Publetariat

 

 

 

  10/21 Marty Qualls gave 4 stars to: Scraps: Fictional Fragments by David Luck
bookshelves: fiction
status: Read in October, 2009

I really enjoyed the scenery of the book set in Colorado and Wyoming. It was just like coming home for me! (born and raised in Cheyenne and a regular visitor to Colorado when growing up). Especially enjoyable was any reference to the cold, wind, weather, smells in and views of the mountains. Characters in the stories crossed my mind several days after reading about their life experiences, so my "intrigue factor" was on high alert as I thought about the well drawn out characters and puzzled over how complex they were (but yet in many cases, they were in simple settings, leading simple lives). Reading the stories was very entertaining and emotional. I would like to read more of David Luck’s work and will be purchasing his "Men Are" to see what his unique perspective is on us men!

I’ve been spending the last 2 weeks trying to spruce upp our NM home for possible sale.  The stucco repairs are never-ending — one of the joys of owning a home made of dried mud!  The more I rub stucco into cracks, the more places I notice need patching as well.  It reminds me of something…..

Editing.  During my recent re-formatting battles to convert my first novel, The Red Gate, into a general e-book format, I began seeing cracks that needed patching.  At what point does a writer consider their work finished?  I’d love to hear from you laboring authors out there.  I know there must be a few clues that the end has been reached, but somehow, I’m still missing them.

My hands are getting calloused, and so is my imagination!  This coming Saturday, I’ll write up my observations about what to do while waiting, since waiting seems to be an author’s primary pastime.

Now that my online bookstore, Booksbyfay Book Store, ( www.booksbyfaystore.weebly.com) is up and running, I have found out everything is in working order. I made a book sale. Now I need to get busy and advertise, advertise, advertise.

I proudly tell you my farm house was built in 1899. I’ve lived here eighteen years in November. My husband and I knew this home and the surrounding land was for us the minute the real estate agent showed it to us.

With Halloween coming up I am reminded as with most homes as old as ours, there has to be quite a history if our house could talk and maybe even a few deaths within these walls. Once in awhile in the dark of night, the groans of this old house settling could easily be mistaken for someone sharing this abode with us. There’s what sounds like soft patter of bare feet, step by step, coming up the stairs in the middle of the night, putting a creaking pressure on the old steps The sound of one of the bedroom doors opening or closing can be quite loud because the doors tend to stick. We’ve gotten used to the noises and our wild imaginations. One of us usually whispers, "Spooks."

I love a ghost story now and then. The stories from the area of haunted homes and cemeteries that are believed to be true are fun to read. Do I believe everything I read? No. Am I going to some haunted cemetery in the middle of the night to prove someone wrong? Definitely not!

"A Teapot, Ghosts, Bats & More" ISBN 1438233698 is a collection of short stories I wrote for contests. Actually, I have written three short story books filled with contest entries that won from second to sixth place. When I was dividing the stories up into categories, I found I had written quite a few spooky stories.

Take for instant, the story about the ghost in the Iowa barn, Jacob’s Spirit. That came about because on a summer day years ago when we lived in the trailer house by my parents, two women stopped and talked to my son. They wanted to see this place the older woman had called home. Of course, many of the outbuildings she remembered had been gone along time as well as a grove of walnut trees in the pasture. The old barn, she remembered well, was the reason for a younger brother’s death around 1900. He was helping roof the barn, fell off, broke a leg and died of blood poisoning. He was buried at the back of the pasture, but the lady wasn’t sure of the exact spot. Perhaps, the parents had thought to start a family cemetery, but years later they retired and turned the farm over to a son. With the passing of time, whatever they used for a marker disappeared, and no one remembered about the grave. How my story plays out is what happened to my husband and I one winter when we had some mischievous sheep. Can’t tell you anymore without giving the plot away. Wait until Thursday and I will put "Jacob’s Spirit" on my blog for Halloween.

　

This post, from Steven Aitchison, originally appeared on DumbLittleMan on 10/23/09.

If all the punctuation marks got together for a party, the party wouldn’t come alive until the comma arrived. The comma is such a versatile little animal. Often abused, under-used and over-used, the comma can be a readers best friend, but a writer’s worst enemy.

Whilst the full stop is the red light to a sentence, the comma has the ability to keep the green light on a sentence for a long time. With its versatility it can keep complex sentences coherent, it can add additional information, add afterthoughts, and enlarge upon thoughts.

