Going Indie

Recently my mother/writing partner, Barbara Andrews, and I launched our first venture into ‘indie’ publishing. Faith, Fireworks and Fir written as Pam Andrews Hanson is an original inspirational romance available for Kindle at Amazon and for
Nook on Barnes and Noble.

My husband, who was instrumental in the process, strongly suggested I blog about the whole thing. “Write something clever, funny, and witty,” he said.

No pressure there!

Naturally all week I’ve felt more witless than witty. Cleverness also continues to elude, so here I sit on a Sunday night willing to settle for mediocre – but even that seems elusive.

I’m just going to plunge in and make do with what I’ve got.

Several factors influenced this leap into independent publishing. First, after 30-plus books with conventional publishers (with more on the way) for Mom and me (and 50 plus for Mom including those written under her own name), the time just seemed right to explore ‘long-tail publishing.’

It used to be if you wanted to write a book, record an album, or produce a movie, and you wanted it to go out to a national, or even global, audience, you had to work with a major publisher, recording company, or movie studio.

But today, with online technology, anyone can distribute his or her work to a vast audience independently. You can sell your book, album or movie using online stores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes. And since it is all done electronically, you don’t have to underwrite the costs of printing a book or burning a physical CD/DVD.

I have to confess I am slow to change when it comes to technology. Case in point: I just recently gave up my ‘chewing gum’ iPod, and I’m sure the Smithsonian will soon come to claim it. However, I’m also a voracious reader and being able to load half a dozen or more books onto an e-book reader when traveling is very appealing. I’ve come to believe electronic delivery systems of books don’t have to replace the traditional form but rather are complementary.

So why make the leap now? While my mom and I continue to write inspirational women’s fiction for Guideposts, we also love co-authoring inspirational romances. It is complicated to plan projects around multiple publishers. The interest in a measure of editorial and scheduling freedom meshed perfectly with the concept of indie publishing.

We view this foray into independent publishing as akin to launching a small business. Not only did we have to write a good book, we also needed to find someone to design the cover and figure out ways to promote it. I owe a great deal of thanks to many people, especially romance author Holly Jacobs who referred me to the fabulous Kim Van Meter, a Harlequin author who is a freelance designer. Holly was also instrumental in suggesting ways to use social media to promote the book, and she titled the book. She is an amazing cheerleader and friend.

And I owe a lot to my friends for not only liking me in person but ‘virtually’ on my official author Facebook page. Even people I don’t know have clicked like for which I’m also grateful.

This is not the first entrepreneurial venture my mom and I have tried. The summer after my junior year of high school, she and I went into the ‘junk’ business. My Aunt Marge (who gave my mom a paper bag of Harlequin romances which in turn spurred her novel writing career) owned a flea market in a small southwestern Michigan town not far from the city where we lived. She offered us a booth to set up and sell our wares. We haunted garage sales for antiques and collectibles and books to resell. I started collecting cookbooks that summer. After expenses, I earned enough to buy myself contact lenses. It was the best summer job I ever had, and my mom and I had a lot of fun.

Just like we are now.

So many books, so little time

Back before I was even pregnant with my first son I harbored this little fantasy of what life enceinte would be like. I imagined something akin to an extended beach vacation (a smooth, sandy Great Lakes beach) where my only responsibilities were to plump out and devour all the books I ever wanted to read.

I got the plump part right at least.

Instead, right up to my delivery date, I taught two classes at Northern Arizona University—much of the time in pain from sciatica. Between grading and clearing out the spare bedroom as a nursery, reading took a back seat. My husband, Ralph, was teaching fulltime at NAU and commuting up and down the mountain to Arizona State University in Tempe for his final PhD class. Our son Erik’s December birth coincided with Ralph finishing his coursework.

I went back to teaching parttime a semester after Erik was born. Sleep deprivation and school work trumped reading. It horrifies me to think of it now, but I only read one book that entire year: a Barbara Michaels romantic suspense novel that obviously did not keep me in too much suspense.

