My middle grade loon book to be published!

On April 16, I signed a contract with Silver Knight Publishing for my middle grade book The Wide Awake Loons.

That book felt “meant to be” from the first.  The conception of books is a subject that mystifies.  The Wide Awake Loons is the only book that I planned in my head before writing it down.  My other novels usually began as a short piece or story that developed as I wrote.

An unusual  shot by Steve Cushman

Loons became a symbol of writing for me.  Does a writer travel from here to there or does a writer dive into their material, submerging ideas and experiences before surfacing like a loon?  I never wrote a first draft so quickly again.  And strangely, I hadn’t really learned how to plan a book in my head.  It may have been the hours at work one summer in Minneapolis and the muggy weather that had me planning a book I put off writing. 

Or the reason was better stated by these authors:

"In writing, there is first a creating stage--a time you look for ideas, you explore, you cast around for what you want to say. Like the first phase of building, this creating stage is full of possibilities.”  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” - Willa Cather


“To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.” -  Aldous Huxley

"Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."  - Ann Beattie  (from the Paris Review, 2011)

Whether I begin a novel in my head or on paper, I usually write as if I’m on a journey with a map rather than an outline.  Events are starred places, however I’m not sure about how I will get there and what is on the way.  That sultry summer when I planned my loon book, I spent some days in Northern Minnesota where I’d vacationed since childhood and where I always heard loons.  Loons are enigmatic, sitting on the water like ducks, but if you see one and approach it, the loon will tease, diving under and making you guess where it will emerge on the lake. 

The Common Loon by Judith W. McIntyre

I read up on loons and while reading nonfiction, the book took form.  At that time in Minneapolis, I lived one block from a branch YMCA.   While writing my loon book, I swam once or twice a day and sat in a sauna with an after-work group.  Since, I’ve known that if I feel writer’s block, I should swim.   

As a child, I was so enamored with Dr. Dolittle that after reading a chapter, I rewrote it in my head with me as Dr. Dolittle’s daughter, talking to animals and traveling with him.  It was probably my first experience, writing in my head.  Animals communicate; you just have to introduce a kitten to a cat and soon, the cat will tell it where it can sleep and when it can eat, and that it should groom itself before approaching.  Birds intrigue, succeeding at navigation and establishing nest sites that are recovered from one year to the next.  Having read many animal and anthropomorphic novels, I’ve long been fascinated with animal communication and also with telepathy.  The Wide Awake Loons portrays two worlds, that of humans as we know it and that of animals communicating between themselves. 

I’ve already set up my fan page for the book, anticipating the cover, and plan to chronicle the publishing of this middle grade loon book.  Here is the Facebook page address:   https://www.facebook.com/WideAwakeLoons


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The Jungle, desk hazards, and reviews: Tom Winton and L. Anne Carrington

It was about time I read The Jungle.  Having grown up in a town where meat was slaughtered and having some knowledge about the history of Chicago, I put this book off.  As a vegetarian most days, I thought the historical expose would be a multiple whammy.  Then I came across a used copy and opened the first page.

What I wasn’t expecting was the fine writing, remindful of a Russian novel. Though much of The Jungle is gritty, even infernal, the fabulous style and portrayal of the characters makes it very readable, as Dostoyevsky is.

Upton Sinclair delved into every turn of a man who, at first, would rather have worked than pursued an education or even information about the United States. His capacity for experience, the gruesome jobs he has in Packingtown, his roaming as a hobo, and his attempts to survive in the mob, give a formidable background to the final political tone of the book.


~~


Compared to the work risks in The Jungle, desk work doesn’t seem to have hazards.  Yet as I finished The Jungle,  I felt as if my computer mouse had given me “the arm electric.”   My new cat Curdie tossed the mouse to the floor a few times.  But checking around, I found that my “arm electric” exactly fit the symptoms of carpel tunnel syndrome. 

I’d known people who had surgery for carpel tunnel; that’s indicated for 50 percent of its sufferers.  I recalled that the condition had to do with tendons but didn’t realize that the electric sensations were from a tendon pressuring a nerve. A few days with support under my wrist convinced me that my problem could be improved.  After buying a wrist splint at the drugstore and wearing it at night for two weeks, that electric feeling has become more and more infrequent.

I wondered if many writers were suckers like Jurgis in The Jungle, having become addicted to a dream, writing fiction during an unemployed year. 