I bet you didn’t think a little curl of a pen mark could evoke such passion.

I have been fascinated with the comma ever since an English teacher told me, ‘The best way to use a comma is to think of it as a way of pausing before moving on to the next part of the sentence.’, whilst this is a myth it is a good way to get started thinking about commas. However, there are so many other ways it can be used.

9 ways to use the comma

 

1. To glue two sentences together
   When two complete sentences (independent clauses) are joined by a conjunction such as the words; and, but, or for.

   Example:

   The post about commas seemed like an unusual topic, but it managed to bring in over 100 comments.

   You will see that the sentence above could quite easily be split into two sentences with the use of a full stop to read:

   The post about commas seemed like an unusual topic. It managed to bring in over 100 comments.

    

2. To give additional information
   Commas are great in allowing us to give additional information in a sentence. The additional information is called an appositive phrase, which is a noun or a phrase placed next to a word to provide identification or give additional information.

   Example:

   Jay White, the owner of this blog, is seen as an authoritative figure in the world of blogging.

   You will see that, ‘the owner of this blog’, is not really necessary, but it does provide additional information, which could be useful.
   

3. Writing a series of three or more words or phrases

   Example:

   He was tall, dark, and handsome.

   He opened the email, read it, and decided to publish the article he had been sent.

   Note that you do not need to use the last comma in each of the sentences above. However, this is a matter of personal preference. Whichever way you choose, use it as consistently as possible.
    

4. Non restrictive phrases
   Non restrictive phrases give additional information to a reader, but it is not essential to the sentence to be understood.

   Example:

   My son, who is an artist, enjoys listening to trance music.

   You’ll see from the above sentence that if we were to take out ‘who is an artist’ the sentence would still hold. It is a non essential piece of information.

   However, if I had two or more sons, the non restrictive phrase ‘who is an artist’ would become essential for identification and therefore the commas would be left out because the phrase becomes essential to identify which of my two sons I was speaking about.
    

Read the rest of the post, which includes 5 more examples of correct comma usage and three of incorrect usage, on DumbLittleMan.

I have to apologize to Publetarians out there who follow my blather — I’m suffering from acute brain overload this week, and will have to postpone my weekly article until next Saturday. 

One really bright happening this week was the considerate reader who suggested I try OpenOffice’s word processor and office software.  It is open source code software, produced by Sun Microsystems, and is seamlessly compatible with Microsoft’s products, but it is nicely devoid of the cute graphics, odd heirarchy and dumbed-down menu layouts that Word is plagued by.  By the way, it is free for download.  I’ve used it a bit now, and would have happily paid for it.  It works.  That says a lot, at least to a crusty writer like me.

Thanks to all of you who have left your comments — I appreciate hearing from you and will fashion future articles, in a curmedgeonly fashion, of course, partly on what comes to me through comments.  Now, back to the keyboard…                                                                                                   [end of article – no need to click through]

This week I’m cheating a bit by presenting the opening to my work-in-progress novel—though I’m using the expression "in progress" very loosely since I haven’t done any work on this in over a year.

I want to point out that the story doesn’t have an especially feminist bent, this isn’t man-hating lit. It’s more an exploration of how each sex (male vs. female) defines the other to some extent, and the possible impacts of removing one sex’s influence on the other. I got the idea one day after hearing someone say, yet again, that if women ran the world there would be no wars or crimes against humanity, and women everywhere would go around in sweatpants and ponytails. I disagree, and wanted to explore the reasons why.

---

The day all the men and boys vanished was otherwise unexceptional. There were no natural disasters to report, no curious lights in the sky, no extraterrestrial visitations. They were simply…gone. As the sun crawled across the surface of the Earth that morning, its indifferent rays sought out each empty bed and cot and filled them all with an unforgiving light.

All over the world, small, identical dramas played out in houses, flats, huts, tents, kibbutzim and hotel rooms. The length of time it took doubting wives and would-be wives to journey from disbelief to resignation betrayed the relative degree of their secret ambivalences. Resolute wives and lovers fared worse, having been certain they had no reason to hold back some small part of themselves against future abandonment.

The worst anguish was reserved for mothers, robbed as they were not only of their sons, but of the rallying support of family, friends and the general public that had always been the acknowledged due of these bereft, temporarily singular, creatures. When each utterly shattered, hysterical woman tumbled to the door of her neighbor, she was as likely to meet a maelstrom of horror matching her own as to collapse into the arms of a supportive caretaker. And what mother has not, for at least one brief second, harbored a dark wish to be rid of a colicky infant, screaming toddler, churlish adolescent, cruelly spiteful teenage daughter or failed son? The self-recriminations of mothers who knew such impulses had been fleeting and unintentional were no less intense than those of mothers who reacted to their losses with a flood of relief that was at once sickening and welcome to them.

