Friday, August 23, 2019

What I've Been Up To


Well, I haven't posted in a while because . . . I've been super busy starting a business! Two friends (Jeannie Ingraham and Deborah Natelson) and I saw a great need in the publishing industry and decided to do something about it ourselves! Stay tuned for more info about Thinklings Books, LLC. I'll link to our website once it's up and running.
One assignment I'm working on is creating all kinds of written content for Thinklings, like blog entries, and my social media biography, which took me a few tries to get right. I'm new to the business side of writing and publishing--thank goodness my friends are not! (And we've hired a couple of expert consultants in marketing and design.)
Here's one attempt at my social media biography that I really like--and so did my friends--but it's supposed to be one paragraph, so I had to chop it and smash it together.
Hope you enjoy learning a little more about me and the role that books and writing have played in my life!

Sparks: My mom had no idea what she had set in motion simply by reading to her tiny firstborn. By the age of two, I’d memorized all the baby books and had my grandpa thinking I could read already. (I couldn’t, actually, until the age of four.)

Embers: My third grade teacher couldn’t have known that her assignment to fill the pages of a blank book with a story would write something on the pages of my life. (I imagined an adventure my gerbils had while I was out of the house.)

Flames: The awkward, self-conscious girl who was graceful enough to navigate high school hallways with her nose buried in a fantasy or sci-fi novel, and still avoid collisions, didn’t dare to hope that a book of her own would ever be published. (I crafted tales about space voyages, and about a vortex that sucked a group of teens into a magical land.)

Conflagration: The college student who came out of her shell enough to join the newspaper staff, and to help manage the literary magazine, hadn’t a clue that grammar class would someday help her earn money as a proofreader, and sublimate her habit of nitpicking. Neither did she foresee that friends and mentors would open the door to an even greater career path. (But first I would be plunged into fiery trials of mental and physical illness, enough to extinguish my writing for a few years.)

Phoenix: The woman who rose from the ashes burns with a new passion. Kindled by kindred spirits, writing skills refined, vision blazing, she embarks—with two friends—on her greatest adventure yet: to revolutionize the publishing industry.

Join with Thinklings Books in helping our emphasis on QUALITY literature spread like wildfire!