While working at a used book and antiques store, I began collecting inkwells.  If my writing hobby had turned into a kind of boomerang with editors, all that desk work was nothing to what writers did with an inkwell and pen. 

I’d developed osteoarthritis, both in my toes from my habit of walking miles, and in my finger joints.  I don’t know when mentholated preparations like Ben-Gay were developed but I could obtain weeks of relief from one application.  I bought a jar for about $5 four years ago and I still have half the jar.  The doctor told me to just keep walking and typing.  I guess the bones grind where the joint cushion is worn, creating space and eventually relieving the pain.

Why do writers become so obsessive that they will put up with painstaking secretarial work?  Tom Winton in Beyond Nostalgia shows how life experience lead his protagonist to write. 

High school romance, at the outset of Beyond Nostalgia, is well-orchestrated and exciting. While Dean and Theresa are relieved to have found each other, discoveries about their mothers' sad psychologies hinge their relationship. Winton has a flair for setting and detail in every scene. The New York City romance, the Copacabana after prom, the chukka boots, stir the senses and nostalgia for the era. Dean Cassidy's attachment to Theresa, even after their break-up, develops into a believable obsession about first love.

This alternates with his disillusionment about being drafted and about his regular work after he marries a woman who exemplifies selfless love for him. Dean's skepticism about the working man's role in America, what leads to his writing, results in a brilliantly elaborated conflict between his married life and the Eden of his first love experience.


~~

Many women feel that life experience has left them injured by the time they are fifty – if they are too nostalgic about their pleasures and their health before that.  L. Anne Carrington has written a delightful book for those who don’t like to look ahead, entitled Fifty.

What is at once satisfying about Fifty is the voice of Randi, the fictional adviser. Sometimes it's caustic, often it comprehends the media and the trends of our time, mostly it is inspiriting. Randi causes a post-fifty woman to re-evaluate her life and its opportunities. Yet she is prepared for our replies, the sort of thing that's said under the breath. You feel that you're not alone in having sentiments that sometimes can't be said aloud.

The book covers single women, working women, bodily conditions and grooming, children, finances,  and of course, men. I especially liked her chapter about the treatment of women by other women, on the job or socially. That subject isn't often handled although during our fifty years or so, women came out of the home and interacted with the world and each other.

I felt ready for anything after reading Fifty and enjoyed Randi's night out celebration.

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Living Wills, my mother, and m. m. Fahren's The Golden Amulet

In writing, in thoughts, a person is a living will of their own choices.  My mother’s death was complicated because of issues about her choices.  I remember four years ago when she was 88, she had a stressful meeting with doctors and other health workers.  My sister was present.  My mother informed me afterwards that she wasn’t going to have any more operations.  What went into her health records was an Advanced Directive, stating her decisions then about her future care.

Until my mother was in her mid 80s, she had few days when she wasn’t in good health.  She taught stringed instruments to elementary school children when I was in grade school.  The sounds I used to hear during private lessons!  Music was a constant in our household, and I also had five siblings.  My mother played violin and viola in community orchestras and the Duluth Symphony.

My mother when she was young

After she attended Northwestern University, she married my father.  Though my father wouldn't learn a musical instrument, his father was a professional French horn player, playing with Sousa after the U.S. Army Band, and then for Arthur Pryor and other orchestras.  I nearly went on to study professional flute after lessons with a symphony musician.  Some of my best memories of my mother had to do with music, especially when she accompanied my flute playing on the piano.  Before that, I remember being thrilled at an igloo cake she made for my birthday party!

Though we had difficulties later on, she was always a leader for me.  She liked to read and introduced me to many authors.  Divorced, she read all of William Faulkner which I couldn’t understand though I admired his work in college.  I read D. H. Lawrence and Eugene O’Neill as an adolescent, when she did, and later, looking for something to read, Rebecca West.  I remember her recommending Watership Down, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime,  and her handing Life According to Garp to me, saying, “Tell me what you think.”

At the Back of the North Wind

My love of children’s novels began with those in my childhood bookcase.  I didn’t know then that Nancy Drew, Doctor Dolittle, A. A. Milne, and George MacDonald were in hers.  As a child, I thought that those books were written in the 1950s.