The full scale of the situation wasn’t fully understood for several days, while fruitless searches were conducted and wary, halting intelligence trickled across borders. A handful of tribes and isolated nations maintain to this day they were unaffected, but the truth of the matter is known: at some point between the previous nightfall and the dawn of that inexplicable morning, every human male on Earth, from zygote to centenarian, disappeared and was never heard from again.

Following the initial storm of panicked calls, emails, tweets and reportage, a peculiar lull took over and life momentarily came to a standstill. News of the crisis remained unchanged, yet no other news seemed worthy of attention. Soon enough, the pull to routine asserted itself. The comfort of it both surprised and shamed the women.  They seemed not to realize that the pragmatism bred into them by centuries of vigilant, if subconscious, self-containment and self-denial constituted their most powerful survival skill. 
 

The last few days must be our burst of Indian summer. When the days like today turn cold and rainy it makes me appreciate those few warmer, sunny days. I spent one of those days cleaning off my flower beds. From year to year, I save my flower seed to use the next spring so the flower beds are the last yard work I do. Early on I potted every flower that wouldn’t make it through the winter and brought them inside. They are happily enjoying the indoor warmth in the south window upstairs.

I always hate to see the colors in my yard go from bright yellows, oranges, purple, and pinks to brown. Right now I have old fashion (Aunt Ethel) asters, a few hardy pansies and petunias trying to hang on. Many of my perennials have been given to me from a member of the family. I inherited being a flower lover. Just not the green thumb that goes with it. I don’t usually think about where I collected my start of flowers until someone takes a tour in the spring. This spring when a friend was visiting, I stopped to explain my asters came from Aunt Ethel Risner in Arkansas, my peonies by the clothes line poles were my mother’s plus her fern peony and white lilies with purple dots. An 80 year old Christmas Cactus that comes in during the winter belonged to a friend of my mother’s in Missouri. One large peony dates back to 1924 from my father’s parents yard in Montevallo, Missouri. His father set the a whole row out, and Dad brought a start to Iowa with us in 1961. The pussy willow, almond bush, old fashion roses and coriospis came from my mother in law. The day lilies came from friend, Gladys. My three small walnut trees and two persimmon trees are from Uncle Frandell Risner’s fall crops in Arkansas a few years back. That is just the top of the list of trees, flowers and bushes I have planted on our land. Some plants I actually bought myself. The ones, that started out as gifts, are now part of my heritage and will long be remember on my family tree just as much as my ability to use my imagination to write books.

Now I have to tell you about going international on ebay with book sales. My first attempt at using ebay was to auction off things. I was never very successful with that. When I self published my books I decided to try selling one of them in "fixed price" on ebay. "Christmas Traditions" has been selling there for a year now. When I published "A Promise Is A Promise" this summer, I wanted to try selling that book on ebay. First though, I emailed all the buyers of my first book to see if I could interest them in buying Promise from me without going through ebay. I did sell about half of my buyers a book. Made me more profit. Now that those buyers know that Promise is a series, they have gotten back to me to ask that I hurry up and get book two done

I’ve always put in an inventory of all my books and contact information with all my sales. The amount of the introductory fee is so small, I have considered this a good way to advertise. I can tell by the hit counter how many take a look at my books. In my ebay, I can see how many are watching my books sell. Some day I shall venture forth with a few more books to see if I can attract more buyers, but right now what attracts attention is the Amish books not my name as the author.

This last week I sold a book to a lady in Onterio Canada. That in itself was a thrill, but now I am opened up to sell all around the world. Since I have the first of both books on www.authonomy.com , I had a couple of writers from England interested in buying my books. Perhaps, they might find my books on ebay in their country and give them a try. Getting known takes time so I just have to be patient and see what happens next. I’ll keep you posted.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

This post, from K.M. Weiland, originally appeared on the Show Some Character! blog on Jason Black’s Plot to Punctuation site on 10/9/09.

Have you ever struggled with a character who just wouldn’t come to life? Who seemed great in your head, but who just laid there like a dead fish once you put him on the page?

Maybe you need to steal his shoes.

