Wednesday, July 8, 2015

The history of my next book, Sweet Home Alaska




When my son moved from Anchorage to Palmer, Alaska, he bought a house next to a potato field, a house built in the 1930’s. It was small by today’s standards – the main floor was mostly one open combination living/dining/kitchen, with a cobbled-in bathroom down steep stairs in the basement, but it had rustic charm, too, with exposed log beams and rough-hewn wood floors.

The house got me curious about the early settlement of Palmer, and I was astonished to discover accounts of one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that took two hundred and two families off relief and shipped them up to Alaska to become independent farmers. Fortunately, the Palmer Library had first-hand accounts from people who had moved up as children with their families, moving from northern Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin to begin new lives in the Alaska Territory.

Reading accounts of measles epidemics, a telegram to Mrs. Roosevelt that resulted in a hospital, mismanagement of supply shipments that left families in the snow as the first snow fell, and Will Rogers’s visit and plane crash made me even more curious about the Palmer Colony.  I bought every book I could find on the early days, starting with the Alaskana Books in Palmer, searching eBay and making copies of books that friends in Alaska owned, and getting copies of 1930’s magazine articles on interlibrary loan.  The Baltimore Sun was selling off its archive of original Associated Press photographs, and that collection included a dozen photographs of the colony days, taken by journalists who traveled north to report on this grand social experiment.  I bought nearly everything they had.

You’d think that with mud, mosquitoes, and living in tents in the snow, people would have unhappy memories of the early days of the Palmer colony, but most of those interviewed remembered their childhoods in Palmer as a happy time.

If I were writing a book about the colony, who should tell the story?  I made up Terpsichore Johnson and her friends, to combine experiences of the real children who came up with their families in 1935. But I also included some of the real people, such as Pastor Bingle, Don Irwin, and Dr, Albrecht, who were credited with the survival of the colony.

Five years later, I had a draft. Two years after that, I had a book ready to show an agent. Six months after that, I found agent Steven Chudney, who championed my book, originally titled Northward, Ho!, as a variant of the pioneer’s  ‘Westward, Ho!’. He  found me the perfect folks to work with: Nancy Paulsen, and her team  at her imprint of Penguin Books for Young Readers. The contract was signed around Thanksgiving, 2013. We got into high gear on revisions in 2015, and the book, now titled Sweet Home Alaska, is scheduled for release February 2, 2016!






Thursday, August 28, 2014

Clara Estby - the Sequel


I've had several people ask me what happened to Clara after the walk; here's how I imagine her homecoming:

CHAPTER 1—Coming Home

           