Fast forward to late summer 1995: I’m recovering from the C-section birth of my second son (my mother, God bless her, ‘edited’ my legs out from many of the pictures of me in bed holding my new baby. A career as an old-timey circus sideshow attraction was surely an option for me then…and I ain’t talking about the Bearded Lady.).

Why I chose as post-pregnancy reading material the Kazuo Ishiguro book from the library I did, the title of which escapes me and even a trip to Amazon doesn’t enlighten me, I’ll never know. I still have nightmares about that book. The ceaseless repetitive surreal scenes did not mix well with the pain pill Percoset. I soon abandoned both the narcotics and the novel.

Books are my vocation and avocation. Ever since my mother introduced me to the Honey Bunch series when I was five, I was hooked. They sure beat Dick, Sally, Jane and their insipidly named pets, Spot and Puff. A voracious reader from that age on, I soon ‘graduated’ to Nancy Drew and never looked back. The year I was ten I read “The Catcher in the Rye” and “True Grit,” both probably too gritty for a ten-year-old, but there was no turning back.

The only time my mom ever censored my choice of reading materials was when I was in 7^th grade. The Detroit Free Press was serializing excerpts from “Sybil,” the story of a woman diagnosed with multiple personalities. One morning the newspaper was missing. My mom explained she threw it away. That day’s installment contained graphic descriptions of abuse Sybil suffered as a child at the hands of her own mother. Naturally I dug the paper out of the trash and read it.

And I’ve regretted doing so to this day.

Over the years, I’ve belonged to four book clubs in three states and read countless tomes crisscrossing genres. About a week ago someone posted a question on the West Virginia Writers, Inc. Facebook wall asking people their favorite authors. Nearly a week later the thread is still going strong. I responded with just a smattering of my favorite books and authors.

And I’m constantly discovering new favorites.

But also over the years something alarming has happened. Some of the joy went out of reading—and writing. Granted, I write to earn money but also because it’s akin to a calling with me. That’s a part of writing I never talk about except to say I knew from elementary school on I wanted to be a writer and have never really veered from that path.

In the dead of winter of this year, my mom and I had a heart-to-heart talk. We both wanted to make writing fun again. And so we have.

That decision opened the floodgates of reading joy. I’m no longer approaching every book I pick up as a ‘textbook,’ wondering if I should try something new, stretch my skills, stick to tried and true, the list is endless. I’m not saying I won’t do any of those things, but for now I’m at peace writing in the voice my mom and I do best together. And ideas for exploring future projects ‘out of my comfort zone’ are already scribbled in a notebook.

This summer, ‘thanks’ to foot surgery, I find myself with lots of reading time and no maternity clothes in sight. So I’m devouring books the way I used to race through the adventures of Nancy and her pals Bess and George.

There are so many books I still want to read (and write) and I need to embrace my enforced stillness rather than railing against it.

Who knows? I may even spend a few hours revisiting “The Secret of the Old Clock,” or “Harriet the Spy” or Harry Potter or pick up Anne Tyler or Jonathan Franzen or Lynn Austin or—the list is endless.

And I, for one, feel like a kid whose just been let back into the candy store.

Summer Camp for Writers

I am not a camper. My idea of ‘roughing it’ is staying at a Holiday Inn. My few experiences sleeping under the stars have done nothing to disabuse me of this notion.

In 7^th grade my science teacher, Mr. Herring, decided to take half a dozen of his students camping in the woods. In October. In northern Michigan. I’ve never been so cold in my entire life. Later, he told my parents (not unkindly) I was the worst camper he ever had.

I took it as a compliment.

Many years later while living in Arizona, my husband and I wanted to climb the nine-mile Potato Patch hike overlooking Jerome and the Verde Valley. The Grand Canyon is visible at a distance. He assured me this involved pitching a tent at a very nice campground. Sleeping on the ground, even in my 20s, was not my cup of tea, the clincher was the bathroom ‘facilities’….or lack thereof.

That was our first and last camping trip.