It may be that the character has too many advantages. You may, as the saying goes, need to make things worse before the book can get better. I learned this lesson from a fantasy novel I critiqued once, although I believe the principle applies in any genre.

The novel in question was a pretty straightforward fantasy arc: hero has to brave a bunch of dangers in order to save the princess. Nothing wrong with that at all. But the hero was, well, too heroic.

He was terribly strong, with the strength of three ordinary men. He wielded an enormous sword that most men couldn’t even lift. He was an exceptional swordsman, having been trained by the best swordmaster in all the land.

Thus fully prepared, he set off to battle.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is certainly a place in the world for hack-and-slash fantasy novels, where heroes with rippling muscles lay waste to armies of the enemy, then retire to the local tavern for a tankard of well-earned ale and a wench (not necessarily in that order). Plenty of books like that have sold plenty of copies.

However, the characterization in them is rather thin. And since this blog is all about characterization, let’s fix that.

This setup wasn’t very dramatic because the hero was too well matched to the task. His backstory eliminated any real challenge from his task. No challenge, no drama. The hero was such a bad-ass, right out of the gate, that of course we expect him to succeed. That’s boring. We need to saddle the hero with some misfortunes. We need to take him down a few pegs before we’ll have any interesting drama to work with.

We need, in other words, to steal his shoes. You can go two ways here:

Read the rest of the post on the Show Some Character! blog on Jason Black’s Plot to Punctuation site.

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear’s Book Trends blog.

Gears grinding, the sorely abused SUV careened through the four-way stop at full speed, forcing the half dozen cars in its wake to scatter like ants in the rain. From there it wove at top speed down 17^th, scuffing too many bumpers and setting off too many car alarms to count.

It literally cut the corner at Holt Street, jumping across a small triangle of sidewalk to bypass a Mini Cooper that showed no signs of forward momentum—never mind that the light was red—, displacing a bus bench and adding yet another battle scar to its disfigured chassis.

From there it screamed down the alley behind Carver Avenue, sending trash cans and boxes of refuse flying like so many bowling pins, and frightening two dogs, a cat and several pigeons nearly to death. It barely slowed taking the turn out of the alley and onto 19^th, though the engine’s squealing plea for a much-needed downshift was heard for blocks all around. Thus alerted to their impending doom, pedestrians and bicyclists fled before the primer-spotted terror as it sped toward the t-stop intersection up ahead, and the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows of the Mironi Brothers Bakery.

At one hundred feet, it held steady. At seventy-five, no change. At fifty the driver yanked the wheel hard to the left and stomped on the brake pedal, sending the rear tires into a smoking, sideways skid. The heap of metal, fiberglass, plastic and melting rubber plowed sideways into the loading zone, caromed off a parking meter and bounced to a stop.

The twentyish driver killed the engine and stepped out into the street, clipboard and pen in hand, head bobbing enthusiastically to whatever his iPod was piping into his cranium. He circled around to the sidewalk, entered the bakery and yanked one earbud loose.

“Yo!” he announced to the girl behind the counter. “Cake pickup for the Carruthers wedding.”

We’ve been on the road, traveling I-40 West bound to our New Mexico Hacienda.  Since our primary care physician didn’t get any seasonal flu shots before we left, he suggested we get them in NM. Not a bad idea, but the whole trip, especially through Tennessee during a Nationally-televised Swine Flue Outbreak, we were sanitizing our hands every fiftenn minutes and driving with the air conditioneer cabin air filter "ON".  Pretty cowardly. 

Once we got in and settled, I checked out my book’s Amazon page to find I’d managed to garner a 5-star, Highly Recommend from Midwest Book Revue!  Hooray! Hooray!  It turned out the excitement faded quickly, though…. No more flu shots in NM!  Ok, I’ll deal with that. I had work to do.

I wanted to upload my book to Smashwords for conversion to their electronic format. I had heard that Smashwords was going to partner with Sony and another BIG HITTER, so I figured this would be a slam-dunk selling venue.

Herein lies the tale of woe….file format conversions are not for sissies.  Right now, my writer’s forward progress has been slowed to a stand still.  A little back-sliding can be entertaining, though.

I’ll give you the whole, sad tale on this Saturday’s installment of the Indie Curmudgeon. 

 

This post, from P. Bradley Robb, originally appeared on Fiction Matters on 10/14/09.

