Course:I took the 12-Week Novelist eclass with Nicole Bokat
from November to February 2004-2005.

Output: Completed novel manuscript.

How I Found the Class:I saw an ad for the class during one of my too-numerous stops by the mediabistro bbs (goofing off is one of the perks of full-time freelancing).

What I learned:The class gave me the needed deadlines to get "write a novel" on my to-do list and, once it was on the to-do list, it actually got done.

How the course helped me do what I did:During the 12 weeks, I cranked out the draft of a YA novel called "The Cortlandt Boys," about Max, a sports journalist who goes back to her old high school to cover the 10th anniversary of the boys basketball team winning the state championship. She finds the boys still stuck in their lives from ten years before until a mystery from the past yanks them into the present. I then spent the spring revising the manuscript. Having
proven to myself I can write a novel when I make time to do it, I've signed up for another 12-week novelist e-class this fall. My next novel will be about a girl who decides God is talking to her, told in the voice of her more conventionally religious roommate at the
boarding school they attend. As the last book never writes the next one, this may become a yearly tradition, or at least a welcome change of pace from the non-fiction articles I normally write.

Laura Vanderkam is a contributing editor at Reader's Digest, and a member of the USA Today Forum page's Board of Contributors. She is co-author with Dr. David Clayton, of the upcoming "Healthy Guide to
Unhealthy Living" (Simon & Schuster, Jan 2006) and is co-author, with Jan and Bob Davidson of "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds" (Simon & Schuster, 2004).