Over the years he’s looked longingly at little pop-up trailers and talked wistfully about the fun we could have in our retirement traveling around the country. He also used to hold out hope I’d actually get on the back of his motorcycle again (as I did for a brief period in college when we first met).

Ain’t gonna happen. He’s come to terms with it the same way I’ve come to terms with he’s never going to care (nee obsess) about clutter the way I do.

Then I discovered (thanks to my late great writer friend Mary Rodd Furbee) ‘writers camp” for adults. For more than 30 summers, West Virginia Writers, Inc. has held a conference where like-minded people can be revitalized creatively as well as make new friends and reconnect with old. As long as I’ve been going the locale has been Cedar Lakes Conference Center in southwestern West Virginia. Cedar Lakes offers charming rustic cabins and a better-than-many-hotels lodge. Geese, a covered bridge, and a lovely little chapel also dot the landscape. Gentle rolling hills envelope the area.

Cat Pleska, the president of West Virginia Writers, Inc., took the photo below at last summer’s conference.

Attending year after year to see old friends, make new, and get those creative juices flowing is akin, I think, to the fond memories many people have about traditional summer camp.

My dad tried to send my four siblings and me to summer camp one year, but we all came down with chicken pox. Darn. However, I revere and embrace the few days I spend each summer at Cedar Lakes at the best little writers’ conference in the country.

Past presenters have included Gretchen Moran Laskas, author of ‘The Midwife’s Tale,’ an Oprah book club selection; the indomitable Lee Maynard; Cheryl Ware, from whose pen the delightful children’s series featuring Venola Mae books took flight; Brad Barkley, an award-winning novelist; Jim Minick, whose memoir on starting a pick-your-own-blueberry farm with his wife garnered a multitude of rave reviews plus a whole host of talented others. This year, Cheryl and Jim will be back to present workshops, and Lee will be reading from his latest book. Pitch sessions to an agent and editor are also available. And it’s not too late to register.

Camaraderie, creativity, and best of all…no camping on the ground.

Can’t be beat.

To Do List Redux

So this morning I was rarin’ to tackle my ‘To Do’ list…but I couldn’t find it.

Not a good sign.

Sure it was on my computer, but I’d already printed it out and added handwritten additions.

And I wanted to be able to cross off items I’d already done. My friend, freelance writer Sandy Smith, asked me if I ever put completed tasks on my list just so I could cross them off.

You better believe it.

Last night I e-mailed the manuscript due today to our editors and was looking forward to ‘checking’ that off. The lost list included work and domestic tasks.

Rather than shuffle all the piles of papers that have sprung to life during the deadline period, I just printed out a new copy…and tossed on one of the piles.

To avoid un-shuffling said piles, I decided a blog on to do lists was in order and went back to find the one I knew I did over a year ago…yep, I’m in repeats.

The first item was the same.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

To Do List

1. E-mail editor manuscript due this week: check
2. Sort out books to donate to library: check
3. Hang more girly artwork in home office: check
4. Get caught up on laundry: never
5. Dip whole body into river of full-time freelance writing: in progress

Has it really been more than a year since I took the item five plunge?

All these months later, I’m definitely entrenched in the full-time freelance writing lifestyle. With my old frenetic life of teaching, advising, writing, and volunteering I needed lists of my lists to keep track of things.

Now, even though things are very different (tho I’m still an aging mom volunteer) I still periodically need a list…or two.

It was nearly three years ago my husband and I decided to make a drastic lifestyle change, giving up lucrative stressful positions at a large university in the mid-Atlantic region of the country to move back close to family, to my husband’s ‘dream town.’ We now live in a middling-size city in Nebraska. He loves his job in this town on the cusp of his beloved West.

And I’ve come to love following my life’s dream of writing fulltime, even though some people still think I sit around eating bon bons all day and watching soap operas….there is James Franco…sigh…but I haven’t watched a soap opera since the early 90’s.

I still miss my students and working at home is definitely work…just work I can do in my pajamas if I want.