My mother at 91

Of course, her thoughts and choices to me were sacrosanct when she showed signs of dementia.  And after a year and a half in assisted living, she suffered a stroke.  I visited her in the nursing home during lunchtime while she refused food, complaining of nausea. She had little movement yet much pain.  That resulted in her being drugged but when a member of the family saw her, a rescue was attempted.  In the hospital, she was given a temporary feeding tube.  A doctor confronted me about these decisions.  I was not legally her decision-maker so I contacted my sister, an occupational therapist who has worked with stroke patients. 

 The Advanced Directive in my mother's records specifically stated that she decided against feeding tubes.  When she was returned to the nursing home, she became agitated and pulled hers out, what many patients do.  

Now my sister and I are strong about filing a Living Will with doctor and lawyer.  States and hospitals have forms for this.  But when a patient has a stack of records, it’s important to stipulate that doctors need to consult the choices a patient made when they were lucid. 

I figured that my mother lived more than 1100 months and only two of them were spent in physical suffering.  But this was a lesson about writing things down, making wishes known so that they could be actualized legally.

Recommended!

The Golden Amulet

M. m. Fahren alluded on Facebook to our time and the elderly, what seemed clairvoyant.  I found her book The Golden Amulet :  a tale of the faerie to be an absorbing and lush reading when my mother’s condition worsened.  I’m sure my mother would have liked reading this book to us when we were young.

Written in classic fairytale style, The Golden Amulet weaves the theme of veiled identity. It's an exciting tale, starting with the mystery of a princess' near death and a traveling minstrel's spectral healing.

The dragon scenes lurch like fire before the investigation of the knight who killed it. A father-daughter relationship has the psychology that makes fairytale rich.