June 11, 1897 – approaching Mica Creek, Washington
 My journal lay open on my lap, but I had given up writing and slipped into a mind-dead trance, rocking gently to the movement of the passenger car and letting myself be hypnotized by the rhythmic clacking of wheels on rails and the string of telegraph poles flashing by the window. Ma and I had gambled away a year of our lives and lost.
For the first two days on the train, Ma had kept me awake with her incessant fretting about having been marooned in New York when Bertha died and worrying about all the people in Mica Creek who could hardly wait to tell her what a fool she had been. Now that we were within minutes of home she slept.
When the train rounded a corner, my journal started to slip off my lap and I broke my trance to grab it. The newspaper clipping I’d tucked inside fluttered to the floor and I bumped my head as I groped to find it under the seat in front of me. With a wry smile I read what the Minneapolis Times had written about us last week when we passed through on our way back home. Considering how our walk had ended it was probably the last hurrah of our year of fame.
  “Coast to Coast:  Wonderful Trip Made by Mrs. Estby and Daughter Across America on Foot…No women unattended ever attempted such a feat before…for three days were they were lost in the Snake River lava fields of Idaho, without a mouthful to eat…President McKinley was visited…A compass, knives, revolver…was most of the baggage carried by the two ladies…sixteen pairs of shoes were used by each of the pedestrians during their trip…”
The reporter had left out the most important fact: We arrived in New York City thirty-six hours behind our deadline and lost our chance at $10,000 for the rights to the story of our two hundred thirty-two day trek.
Miss Waterson was not the only publisher in New York, however. I sketched a book cover and meticulously lettered:  From Mica Creek to New York City, by Clara Estby. I’d write the book, sell it in time to pay our debts before our farm was auctioned off, apply for college scholarships, and start a new life on my own, far away from the small-mindedness of Mica Creek. I’d be the image of the New Woman, strolling ivied halls with slews of chums who would want to hear about camping out with Indians and having tea with President McKinley. And  after college, would Charles have had his own adventures and be ready to stay put—perhaps with me?
But that was months and years ahead. Perhaps I would have a letter waiting from Charles. Tonight I could take a bath and wash my clothes, snuggle into bed, and Ida and I could catch up on everything we’d missed in the year I’d been away. Tomorrow I would gather an armful of lilacs for Bertha’s grave.
Uff da! The maroon mohair upholstery prickled my shoulder blades like a dozen horse flies. With a slap I closed my journal and rose unsteadily to take a wide-legged stance to keep my balance while I slipped my journal into the overhead luggage rack and slid the linen antimacassar far enough down the seat to shield my back.
As the train rounded another curve, I clutched the rack to keep my balance. Ma groaned and shifted in her seat by the window. Her eyes twitched under closed lids, her mouth gaped, and her cheeks vibrated slightly to the rhythm of the train. I would have retreated into sleep, too, if I could, but how could I sleep when I didn’t know if, in an hour, I would be greeted as the heroine who got Ma safely home or the villain who enabled Ma to go?
            I had just regained my seat when the conductor passed through the car, acknowledging me with a nod. “Are we close to where you want to stop?” he said.
            “Soon,” I said. After the conductor moved on to the next car, I took a deep breath and rubbed my damp hands against my skirt.
            To someone from outside Spokane County, one wheat field probably looked like another. But as I looked again out the window, I began to recognize our neighbors’ lands. There was Mr. Arenson’s patch, plowed up to within six inches of the back porch of the house. He would commiserate with Ma over losing the ten thousand dollars.
            I could tell from the wobbly rows that Old Mr. Williamson’s fields were next. He had been scandalized that Ma, a woman with eight living children, would leave home for a year to walk across the country. “I could have told you it would come to no good end,” he would say. There had been days I would have agreed with him.
            Next was the Iverson brothers’ field, plowed in curving lines which outlined each gentle rise of the land. Maybe, if Erick had plowed in graceful arcs because it was beautiful and not just because it was the method described in the latest Grain Grower’s Monthly, I would love him as much as he apparently loved me.
            As the conductor re-entered our car I signaled and shook Ma’s shoulder. “Time to wake up, Ma.”
            A long whistle and squealing brakes broke through Ma’s deep sleep, and I helped her stand as the brakes squealed again and the train slowed, then stopped in a series of jerks. As the other passengers mumbled about this unscheduled stop in the middle of the wheat fields, the conductor slid open the door of our car, leaped to the ground, and held up a hand to help Ma down. Even with my weak ankle I didn’t need his help, but I played helpless damsel and took his hand as I stepped down to the crushed gravel and cinders along the tracks.
            While Ma gathered her wits and her strength, I was content to stand in the shin-high wheat sprouts and watch the cinder plume from the receding train trail out, then slowly settle to the ground. I took a deep breath of Eastern Washington air. Under the lingering trace of cinders was the smell of plowed earth and new wheat. It was my favorite time of evening, when the sky faded from deep transparent blue in the east to milky blue edged with pink and gold in the west. I’d hold that serene view in mind as I faced what lay ahead.