In our modern world, it is difficult to separate the concept of art from the medium it is delivered in. For most of our lives, music has been synonymous with the package it was delivered in – be it vinyl, cassette, or compact disc. Movies are even more difficult to pin down, having existed wholly in their medium as film before expanding into video cassettes and DVDs. And books? Since Gutenberg, books have been a wholly contained identity, where the package and idea were tightly intertwined.

With the blurring of medium and message naturally came entrenched industries dedicated to delivering the package more than idea. Thirty years ago, you had to leave your house to see a movie. A century ago, music was wholly witnessed live. And six hundred years ago, the story and the idea were not typically delivered to the great unwashed masses in books, but orally in a communion between thinker and audience.

Because of the financial requirements of packaging ideas – regardless of delivery method – each industry erected walls, barriers to entry, and in those walls were gates and gatekeepers. These individuals and organizations were tasked with deciding which ideas were worthy of the industry’s money, and the audience’s time. And for a long time, such a concept worked. The industries delivering ideas as product flourished, billions upon billions of dollars were made. The public was largely happy.

Or they were, until the mediums suffered a vast digital destruction. The combined increase in computing power paired with a popularized communications medium meant that the bar to entry was suddenly and significantly lowered. That bar which continues to fall.

I was working as a music journalist when that industry was waking up to this quiet, slow, yet dramatic power shift. For the first time, technology allow a properly motivated individual to remove vast swaths of the music industry. Home recording equipment could be completely purchased for about the same price as a single weekend in a professional studio. Making matters worse, the quality of the new end product was roughly on par with that of former standard. Discerning ears could and did tell the difference, but passionate pioneers were able to blaze forward – many removing the remainder of the music producing chain and selling directly to customers.

You see, it wasn’t Napster that spelled the doom of the music industry, it was Pro Tools and MySpace. These two items tore down the gates going into and coming out of the walled industry. These empowered the solo musician to both create and promote without someone else telling them how or what or where or when. And while the modern music industry is still alive and arguably kicking, the world today is experiencing a musical renaissance never seen before, largely without the Big Four labels.

How does this relate to publishing? The actual mediums bare very little similarity. Music is easily portable and nearly ubiquitous in the daily lives, able to be consumed and shared in small chunks. Books, while quickly reaching that same level of portability, asking much more of the reader in terms of time and attention.

But look at the similarities in disruption that allow me to write and you to read this essay. It was written on a computer which I paid nothing for, on an operating system freely given away, and in a pair of programs (1,2) that give me every ounce of production power that publishing industry had a near monopoly on when I was a child. While musicians have ProTools, writers have the entire computer and we’re waking up to the power of the server.

Read the rest of the post on Fiction Matters.

I was happy to learn yesterday that Storm Approaching has been given an Honorable Mention in the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards, in the Genre Fiction category.

All about Publetariat

I’d say out of all my books Open A Window (Alzheimer’s Caregiver Handbook) ISBN 1438244991 is the one I am most proud to have written. At the nursing home, I’d been approached by resident families with questions. Not realizing the awful twists and turns Alzheimer’s takes, family members were caught off guard. They needed education.

 

 

The thought came to me that I should write an Alzheimer’s Caregiver Handbook to help educate people who have loved ones in the nursing home. I made a list of all the symptoms and behaviors that went with Alzheimer’s disease. While I was working, I watched for examples to use in this book. Each example, I wrote down right away when I got home so I wouldn’t forget any of the details. Eventually, I had enough information to make a book.

 

The program – Lotus – came with my IBM computer in 1999. I know that program has been outdated for a long time, but I like using it for documents. I’m used to it. The program has a booklet maker which came in handy back in the day when I had to make hard copy. The book pages are printed from the middle of the book back to the front on even pages. Turn the pages over and print the odd pages. This wasn’t a perfect system. I had to start over several times, because of printer errors.

Finally, I had a completed manuscript. After some consumer shopping, I found a Print shop to make my books. I wanted two staples to hold the book together on 100 books. That must have been a time consuming job that the workers weren’t crazy about doing. The woman at the counter tried to talk me into using the spiral plastic or perfect binding. I didn’t want my book to look like a telephone book, and perfect binding was expensive. This special book should look as much like any other book as possible so I was determined to use staples.

I designed the cover myself. A simple window with tie back curtains in purple, because that is the Alzheimer’s Association color. That cover didn’t suit the printer. They had to use one of their clip art windows. It’s been awhile, but I think the reasoning was I had too many shades of purple in my curtain plus the brown window. Thinking back on that explanation, it seems to me that no matter what the cover colors, the printer should have been able to print them. Anyway, I paid the extra $25.00 for the cover. The discussion about the staples and the cover kept up over a couple of weeks while they held up my printing job. By that time I was anxious to get my books done before the Printer found some other problem. The window turned out to be a good choice for the cover after all.

