Well, it has actually happened--my second book, Starting the Colt, is out! It even arrived earlier than expected from the printer. Now it's time to take off my writer's hat and put on my marketer's hat--not my favorite hat. I'd much rather be spending more time with my cowboy hat, but that's not going to happen for awhile, what with winter cold and snow. So it's a good time of year to be selling books in my spare time.

I am an introvert--I don't enjoy publicity or the process of publicizing my books, but I am trying to balance the side of me that would prefer to remain invisible. Every time I take a load of books to the post office, the rewards of marketing outweigh the challenges. Starting the Colt is now at the library and available in over half a dozen stores across northern Nevada. I just barely got it in at the Western Folklife Center in Elko before the week of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

My hard-working publisher, Janet Muirhead Hill, at Raven Publishing, has Starting the Colt up on Amazon.com, both as a paperback and as a Kindle book. She has been so great to work with--promptly answering my many questions, always making good suggestions and guiding our projects in the right direction.

As I have been subbing, I have shared with students the progress of my book in its journey toward publication and had a few opportunities to give mini-author talks or short readings. I love talking to students about reading and writing.

Other projects include tweaking my website (www.janyoungauthor.com) and placing the curriculum unit that I wrote last summer on TeachersPayTeachers.com. I have spent the past month and a half familiarizing myself with TpT--the products, the descriptions, and the process of formatting and uploading a digital product. Here, teachers can easily access the CU for an affordable price, and even download a free introductory mini-unit. Visit my TpT store to find "STARTING THE COLT Curriculum Unit Common Core Aligned" and "STARTING THE COLT Mini-Curriculum Unit Common Core Aligned."

Writing a curriculum unit, like writing a book, is hard work, but fun work! Word games, like crosswords, always fascinated me, as well as reading about origins of interesting words, phrases and idioms. This background gives me ideas for the vocabulary section of each chapter. Exploring idioms and opening up the world of cowboy slang to non-ranching kids is a challenge I really enjoy.

Having learned about the Common Core Standards and DOK levels, I'm coming at the chapter questions from a different angle than when I started the CU for The Orange Slipknot (before I revised it for the Standards). Instead of majoring in recall/retelling questions, I have almost none of those; the questions tend more in the direction of what you would discuss with a writer's group--just on a fourth grade level! Teachers want their students to learn how to think about literature. I am trying to help them understand how an author crafts a book--to talk about theme, plot development, character development, foreshadowing, etc.

School has been out for a week so I'm on my summer schedule. I've made my list and checked it twice...no, actually I check it almost daily, working on the various projects on my summer list: yard, house, writing, grandkids, horses, etc. My main writing project for the summer is to complete the curriculum unit for Starting the Colt. I had several chapters done, or almost done, so the hardest part--getting started--is behind me.

For the last couple of years, I've been studying the Common Core Standards and rewriting the CU for The Orange Slipknot to align with them, since this is what teachers are now looking for. I have a much better idea of what is needed this time around, including less DOK 1 questions and more DOK 2 and 3 questions.

DOK = Depth of Knowledge. Level 1 is basic recall, or reciting facts. CC downplays an emphasis on this level and encourages deeper thinking. Level 2 requires more engagement with the material: infer, interpret, summarize, compare, etc. Level 3 involves a deeper level of thinking and reasoning; there may be more than one correct answer to these questions. Level 4 becomes an extended final assessment activity, designed around the "essential question" that introduces the entire unit. You can see how a background of working in the school system is an advantage when trying to craft a CU that will meet teachers' needs.

Actually quite a bit has been going on in the "Writer's Corner" of my life--yes, it only is one corner, not the main thing, which is why it takes me so long to get things accomplished. Two big things:

1) As a follow-up on my November blogpost, over the next few months, I contacted an administrator, several teachers, and various resource people in the school district to learn more about the Common Core Standards and how I might incorporate them into my existing Curriculum Unit for The Orange Slipknot. I ended up cutting some of my original material, rewording much of what remained, adding a few new things, and then inserting numbers to indicate which standard was met by each activity. My goal was to finish this by the end of summer, which I did. The second edition will be a great improvement! (It is not yet available.)

2) My second book, Starting the Colt, is in the works and is slated for release this coming spring! I recently finished editing and proof-reading the "page layout" version, in which the pages on my screen actually look like book pages--kind of exciting to get that visual of the finished product. I was amazed, in my editing, at how many things jumped out at me that needed fixed, clarified, or just improved. There was much less editing needed than in The Orange Slipknot, hopefully because I learned so much about writing from that experience that I did a better job in my initial writing of this one. But my publisher will now do further editing before creating the galleys, so I guess that remains to be seen.

Now that those two biggies are behind me, I have two more biggies to tackle. One involves marketing: Every year I contact all the Nevada fourth grade teachers for whom I can find email addresses (a very time-consuming project) to make them aware of The Orange Slipknot-plus-Curriculum Unit as a great social studies tool. The other involves writing: Now that I'm up to speed on the Common Core Curriculum, I need to craft a CU for Starting the Colt. This should take me much less time and work than the first one did.

One of the purposes of this blog has been to demonstrate what is involved in being a writer. First you write and self-edit the manuscript. Then you must market and sell the manuscript; however, I managed to skip this step with my second book, because my original publisher, Raven Publishing, was interested in my sequel. There is much involved in the publishing process--editing, proof-reading, galleys (preliminary unfinished copies), artwork and cover design, deadlines. Then you market and sell the book, which includes flyers, phone calls, emails, presentations, etc. And yes, blogging. Since I procrastinated so badly on my blogging, I am making up for it by posting twice in one day!

Oh yes, and don't forget websites--finding a host and learning your way around their technology, creating and updating your website, then repairing the things you screw up...which I was just reminded of as I tried to post this. In posting my earlier entry today and updating the link on my "janyoungauthor.com" home page, I found I had accidentally wiped out my entire home page. Instead I had somehow uploaded the wrong home page: the one from "jackyoungclinics.com"! I will admit to a few moments of panic as I tried unsuccessfully to get the right page to come up, until I finally figured out what had happened, and got everything back to normal. Sometimes I love playing with websites, but when things don't go right, well...let's just say the problem is not always fixed this easily!

Something I've been struggling with in my mind for several months is learning how I might make my Curriculum Unit more teacher-friendly by aligning it with the new Common Core Standards. Listening to teachers and reading the school board reports, I hear that now everything in the classroom must be aligned to these standards.

The problem is, I don't even know what the Common Core Standards are or how I might do this. Subbing in various schools, I have picked up on the fact that teachers themselves are struggling to figure out the standards and what to do with them. So how is someone like me going to figure them out? And how important is it that I do this? The more I look into it, the more questions I have and I'm not sure who can even answer them.

I started by asking a few teachers, who seemed to think I was on the right track. Then I turned to the internet to find information. I don't know if I need to find someone to help me, or if I can figure out what I need to know by just digging around on my own. But there's only one way to find out--start digging. I'm already getting brain-strain.

I want The Orange Slipknot and my Curriculum Unit to be useful teaching tools in the classroom. Teachers will be more likely to buy them if the necessary work has already been done for them. As an author who is also working in the school system, I hope to use my knowledge and experience to help me market my book to teachers. Being an author is more than just writing a good story--there is lots of work to do after the book gets published.