            I took Ma’s elbow. “Do you need help?” I asked.
“I can walk on my own.”  She pulled back her shoulders and turned from the tracks toward home.
As we passed the marker to the edge of our fields, Ma increased her pace and I nearly forgot my limp as I hurried to keep up. Arthur or Johnny—at that distance in the twilight, I couldn’t have told which—was the first to see us. He dropped the slop buckets with a clang I heard from fifty yards away. He darted first to the barn, then streaked across the yard to the house and flung open the screen door with a bang. A larger figure—Pa for sure—emerged from the barn, and Ida, carrying Lillian, and Arthur or Johnny leading William by the hand came out the kitchen door. They drew together in a ragged line: Pa, one of the middle boys with William, and Ida with Lillian.
            No one ran to greet us. As we drew closer, no one smiled. Pa worried the frayed edges on the straw field hat he held in front of his chest. I had alternately expected recriminations or a joyful greeting, but not this eerie silence. My heartbeat slowed, waiting for whatever happened next.
  I waved. “Hei!  I called. Drawing nearer I could tell it was Arthur between Pa and William. He raised a thin arm in answer, but no one waved back.
            “Ole?” Ma said as I closed the gate behind us. She reached tentatively toward Pa, but he just crushed the edges of his hat with both hands. He opened his mouth to speak, gulped back his words and looked to Ida.
            Ida tucked a strand of silvery-blond hair behind her ear, tightened her lips and resettled Lillian on her narrow hip. Ma reached out to take Lillian from Ida’s arms, but Lillian turned her face from the stranger-ma she had not seen for a year, and hid her face in Ida’s neck.
            Ma winced at Lillian’s rejection and turned back toward Pa. “Hva er galt?”  What’s wrong? “Og hvor er Olaf? Where is Olaf?  Is he working in town?”
            Ja.” Pa nodded and unraveled another strand from the brim of his hat.
            Ma looked up and down the line again. “And Johnny?”
            Ida fixed Ma with a hostile glare. “Johnny’s dead, too, Ma.” 
            Stunned, I looked up and down the line of sisters and brothers again, not believing that Johnny, as well as Bertha, was gone. Ma dropped her satchel and stepped toward Pa, who opened his arms to her. Ma wailed, Pa murmured comfort.
            Ida pried Lillian’s arms from around her neck and set her roughly down. Lillian took her emotional cue from Ma and Pa, and started to howl, and then reached up to Ida to be picked up again. Ignoring Lillian, Ida jammed her fists on her hips and shifted her glare to me. “While you were off having tea with President McKinley and getting your picture in the paper, I was shivering in the woodshed, waiting to hear each day which of my brothers and sisters was still alive.”
            “We tried to get home sooner,” I started.
            “You didn’t try hard enough, though, did you?” Ida said.
            My hand went limp, dropping my bag to the ground. “But how did—“
“Diphtheria,” Ida said. “Both of them.”



           








