Lindsay Eland - Middle Grade Author

My fellow awesome critique partner, Kate Milford’s, The Boneshaker is due out May 24! It is so amazing and I recommend EVERYONE to go to amazon and preorder…NOW!

Right now, she is currently holding a contest on her facebook page! Check it out here:

This is what my 8-year-old Gracie wrote for a school assignment. The last line is my very favorite.

My Dreams

by Gracie Eland

“Martin Luther King had a dream that all people were treated equally. If I had a dream it would be about wishing to become the most famous artist in the world. I hope that I become not one of the best artists but this best int eh world. I would draw and paint animals and people like Mona Lisa. I hope that I become just as good as my mom’s sister, Alisa (and she is amazing!). I dream of sharing my gift to the world. I also dream of being the fastest human on earth.”

Oh, that last line. How I love it. Of course, I love the fact that Gracie wants to be an artist and she really is an exceptional one…but that last line: “I also dream of being the fastest human on earth.” It makes me laugh out loud and smile even as I read it. The randomness and sweetness of the statement and the dream.

I remember the talk in Elementary school about who was the fastest.

Fastest boy?

Fastest girl?

Fastest kid overall?

Me and a great friend Lauren McGrath were the fastest girls in the 6th grade. Sometimes she would win and other times I would (though I have to say that I did not beat Lauren after that year and she went on to race all through High School and College…the Air Force, to be exact, so umm…yeah, she’s faster) Anyway, I remember as a kid running as fast as I could, the breath whooshing through my lungs, my legs on fire. The image I had in my mind of what I probably looked like…or what I hoped I looked like was not unlike Dash in The Incredibles. So, so fast that my legs were blurry. That if someone took my picture I’d just be a streak on the film.

Ah yes. The dream of being the fastest.

Sweet memories.

How could you not love stained glass? There is an elegant and raw beauty in the transluscent color of stained glass. The way it captures bits of the sun and immediately illuminates a picture, a work of art, shards of glass glued together meticulously in an arrangement that makes you look up and take notice.

But stained glass isn’t always illuminated. Sometimes the sun isn’t hitting it at just the right angle and And the sun is not always at the right angle nor does the stain glass light up at night. And when it’s like that stained glass tends to darken, reflecting the cloudy day or the dark church or the night sky. A piece of art that is meant for those precious moments out of the day.

And there are stained glass moments through each day. Moments that are illuminated just for us—even if for a tiny second.

We just have to stop in the midst of our business, in the midst of our heartache or worry, and stop and look up and let the sun illuminate that moment that is all yours.

Hi everyone! Here’s another interview I did with the wonderful ladies at Mundie Mom’s!

Check it out!!

Click right here to read!!

Stars have always been a favorite of mine. I don’t necessarily know when I looked up and saw that one star that changed the way I saw the sky, and I don’t know why it changed the way I thought of them, but I find myself loving them now more than ever.

They make me think of bigness, and dreams, and hopes, and love…the kinds of things that make my heart and my world expand. I think they’re magic.

I love their distance and how they still sparkle from millions and millions of miles away.

The way they shoot across the sky so fast that you’d miss it if you blinked. And I like to wonder where they’ve gone.

And I know there is science behind the stars, and though I respect the science of what they are and where they’ve gone and the approximate distance they are from us, and how big they really are…I don’t want to know those things. Really I don’t.

I want them to remain a mystery and a wonder to me. I want to look at them and marvel and smile and feel my heart quicken at the sky filled with so many sparkly diamonds I literally gasp.

I had a wooden brown box when I was younger that my dad gave me. Inside I kept special notes, the dolphin charm I got at the beach, the bracelet I bought in El Salvador, Indian Rupees, a small stack of “books” my cousin and I would write back and forth to each other, the ring my dad got me when I was sixteen, a picture of my sisters, a small glass fish I used to hide in my desk in fifth grade.

I would take out the box every once in a while and open it. Peek inside and take out each treasure one by one by one.

I find that the older I get the more I don’t want to know about some things…like stars. How some things I’d just like to keep to myself…to keep it the way I first saw it, to the way my heart sees it still.

And I know that if I could catch a star, I wouldn’t show it to anyone…no one at all. Instead, I’d keep it closed in my brown wooden box, and every once in a while when I wanted to smile, or wonder, or gasp, I’d lift the lid just a little bit and peek inside and smile at my own piece of heaven.

Here is a fun interview I did for the show Off the Page with the wonderful librarian Stacey Mackenzie! If you scroll down the page a little you’ll see “Off the Page” and then a link to the show featuring author Mary Peach Finely and myself! Enjoy!

Off the Page Link!