So last week on the blog, I reviewed Friends for Freedom, but unlike with my other picture book reviews, you may have noticed that I didn’t include a reaction from my kids. This was because I hadn’t read it to them. I thought they were too young, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about slavery, women’s rights, etc. with my 5 year old. I didn’t know if Pre-K Monkey could handle it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted her to know how unfair people in this world can be. Despite all of t

So last time I talked about finding sources. This time I’ll talk about how I incorporated the research into my novel. Here is kind of how I thought about it: 1) Insert only relevant facts The easiest thing to incorporate into my book was facts. Solid facts from solid evidence. Foods they ate, clothes they wore, specific architecture, though incidentally this type of information was the hardest to find. It was tempting to just throw in everything I read and learned while tryin

I enjoyed this article from WritingSpirit Blog about Louisa May Alcott’s writing methods. WritingSpirit has found articles from The Writer Magazine dated back to the 1890s. One gem is an article entitled “Methods of Authors: Favorite Habits of Work” which discusses Louisa May Alcott’s own habits (Alcott died several years prior to the writing of the article). One interesting tidbit is that she would think up whole chapters word for word at night and wait until the daylight to