Last weekend I attended WisRWA’s fall workshop, “Unlock Your A Game”, led by Heidi Cullinan. It was an intensive one-day workshop based on the book by her and Damon Suede, “Your A Game: Winning Promo for Genre Fiction”. Going in, I thought I understood the concept of branding, but I had no idea just how involved a process it is. It’s not merely a tagline that describes my books. It’s symbols and pictures and even colors used on business cards and websites, maybe even the clothing you wear to an event. It might be the font color, size and style on your website and book covers. It’s how you portray yourself in everything you say and do to agents, editors, publishers, media, and, most importantly, your fans and readers.

Think about it. When you go to the grocery store what products immediately catch your attention? Why? Which ones do you buy, claiming they taste better when maybe it’s more the color of the packaging than the actual flavor? Brand is more than the name on the label, or author’s name on the cover. There’s Flo from Progressive Insurance, the Geico gecko, Madge the manicurist who used to soak her hands in Palmolive dish soap, Mr. Clean, and those scrubbing bubbles, just to name a few. You don’t need to be told the brand name to recognize them. That’s branding.

“Your A Game” teaches using game theory to craft Brand, Presence, and Market strategy. Brand is my piece in the game; presence, the rules of engagement; and market, my playing board. I’m currently working on my brand, my tagline, my piece in the game. It’s the thing that will first and foremost set me apart from all the other players.

We spent all day breaking down each of the three components, interspersed with exercises meant to put our new knowledge to work. This proved to be not as easy as you might think. By the end of the afternoon, when it was time to put everything we learned together into draft bios and pitches, we were exhausted. Heidi warned us in the beginning that there was a lot of information and by the time we were done our brains would feel overloaded, overwhelmed, and be just plain over flowing. She wasn’t kidding! By the last exercises I couldn’t put two words together on the page and have them make sense…or even not make sense. My hand refused to move my pen across my paper. And I wasn’t the only one in the room who looked like they might need help remembering their own name.

Despite all this, I loved every minute of it! That’s right. I loved it and even bought the e-book when I got home. I anticipate some long winter hours studying and practicing until I get it just right.

Few paths in life are straight and easy. Changes have to be made, twists and turns, perhaps back tracking before choosing a new direction. The reasons can be many, from an unexpected personal or family situation, to the decision that another path has become more desirable. I have made the decision to change my path toward becoming a published author.

My dream to publish has been a lifelong one. I have taken classes, joined critique groups. Over the years I’ve had success publishing poetry and short stories, but the goal of publishing a novel still beckoned, just out of reach, until recent years when I felt ready to push ahead.

My goal has been to find an agent/publisher. This is a high-reaching goal. Agents and editors receive thousands of submissions. Some requested and some cold. Some are not very good, but many, if not most, of them are very good and worthy of publication. Unfortunately, not all of them can be accepted. It costs a publisher considerable money to bring a book to the marketplace and they have to give everything they can to each title chosen to make it a success. Because of this, many wonderful stories have gone unpublished, unread, in the past. The rise in the number of small independent publishing companies has improved the odds of publication, but they have even less money than the big houses to invest in new titles.

Then along came self-publishing. The down side is this allows even poorly written unedited books to be published. The up side is now readers have so many more good books to choose from, books that don’t necessarily fall into the specific needs of traditional publishers but do provide an exciting and exceptional read.

Comments received from submissions have indicated my book is a good read but it just doesn’t fit into the narrowly defined needs of publishers at this time. I could decide to stick it in a drawer to wait and see if those needs change, or I can take control of my path and publish it myself. This being said, my path to publication has taken a turn. I’ve decided to abandon my search for an agent/publisher and self-publish.

I have arranged for a professional editor. I am discussing the correct path forward with authors I know who self-publish. I am considering cover design. I’m even considering a different title. While my path has changed, the end goal is the same. Stay tuned for updates.

September is here. While technically it’s still summer, fall not scheduled to officially arrive until the 22^nd, all the signs are here. Leaves are changing. Nights are cold with mild days. Acorns litter our yard this year in greater numbers than ever before, which causes me to fear a harsh winter is coming. School is back in session for children everywhere and their mothers are celebrating with pumpkin spice anything: coffee, lattes, muffins, scones.

