Freelance Flashback: Snow Bunnies

Happy  holidays! After a sleet-filled ride from New Jersey back to Maryland, we are home. We spent Christmas with my husband's family. Christmas Eve Italian style is my favorite meal of the entire year.

(My favorite dish: pasta with walnuts and anchovies. The New York Times featured the recipe.)

Pizzelles are a traditional Italian waffle cookie.
whatscookingamerica.net

My side of the family -- my parents, brothers and their families -- are enjoying winter white. They are holed up at my parents' cabin in the Catskill mountains, where a foot and a half of snow fell last night.

My sister-in-law shared this photo from the back deck of the cabin.

When I was growing up, my family spent our holidays on the slopes. I had to stop skiing after knee surgery in 1985, but here is a Baltimore's Child article from 2009 about another ski-crazy family.

Family Adventure - December 2009

Life’s an adventure for The Laras

By Laura Shovan

Paul Lara was used to working long hours. A mechanical engineer for the federal government, he would leave his wife and young daughter at their Laurel home every morning at 5 a.m. and wouldn’t return before 5 in the evening.
 
But that was before an extended family adventure last winter made him rethink his lifestyle. From late December 2008 to late March 2009, Paul, 35, his wife, Jennifer, 39, and their 3-year-old daughter, Olive, skied and snowboarded together in Colorado, California, and Nevada. During that trip, Paul and Jennifer, an education professor at Anne Arundel Community College, telecommuted to their jobs and focused on family time and teaching Olive how to ski.
 
Olive learned to ski and the Laras learned to slow the pace of their lives. Paul now works from home twice a week.

Happy Trails
 
Jennifer grew up in south Florida, but left that warmth behind to earn her bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University. She then attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After teaching stints on the Navajo Nation and in Ecuador, she moved to Bowie, where her sister lived, in July 2000.
 
Jennifer met Paul—who was born in Ecuador, but grew up mainly in Silver Spring—at a salsa dance class at the University of Maryland, where he was finishing his engineering degree. 

They soon learned that they both loved sports—snowboarding, skiing, hiking, biking, running. In 2004, they eloped outside of Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Grand Teton National Park, where they also were snowboarding.

When Olive came along, they naturally wanted to share their love of the outdoors with her.

“It gives us something that we can do together,” Jennifer says. “Here we are outside, getting fresh air, doing a sport. Skiing is great exercise in a beautiful environment.”

Rather than catch occasional weekends at a local slope, Paul and Jennifer wanted to immerse Olive in skiing. 

Having introduced Olive to skiing at age 2, Jennifer says she realized, “If we want Olive to be a really good skier, she really needs more than one week a year. We both said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could live in a ski town for a season?’” 

So that’s what they did.

Paul and Jennifer found affordable multi-resort ski passes and organized long-term condo rentals in Lake Tahoe, on the California and Nevada border, and in Breckenridge, Colo. The couple then convinced their employers to allow them to work long-distance via the Internet.

“I would work in the morning until Jennifer and Olive woke up,” says Paul. “Then we’d make breakfast together” and plan the day. “I spent a lot more time not only with my daughter, but also with my wife.”

Jennifer describes a day on the slopes: “One person would work and ski with Olive, and the other person would do some adult runs. After a month, she could go down a real run.”

“Skiing is everyone equally participating,” she adds. “That’s not what you get when you go jogging with a kid in a stroller.”

Videos of Olive show her gleefully tackling a ski run. She glides down the mountain in a sky blue parka and pink helmet, laughing as she skis past the camera.

“When we’re out there, she just smiles and she tries new things,” Jennifer says. “Even now, she talks about Colorado and Lake Tahoe.”

The slower pace and beautiful scenery helped Paul realize “how different life is out there. You don’t get up and commute 30 miles in traffic to work.” 

Jennifer says, “Being away for three months proved to him that ‘I can work from home.’”
The time away also shifted Jennifer’s thinking. 

