One week more
Only one week until Nerviest Girl‘s pub day! It’s hard to think about much else. There’s an awful lot of behind-the-scenes work that happens in the months before and after a book’s publication—all kinds of outreach you’re supposed to do—without being obnoxious about it, of course. And yet everyday life rolls on, full of its usual deadlines and tides and busy-ness. On Instagram the other day I wrote about a new daily rhythm my family is trying out—a radical shift from my decades-long pattern of homeschooling in the mornings and working in the afternoons/evenings. We’ve flipped the day so that I work mostly before noon (with another burst in the late afternoon), and we do our high tide studies between 12 and 3. Today is only day two of this experiment. I decided to see if my old, tried-and-true method of blogging as a transition to other writing & paid work would work as well as it did when I was balancing babies and books.
First, the Nerviest news!
• Julie DenOuden, a California teacher and blogger at Girl on the Move, published a delightful piece about Nerviest Girl yesterday: Literary Travel: California Adventure. She uses the book as inspiration for a fun Southern California exploration. Makes me homesick for San Diego!! In a world without Covid, I’d be heading that way next week to celebrate pub day in the town that inspired the novel. I appreciate the opportunity to travel vicariously through Julie’s fun post!
Since she includes a visit to the San Diego mission, I’d like to recommend An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Jean Mendoza, & Debbie Reese. Important context for any study of the missions with kids. (Amazon affiliate link since I couldn’t find a listing for it at Bookshop.org. Odd!!)
• Do you subscribe to Chris Barton’s newsletter, Bartography Express? It was one of the first newsletters I created my treasured “Good Things to Read” folder for in gmail—the folder I turn to as an antidote to doomscrolling. You should definitely sign up in time for his August issue, which comes out tomorrow. Just saying!
• To celebrate launch day, I’m going to do a FB Live/IG Live readaloud event next Tuesday, August 18, at 1pm Pacific. More info coming soon, so think of this as a save-the-date. I’ll read a couple chapters of Nerviest Girl and do a little Q&A in the comments.
• Another fun thing happening next week: the Reinventing the Author Visit workshop with Julie Hedlund and Kate Messner. I was pretty bummed, last spring, to realize my fall travel plans would have to be canceled—I’d hoped to be making lots of school visits this year. I’m still hoping that! They’ll just have to be virtual visits. I signed up for this workshop to help make my Zoom/Skype presentations as lively and smooth as possible. (If you’re a teacher or school librarian interested in author visits, please keep me in mind! You can reach me via the contact link in my menu.)
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More book-related news coming as the week rolls on. Right now, I need to hop up and put my bread in the oven. My baking schedule got jumbled this week—I usually prep the bread on Saturday and bake on Sunday morning.
Then I’ll work for a few more hours (with a break for fresh bread, obviously!!) and begin easing back into high tide with Huck and Rilla. Huck is taking an Outschool course that uses Hot Wheels to teach the physics of collisions. Rilla and I are planning some art history studies this year. I miss homeschool blogging and hope to do a lot more of it this season!
Just came out of the oven!
Melissa says:
That bread. Oh, my. It made me drool. Not kidding.
And your book news! So exciting! You deserve every good thing, Melissa!
On August 11, 2020 at 2:22 pm
Susanne Barrett says:
Before COVID, I was hoping to perhaps see you if you came down for Comic-Con or for Nerviest Girl … sigh.
But it looks like we *might* be moving up your way. We can’t afford living here, even in less expensive Pine Valley. So we’re hoping to sell while the housing prices are high, move to the Eugene area and rent for a year or two until housing prices go down a bit, and then we’ll know which areas we like best (unless we find something we can afford right away). We are downsizing quite a bit (both house-wise and yard-wise), so those considerations should help We’ll see if it works out the way we hope. Houses are selling fairly quickly in Pine Valley (usually it’s a very slow market), so we’re fixing up this old converted mountain cabin and seeing what happens!! 😉
I love the SD Mission; it’s one of my favorite places to just sit and absorb the history, the quiet, the ambience. I often take a journal and write a bit there, too.
Take care, and I am looking forward to seeing much more about your Nerviest Girl campaign!!
Warmly,
Susanne 🙂
On August 12, 2020 at 1:04 pm
Carrie says:
Hello! I have been so excited to “discover” you and your treasure trove of a blog!!! My daughters love your books. We found our way to you through Sarah MacKenzie and have loved everything we have come across! I only recently learned of your blog and I think my husband and four children will have to pull me away to eat and sleep this week since I will probably disappear regularly into your rabbit hole 🙂 Thank you for writing and sharing your stories! We are a homeschool family – in our eleventh year, somewhere between classical, Charlotte Mason and everything else – one might call unschooling or eclectic. I can’t tell you what a joy it is to find a fellow homeschooler who just happens to be writing down so many of my very own thoughts! 🙂
On October 3, 2020 at 2:57 pm
Melissa Wiley says:
Carrie, this reply is woefully tardy–but I wanted to thank you for all the kind words! It’s lovely to meet you through the blog.
On March 19, 2021 at 3:09 pm