Having to do ‘to do’ lists is a good sign…it’s an indication of a balance between my old life and my new.

Truly, I’ll never stop missing teaching college students. I loved ‘em like they were my own children, well, most of them. I do offer up a prayer of thanks every single day I no longer have to grade. I loathed grading, absolutely loathed.

Conversely, I’m fulfilling a childhood dream: being a writer. Of course I envisioned doing it living in Connecticut, surrounded by my ten loving children…sort of a cross between Jean Kerr and Shirley Jackson.

But the prairie suits me just fine.

Dear Pen Pal

Long before Hello Kitty and stretchy bracelets, having a ‘pen pal’ was all the rage. A magazine, the name long forgotten, matched up pen pals..sort of an eHarmony for the elementary school set.

When I was ten…the age I decided I wanted to be a writer (or the First Lady, or Mrs. Donny Osmond, or save the seals and the environment) a girl named Diane and I started corresponding.

She was a couple years older and lived in Pennsylvania, a fact that just now comes back to me all these decades later. We hit it off and even spoke on the phone several times over the years. We never met but the written word cemented our friendship.

One summer night after my sophomore year in high school (the grade my youngest son is in now), I came home from my job at the ice cream/sandwich shop run by a local pain-in-the-keister businessman. The pay was low, the work was mundane, and at the end of the night we had to make the restrooms hospital-clean.

My mom, my Rock of Gibraltar, told me Diane’s mother had called. Diane and her boyfriend had been killed in a van accident that evening. If my pen pal had lived, she would have been a vegetable.

I sobbed into my mother’s arms, my sophisticated 16-year-old bravado dissolved.

Since then I’ve lost friends to the ravages of disease, but never one whose only connection to me was words.

Cherish the power of words. They have the ability to bind, to wound, to wrap us in a cocoon of love and warmth or shatter our illusions and make us no longer whole.

“Not Quite a List Poem” or “The Dog Days of Blog Posts"

One of the best aspects of having poets for friends is being exposed to many different forms of the genre. List poems especially intrigue me. The poet itemizes something in a cohesive fashion, and the ending is significant.The structure of the words fairly sings. Originally what was going to follow was a list of random thoughts on July, but it wasn’t gonna be in tune.

As an aside, I went to one of those Facebook sites called “I Write Like” that checks what famous writer a person writes like by analyzing word choice and writing style and comparing them to those of famous writers. You paste in a sample of your writing so I ‘pasted’ in the first few paragraphs of my last blog post.

My analysis?

Bram Stoker. Yep, Dracula’s ‘daddy.’ Nuff said. Course my dh points out it’s my old-fashioned style. Tried another piece and got the bard…yes, that BARD…jolly olde England with the emphasis on OLDE.

Pretty much sums up July.

And I did have a pithy (okay, really pathetic) attempt at a list poem that started like this:

July

Fireworks flying forth, parachutes a dud

Friends gathered, food fine….

But I got sidetracked, which is just as well.

Think I’ll stick to prose and leave the poetry to the experts: the poets.

p.s. I just pasted in the first two graphs of this piece for analysis: H.P. Lovecraft.

The End

The Write Stuff

This morning my husband, mom and I went to 8:15 church, heard a wonderful sermon on prayer by Pastor Rebecca, and came home. Pretty typical Sunday morning, though sometimes dh and I hit Walmart after church because it’s less crowded then.

We deviated from the norm a bit and took a walk before our usual waffle brunch (husband cooks). When we got back, my mom was paging through the annual ‘What People Earn’ issue of Parade Magazine.

“Stephenie Meyer earned $50 million last year,” my mom informed me, adding didn’t I have any bestseller young adult ideas in my arsenal….

According to past interviews with Meyer, she dreamed the idea for her uber successful “Twilight” novel.

After re-watching the movie “Speed” last night, I dreamed I was locked in a room with a group of people. The room was slowly filling with poisonous gas, and we all had to breathe through nose plugs.

I think it’s been done. And if not, I don’t wanna write it.