I enjoyed the strong and telling prose in this tale, so resonating and yet strumming a time that the young today can enjoy.

~~~~~~~~~ 

The House in Windward Leaves, my middle grade fantasy about identity, will be featured at DailyCheapReads junior edition on March 8, 2012.  

Resolution Again: Revise

My New Year’s resolution is the same as last year’s, until June at least.  2011 was my first year writing in which I spent most of my time revising!

After I revised my Authonomy Editor’s Desk book, The Swan Bonnet, I kept going with my old stuff.   I had loved the new idea and if I got the message, “Not right for us but send again”, that had me going on to my next idea.  I enjoyed making a creative mess but I wasn’t so avid about cleaning up.

One recent year I went dry.  I thought that sad but while reading A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf, I knew I hadn’t gone the length.  Virginia had to keep revising for publication and she suffered.

“This is in fact the last day of 1932, but I am so tired of polishing off Flush – such a pressure in the brain is caused by doing ten pages daily…”

Back to my last blog subject about writing and sanity, I had pondered the sanity of Virginia Woolf’s work.  I’d suspected that life issues caused some of her infamous madness.  And found that her suicide was related to the threat of Nazi invasion.  Leonard Woolf in his memoir, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, wrote of a suicide plan that he discussed with Virginia and other Jews in England.  Virginia died when the Nazis were winning and invasion seemed imminent.

She revised to migraine level.

  

“I am now galloping over Mrs. Dalloway, retyping it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O.  [The Voyage Out]:  a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, and joins parts separately composed and gone dry.”

Hey, that’s what I did when I revised.  Put the whole thing through the typewriter or word processor again.

I had so much thrilled at my imaginative discoveries that I went from one project to the next like a thrall.  But along the way, I’d also discovered that the more I enjoyed myself, I didn’t like reading what I wrote.

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” (Samuel Johnson)

What we read of Willa Cather is one-third of what she first wrote.  My old manuscripts were like crude sculpture, needing refinement.  The more I lopped words, the more the story came out of the blob.  When I drafted a story, I put in everything I could think of, the kitchen sink, so that if one thing worked and another didn’t, that could go.   I'll probably cut 25,000 words out of my adult novel by the end of my current rewrite.

I suppose I gave up rather than working.  If digital publishing hadn’t happened in my lifetime, it’s doubtful that I would have done the work that might make my projects readable.  I received letters from top editors at major houses but I didn’t get what I wanted - a long letter discussing revision like the Authonomy reviews.  I received short or brief letters.  And I thought my next project was going to be the greatest.

As with most longterm work, revising and editing my own manuscripts began to feel like a skill.  I regretted that I hadn’t learned it earlier.  I’d had my experience amongst writers in Minneapolis and after that, I wrote in a vacuum, not realizing that writers are like other working people.  They probably won’t do so well alone.

“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”  (Lawrence Kasdan)

At first the revising was like bicycling a mountain path but the ride down was so nice that I revised another book even if it made me look at my past mistakes.

During this, I read Nancy Brook's Cycling, Wine and Men:  A Midlife Tour de France.  In this memoir, the author literally bicycles mountains while musing on the challenges of life after 40.  Here is my review:

Nancy Brook has chronicled both the challenges of middle age relationship and that of athletic endurance in this delightful book. It is a ride to take, the strenuous mileage of her cycling while she works out personal dilemmas and proves that she can pass her own test - riding up mountains in France. This is a tour of France with the underpinning of purpose.


While I could imagine this exciting trek like a viewer of athletes on television, she has provided tidbits on the French villages, history, and the ambiance of her tour friends. Like the destinations on her map, she has interwoven her own concerns, the doctor Dante, the cat Oreo missing at home, and the epiphanies that she reaches in the way that she cycles to a mountaintop near the end. This is a book that celebrates womanly endurance while facing whatever surrounds.  It has the travel writer's description and the flow of story, two-fold and inspiring.

Fiction, Sanity, and a review of Jeff Blackmer's Draegnstoen

The House of Windward Leaves is free on Smashwords until January 26 with coupon PB55U

 

Dealing with the possibility of death at Christmastime, I was drawn into

reading one of the vintage books I was listing on eBay, The Enchanted Hat by Harold MacGrath.  At once, the 1900 book reminded me of P.G. Wodehouse.  A lost book, each of its long short stories centered around a piece of clothing.  While I had to think about old age, I read at bedtime a book that entertained a century ago and because I needed something lighthearted.   

I also read Draegnstoen by Jeff Blackmer.  So satisfying and hitting the spot for another reason.  Its well-drawn characters and historical conflicts put my anxieties into perspective.  Here’s my Amazon review:

 

Draegnstoen settles at once into the bones. After so much Arthurian tragedy, this book glimmers of a triumphant end, that of the Britain tribes ousting the Romans. I was entranced with the royalty that led to Coel, Old King Cole in British legend, his brother's marriage to his sister and the dragon hunts, depicted so that I wondered if dragons might have become an extinct species in Britain.

The momentum along with the details made me confident of the author's research into the fifth century A.D. And the intermarriage with the Pict tribes from Scotland was charming, in dialogue and in the uncertainty of the alliance. The Pict princess entered battle tattooed and she had a crow at command.

