by jphilo | Jun 27, 2011 | Book Updates
The first proofs (the edits on the original manuscript sent in by an author) are out of my hands. On Friday I emailed my first proof edits back to the publisher. Now the editor assigned to Different Dream Parenting will spend the next month wrestling with my changes and overseeing the typesetting. Then she’ll send the final proofs this direction for final inspection before it’s off to the printer.
Suddenly, life is not in the thrall of one, all-consuming task master. Suddenly, I have choices to make. Time to fill. A multitude of ideas to pursue. And no more excuses to avoid unpleasant tasks like weeding the flowerbeds. Boy, did they need weeding.
So this morning in the aftermath of last night’s doozy of a thunderstorm, while the sky cleared for a few short hours, my hands were busy pulling weeds, deadheading blossoms, pruning the plants in hanging baskets, and treating my arms and legs to an unplanned, but highly effective mud bath.
By the end of an hour, the flowers had been granted a reprieve in their battle against the weeds for access to the sun. The gardens no longer looked wild and neglected. The spreading violas were tame once more, the daisies were cut down to size, the dead rose buds were gone, and everything remaining had the natural, shaggy beauty my daughter loves.
I could have done more, but indoor tasks were calling. Lists to make, blogs to write, marketing to be done, emails to send, workshop presentations to prepare, new book proposals to plan. More than can possibly be done before the final proofs arrive.
But for a few short weeks, I’ll bask in the freedom and the chaos, the chance to dream and shape something new. I’ll dive into the mishmash of new beginnings and see where they go. I’ll enjoy unexpected mud baths and life with the natural, shaggy beauty of my flowerbeds. My empty hands are itching to get dirty. It’s time to bring on the mess!
by jphilo | Jun 13, 2011 | Book Updates
For about a week now, I’ve been editing Different Dream Parenting. going through the suggestions sent by the editor at Discovery House and making changes. The process is slow, humbling, engrossing, and painful at times. My thoughts ranged from Did I really write that confusing sentence? to Why does the editor have to be so picky? to I don’t want to do this anymore!
But then something happened this weekend which improved my attitude about the entire process. I was listening to an audiobook by a best selling suspense/conspiracy theory author. He’s written many books and made boatloads of money. Still, I won’t reveal his name – not out of respect, but out of compassion.
I walking along, listening to a scene where the protagonist (male) was in the hospital after an accident and the person who is revealed in the end as the antagonist (female) comes to visit. When the woman enters the room (wearing a white skirt that accentuated her tan legs), the author said, “She placed a pair of penetrating eyes on the man in the hospital bed.”
An image of two eyeballs lying on the fresh, white sheet covering the hospitalized man came to mind, along with several rascally thoughts:
Wouldn’t the eyes roll off onto the floor?
Or would penetrating eyes sink through the sheets and burn into the protagonist’s chest?
Did the sight of penetrating eyes make him want to barf?
What color were they?
Were these the antagonist’s actual eyes?
If so, is she now blind?
Or if they were extra eyes, did she pull them from a pocket?
Wait, wouldn’t penetrating eyes burn right through her pocket?
So were they in a carrying case?
And finally:
Why in the world didn’t the author’s editor catch that?
Thank goodness my editor wouldn’t let that kind of sloppy writing slip past her.
Suddenly I was eager to return the slow, humbling, engrossing, and sometimes painful task of editing that is ruling my life right now. I was grateful for my editor’s eyes which had deftly penetrated the snafus in my manuscript. Every now and then, I wonder, Does she ever take out those penetrating eyes on some poor sucker’s hospital bed?
by jphilo | Apr 21, 2011 | Book Updates
Looking for a special a treat to plop in your Easter basket come Sunday morning? Here’s one that’s better than chocolate, better than dyed eggs, better than jelly beans, better than live chicks and bunnies, better than stuffed animals.