At about age ten, I realized a career as a musical comedy star on Broadway required talents I lacked. So I decided to follow in the footsteps of Jean Kerr, Shirley Jackson and my mother.

Though my freelance income is closer to that of the switchboard operator from Erie, Pennsylvania (whose salary is also listed in the magazine) than to Meyer’s, it was a good decision.

My mom has had more than 50 books published, and our 29^th together comes out this summer.

I sing in the shower, stumble my way through zumba class, and sit down every day at the computer…grateful, grateful, grateful.

Keeping the Faith…

Do you ever lose faith in yourself, in your abilities, in the very things you know you do best?

Do doubts plague you, keeping you awake at night and fueling crazy dreams?

If not, quit reading right now because you’re a stronger person than I am.

A couple factors, including a serious lack of sleep (I hate going to bed, and for more than two months I’ve been getting up at five a.m. to go to the local Y to exercise) made me a doubting Thomas the last week or so. My faith in God wasn’t wavering, but my faith in myself seemed pretty shaky.

With the help of some writer friends who answered a multitude of questions for me this week on a project and my mother’s unwavering confidence in me, the tide seems to have turned.

The incomparable Joyce Maynard had a book of columns called Domestic Affairs published years ago. I devoured it time and time again when I was pregnant with Erik. She wrote about life with her three children and then-husband, about making pies and raising babies. She’s a superlative writer, and one of my favorite columns related a bad spell in her household compounded by a stopped-up kitchen drain. That clogged sink became a metaphor for everything rotten going on. She wrote that it seemed like one day the drain problem was solved, and life righted itself. That particular piece resonates with me still.

To stay with the water clichés, there’s an ebb and flow to life. Lately I’ve felt like a beached whale (despite all the zumba, toning classes, and tread milling), unable to do what I do: produce decent words, plot out stories, write a coherent e-mail.

But this week the dam broke, and I feel like myself again. Today my mom reminded me about the old pump in her grandparents’ backyard in Saginaw, Michigan. It had to be primed to produce, she told me.

Thanks Mom for the reminder, thanks Char and Anne Marie for the answers and thanks to my husband and children, who think having a crazy writer in the house is a perfectly normal thing.

Where do ideas come from?

The last blog post I wrote was lame. I knew it was lame, my dh said it was sweet but lame and my mom said it was lame.

It was. She said it was an okay idea but not only are people sick of winter, they’re no doubt sick of even talking about winter.

I told her I wanted to write about writing next, and she said “Where ideas come from?” And I said, exactly!

That’s the reason I write books with my mom. We have an almost symbiotic relationship, not to mention she dazzles at what I’m not good at and I’m an idea person, which has never been her forte she will say.

This works domestically too. She’s lived with us for going on eleven years, and she doesn’t mind loading and unloading the dishwasher, and I have no problem washing the pots and pans. My husband cooks, and mom and I both know how fortunate we are in this department.

But I digress.

Where do ideas come from, for everything from blog posts to books?

For more than ten years, I told my reporting students to avoid question leads if at all possible because that kind of opening is weak and leads the reader to say ‘who cares?

Apparently I’m not quite over the lameness yet.

I’m in a slump.

So stay tuned for ‘Where do ideas come from, part two.’

By then maybe I’ll have some idea besides the ether.

On Writing

It’s Wednesday already? Time for a new blog post, but I got zip, zilch, zippo. Sigh.

One of the reasons I started blogging, in addition to writing about things that have been on my mind for years… or weeks… was to jumpstart my creativity, get the juices flowing, try out something new besides journalistic writing or fiction… yada yada yada.

More sigh.

I think it’s going around. A brilliant writer friend of mine… truly brilliant… feels like writing is becoming ‘old hat.’ Since this person also makes gentle fun of my ‘old lady’ clichés (my husband chides me for my ‘air quotes’…I can’t win!), let’s substitute ‘clichéd.’

I’m rather fond of air quotes. So there.

Since I was about ten there’s nothing I wanted to be more than a writer (well, okay the mother of ten children and a musical comedy star came in a close second and third).

