Ruthless and usually right

I teach year three in Sydney, which means my professional life is largely spent with eight-year-olds, and I want to say directly that they are excellent literary critics. Not in the formal sense. In the sense that they will tell you without hesitation the exact moment a story lost them. I test my ideas on them when I can get away with it. I read opening paragraphs aloud and watch the room. Last term I read three different versions of the same opening and one of them had every hand up within ninety seconds asking what happened next. The other two got polite silence. I'm using that one. The middle-grade novel I'm working on is set in a coastal suburb that is clearly somewhere between Cronulla and Wollongong and follows a ten-year-old girl whose family has just moved and who has very specific opinions about everything. I've been working on it for three years because the school year does not leave enormous margins. I write in school holidays and on Sunday mornings when the city is quiet. The chapter I'm on now involves a skate park and a misunderstanding about a bicycle that I'm having trouble making funny without making it silly, and these are not the same thing.