Drum roll please…
It’s a sneak peek at my upcoming book, Different Dream Parenting. And it’s not just a page loaded with informative content, chosen willy nilly from any old chapter in the book.
Another drum roll please…
It’s an excerpt from the index. Yes, you heard that right. It’s a sneak peek at the one section packed with features found nowhere else in the book:
alphabetical order,
straight right columns,
key words and concepts,
discriminating capital letters,
commas and semi-colons,
and other goodies that make the hearts of left-brained librarians go pitter pat.
Please keep in mind this is just the first draft. I’ll be adding lots more juicy, tantalizing key words and phrases during the rewrite – you know, the kind of stuff that really grabs the reader so they keep turning pages and coming back for more. Sometime in the future, page numbers will make an appearance, but not quite yet. And the editor just emailed to say the house prefers running outlines over tabbed one. So today, I’ll be adding teeny, tiny feet to each page and shoving them into miniature cross trainers so this index can run like the wind. But not now. Not yet. Now’s the time for your sneak peek at Different Dream Parenting.
A final drum roll please….
Documentation,
computer,
individualized educational plans (IEP),
insurance,
hospital,
medical,
parent,
sample forms,
Dougy Center,
Down Syndrome,
Durable power of attorney,
Early childhood intervention,
Eareckson Tada, Joni,
Easter Seals,
Elks Club,
Emergency preparedness plan,
Employment,
Estate planning. See Financial and estate planning
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR),
Exceptional Parent Magazine,
Extended family,
Facebook
Are you a little breathless? Hankering to hurry on over to Amazon and pre-order the book? Dying for the sequel? Well, stay tuned, ‘cause when the running index revision is done, you’ll get another sneak peek.
Same time.
Same website.
All new content.
All the time.
We aim to please.
by jphilo | Mar 28, 2011 | Book Updates
Yes, yes, yes!
Hip, hip, hooray!
Grin, grin, grin!
Jig, jig, jig!
The above celebration is for those of you who didn’t hear the first big yahoo on Friday afternoon when I sent the manuscript for Different Dream Parenting to my editor at Discovery House Publisher (DHP). Anyone who didn’t hear the second yahoo when the editor emailed back to say DHP plans to release both paper and electronic versions next October can lay claim to the celebration, too.
When parents of kids with special needs kids hear the titles, Different Dream Parenting and A DIfferent Dream for My Child, they almost always nod and say, “That’s exactly what this is. A different dream.” Some of them ask a follow up question. “It’s kind of like the story, Welcome to Holland. Have you read it?” I nod, and we launch into a discussion about how parenting a child with special needs is indeed like a delightful vacation in Holland – even though we thought our vacation would be in Italy.
Well, I almost let out a third yahoo on Friday while reading a favorite special needs blog by Ellen Seidman at www.LoveThatMax.com. Last Monday she posted an interview with Emily Perl Kingsley, the author of Welcome to Holland. Kingsley wrote the essay in 1987, after her son was born with Down Syndrome. At the time, she was a writer for Sesame Street and was instrumental in the inclusion of people with special needs on the show. The interview, which tells how Welcome to Holland became famous, is wonderful.
But don’t take my word for it. Go to www.LoveThatMax.com and read the interview. You’ll be amazed by how one person used her talents to influence and encourage countless families. Maybe Kinglsey’s efforts will give you some ideas about how to influence the world around you. She’s inspired me to get cracking on a proposal for another book to assist parents of kids with special needs.
So much for celebrating. It’s time to get to work again!
by jphilo | Mar 17, 2011 | Book Updates
For those of you who followed the Readers’ Choice Awards at about.com, the official results are in. Actually, when the voting ending on March 8, the winning nominee in the special needs memoir category was obvious. But about.com’s contest rules require a week to verify the results before announcing the winner. Then it took me a week to write the post, so two weeks late, the winner is…My Baby Rides the Short Bus.