“When you’re away,” she says, “you can be present in the moment without feeling the need to multi-task. You’re not torn by all the things you should be doing—you’re not surrounded by it.” Now, when she’s playing with Olive at home, Jennifer focuses on fun and puts chores out of her mind.

The Laras are planning their next ski trip for January, and Olive is already eager to get back on the slopes. 

Jennifer adds, “Now that it’s cold out, she said to me, ‘Oh, Mommy, I can’t wait to go skiing.’” 

Freelance Flashback: School Visits

Welcome to a new Author Amok series: Freelance Flashback.

For many years, I was a freelance feature writer for the Baltimore Sun and  Baltimore's Child. The deal was this: I wrote an article;  I got paid; the publication owned the rights for two weeks, then they reverted back to me.

Except that's not what happened. My articles are archived by both publications. Sometimes other websites, instead of linking to an article of interest, will run the full thing on their page.

Even though I am not paid for these "reprints," I don't mind the practice so much. It gets my name, as an author, out there. However, I do own the rights to these articles. Why not repost my favorites on my own blog?

Let's start with a feature I wrote for Baltimore's Child about author school visits. There is advice here -- both for schools and for authors -- from two wonderful Maryland children's authors, Michelle Y. Green (A Strong Right Arm) and Lois Szymanski (Out of the Sea: Today's Chincoteague Pony). 

But my favorite part of the piece is remembering how I got to see Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) messing with tweens' heads.

Bring a Children's Author to School: It's an Open Book Affair!

From Baltimore's Child March 2005
 
When a Children’s Author Comes to Visit, It’s an Open Book Affair
By Laura Shovan

I’m standing in the back of a crowded ballroom. The room is cavernous, but every chair has been filled. 

A throng of mostly preteens is talking with rock-star awe about the person they’ve come to see—children’s writer Lemony Snicket. Snicket is the alter ego of Daniel Handler, author of the popular books A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The Howard County Library won his visit in a contest sponsored by publisher Harper Collins. To his fans, Handler is a superstar.

A Baltimore Sun photo of Handler's visit.

Libraries, bookstores and schools often sponsor author visits to promote exactly this kind of excitement among young readers. If you’re considering scheduling a children’s book writer to come to your school or community, there are ways to ensure the visit gets as positive a response from kids as a bestseller like Handler receives.

Maryland author Michelle Y. Green explains, “Many children’s only experiences with a book are negative. A book is something you read so you can take a test. And so, what an author or an illustrator can do is make the connection that reading is fun, reading is enjoyable.”

Author Lois Szymanski is the regional adviser for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) in Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. She adds, “Writers get kids fired up about writing, about putting their ideas on paper.”

Green, who wrote A Strong Right Arm, an award-winning biography for children about Negro League pitcher Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, says that when planning an author visit, schools “should see children’s book authors and illustrators as resources and partners in the education process.”

Michelle's children's biography features a woman
who played in the men's Negro League.

And the clearer your goals are, the better you will be able to communicate them to your visiting author.

“Share with the author what points [the school] wants to get across to the kids,” says Szymanski.

In addition, many writers use audiovisuals in their presentations. Ask the author if he or she needs any equipment. Szymanski uses Power Point when talking about Patches, A New Kind of Magic and her other books about horses.

Lois is well know for her books
about horses and Chincoteague ponies.

“If the kids see wild horses galloping across the screen, it keeps their attention,” she says.


Read the rest of the article at Baltimore's Child.


I hope all of you NaNoWriMers are busy getting your words in today. If you write every day, you'll need 1,666 words per day to reach the 50,000 word finish line.

Interestingly, 1500 was the word limit for my Baltimore's Child features. Articles for my local edition of the Baltimore Sun were shorter, 750 words. If you're interested, both paid about $250 per piece. If you were writing articles, instead of a novel, you could earn $8,300 to $16,000 at that rate!

