Over President’s Day weekend I attended the San Francisco Writers Conference. I love conferences, especially those for writers. I enlarged my circle of writer friends with authors and editors, and I pitched Aloha Spirit to agents. I attended sessions on perfecting a pitch, marketing books, and creating a brand for an author name.
My favorite panel talked about creating a million-copy bestseller and featured author Kerry Lonsdale, her agent Gordon Warnock from Fuse Literary, and Danielle Marshall from Lake Union Publishing. The three of them worked together to make Kerry’s books successful. The possibility of finding such a team for myself is inspiring.
At other conferences I’ve heard about the importance of building a brand. Your name has to stand for something. I write historical fiction, stories based on real women from my family’s past. So here’s my brand: telling the stories of history’s unknown women. Like it? Explore my newly renovated website. It features a picture of my grandmother, featured in Under the Almond Trees, reading under a tree. Leave a comment and tell me what you think!
For 22 years, November has meant report cards and parent conferences. Since this is my last year of teaching sixth grade, I feel a bit nostalgic and want to offer some observations and advice for parents.
Every culture has superstitious beliefs. As a child, I was encouraged not to step on sidewalk cracks lest I break my mother’s back, to throw spilled salt over my shoulder, and not let black cats cross my path. While researching my book Aloha Spirit, I learned about Hawaiian superstitions because one of my characters is very superstitious. Her precautions against spirits and for luck are a combination of Catholic, Hawaiian, Chinese, and European since that is the culture of Honolulu, where she lives.
Everyone has stories. As I get older, the stories of my youth become more and more interesting to my sons. They can’t imagine a world without electronics, without cell phones, without CD players. To me, it’s daily life. To them, it’s a family story. The challenge for me is to tell them every wonderful (to them) detail while I still can and they are interested.
Fort Snelling is in Minnesota, but I am researching a time when it was part of the Michigan Territory, just after the Black Hawk War ended in 1832. My interest was piqued by an ancestor of mine who was born at the fort in 1836. Her father was the acting sutler at the fort. Her mother, Samantha Lockwood, was the sister of James Henry Lockwood, a prominent citizen in nearby Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. During the middle 1830’s, Zachary Taylor, future president, was a colonel in the regiment at the fort. Jefferson Davis, future Confederate president, served under him. Taylor’s daughter, Sarah, was the maid of honor at Samantha Lockwood’s marriage. Then Sarah fell in love with Jefferson Davis. Her parents disapproved, so they eloped. Sarah died of malaria three months after her marriage. After Samantha’s daughter was born in 1836, her husband disappeared and she married James Churchman, a circuit lawyer who was friends with Abraham Lincoln. Churchman and Lincoln were both on the circuit at this time in this area.
And the winner is…House of Hades by Rick Riordan! Some students voted for it because Hunger Games, its opponent, had won before and they wanted to see a book win for the first time. In order to showcase the diversity of reading interests for my sixth graders over the years, here is the list of winners for every year I’ve held the contest to choose their favorite novel.