CHAPTER 2—Up in Smoke


After an hour’s bickering over whose fault it was that both Bertha and Johnny had died while Ma and I were gone —a distressing amount of the blame was pointed at me—Pa interceded and sent us all to bed. I had not seen a bed in three days, so despite hostility radiating from Ida, I escaped into sleep from the reality I had come home to.
            I woke to the smell of smoke. I bolted upright, ready to sound the alarm and looked for Ida, but moonlight filtering through the muslin curtains revealed only Lillian, who was drooling onto Ida’s pillow as she sucked her thumb in her sleep. Where was Ida? My ears pricked to a furtive scraping, like someone trying to drag something quietly across the floor downstairs in the kitchen.
 I slid out of bed and crept barefoot down the stairs, shifting part of my weight to the hand rail as I stepped cautiously from tread to tread, ready to lift my foot at the first threat of a squeak.
            At the landing, I crouched below the half wall along the lower stairs and raised my head just high enough to peer into the kitchen.
            Ida stood with her back to me. The single candle on the table cast a ceiling-high, wavering shadow against the side wall above the stove. Ida and her shadow image reached down to an apple crate on the kitchen chair she’d dragged next to her and withdrew a sheaf of pages. She opened the top of the stove with a hollow clink, thrust the papers into the fire, and watched them burn.           
            I leaned forward over the half-wall and squinted toward the glow of the open stovetop to see what was on the pages Ida lifted next. Handwriting, margin to margin! I stood abruptly and nearly tripped on my long nightgown. “Uff da!”
            I stumbled down the last steps into the kitchen. “Ida, no!” I whispered hoarsely. “Those are Ma’s notes I need for my book!”
            Ida stuffed the last batch of Ma’s journals into the stove and firmly replaced the cover plate before she turned to me. Her pointy-chinned face was fiery red from the heat. She looked up at me from her height of five feet, nearly a head shorter than I, but feisty as a banty hen protecting her eggs. “Double ‘uff da,’ yourself.”  She crossed her arms defiantly. “Bertha and Johnny might still be alive if you had talked Ma out of leaving us for so long instead of goading her on.”
            “You can’t blame me for that—even Pa couldn’t talk her out of going.”  
            She parted her feet in a sturdy stance and glared, ignoring the thin rivulet of sweat that ran from her scalp toward one eye. Clearly she would not move, so I lunged forward, grabbed her under the arms and dragged her, flailing, away from the stove. I raced back across the kitchen and snatched the stoveplate lifter. Ida raced toward the stove, too, and grabbed the poker. As I started to lift the cover plate, she cracked the poker down on the stove top, inches from my hand, with a clang to rival a blacksmith’s at the anvil. My hand jerked back and I froze, seeing an Ida who was a stranger to me.
            Her bangs were wet with perspiration and spiked like a crown of thorns. “I never want to hear about your crazy trip again! We’re already mortified by the local gossip about Ma’s leaving her family to tromp across the country to ‘save the farm.’ Why would you want to spread the gossip with a book?”
            “At least Ma tried to save the farm instead of sitting in her rocker and whining!” I moaned as I thought of Ma’s notes in the fire and extended the stoveplate lifter cautiously toward the cover plate again, staring into Ida’s pale blue eyes to see what she had in mind to do next.
            She met my stare as she lifted the poker threateningly.
            “Sounds like a cat and dog fight in here!”
            Poised with stoveplate lifter and poker in mid-air, we turned our faces to Pa, sleep-rumpled and slump-shouldered.
            He put one hand to the small of his back as he twisted slightly to the right and left to stretch out the night kinks. “Your Ma and I already lost two children in April. How is losing two more in a duel going to help?”
            I reluctantly put the lifter down on the stove and watched Ida lean the poker against the wall.
            “Upstairs, both of you.”
            “But Ma’s notes!” I wailed. Pa clearly did not understand what was at stake. The arteries in my neck throbbed in despair. .
            As Ma emerged from the bedroom I repeated my cry, “Ma, your notes!” All last year’s misery was for nothing without the book. She strode past Pa to the stove and opened it. In orange light cast from the last of six hundred pages of her burning journals, she picked up the poker. Instead of trying to save her work however, broke the pages into chunks that would burn faster.
            “But Ma!” I wiped one arm across my face to wipe the dampness from my forehead and destroy the evidence of gathering tears.        
            “There was nothing worth saving, Clara. Pencil scratchings on paper. I can’t undo last year and bring back Johnny and Bertha. But I’m going to do my best to forget last year, and I want you to forget it too. I want you to promise that you’ll never talk or write about our walk again.”
            “But…”  How could I never talk about the most heroic thing I’d probably ever do in my whole life?  
            Ida shot me a smug look as she put on her clogs and a shawl to visit the outhouse before she went back to bed. I restrained the urge to throw something at her as she flounced out the kitchen door.
            I looked to Pa. “Ja,” Pa said. “That’s the end of it.” 
Ma and Pa apparently assumed I’d obey and did not wait to hear my promise. As Pa took Ma’s elbow and led her back into the bedroom I thought about sneaking back to the stove and fishing out any unburned scraps of Ma’s work. But it was her work, to save or let burn as she wished.
            Ish da!” I stiffened, then dashed toward the stairs. At least I still had my own journals, and I had to keep them away from Ida. If I left them anywhere in the bedroom or the kitchen, she would be sure to find them. I lifted the front of my nightgown and took the stairs two at a time to the landing. Breathing heavily, I snatched my satchel from the girls’ bedroom where I’d dropped it and tiptoed, clutching it to my chest, toward the boys’ bed. Arthur and William were motionless. How they had slept through the ruckus downstairs defied understanding. The satchel handle caught on the bedsprings when I tried to shove it under the bed upright, but on its side, the satchel just slid under their bed, where it should be safe until I found a better place to hide it.
            Back in the girls’ room, I moved Lillian back gently to the inside edge of my pillow and turned Ida’s pillow to the undrooled-on side. I looked down on Lillian, face flushed with sleep and still sucking her thumb.  
            Long after Ida returned to bed, I lay on my side, as close to the edge of the bed as I could without falling out, and waited for morning. The bed creaked and rocked each time Ida shifted with exaggerated flops from side to back to side again. It amazed me that anyone who weighed barely ninety pounds could make the bed rock so. At last she snored and the bed was still.   