'Tis the season to Vote. Help choose my next Freelance Flashback post. Would you like to see:

Meditation for Kids (Baltimore's Child);
The Dodge Poetry Festival (Baltimore Sun);
or Destination Imagination (Baltimore Sun)?

Amok in Announcements (Again)

News! My family adventure article is finally up at Baltimore's Child online. http://www.baltimoreschild.com/articles/index.cfm?fuse1=detail&ArticleID=1024 Look for a "shout out" to Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series.

Just got news my children's poem "Alphabet Soup" sold to Shoofly Audio magazine. It should be published in 2009-2010. I love this magazine's concept. No print copies -- you get an MP3 file or a CD. A great option for LD kids or those with sensory issues. Visit the magazine at http://www.shooflyaudio.com/ A poem I posted a few weeks ago, "Driving Home from the Poetry Festival, 1996," will be appearing in the next issue of Little Patuxent Review. The theme is "Turning Points." You still have time to submit work to this beautiful journal. The deadline for "Turning Points" in November 1. More info at http://www.littlepatuxentreview.org/. There are usually a few (wonderful) group readings when the issue is launched. Look for those announcements in a few months. Save the date: I just scheduled a group reading for 3/31/09 at Howard County's Central Library. A group of contributors from the Maryland Writers Association anthology, "New Lines from the Old Line State" will do a short reading and panel discussion. We'll also be selling the book. If you can't get to the reading, you can buy the book here: http://marylandwriters.org/publications.html. Two of my poems are among the entries. Last, a great writing opportunity for kids. Last November, I participated in my first NaNoWriMo (that's National Novel Writing Month, an annual event). I crossed the finish line with my YA suspense novel clocking in at 50,000 words -- about 75% of a complete draft. Woohoo! It felt like a real accomplishment. NaNoWriMo has an awesome program for young writers. Less focus on word count, more on, "Just write it!" Here's a blurb from the very kid-friendly website: "The Young Writers Program of National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a novel by midnight, November 30. The word-count goal for our adult program is 50,000 words, but our Young Writers Program allows participants who are 17 years old and younger to set reasonable, yet challenging, word-count goals. The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly." This is a great idea for kids who love to read, but hate school-writing (the dreaded BCRs come to mind). There's a ton of online encouragement and support during NaNo month, November. Check it out at http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/ywp I promise to get back to the Dodge Poetry Festival soon. Festival Assistant Michael Murphy will be on the hot seat, giving us a behind-the-scenes view of the event.

Amok in Literary Allusions

Samwise McBark-Bark, who thinks he is the Sir Lancelot of our household.

Writers & teachers read a lot. It's a job perk (or hazard, according to Mr. Amok).

With all those storylines, characters, settings, crises floating around in our consciousness, we're prone to making literary allusions.

We named the new pup (who came from Schnauzer Rescue http://www.schnauzerrescue.net/) Samwise, hoping he'd be a true and noble friend like Frodo's Sam in LOTR.

I've been reading Kevin Crossley-Holland's wonderful Arthur trilogy -- it begins with "The Seeing Stone" -- and have noticed that Sam answers to his name, but has a secret identity (not unlike T.S. Eliot's cats http://www.dentonbach.com/poems/7.htm). He thinks he is Sir Lancelot. Protector of the weak, e.g. anyone who's come in the house and gotten his okay. Barker at invaders, e.g. anyone walking within 50 feet of our house.

He's our first literary dog. He came to us as Sammy -- we added the allusion. I've known a MacDuff (dog), Atticus Finch (cat), for goodness sake, Demi Moore has a daughter name Scout.

Are you addicted to allusions? Do you find allusion-dropping funny, cute, clever, or literarily obnoxious?

Look for a post about my family outing article at Baltimore's Child magazine this month (it should be up soon at http://www.baltimoreschild.com/). My kids immediately dubbed the marshes at Calvert Cliffs State Park in Lusby, MD: The Marshes of Morda. They couldn't help it. We'd just finished reading the entire Chronicles of Prydain.

Whoops, I did it again.