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. The cold nights make for better sleeping. Mild days still allow for a round of golf, or a hike on one of our many beautiful trails. And I admit I might just love pumpkin spice a little more than is healthy.

When I was growing up I loved that school would be starting again. By then I was bored with summer and ready to go back to the classroom. Store shelves stacked high with colorful notebooks, file folders, and 3-ring binders made my heart race. There was nothing better, to me, than a new box of crayons, colored pencils, or markers. Oh the possibilities in that box! I couldn’t wait to find out who my teacher was going to be, and which of my friends would be in the same class with me. In high school, fall meant football games, dances, Homecoming.

When my children were young I still felt that excitement. Except, by then I was looking forward to days free from the complaint, “I have nothing to do!” From our current home I can hear the school bells ring and listen to the children on the playground during recess. That’s when all the old memories come back.

Perhaps my excitement came from my father. He was a high school teacher and always anxious to start the new school year. I think his excitement became my excitement. Before school started I would sometimes go with when he prepared his classroom. At the end of the year I could help him pack anything that wasn’t staying over the summer. During the school year he graded papers while we did our homework.

Later, when we were older, my mother went back to school to become a grade school teacher and librarian. I always knew that one day I would attend university, but the example of her going back as an older, non-traditional, student gave me the courage to do the same and finish my degree after my children were in school. And when I did, that old feeling came back, the excitement of a new school year, new classes, and old faces.

The one bad side…fall fast becomes winter.

I am always writing. Sometimes that means sitting at my computer, as I am now. Sometimes it means doing almost anything else while my brain works on something to do with my book.

Lately, that means trying to work out a story hole in “The Healing Heart”. I’ve been revising my first 20 chapters in order to get myself back on the path, and in doing so I found one inconsistency and a couple holes. Most have been quick and easy to fix, but one has kept me stymied. I need to add a scene, a not necessarily long but crucial scene. The problem’s been how to do it without sounding like I’ve just stuck it in there…a sort of info dump that takes away from the flow. I knew which chapter it had to be in, I just couldn’t figure out how to do it.

So, I thought about it. And thought about it and thought about it. I thought about it while typing in the revisions for previous chapters. I thought about it while lying awake in the dark at night. I thought about it while cross-stitching and while making jam. I thought about it while staring blankly out the window at the rain. You get it…I thought about it a lot.

Then it hit me while reading a magazine. Why then? I don’t know. All I know is the answer was so obvious I also don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.

That’s the way it is with all writers. We don’t write so much because we want to, but because we HAVE to. It’s a compulsion. And sometimes it’s pure torture. When you read a book you can’t help but think how easy it would be to write one. All you need is a story idea and everyone has at least one of those. Ask any writer who’s had to make small talk at a cocktail party, or been forced to speak to the stranger sitting next to them on a plane. Everyone has a book they’d write, too, if they had the free time.

Writers don’t write a book because they have a free weekend. (After all, you can READ a book in a weekend so writing one over two days is nothing, right?) Writers write because they can’t not write. For many that means getting up before the kids are awake or it’s time to go to the day job. If they go for very long away from their computer, or notebook for those who prefer drafting in long-hand, they start pacing the floor and muttering things that could frighten the children. Now, it could just mean they’re working out their killer’s motive and signature, but it could also mean they need to get back to their writing before all the plot twists in their head drive them to drink.

Finding the right words to put on paper might be agonizing, but once I do the feeling is like a drug and I have to do it again. That’s what it means to be a writer.

I love history. It’s why I chose a history degree program when I went to college. It’s why I read historical, both fiction and nonfiction. It’s why I write historical novels. I just really enjoy researching. I own many nonfiction history books, there’s the internet, and then there’s fiction. That’s right; sometimes I use other people’s fiction to help with my research. Always fact-checking before using, of course.

More often than not, research using fiction means analyzing how they write their dialogue, how they show emotion, how they incorporate historical details that make the reader feel like they’re really there without leaving the story reading like a dry academic paper. Recently I’ve been reading a collection of short stories and was reminded of a WWI detail I’d read about in the past but had since forgotten.

“Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and The Great War” is a collection of short stories about love during the time of the signing of the Armistice. (The 100^th anniversary is November 11^th.) The story “All For The Love Of You” by Jennifer Robson is about a young American girl living in Paris at the time of the Armistice. She makes herself useful by volunteering at The American Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks run by Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd. There she meets an American soldier whose face was severely damaged in battle and he has sought out Mrs. Ladd to make him a mask to hide his injuries. They, of course, fall in love. Daisy Fields and Captain Mancuso are fictitious; however, Mrs. Ladd and the American Red Cross studio were real.

The large-caliber guns of artillery warfare had the power to destroy men’s bodies in a way never seen before. Bones were not merely broken, they were shattered upon impact. Trench warfare made this all the worse. Soldiers believed they could stick their heads up quick to survey the landscape without understanding the fast and immediate destruction of the machine gun. New methods of facial reconstruction were being advanced that are still in use today, but it was not enough. Men were left with open wounds that even the best surgeons could not repair. Something had to be done to allow these men to go home to their families, their communities, without fear.

Francis Derwent Wood founded the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department in England in 1916. In 1917, Wood’s program came to the attention of Anna Coleman Ladd, a sculptor living in Boston. When her husband’s work took them to Paris, Mrs. Ladd consulted with Wood and opened the Studio for Portrait Masks under the administration of the American Red Cross. Her studio was credited with the best work, a single mask taking up to a month to complete. Creating first a plasticine likeness, a mask was fashioned from galvanized copper one thirty-second of an inch thick. The mask, when completed, would weigh between four and nine ounces, depending on whether it was made to cover the entire or just part of the face. (Most were partial masks.) The metallic surface was then painstakingly painted with hard enamel to match the skin tone of the man, match his eye color right down to the flecks of light reflected in the good eye. Eyebrows, lashes and hair were made from real hair. Wood’s studio used slivered tinfoil, reminiscent of ancient Greek statues. Eyeglasses were often used to better anchor the mask to the wearer. If he did not normally wear them, plain glass was used. While not perfect, the likenesses were remarkable and allowed the men to return to the public without fear or horror.

By the end of 1919, Mrs. Ladd’s studio had made 185 masks. Her studio closed in 1920. There is no record how many masks were made by Wood. His department disbanded in 1919.

These lightweight metal masks were more comfortable and durable than the old leather prosthetics, but they did not hold up for the lifetime of the wearer. After only a few years they would become too bent, chipped, to retain the wearer’s likeness. Very few, if any, masks survive today. There are, however, many before and after pictures of soldiers who wore the masks and the work is remarkable. If you Google WWI face masks you’ll be amazed by the difference they made in these men’s lives.

I’ve written many times about my first novel, “Mary Bishop”. While it’s currently making the rounds looking for an agent and/or publisher, I’m working on my second novel, “The Healing Heart”. This one takes place in 1918 and covers the end of WWI and the Spanish flu pandemic. One of my two leading men, Harry, returns from the Western Front with a severe facial injury. He loses an eye and has a jagged red scar down the right side of his face from artillery shrapnel. Will Harry get a mask? I don’t know yet, but it will at least be a topic of discussion.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows I enjoy a good game of golf. Anyone who has ever golfed with me knows I must also enjoy a bad game of golf because I keep going back. The other day I was golfing with my sister-in-law and the same old questions came up: Why do we keep putting ourselves through this? and Who ever thought of spending a perfectly good afternoon (or morning) hitting a little ball with a club, trying to get it into a little hole? I wasn’t able to find an answer to either of those two questions, but I did find a few facts about the evolution of the game.

15^th Century: The game originated on the eastern coast of Scotland. Players hit a pebble over sand dunes and around tracks using a bent stick or club. The game was so popular when the country needed to once more prepare to defend itself against the “Auld Enemy”, King James II found many neglecting their military duties. The king’s parliament banned the sport in 1457. The people largely ignored the ban.

16^th Century: The game was given the royal seal of approval in 1502 by King James IV, the world’s first golfing monarch. It quickly spread throughout Europe. King Charles I brought it to England. Mary Queen of Scots introduced it to France. The term “caddie” came from her French military aides, cadets.

17^th Century: Leith, near Edinburgh and one of the premiere courses of the day, hosted the first international tournament in 1682. The Duke of York and George Patterson of Scotland beat two English gentlemen.

