Family, History, memories

The connection: My grandfather and son

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2013-07-21 18.27.27

Memories. Sometimes they pop up with no fanfare. They come to the front of your mind when it is triggered. My Pepere Gervais, french for grandfather, passed away many years ago. I have great memories of him. His ability to beat anyone in checkers. I mean anyone. It became a game of will as grandchild after grandchild tried to win to no avail. Another memory is of my pepere, mom and I crossing over the border into Canada to watch live professional wrestling. We were all fans and to this day my mom and I carry on watching.

But this past weekend a new memory popped up thanks to my son. His favorite deodorant at the moment is Old Spice, he has worn it for a while now. My grandfather wore Old Spice. As a child I would love to go visit him and go into his room and smell the scent for I loved the smell and I loved my grandfather. It was always great to spend time with him.

So yesterday as I was getting ready to leave the house my son walked by and this memory of me visiting my grandfather popped up. It made me smile. My son gave me some money to pick him up another stick if I stopped by anywheres on the way home. Telling my husband in the truck, he said I have some new deodorant in the closet he can help himself.

And while I told my son afterwards about this, I still got him a new stick. For I love the scent and thanks to him he reminded me of my grandfather. I hope he wears Old Spice for very long time. Even though they never met, they are now connected.

Author, Newsletter, Sharon C. Williams

My newsletter

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IMG_0175Recently I blogged about newsletters. How I wanted to get on board with this way of spreading my brand. The sites I visited all wanted me to share my personal home address with the world. I wasn’t feeling that. Thanks to my lovely editor, Nancy, she directed me to Mad Mimi, a free site where all that was required was town and state.

So I went about setting up my first issue. It was a little time-consuming for I wanted it just right. I’m not sure how many emails I got from myself as I tested various versions. It took some time but after a few hours I got the pictures, links and story laid out that looked pleasing to my eye. I was nervous as heck and excited to get it ready in time to announce to the world which I did promptly on my social media outlets

Here is the link to the first issue.

https://madmimi.com/mimio/b1a564/preview

The link to subscribe, if interested, is here:http://mad.ly/signups/98152/join

I was fortunate enough to get a nice small crowd of people interested in reading more of what I had to say. Hopefully I won’t disappoint. Being an author means more than just writing. It involves editing, revising, editing again and then either self publish or find a traditional publisher. But it doesn’t end there. After comes the marketing and promotion which one has to do regardless how your book is released to the world.

It’s a marathon not a sprint. I need to invest in water.

Author, Jasper Amazon Parrot, Research your novel

Your book: Researching

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P1010445-MMy writing group, the one I started, met over the weekend. During our reading and critiquing one of the members asked me if this animal lived in the rainforest. A valid question and one that no one had asked me before.

Do you research your books? In “Jasper, Amazon Parrot: A Rainforest Adventure” I have three folders. One each for spider monkeys, parrots and the three toe sloths. I may own an Amazon but I still wanted to see about their interactions in the wild. I also researched the various rainforests for each is separate as to which animals live there.

While writing the sequel to Jasper my friend Gina and I were hashing out what chaos or challenge I could put my main character in. She said, “How about elephants?” My thought was yes who doesn’t like an elephant, right? I progressed to write three pages on an uplifting scene. Once I finished I thought to myself, hmm elephants in the rainforest? Of course there are elephants there I mean of course . But I decided to check it out just to be sure. I mean I was right and I was just going to collaborate what I already knew. I found out within minutes how wrong wrong so incredibly wrong I was. I am not sure what made me decide to check this fact but am sure glad I did.

Do you really want to irritate your readers? Do you want to put in information that is poorly research if researched at all? I don’t. A good example of this is my children series featuring my main character Jasper who is an Amazon parrot. I know about parrots having lived with one since 1999. But prior to owning any of my birds I read numerous books to make sure I understood as much as I could before taking on such a task. So why should my books be any different?

Did you know that a three toe sloth are more active during the day then a two toe sloth? This is huge since my character George is a sloth who enjoys spending time with my main character during the day. Yeah small facts that are important. Lesson learned, I went away from the research in volume 2 like I had done in volume 1. Never again. Kids are not stupid. I don’t intend to insult them.

The Musings of A New Englander