This month I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge, blogging every day of the month of April, except Sundays, on a topic from A to Z. I’m posting short-form topics meant to get you talking and sharing! Join the discussion in the comments.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever created? What are you most proud of? What most resembles the deepest inner you? What work of yours most makes you want to shout out to the world, “Hey, I made this thing!”?

Talk to me about it.

There’s a novel I’m somewhere in the middle of writing, again, for the second time, because I wrote it almost all the way through many years ago and then realized I had screwed it up. It’s the only novel I ever wrote by starting with a theme. It’s a theme that matters, that I hope to change people’s thinking about, and it lead me to an incredible story of a girl who recieves a mysterious package in the mail. The letter inside it warns that she is in great danger. To save herself, she must agree to a curious journey that takes her to unusual, hidden places all over London; forces her to confront ghosts from her past; and eventually leads her into a future that will challenge everything she thought she knew about herself. It is a delightful story to write, full of all the sorts of things I love most, like old books and maps, secret libraries, wise and cranky old men, taxidermy, several unfriendly cats, exploratory adventures, mysterious mail, and one stubborn girl who just might need help to see herself more clearly than she can on her own. It is, at the same time, a difficult thing to write, because I have so much hope for it. I haven’t worked on it in a while; I’ve been working on something less dense, less weighty for me, brighter and younger and with less at stake.

But I can’t wait to return to this one, when I am ready.

I call it The Map of Innocence, and it is.