Imagine telling Nobel & Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison that, at age 40, it was too late to publish The Bluest Eye. Or, telling Bram Stoker that at age 50 Dracula would never see print. How about Laura Ingalls Wilder who, in her mid-60s when she published Little House in the Big Woods, was (get ready for this language) too old. Then there's Raymond Chandler, who published The Big Sleep at 51. I can only imagine his reaction had he been told that it was too late to get

"I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." Anyone who knows me -- family, friends, teachers, students, fellow writers -- knows that my love affair with Truman Capote and Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Christmas Memory is perhaps a bit more than a love affair, one that defies definition. The night before I was scheduled to sign off on what I believed to be the final edits for my debut YA-novel, Honeysuckle Holiday, I did somet