As the first light prodded its way through the gap in the muslin curtains, I slithered from under the quilts and stole downstairs with my satchel to the kitchen to find a safer hiding place for my journals. Clutching the satchel in one hand, I poked about the kitchen and parlor for a likely spot. Ida dipped into the flour and sugar bins every day. The utensil drawer in the work table was already jammed with scrapers, spoons, whips and corers, and Ida used that drawer often, too. The desk in the parlor was already overflowing with copies of Ma’s old letters to the editor and to members of her suffrage group. There might be room on the bottom shelf of the low bookcase if I were bold enough to hide the journals in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter, but I could not bear to leave the journals so exposed.
            The wood bin. No one would be building a parlor fire in May, so I could safely tuck my journals under the kindling until I could find a better hiding place in the barn. Three journals, five letters, a year of my life. Avoiding noise, I laid each piece of wood gently on the hearth to make a space for my papers, then replaced the wood to conceal my record of the journey.
             Back in the kitchen, I primed the pump by the sink with water from the pitcher and pumped water into a pan for the coffee pot. My hands automatically found their places on the handle where the red paint had worn away, where Ma’s hands, Ida’s hands, my hands, Bertha’s hands had been a thousand, thousand times.  
            Bertha had looked out this kitchen window, sat in these chairs, laughed in the rope swing in the orchard. How could she be gone when everything she had touched was still here?           I sighed as I opened the stove to the ashes of Ma’s hundreds of pages of notes. It seemed disrespectful to make coffee over the ashes of her work, so I scooped them out into the ash bin to dig in around her Austrian Copper rose.
            After starting the fire and putting on the pot to heat, I unpacked the rest of my satchel except for several pages of names and addresses of all the O’Keeffes I had found in the city directories at the New York Public Library this winter. In a panic when I realized Ma and I might never find a way home from New York, I’d spent every spare two cents I’d earned on another stamp, trying to locate someone who might know my real father. It wasn’t an attempt at blackmail. Not really. I just thought that someone who had once loved Ma might want to help Ma and me get home. Thirty or so of the names had been checked off as contacts which had led to no information on whereabouts of the Patrick O’Keeffe who was my father. Either no one knew Patrick O’Keeffe, or no one was brave enough to risk upsetting his life with admitting he had an illegitimate daughter. Just as well. We’d made it home without him. I fed those pages to the fire with no regrets.
I emptied to rest of the contents of my satchel: my cracked oilskin poncho, Indian beads,  pistol and nearly full box of bullets, the owl Pa had carved for me before I left, a half-bottle of mercurochrome, a sliver of soap, and  the pen knife Arthur and Johnny had loaned me for the trip.
            J. E… I ran my fingers over the initials Johnny had clumsily carved on his side of the knife. Maybe you had to see a person dead and touch his stiff hands before you could convince yourself he was really dead. Since I had missed Bertha and Johnny’s funerals, it might take a long time before I stopped expecting to see them around the next doorway.
            When the coffee started to boil, I pulled myself out of morbid thoughts and moved the pot to a cooler spot on the stove so it wouldn’t bubble over while it brewed. For a year I’d missed this kitchen: the red and blue rag rug Aunt Hannah had woven when she was still in Norway, Ma’s counted stitch table runner, the table, chairs, Pa’s finely finished storage cupboards, Ma’s framed angel picture by the kitchen door.
            As I took my first sip of coffee, I winced and almost spit it out. If I’d been paying attention I would have noticed that those brown grounds didn’t smell like coffee. The bitter taste of chicory root without the ameliorating effects of cream and sugar would take some getting used to. The family must be down to the last pennies if Pa was willing to give up his coffee.
A glassful of water washed out the last traces of chicory but reminded me of the way Bertha and Johnny had died, with their throats filling with leathery layers of multiplying diphtheria germs until they could not swallow or breathe. Did they know they were going to die? My own throat felt tight.