My ‘dream job’ in my early 20s would have been to be a writer on SNL… you go, Tina Fey!

Words are my vocation and my avocation. I love words, books, newspapers, cereal box copy… you name it. And I love wonderful words written by others. It’s like one great big word love fest.

Except of course when the words won’t come, when the ideas stalemate, when the punctuation snarls and growls.

Scary.

Still we writers persevere. We have to. We sure don’t have any other marketable skills.

So for everyone out there who shares a passion for the written word… whether as reader or writer or often both… don’t let the passion burn out.

Lists

In the summer of 2003, I went with my late great friend Mary Rodd Furbee (sister of my dear friend Susan) to my first West Virginia Writers, Inc. Conference in the little burg of Ripley, WV. The gathering has met for more than 30 years now and boasts a line-up of past presenters that includes novelists Lee Maynard, Gretchen Moran Laskas, Brad Barkley, essayist/poet Jim Minick and children’s author Cheryl Ware to name just a few.

I’m looking forward to making the trek from the prairie to the hills again this summer to attend what will be my eighth conference. Humorist and novelist Terry McNemar, the organization’s president, is planning another stellar line-up.

This conference is like a big family reunion, welcoming old members and new alike into the fold. It’s a wonderful way for writers at all stages to jumpstart their creativity and feel energized about their craft. It’s also a good introduction to new genres.

Warning: I digress.

My aforementioned friend Susan says she likes to see where my train of thought ‘wends’ and eventually leads. Susan is too kind. I like to start at Point Q, detour back to B, and end up nice and neatly at Z.

My main introduction to poetry before WVW was Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, with a little Charge of the Light Brigade thrown in. Sure I loved Poe, but his short stories, not the gloomy Lenore.

Then I started going to the conference, some years as a presenter, some as a pupil.

I learned about spoken word poetry, prose poetry (and flash fiction), list poems…and was educated and illuminated. Probably my favorite poem of all is Eliot’s The Wasteland, but it was nice to be exposed to some new things.

At this point, even if I were Susan, I’d wonder where I was going with this.

But I know exactly where I’m going because I know exactly where I started. At 5:45 this morning I was in a YMCA exercise room dropping and giving the substitute ‘drill sergeant’ ‘50’ in a toning class.

I recounted my day in an email to a friend. Reading over it, it occurred to me that I had written a ‘list poem.’

Lately I’ve been all about trying new things to embrace the lifestyle change I’ve experienced over the last year and a half. I’ve gone from an über stressed, overworked (my own fault), frantic lifestyle to the following:

i went to 5:45 a.m. 'toning' class run by substitute 'drill sergeant' instructor

came home, went back to walk

thought about yoga tonight but stomach muscles (or lack thereof) have had enuf

ordered flowers for funeral

worked on writing-related stuff, but not writing per se

laundry

feel fragmented, need more sleep

need to revive 'ancient' multi tasking skills that used to allow me to teach/advise fulltime

write, be 'super volunteer mom'

or not

Bad poetry and pathetic pushups…it’s a start.

Back to the drawing board….

I spent all morning writing a blog post about a defining moment in my life, and Martin Luther King Day seemed the day to articulate these thoughts. We’ve come a long way since Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but we still need to keep the dream alive.

I then spent less, but more frustrating, time scouring the house for my 1978 Lake Michigan Catholic High School Yearbook. Before doing so, I even logged onto a classmates website for the ‘free’ membership in hopes of finding the photo I was looking for.

Even tho a picture of an old cute neighbor boy of mine popped up as the ‘newest’ member of the site, I still wasn’t tempted to pay the $9.95 not-so-free fee to gain access.

One of the reasons I started blogging was to find my individual, as opposed to collaborative, voice as a writer. Since my writing partner is also my mother, she’s highly supportive of the whole endeavor. Also, I wanted to finally write about things I’ve mulled for years. Like defining moments from my older son’s younger days that have helped shape me into the ‘holding on and letting go’ mom I am.