18^th Century: Golf officially became a sport when the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith formed the first club in 1744. They hosted an annual competition and gave silverware for prizes. The rules drawn up for the competition sound very much like our rules today. The first reference to golf at St Andrews is in 1552, but it wasn’t until 1754 that the St Andrews Society of Golfers was formed to host its own annual competition following the Leith rules. The first 18-hole course was built at St Andrews in 1764. This established the now recognized standard for the game. The first club formed outside Scotland was Royal Blackheath, near London, in 1766.

19^th Century: St Andrews was honored with the title “Royal & Ancient” by King William IV in 1834, thus establishing the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Andrews as the world’s premier golf club. The Industrial Revolution of the Victorian Era gave birth to the railroads, allowing ordinary people to explore outside their cities and towns. Golf clubs quickly spread throughout the countryside. This led to mass production of clubs and balls, making the game more affordable. Before this, clubs were hand-crafted from beech with shafts of ash or hazel, and balls were constructed from compressed feathers wrapped in a stitched horse hide. The game’s popularity exploded. The forerunner to the British Open was played at Prestwick Golf Club in 1860. The United States Golf Association (USGA) was established in 1894. The first club formed outside Britain was in Bangalore, India, in 1820. The Royal Curragh, Ireland, formed in 1856. The Adelaide in 1870, the Royal Montreal in 1873, Cape Town in 1885, St. Andrews of New York in 1888, and the Royal Hong Kong in 1889.

20^th Century: By 1900 more than 1000 golf clubs existed in the United States. Funding through commercial sponsorship established the USA as the center of the professional game. US courses are beautifully sculpted and landscaped. British courses are typically rough links. But some of the most famous courses are still found in Scotland: Gleneagles, The Old Course at St. Andrews, Carnoustie, Royal Troon, Prestwick, just to name a few.

www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-History-of-Golf/

No matter what your career path, conferences are a wonderful way to meet others and recharge. It’s a chance to make new friends who understand your world, your way of thinking. It’s a great way to meet industry people who can take you to the next step in your career. And, for writers, who are introverts by nature, all this face-to-face time is even more important.

Writers spend a lot of time alone. They talk to each other on social media. They communicate with agents and editors by email. You might say that their characters are their closest friends. But give them the chance to go to a conference and the whole world opens wide.

By the time you read this I’ll be at RWA’s annual convention in Denver. I’ve attended one-day workshops and two-day conferences at the state level, but never before have I taken the opportunity to go to a national convention; four days with thousands of men and women from all over the country who share my passion. There will be agents, editors, and publishers there. I have appointments set to pitch “Mary Bishop” to several of them. Industry people offering editing and cover graphics services will be available for writers who self-publish. If I was looking for a personal assistant I would have a chance to talk to them, too. Winners will be announced, honored, for the two big annual competitions. Some names I will recognize, but I will only know a handful personally. Attendees will range from the highly successful to those just starting out.

As an introvert, I’m a little nervous. Talking to people I don’t know is difficult for me. But, as a writer with a goal of publication, I’m excited about all the opportunities. And I look forward to the inevitable recharge. My “battery” has been flashing low power and could use a good boost. I expect to return ready to write, write, and write some more.

There’s been a growing movement to cleanse our history by banishing everything that does not fit with our contemporary beliefs of inclusiveness and understanding. This is a very sad and dangerous thing. If we don’t teach our history, if we banish it to some hidden place where no one dares speak its name, how are we to learn? For it is only through knowledge of the sins of our past do we improve our future.

A couple weeks ago the ALSC (Association for Library Services to Children’s Board) changed the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the Children’s Literacy Legacy Award. Their reasoning was that Laura’s “stereotypical attitudes [are] inconsistent with ALSC’s core values”. In other words, Laura Ingalls Wilder was a racist. Laura’s writing does express prejudicial views of indigenous peoples and peoples of color, but it also teaches understanding of cultures that are different. For example, when Pa takes Laura to visit an Indian camp. Yes, Ma feared what some of the native people were capable of doing based on the experiences of others at the time. Some tribes were known to rape and murder white settlers. Some routinely kidnapped children to adopt as their own or act as slaves for their women. This would have been a very frightening prospect to a mother often left alone with her children while her husband was away hunting or gone into town for supplies (a trip that could take him away for days, if not weeks).