I set my glass on the floor. Bertha and Johnny were dead, Ida hated me, I was unwelcome at home, and if I didn’t keep up my resolve to confront Erick Iverson—how could I have forgotten even for an instant that I had to deal with him as well as my family—I would be carried away on the momentum of the expectations of all of Mica Creek and be Mrs. Iverson before the ides of July.
            The sound of Pa’s boots on the kitchen porch steps startled me out of self-pity.
            God Morgen, Clara,” he said as he flung open the kitchen door, set down a pail of milk, and leveraged his feet out of his barn boots. Marmee padded in behind him,  rubbed my ankles, sniffed my heels, tickled each toe of my bare feet, as if she could tell by smell where I had been this last year. At least she was still my friend.
            Pa poured ersatz coffee into his favorite mug and bent his rear toward the chair across the table from me, then straightened when he saw the gun. “My word, Clara, you don’t expect more trouble from Ida this morning, do you?”  He leaned over and shoved the pistol aside with the back of the hand that held his mug.
             “I was just unpacking,” I said.
            Pa set down his coffee and moved the pistol and bullets to the top of the kitchen cupboard and sat across from me at the table. He didn’t say anything, just sipped his coffee and looked at me, letting me know he would be a congenial listener for anything I wanted to say.
            His brushy mustache was tinged with red, at odds with the thinning hair on top of his head, which had faded to gray and brown. His eyes were a lighter blue than mine, his face longer, ears larger. His fingers were skewed with arthritis now, so he held his cup awkwardly. But his fingers were long and slender, with tapered tips. I looked at my own cracked and raw hands, with shorter, blunt-tipped fingers. I had always wished I had inherited his hands, but after Ma’s revelation in Pennsylvania last year I knew why I looked not a bit like Pa. I looked shyly back down at my own hands, clasped neatly around my mug. Had Ma told him yet that I knew he was not my real father?
            He put down his cup and neatened his mustache. Finally he spoke. “I see you lived through the night at least. How about Ida?”
            “She lives, but since she spent most of the night bouncing the bed to make sure I didn’t sleep, she may not get up until noon.”
            Ja, well,”
“Do you think Ma will change her mind about writing the book?”
            Pa shook his head. “Nei, and I agree. How do you think she feels, coming home broke and having Bertha and Johnny die while she was gone? Writing a book would be like rubbing her nose in her failures. It’s going to be hard enough for Ma to fit back in among the neighbors without reminding them about your escapades.” Pa got up and poured himself another cup of coffee.
            I followed Pa to the stove. “But Pa, if I went ahead with the book there would be enough money to save the farm, at least for a little while.”
            “It would be better for the whole family to put this behind us. People—even Erick—will forgive us if we just behave ourselves now…”
“By ‘we’ and ‘us’ you mean Ma and me, don’t you?”
He looked away. “Ja,” he sighed.
“I only went with Ma because you asked me to.”
Pa handed me the owl he’d carved me just before I left. “I also depended on you to show some sense and bring her home if the going got too hard.”
“But you also asked me to take care of Ma, and if she wasn’t quitting I had to keep going with her, didn’t I?  I thought you’d be thankful that I got her home safely.”
“Too late, though, wasn’t it?”
“Too late?” I paced the room, gesturing wildly in frustration. “I risked my life walking four thousand miles and scrubbed my hands raw on other people’s laundry to keep Ma off the streets when we were stranded and instead of gratitude, you say ‘too late?’ How was I supposed to cross four thousand miles with her when she was so in the throes of her dismals I couldn’t even get her out of bed for months? I wish I’d never gone with Ma in the first place. She wears me out Pa, and I have to get out and start my own life. I can’t—I won’t—stay here if no one even appreciates what I went through.”  I halted and glared at Pa, waiting for his response. I knew I wouldn’t get an apology, but hoped I’d get some sign that he didn’t blame me for what happened anymore.
He looked down at the floor for a moment, then strode to the parlor. “Who’s this Mr. Doré you have a letter from?”  He opened the writing desk and dropped an envelope on the table in front of me. “You had a letter from Salt Lake City about two weeks ago. With the hullabaloo last night I forgot to give it to you.”



