Looking Back

My blog has a birthday! February 22, 2008 was my very first entry. 

I reviewed books, talked about writing, shared links. Blogs were fairly new and not quite as ubiquitous back then. 

A lot of my early entries talked about memories. And people I knew. 







Yesterday I walked at my favorite park in St. Petersburg, listening to a great podcast. I highly recommend the NCTE's WHY I WRITE podcasts. Not only does it make walking fun, I learn something. THIS ONE by Sharon Draper was yesterday's listen. 
She talked about how she came to write STELLA BY STARLIGHT, her grandmother's journal, her summers in the south. And although the book was inspired by her grandmother, it wasn't about her grandmother.

I love it when kids ask questions about my stories' truths and whether my characters are real people, people I know. 
Because characters often are based on real people, and they certainly begin with the truth.

In the spirit of those early blog entries, and in my newly revived effort to review more books where it counts (Amazon and GoodReads, places that mean a lot to books), here's a book about real people and life stories turning into book characters.

Fans of Lois Lowry- this one's for you.
And for a lot of readers who appreciate how authors come to their stories.
And for authors who struggle to find stories and then discover they are right in their own backyard. Or at least the inspiration for a story is!

From the chapter titled BOOK WRITING.

     "The Mystery of the Girl Who Lived in a Tower," Anastasia write dreamily.
      Then she looked at that title. Good grief. It sounded like a Nancy Drew title. Probably on the library shelf of thelve thousand Nancy Drew books, there was already one called "The Mystery of the Tower Room" or something.
     She tore that page out of her notebook and threw it away. It was much harder to write a book than she had ever realized...