toddled off to work, and I promptly fell asleep. When she got home, we went out into a beautiful early fall sunset and walked round her lovely city. I, like any good tourist, nearly collided with a bicycle every chance I got. I also dropped the little plastic fork I was meant to eat my pommes frites with and had to ask for another. My most bourgeois moments.

That night, my hostess went to bed, but I was wide awake. I stood in her living room and looked down her beautifully narrow European street into an open square. I saw the fountain being turned off.  I watched the moon hang over nearby apartments. I took this photo.

I flipped through her foreign channels and found reruns of an old Australian show called The Secret Lives of Us. It was one of those elusive television moments when you stumble upon something that will become so much a part of your psyche that you can no longer remember if it was you or the protagonist who developed an opinion or preference or catchphrase. Forget instant play, this show and I were instant friends.  I sat on a creaky Dutch couch and ate stroopwafel with thick strawberry yogurt and chunks of real, rich European chocolate. Everything was dark and still and quiet, and I couldn’t have been happier.

This is what I envision when I think of living abroad, the sense of newness and satisfaction that comes with traveling outside your comfort. It’s so much easier to imagine a different version of oneself with a drastic scenery change. I’m reminded of stage managers calling for a bath of blue lights, then red, as people dressed in black scuttle around, pushing fiberboard cutouts around.

My mind knows this is not the reality of moving out of the United States. I can convince my brain of the obvious problems and setbacks. But, right now, my angsty New York feet are aching to be somewhere else, though I know I’m home.