Friday, April 12, 2013

The Search for an Agent



My latest book, NORTHWARD HO! is the story of Terpsichore Johnson, one of the kids swept up in President Roosevelt’s plan to take families off relief and relocate them in Alaska as self-sufficient farmers. I typed ‘The End’ in January. Next step was finding an agent. Here’s my progress:

Write a one-sentence hook, a one-paragraph summary, and one-page synopsis of the book so I’ll be ready to tell people about it. (done)

Go through notes of Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conferences to identify agents who like middle grade historical fiction--or at least are open to something besides dystopian society, dysfunctional family, steampunk, fantasy, contemporary problems, and paranormal novels. I often enjoy reading in those genres, but it’s not what I write.
(done)

Read the acknowledgements pages of books that are similar in feel to NORTHWARD HO!  If the author has an agent (and nowadays, most everyone but me does) the agent is usually thanked. (done)

Ask writing friends, especially those who write similar books, if they like their agents. (done)

Compile a list of possibilities. (done)

Google the possibles. What does each agent say she likes? Do she represent authors I admire?
How does each agent like to be contacted? (Snail mail or email? Query only or Query and sample? Filling in their on-line form?) What is their contact information? Are they open to new clients?)  (done)

Look up each agent in query tracker (Querytracker.com)  Verify contact and submission information and note the typical response time to a query, a partial, or full submission? (done) 
(This is to remind myself not to expect responses quickly.)

Write query letters, personalizing each by mentioning any connection, such as having heard her at a conference or representing an author I know or admire.  Include samples, synopsis, or whatever else that agent wants with the initial contact. (done - at least for my first, top six choices.)

Wait. Typical response time on a query is one to three months. Then, if the agent is interested, she will ask for a chapter, or three chapters, or fifty pages. Wait. Then, if the agent likes the sample, she will ask to see the whole manuscript. Wait. I’ve read writers who eventually sign with an agent queried over a year before. As Charlie Brown would say, “Aaugh!”  
Receive email from one of the agents who liked the beginning and requested a full; she’s leaving her firm and not accepting clients now. Say “Aaugh!” again.  