The nursing home administrator helped with book sales since many prospective book buyers that needed educating went through her office. People read the book and sent me complimentary comments. They were relieved to at last understand in layman terms what happens to a person who has Alzheimer’s disease.

In 2000, I started an Alzheimer’s support group at the nursing home. Open A Window came in handy as an ice breaker. I read a chapter. That was enough to get people started talking about what has happened with their loved ones. You would think that the many people in this support group over the eight years I facilitated it would be book buyers. In some cases, that was true. More times than not, someone would get me aside, with tears in their eyes, to whisper about a particularly hard situation they had at home. Always, I could say I knew how these people felt, because I had been there while taking care of my father. I offered advise from my experiences but I wanted to do more. I gave them a copy of my book. At the December meeting, I always came up with some small gift for the members. One year, it was a copy of my book. Since I hadn’t meant for this to be a profit making adventure, all I wanted was enough money to cover the printing cost.

Most of the books I sold went to audiences I spoke to on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association. I was asked to speak at a training session for new employees at a Cedar Rapids Nursing Home. I left one of my books and mentioned reading from the book worked well for a support group. Soon after that, the social worker asked me to come to her support group meeting to speak. I sold several of my books as a result of that meeting.

The nursing home gives a inservice each month to educate the staff on various topics. One time, Jolene Brackey, a well known Alzheimer’s speaker and author, was invited to talk. At that time she lived at Polk City, Iowa. Since then she has moved to Montana. To find out more about her, her website is http://www.enhancedmoments.com This young woman gives a very dynamic speech that has her audiences laughing one minute and close to tears the next. Jolene asked if we had a support group she could talk to after the inservice. My group met at night, but I put out the word and had an afternoon meeting.

What I didn’t know was the administrator had sent Jolene my Open A Window book. After she read Jolene’s Creating Moments Of Joy book, she told her there was an author at our nursing home. She sent me a note to let me know how much she liked what I had written. One day, I received a call from Jolene. She was writing her latest book Creating Moments Of Joy the third revised edition. Jolene asked me if she could use some of my stories in her book. I was thrilled. That was the first of my writing to get published. Jolene said I was more descriptive than she was. That was quite a compliment from a woman who writes as well as she does.

When my supply of books ran out, I wanted to order another 100. By then I had come up with more examples so I had to do a new hard copy. Then I set to work on the cover. I didn’t want to pay another $25.00 so I scanned the window on the cover. For the new cover, I enlarged the window and the title. I bought stock paper and printed my covers to be stapled on the books. The old question of did I really want staples came up again. I held my ground and got what I wanted.

Under the window on the cover, I put By Fay Risner CNA. The idea of using CNA was to give my book some credence as help in a complicated disease. I got the idea while I attended an Alzheimer’s annual conference in Cedar Rapids. A speaker was listing who would be talking that day. One topic was about therapy dogs. The speaker said the dog used in the session was so well trained, he had more alphabet soup behind his name than she did. It occurred to me that I had alphabet soup behind my name. Granted I was way down on the health care totem pole, but still I should use what I have.

In 2002, I had mentioned to the Alzheimer’s Association director that CNAs aren’t getting enough training about Alzheimer’s before they start work. An evening session was started that year for CNAs to coincide with the evening session for family members. I was asked to be the first speaker. One woman in the audience is a social worker. She bought a book. Months later, I received a call from her. She was taking books to a social worker conference in Ames. Would I like to give her a box of my books to put out for sale? I was thrilled. She sold them all. The next year, the social worker took another box. A social worker at the conference took her book back to Grinnell. Loaned it to an nurse training CNAs and that nurse ordered three more to use for her training sessions.

Now I have Open A Window published. This is one of the books sold at the Lemstone Christian Bookstore in Cedar Rapids at Collins Road Plaza across from Linndale Mall. On the back cover of my book is a review from Jolene Brackey. Below that is as many of the reader reviews that I could fit on the page. I’ll talk more about the importance of reviews one of these days.

 

 

　

　

 

Mom tells me you haven’t fed her all day.

Dad keeps asking me the same question over and over.

Aunt Mable wants me to take her to her parents house. Her parents passed away years ago.