Even the twenty-ninth time, proofreading my newest book is a thrill. The proof copies arrived, and opening the box and seeing it in print is a thrill. Even finding the typos and deciding on changing some things here and there is rewarding, trying to make the book the best it can be.
Already I have ideas, and actually have begun to write, the next one, from the character Suzanne’s point of view. But first things first. Let’s concentrate on Sam’s Sea Stars Saga!
This book, like my last three, was written in draft form in November during National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo. Each day I posted a chapter, usually somewhere around 1500 words. Then, I began the REAL writing. The final copy is just under 90,000 words. It is the story of the Wentworth family and thier passion for fostering and adopting sibling groups.
If I were to live my life over again, I would have committed to doing this. While I enjoyed, no loved, raising my Paul and Nancy, I would have doubled, tripled, quadrupled that by raising others as well. Of course, I “raised” well over 5,000 kids in my classrooms over forty years. I told them at the beginning of the year that I was their “other mother” and that they were “my kids.” Some of them still stay in touch. What a joy. But, the need is so great, especially now with not only the 49,000 children in Florida in foster care or Wards of the State, but there are thousands of illegal migrant children whose whereabouts we don’t even know about, who are unsupervised, perhaps working illegally as child labor, or worse yet, as sex slaves. My heart hurts for them.
I will soon complete the editing job on my newest book and hope to find readers for the series: Seashell Saga, Cher’s Seaside Saga, and now Sam’s Sea Stars Saga, and later on, Suzanne’s Seacasstle Saga, my next project.
About the Author