We spoke yesterday after he returned from the Berlin airport where he saw his girlfriend off on her return trip to the States. Even though Erik flies back in three weeks, he said it was really hard to go to the airport and not be getting on a plane to come home.

So I have a lot on my mind, the words need visuals, and the dishwasher needs unloading.

All I ever wanted was to be a mom and a writer. And some days I just struggle to do either well enough.

To Do List:

1. E-mail editor manuscript due this week: check
   
2. Sort out books to donate to library: check
   
3. Hang more girly artwork in home office: check
   
4. Get caught up on laundry: never
   
5. Dip whole body into river of full-time freelance writing: in progress
   

 

 

Bake Someone Happy

It’s not yet December 1, but my holiday baking is done. Granted, the Buckeyes still need to be dipped in melted chocolate (yes, a Michigander-born girl doesn’t let the Ohio-ness of those tasty treats dissuade), but that’s it.

Why the frenzy? The reasons range from wanting to mail a tin of cookies to son Erik in Germany to having a nice variety for a tray for my department chair husband to take in to the last faculty meeting of the semester and…

…wanting to get it over with. There I said it. The days of joyfully dumping out all my Grandma Rock’s old metal cookie cutters and pulling out her sugar cookie recipe are long gone. Sometimes I wonder why?

Frosted cut-outs and golden cookies studded with M&M’s were just two of my maternal grandma’s specialties. Both my grandmothers excelled in the kitchen. My dad’s mom, widowed when my dad was just 12, supported him and her four older daughters by being the head cook at Mercy Hospital in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Even though she was on her feet cooking all day, Grandma Andrews spent all her time in the kitchen when all her children and grandchildren gathered for holidays. From her sister Carrie, my great aunt, I learned how to make shortcake dotted with butter and Sugar Cakes, melt-in-your-mouth sugar cookies made fluffy with buttermilk.

My mother didn’t like to bake so she taught me when I was very young. Soon I was adept at family favorites from both sides, including chocolate applesauce cake, date nut bars, tomato soup cake, best two egg cake….and inept at things like fudge and one concoction involving powdered sugar, cocoa, milk and Cocoa Krispies. I think it was supposed to be frosting.

In 7^th grade I nearly flunked the sewing part of Home Ec (In middle school, my sons took BASE, which was…home ec with careers added. Sensible addition.). I did much better in the kitchen. I can still remember the day we learned the ‘water displacement’ method to accurately measure peanut butter. It’s slimy, but it works.

So what happened over the years?

Well, writing became a much better (and lower calorie) outlet for my creativity. Then there was my husband’s diabetes diagnosis…and the fact the disease runs on both sides of my family. The oldest of Grandma Andrews’ four daughters was Dorothea, a nurse, who had a foot amputated due to complications from the disease. Also, while both my children enjoy an occasional cookie, and Erik is very partial to the chocolate chip oatmeal cookies (recipe listed below), neither seems to have inherited my raging sweet tooth. Finally, the whole working mom balancing act ultimately left no time for laboriously rolling out cookies and decorating with colored sugar, not when there were papers to grade and copyedits due.

Now there are no more papers to grade, not for me. After 15 years at a large university, my husband and I were ready for a lifestyle change. This will be our second holiday season here on the prairie, in the town my husband wanted to live in for nearly 20 years. Long before we had children, we’d drive ‘home’ for the holidays from Flagstaff, Arizona to our folks in Iowa. This Nebraska town on Interstate 80 enchanted him, though at the time I thought he was nuts. And not the kind that go in cookies. Instead we went east. But when a job opened at this university of 6,500 students in his ‘dream town’ at the exact time we were ready for a move, it seemed like fate and faith were aligned.

It’s been a challenging yet wonderful change. Soon I will be realizing my life-long goal of staying home to write fulltime. It’s scary, exhilarating and, apparently, baking inducing.

Maybe next year I will pull out Grandma Rock’s cookie cutters.

What’s your favorite holiday cookie recipe?