Ahhh shucks, you might be saying. I was hoping the winner would be A Different Dream for My Child. Well, so was I. But Different Dream came in at third place out of five, which was a very satisfying finish. Especially behind My Baby Rides the Short Bus and the first runner up, The Braided Cord. Both are excellent books, as are the fourth and fifth place nominees Gravity Pulls You In and Shuyler’s Monster.
In a way, I feel as though A Different Dream won the Miss Congeniality competition, which was always my favorite part of the Miss America competition each year. I always identified with those gals. They were so darn spunky!
The real winner in the special needs memoir category (and the other three special needs categories at about.com) are the parents, kids and professionals in the special needs community. Why? Because the visibility of the 20 finalists (5 in each of the 4 categories = 20, for those of you wondering about the math) has been raised significantly.
Which has already led to more traffic at the nominated blogs and mores sales for the nominated books.
Which means more parents looking for support are finding it.?Which means they don’t feel so isolated or alone.?Which is why the blogs were created and the books were written in the first place.
The person who made all this happen is Terri Mauro at about.com. She advocated for the inclusion of special needs categories in the Readers’ Choice Awards, and she did all the organizing, posting, counting, and such. So thank you, Terri, for all your hard work. You can thank Terri yourself, check out the Readers’ Choice Awards, finalists, and nominees in all categories at www.about.com
If you want to make A Different Dream for My Child more visible, please consider writing a review of the book at about.com. Just go to the finalists page and scroll down to the link for A Different Dream for My Child. Then click on “tell us why you like it” to get to the electronic review form. Your reviews mean a great deal to me personally. But more importantly, they make a big difference in whether or not potential readers buy the book.
by jphilo | Mar 10, 2011 | Book Updates
Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos was an unknown entity when I picked the audio version at the library a few weeks ago. The large yellow sticker on the front of the audio CD case labeled it at 2011‘s All Iowa Read.
The plot summary on the back cover introduced Hope Jones, a woman swallowed by a tornado in the mid-1970s and alluded to her disappearance and it’s impact on the lives of her three children, even into adulthood. The Iowa/tornado connection was obvious, but when I took the book home and began listening, others emerged.
Hope and her family live in Emlyn Springs, a small, fictitious town with Welsh roots south of Lincoln, Nebraska. The town is a vibrant community when Hope and her physician husband, Llewellyn move there in the early 1960s. Over the years, Emlyn Springs follows the same slow decline of many small, Iowa towns, exacerbated by the farm crisis in the 1980s. By the early 2000s, Emlyn Springs, home of Fancy Egg Days, is struggling to survive.
The book had another, more personal connection. Hope Jones, mother of three, is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) when her children are young. At the heart of the book is the devastation wrought on Hope’s body and self-image, her marriage, and her children by the nasty, debilitating disease. It’s effects were a whirlwind of destruction, every bit as treacherous and confusing as the tornadoes that strike Emlyn Springs in 1978 and 2004.
How could I not compare and contrast the Jones family’s experience to our own?
Dad was diagnosed in 1958. Hope some years later.
Mom’s total, almost obsessive devotion to Dad. Llewellyn Jones pulling away from him.
The impact of the illness on Hope’s three children into adulthood. My siblings and I, also.
Emlyn Springs residents caring more than Hope realized. The same was true in our town.
The ways MS changed Hope’s personality. The ways it changed my father, too.
To be honest, I didn’t like Hope much by the end of the book. I didn’t like her response to the disease, even though I understood her reasons. Her multiplied devastation in her family. She was like someone who chooses to stand on the roof during a tornado instead of going to the basement. Sing Them Home bothered me. A lot. I found it too dark, too lacking in hope – ironic in light of the main character’s name. But I’m glad to have read it and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Why? Because it gives an accurate picture of small town, midwestern life. And once you’re read it, you will look at multiple sclerosis with new eyes. So I say, join all Iowa and read this book. Hopefully, it will bother you, too.