So what am I doing while I wait? That is, besides checking email and phone messages hourly, re-organizing the linen closet, and eating far too many Wheat Thins?  Look for a pattern for a 1930‘s dress. Find sheet music for the song the 20th-century Alaska pioneers sang. Talk my sisters into making a recording of the song. Start researching the next book, which will probably be set in the San Juan Islands, home of my writing woodshed.  

Meanwhile, I’m also still promoting my first book, THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS. Earlier this week, over one hundred people attended my show and tell in Port Ludow, Washington.  I came in 1896 bicycle costume with satchel of realia and a display panel of newspaper clippings, photographs, and period postcards that inspired chapters of the book. Lovely group!



Upcoming Events


April 19-21, 2013 - SCBWI Washington Annual Conference
Taking Fiction Master Class on Revision; participating in Published Attendee Showcase; hearing presentations from a couple of the agents I queried.
Redmond Marriott Town Center
7401 164th Ave. NE, Redmond, WA 98052

May 11, 2013 - Gina Krog Lodge, Daughters of Norway, 11:00 a.m.
Program on THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS
St. Andrews Lutheran Church
2650 148th Ave. SE, Bellevue, WA 98007


May 17-18 - Presenter, NW Christian Writers Renewal
10:45 a.m. - 12 Noon: Writing Historical Fiction, with THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS 
Overlake Christian Church
9900 Willows Road NE
Redmond, WA 98052

September 15, 2013, Thea Foss Lodge, Daughters of Norway program speaker 1:00 p.m.
THE YEAR WE WERE FAMOUS 
Chimicum Tri-Area Community Center
10 West Valley Road, Chimacum, WA 98325

Monday, July 23, 2012

Will Rogers Medallion Award!


I was tickled to learn that The Year We Were Famous won the 2012 Will Rogers Medallion Award for young adults. It was a good thing I had Clara and Helga's true story to work with because I never could have made up such bold and persevering women, nor imagined that they could have survived the blizzards, blisters, flash floods, and everything else they encountered between Mica Creek and New York.
I am also lucky to have such great writing friends, among them the eight other YA authors I get to appear with at Northgate (Seattle) Barnes and Noble on July 27:
Megan Bostic, Never Eighteen
Jennifer Shaw Wolf, Breaking Beautiful
J. Anderson Coats, The Wicked and the Just
Helen Landalf, Flyaway
Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
Diana Renn, Tokyo Heist
Marissa Burt, Storybound

I haven’t read all their books yet, but I plan to read them soon!  Helen, Megan, and J. Anderson (aka Jillian) and I will also appear together August 13 at Everett Public Library  where my daughter, Emily Dagg, is head of children’s and young adult services. We’ll be part of a series on dream jobs, and on days like the one I found out about the Will Rogers Medallion it does seem like writing is a dream job. 
Schedule of Events

July 19 Daughters of Norway National Convention
Lakeway Inn
714 Lakeway Drive, Bellingham, Washington
Program on The Year We Were Famous and Selling Books

 July 27 - Barnes and Noble, 6:30
 Northgate Mall, 401 NE Northgate Way # 1100
Seattle, WA
Program and book signing with 8 other YA authors
August 13 - Everett Public Library, 7 p.m.
Dream Jobs - a panel of YA/MG authors
2702 Hoyt Avenue Everett, WA 98201
Books to be sold by University of Washington Bookstore
Joint Book Clubs on Orcas Island
Darvill’s Book Store Details to be announced
September 23 - Northwest Bookfest
Kirkland, WA 
Panel on YA fiction - details to be announced
October 7 - Write on the Sound Writers’ Conference (9:15 - 10:30 a.m.)
Teaching a class: Fact into Fiction
Frances Anderson Center
500 Main Street, Edmonds, WA
Books sold by Edmonds Book Shop
October 19-21  - Women Writing the West Conference
Albuquerque, NM
 TYWWF has been submitted for their WILLA (Willa Cather) award
Author signing
November 16-17 - National Council for the Social Studies
Seattle, WA
Presenter - details to be announced