This whole book is elegantly constructed with intrigue and the spying that finally gathers the tribes to Coel. They fight the Romans, one thane revenging a crucifixion, and as the Goths dominate Rome. But it is the focus on individuals that keeps one reading. In the end, I felt a chill in my spine because I believed this book had comprehended early Britain and a war it had won.  

And I was reading Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship,Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, short stories that present real scenario, character-oriented so that a person can think through dilemmas.  There are middle-aged characters and older in this collection, usually spoked with the younger generation.

On writing sites, I sometimes read forum comments from authors who feel unstable if they don’t write.  Hannah Warren, the author of the upcoming Casablanca, My Heart, recently said that she felt restless if she didn’t write.  I responded to that on Facebook, saying that she might have creative energy the way an athlete has muscular energy and that energy needs channeling. 

 

I wondered about this some years ago when I found that writing stabilized my days.  Legends about authors are often about their journey to instability.  How many, from the inside, took a journey to mental sanity?  Writing is to make sense of reality, and also of undercurrent emotions and thoughts. 

The year I wrote The House in Windward Leaves was one of the worst in my life, I thought at the time.  With men problems and my hometown blowing up into strike news, I really thought the adult world was nuts.  Reading fantasies on the internet now, I sometimes wonder if the author was “going through things.”

Writing became a habit but I didn’t feel it gave me constant sanity; it often gave me upsets.  Only for about an hour after writing, but I might feel disoriented when I was getting ready for work.  I even felt that I was experiencing method writing like a method actor.  Incidents in the day felt like coincidences, causing me to adjust my story.

Working with used books and listing them for the internet, my librarian work, is a sane task.  Recently, my 92-year-old mother has continued her decline in suffering a stroke.  She had come to love her assisted living community and liked her apartment, decorated with familiar living room pieces and photographs.  Then she had to enter a nursing home.  The sadness with my five siblings drove me to my librarian work.  But during the last weeks, I’ve found sanity in writing again.  I could lose myself in the adult book that I’m revising.

When this happens, I’ve thought that writing is like reading, only enhanced.  You open up the pages and if you get lost in them, forgetting your worries, then you think that you might be onto something.  During difficult times, many people look for a book that can totally involve them.  In Minneapolis many years ago, I interviewed at Odegaard Bookstore with the owner, Dan Odegaard.  He had a very fine bookstore and he told me that he felt like a doctor, helping customers to find the book they needed.

The art of fiction might spring from a need people have when troubled, that of sharing bad stuff.  Friends do that.  Group therapy is based on people sharing experiences and anxieties. Writers with problems have been attracting readers since the novel was first published.  Perhaps that’s because people don’t like to confront problems and that the novelist, confronting events, issues, and their effects, takes the reader in hand.  Maybe it’s brave to confront that way, like an explorer or a hero going into dangerous territory, risking panic or hysteria or injury.

Fiction from Reality or the news that can't be published

Reviewing Joanna Stephen-Ward's Vissi d’arte, Shah Wali Fazli’s The Interpreter, Faith Mortimer’s Assassin’s Village, and MG Villesca’s Getting ME Back.

Reading, we like to believe we’re in something true, that it “rings true.”  When movies were only available at the local theaters, everyone liked to give their opinion. “It was OK, but some of it seemed fake” or “I could see the camera tricks” or “Wow, you should see it.”  The main criteria used to be its reality factor.

Older, I lost my romanticism and preferred more often to read fiction that told me about times or people.  Experiences with slander and assumptions about identity made me sensitive about imagination, when it pretended or indulged in wishful thinking, and when it had insight.  Fiction to my thinking was news that couldn’t be published.  It was the personal news that affected society.  I was never much for reading history or politics.  But I’m fascinated with fictionalized history while it fills in my gaps.

It would be disappointing if Jane Austen hadn’t spent time in Bath.  Or to learn that Margaret Mitchell never really considered divorcing a man like Rhett.

This posting features books admittedly woven from the author’s own life or setting.  But it’s the skill of these authors that brings their unusual experiences to the reader and in story form.

At Amazon.com

Vissi d’arte A Story of Love and Music by Joanna Stephen-Ward

For anyone who has attempted the discipline of the performing arts, Vissi d'arte starts out with the stepping stones.  The characters lead the reader on, Max the banker who has always desired to show off his voice on stage, the young women vying for lead roles, some unsure and one insidious, a director whose favorites wait on his choice, a journalist who uncovers the intrigue behind the curtain, and an opera coach whose past is veiled.

It's entrancing to identify with a student in this Australian opera school. Their language lessons and their acting practice are carefully depicted while the author shows how the intensity of this art and its student circle can develop into destructive passion. The knives in rehearsal, the parts assigned become prelude to a desperate singer's scheme to obtain a lead singer's life. But the most operatic of all pasts is that of the teacher, Harriet Shaw, not known to have sung since she left England.  Vissi d'arte portrays both the discipline and the off-hours release of this demanding lifestyle.

At Amazon.com

The Interpreter by Shah Wali Fazli

While The Interpreter portrays an insider's panorama of the conflicts in Afghanistan, it is also crafted as a story that tunnels into the vendetta between an Afghanistan man and his Taliban torturer. Yet the book is written with the gray zones that make this conflict one of controversy.