Basic Cake Box Cookie/Bar recipe

• 1 box any flavor cake mix (Pillsbury Classic Yellow particularly good)
• 1/3 cup oil
• 2 Tablespoons water
• 1 egg

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all ingredients. Add one 12 oz. package chocolate chips or any flavor. Spread in a greased 9 x 13 glass pan. Bake at 350 for ten – twelve minutes til golden brown. Let cool and cut into bars.

You can also use this dough to make cookies. Bake the cookies at 375 degrees.

Roll the yellow cake mix cookie dough into balls and flatten with a sugared glass slightly. Bake at 375 7-8 minutes or until golden.

Frost or sprinkle with colored sugar.

You can also use a chocolate cake mix, but it’s drier so use ½ cup oil. Or just make brownies!

Lemon is also a good flavor. Just form into balls and let flatten as they bake. Make a thin glaze out of lemon juice, powdered sugar and a little milk or water.

Or bake in a greased 9 x 13 pan again til done and frost with canned lemon frosting.

Try cherry cake mix, and add cherry chips and almond flavoring and a vanilla frosting glaze or spice and melt caramel and drizzle on top.

Iowa State Fair Cookbook Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup shortening or margarine (I use margarine sticks)
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1 12 oz. Package semisweet chocolate chips

In a bowl, combine sugars, shortening, and eggs; beat until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, soda, powder and salt. Add to shortening mixture. Add oats. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop by teaspoonful onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake in 375 degree oven 8-10 minutes or until done.

The dough works better after it’s been chilled a bit in the refrigerator. And the best thing about these cookies is you can freeze them as drop cookies or roll up as logs in wax paper. Either way you can bake right from the freezer when you want some.

Mother’s Occupation: Freelance Writer

In about twelve hours from now, I will be standing in my college professor husband’s feature writing classroom to discuss freelance writing. In another lifetime, I taught reporting with a decided features emphasis. Along with my writing partner/mother, I have co-authored 28 novels aimed at women with number 29 due at the first of the year.

Despite my ‘resume’ and doing tons of research and talking to my mother, who sold her first story to Highlights for Children in 1965, I have no clear idea of what wisdom I’m going to impart to these bright shiny faces.

My husband said he simply wants me to talk about how to find a niche and market articles, using the same principles I have always applied to writing and selling novels.

I still got zip.

When I was in elementary school, students had to fill out index cards at the start of each new year stating the occupation of each parent. I can vividly recall sitting in a second grade classroom in Three Rivers, Michigan and printing in block letters FREELANCE WRITER instead of ‘housewife’ following Mother’s Occupation:

My mother, Barbara Andrews, attended the University of Michigan in the 1950s. She realized journalism was not really her forte so she went home to Kalamazoo College. There she could ‘dabble’ in her interests such as writing and theater. She met my father in a play. They fell in love, got married and she decided not to attend law school in Indiana. Instead she taught junior high and eventually along came me, then Joan, Steve and Mark.

My father, a school personnel director, always wanted my mom to go back to teaching. However, daycare was non-existent in those days, she hated teaching and she’d have to drive to another district since nepotism policies prevented him from hiring her.

So she became a FREELANCE WRITER, turning out material for Sunday School magazines, crossword puzzles, true confessions, antiques publications.  Then one day my Aunt Marge, who owned a flea market near the shores of Lake Michigan, gave my mom a big bag of used Harlequin Romances. My mother studied those stories and went on to write numerous romances under her own name. When I was pregnant with my first son, he of the wandering nature, she suggested we team up. I’m plot, she’s character.

This month marks the 16^th anniversary of the publication of our first co-written book. On the day we sold that partial manuscript, we got a rejection letter back on another proposal.

Kinda puts things in perspective.

In the morning, I’ll be able to pull stuff together and go in and tell my husband’s students that if they want to be FREELANCE WRITERS, more power to ‘em.

And then I’ll tell ‘em how.

Not that I have all the answers by any means… in fact I’ve been soliciting help from my writer friends…but it is the family business.