There’s a campaign going on right now to silence any recognition of our own Civil War. First you pull down statues of Confederate officers. Next thing you know everything about the Civil War is deemed offensive and removed from text books and history curriculums. If you do that, then you can’t teach about the good things that came from that time period. Things like the Underground Railroad and the eventual emancipation of the slaves. How do you teach about slavery and then the civil rights movement of the 1960s if you can’t teach about the Civil War and President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation?

And how long will it be before we start banning books again? If Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name is no longer acceptable on a children’s book award, when do we start pulling her books from library shelves, Amazon, Barnes and Noble? And after her, do we continue on to Mark Twain and Harper Lee? It’s called censorship, and the list is endless.

But these things offend us, you argue. They make us uncomfortable. Yes, they do! Sometimes history makes us uncomfortable, and it should. That’s how our children learn what’s right, by learning what’s wrong. There were definitely bad policies made because of hatred, fear, and ultimately, greed, during our quest for western expansion and the acceptance of slavery.

Why deprive our children knowledge of our rich history, all the good that’s come before, because we don’t like to hear the bad? It reminds me of the three monkeys: Hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil. Except it’s not true; if we don’t hear or see evil, how can we help but speak evil. We won’t know any different.

I grew up with history. My father is a retired history teacher. I have a history degree. I read and write history. Please, don’t let anyone take this away from our children. Fight to preserve our past so that we might learn and grow in our future.

Mother’s Day was weeks ago but the job of being a mother never ends. It’s not a one-day-a-year job. It’s a 24/7 job that starts the day she knows she’s pregnant until the day she passes away. Doesn’t matter how old her children are, they will always be her children and she will always worry about them.

I worried about our son when, after college, he took a job in south Florida. He had to drive his then new-to-him pick-up truck all the way there while pulling a trailer. He’d never pulled a load like that before. I worried about him when Hurricane Irma barreled down on them last year.

I worried about our daughter when she decided to make a much needed change and took a job in another state, in a city she’d never visited before. I worried about her when she did a couple contracts as a men’s maximum security prison nurse.

I worried about them when love relationships fell apart and they called because they thought their entire world was falling apart and only their mother could help. I worried about their jobs and what would happen if (you fill in the blank). I worried about them when they were sick or injured and too far away for me to do anything except listen and pray.

At the same time, I feel tremendous pride in their confidence, their sense of adventure. I could never have packed all my things and moved all by myself to somewhere I’d never been before. I was married when we moved half way across country. Our daughter is coming to visit next week and she’s making the very long drive alone. She’s done this before and all went well, but that doesn’t mean I won’t worry about her the entire day she’s traveling here, and then again the entire day she’s traveling back home.

Being a mother is not for the faint of heart. It’s not an easy job. It’s not a job to take lightly. But it is a job that pays in happiness much greater than the sorrows and I wouldn’t do it differently for anything in the world.

Writers write, and that’s something I haven’t been doing a lot of lately. My calendar has been pretty full for the last couple months; plus, I admit, I fell into a bit of a discouraged phase where I found it difficult to force myself back into the habit. So I turned to my wonderful writer friends for example and encouragement.

My WisRWA friends are the best! They’re always right there when someone needs a suggestion or just a little pick-me-up.

Writing is a tough business. You can pen a brilliant novel and have trouble selling it. Publishers are, of course, all about making money and your great American novel might not be what’s selling at the moment. Or, maybe they just bought a similar work from a name they know will sell on recognition alone. Again, you may have offered them the best book they’ve read in the last decade but if no one knows your name they might have trouble selling enough copies to clear their bottom line. It’s all in the timing, who you know, and who knows you. That’s where conferences come into play. You get to schmooze with editors and agents, pitch your novel, get your name and face out there.

But before a writer can get to the point of even worrying about such things…a writer has to write. I’m in between these two stages of my career. I have one completed novel I think is really good and another where I’m struggling to write that elusive first draft. It can be hard to work on the latter when the attempts to sell the former leave you questioning why you’re doing this to yourself in the first place.

I’m also finding my creative juices drained by my weekly search for a blog topic. With that in mind, I’m going to change from posting every week to every other week. I hope no one is too disappointed, but I figure it’s a win/win situation. You get better, more interesting, blog content and I get a steady flow of new chapters for my work-in-progress.