Shabir was learning karate when the Taliban captured him, beat him, and tortured him, sending his family to Russia for refuge. His bravery in joining the American forces as an interpreter leads to compelling scenes of encounter. When he interprets intercepted radio messages, he knows he is a target. Although he eventually vanquishes his tormenter, there is more to this. It reminds me of the end to Doctor Zhivago in that Shabir must leave; he has to be displaced.  This is a moving book, rich in scenes of Afghanistan.

At Amazon.com

Assassin's Village by Faith Mortimer
This is the kind of mystery I love to read, psychological and delving beneath mere motives to the twisted and eventful pasts of the characters, these involved in a theatre group.  Individual stories are taken up and told to a present where the confrontations inhibit the truth. That's where the character masks take over, one mask meeting another so that the dialogue perplexes.

The history of the British on Cyprus extends this mystery, meting out their relationships with the local Cypriots. All of the characters are fascinating; their habits and quirks in this setting held me rapt. I was reminded of Doris Lessing and Muriel Sparks' stories about ex-patriot British people in Africa.

Assassin's Village begins as mystery about an arrogant and despised man's murder but halfway through, it becomes a tangle of tragedy, mounting until it has revealed the inner grief of the woman most damaged.  Throughout, the scenes and the characters are held in lively balance, keeping tragedy underneath and delighting the reader's senses.

Getting ME Back by MG Villesca
It's not often that a book about teenagers presents cars dragging Main Street and rural parties with such convincing atmosphere. Telling such a story as it happens is not an easy thing. The hurdle that MG Villesca clears is in portraying the flirtation and intense feelings that teenagers really have.
Linda doesn't tell us that she is the kind of girl guys want. She's more concerned with her own conversation when it comes to boys and especially the one she is ecstatic to date. While she tries to maintain a cool head, she juggles her friend relationships with that of her well-off boyfriend. His possessiveness is told with suspense, how it ricochets into her daily life and how his discreet violence affects an entire town.
Besides giving an almost panoramic picture of a Texas town, its car culture beginning at a carwash and Linda's inner struggles, the author has provided a book that will undoubtedly capture YA readers.

"I was born to reject rejection" - a tune Hans Christian Andersen might have liked

I’d hardly begun submitting creative work when I first heard the theme song of Oklahoma Crude, “I Was Born to Reject Rejection.” 

I saw the movie on late-night TV and then on “Film du Jour,” the afternoon films in the Twin Cities.  I can still hum the theme song melody, many years later.  Faye Dunaway was trying to work a laggard oil derrick. The hired man, George C. Scott, helped her grudgingly when Jack Palance, that great villain, threatened to take her property. 

AgentTracker is a site where you can record your rejections and have access to the websites, the statistics, and the feedback of agents and publishers.  If you only want to see positive information, the people who are considering your full manuscripts, you can just filter that.  But those round red faces of rejection.  After awhile, the tomatoes lose their impact.

 

Buying used books, I keep a mental list of what I want to read.  At the local library sale, one of my scarce finds was Hans Christian Andersen’s The Story of My Life, an 1871 Hurd and Houghton edition, possibly a First American Edition.  Although the book was sturdy, I’m afraid to read old books.  Sometimes they disintegrate in your hands.  When this book sold, I had to have a look before the buyer paid for it.

 

Then I had to keep reading until the last hour.  Hans Christian Andersen’s life was a fairy tale.  The son of a shoemaker, he described visiting a jail and then an insane asylum as a child.  His grandmother gardened for the asylum, a woman from a well-off family who married a comic actor.  Hans had a thing for puppet theatre and when he began making clothes for his puppets, his mother decided he should become a tailor.  This boy was off to see everything early and somehow he met Prince Christian who later become King Christian the Eighth of Denmark.  Hans wanted an education but Prince Christian assumed he would work in a craft, much to Hans’ disappointment.

He took off for Copenhagen as a teenager and literally knocked on the doors of every famous person in the arts.  He sang until his voice broke and danced until he found a mentor.  Then he wrote a tragedy, only to be told that he should stop writing until he got an education.  Somehow his benefactor obtained funds from royalty for his education. 

After publishing his poetry to acclaim amongst the poet friends he’d collected, he was terribly hurt by the cruel criticism that followed.  Somehow he obtained funds from royalty to travel.  He said no one wrote him, realizing his clownish reputation, and when he returned, he wrote Wonder Stories for children.  The Little Mermaid paved the way.  After that, Hans Christian Anderson continued to consort with royalty and traveled everywhere, meeting the Grimm Brothers, Mendelssohn, Dickens, and of course, Jenny Lind.

This guy never stopped.  I’d thought that writers were chosen.  Hans Christian Andersen was chosen to reject rejection.  Amongst the many insults he garnered was that of the Grimm Brother who had never heard of him.  He was really a whirlwind fairytale, shoemaker to castle.

It just goes to show that things haven’t changed so much.  I’m not so good at knocking on doors and I hardly know how to beg.  So I took the traditional approach in launching my fantasy book, The House in Windward Leaves.   I went to the reviewers and found a few good lists.  After submitting to editors and agents over the years, I found submitting to reviewers a very pleasant project.  It was a risk, asking for reviews from people who read a lot.  But published books are really about readers.  Of all the submissions I’ve ever done, I enjoyed these review submissions the most, however they turned out.  That became a bit of a spiral, finding people who wanted to read my book, and wanting to find more.