During a recent subbing job, while assigning an article on environmentalism, I was reminded of one of several reasons I am writing books.

When our boys were little (if you know them, you'll find it hard to believe they were ever little!), my husband and I moved to northern Nevada--ranching country. I was fascinated with ranch and cowboy life, so different from my more urban background. I realized many kids have no idea where their food comes from or the importance agriculture plays in our lives. Food doesn't come from the store--it is produced by farmers and ranchers. Cowboys aren't just colorful characters in the Old West, movies, or rodeos, but play in important role in beef production.

Having been a bookworm all my life, I read piles of books to my little ones, hoping to instill in them the love of books. Many were engaging and well-written, but some made me wonder if I couldn't have written a better one myself! I began to toy with the thought of someday writing books for children.

Fast forward a few years. My boys are bringing home papers from school with a strong environmentalist slant, sometimes (as in the assignment I mentioned above) with a blatant anti-farming/ranching element. My pro-agriculture feelings were kindled even further.

By this time I was writing and selling stories and articles to magazines and felt ready to attempt a book. I had read that nonfiction was a good way for a new author to break into the publishing game. I fumbled around with a few fruitless endeavors before it occurred to me that I could probably appeal to more kids in a fiction format, weaving background information into my story.

Not only did this approach prove successful, but during author talks I can bring out the agriculture angle even more, as part of an entertaining slideshow. The curriculum unit, while primarily integrating elements of reading and writing, helps teachers use the agriculture focus as a science connection and the Nevada ranching focus as a social studies connection.

Unfortunately, there was no time the other day to take the time to talk with my class about environmentalism, its agenda, and how it is pushed in the classroom and elsewhere. But through my books, I am doing what I can to educate kids about agriculture and the unique ranching sub-culture of the West.

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."

When the second book is about to arrive, and you must find a way to squeeze more book stuff into the same small space in your small house, cleaning and re-organizing is the order of the day! Fortunately, as a substitute teacher, I'm still on my two weeks of Christmas vacation. Much of my vacation to-do list is crossed off, and it felt good to cross off one more today. I ruthlessly discarded useless space-stealers I had been holding on to "just in case I might ever want this."

In the process of cleaning out old file folders, I discovered two newspaper clippings from 1998 that I had ear-marked as ideas for a future book. What a find--turns out they both dovetail with some ideas I've been playing with! Now, back to the computer to continue my pursuit of new online opportunities. Such pursuit often feels more like floundering, but I am so thankful as an author for all the ways the computer and the internet have opened doors of convenience and connection.

Galleys are the uncorrected preliminary version of a book that can be sent to reviewers a few months before the book actually comes out. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_proof) The galleys of Starting the Colt have been printed and sent out to reviewers. In proofreading one last time (I think!), I managed to find a few things that needed fixing. We are getting close to publication! It was very exciting to receive my galley copies in the mail and see what my book will look like shortly.

What I found amazing in proofreading was that as many times as I have read through my story, I found it as hard to put down as if I'd never read it. My husband asked me one evening when we were going to eat dinner. I thought to myself, "Not now! I'm right at the good part--I have to keep reading!" Not like I didn't know what was going to happen, right? And yes, I did get up and start dinner...after just a few more minutes of reading.

It reminded me of the many times my mom scolded, "Jaaaaan-ice! Haven't you started on your chores yet?" And I would answer, "Oh, just let me finish this page" or chapter, or one more chapter, or however much I thought I could sneak in before she'd get after me again to do my homework or piano practice or my chore list taped on the refrigerator. Has my love of books been passed on to my kids and grandkids? You bet!

Never count your chickens before they actually hatch. Things do not always go as planned, and I'm sure this won't be the last time...the books that were supposedly "in the mail" to my publisher turned out to be not in the mail, not even printed. So then a last minute change of printer resulted in several more weeks of delay and lost opportunities to sell books at an event and on a trip, but they will actually arrive in a couple of days now.

Meanwhile, I have been distributing flyers and bookmarks and talking up my book. I've used my unplanned extra time to get over being sick, visit grandkids, make my Christmas plans, and work on another writing project. I hope to use my two-week vacation from my job at school to resume work on the sequel to The Orange Slipknot, which I haven't touched in months.

When my books arrive this week, I will spend that evening autographing and stuffing books into prepared mailers which I will take to the post office the next day. Hopefully all prepaid orders will arrive by Christmas! Then I will begin my new job of selling books. I have stores to visit and press releases to send out. I will need to devise a way to keep track of my business transactions. Writers must also become small business managers!

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity...scores of emails arranging last minute changes and details...many decisions to be made about ordering, printing, shipping, autographing, and delivering books. Every time I thought about updating my blog, I told myself, "...but not until I do this, this and that!" All these must be fit into a life already busy with my daily job, piano students, shopping, projects and responsibilities at home, grandchildren, and weekend activities such as house painting, horse activities, and a three-day trip to California to visit family. But in a few days my first box of books will arrive! I can hardly believe it.

If my box arrives on time, I will be selling books at a local pre-Christmas craft sale next weekend, along with the framed photos and cards I make with Bible verses on local photos I have taken. This week my spare time will be taken up with putting together my photos. The following week I will probably start visiting local stores and calling or emailing other stores and libraries. This weekend I have been printing up bookmarks and flyers I have designed. How could I ever have managed without email, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Photoshop? The computer is surely a marvelous tool, along with home printers, digital cameras, scanners and copy machines. How different things would have been if I had published my book ten or twelve years ago, before I entered the digital world.

One thing I have been trying to show in this blog is that writing books involves much more than just writing a good story. I am very glad that over the years, I have spent many hours reading up on book marketing. I had some idea of what to expect, but actually doing it is a real challenge.

Lately I have been working on the Nevada pages of the curriculum unit. I wrote The Orange Slipknot because I wanted to share my love of Nevada--not the glitz of Las Vegas, but the beauty and uniqueness of buckaroo country. I grew up in California, so Nevada is my adopted state. I was a town girl, not a country girl. I never imagined I would grow up to marry a cowboy and raise my kids 50 miles from a town. Life here was so different from what I had known. My letters home to family and friends were filled with adventures and anecdotes that had them shaking their heads. More than once I was told I should write a book. Those letters contained the seeds of stories to come.

When I started my journey into writing, I began by reading books about writing for children. They all advised, "Write about what you know and feel passionately about." I knew I would write about kids growing up in Nevada. My first piece of writing was called "The Best Thing About Nevada," in which a boy tells about all the things he loves about living in Nevada and cowboying with his dad. I didn't know it then, but it was "Ben" in disguise! So many elements from that essay found their way into The Orange Slipknot years later.

Not too long after that I took a course on writing for children. Several of my assignments became Nevada pieces of one sort or another. The first piece that I sold was a magazine article about kids and horses. It would be a few years before I came up with a story that I thought I could develop into a book, but this book was destined to be about growing up in Nevada's cowboy country.

Cowboy country is ranching country, and ranching means beef cattle. As I got more and more interested in sharing my ideas with kids unfamiliar with this lifestyle, I began to realize that many kids don't even know where hamburger comes from. I got involved with Ag in the Classroom and started reading Range magazine. I began to think about how I could use stories to help educate kids about agriculture while entertaining them with cowboy tales.

Agricultural roots were once strong in this country, but now most people are so far from that lifestyle that they have little concept of the relationship between ranching and our food supply. Much of what people do hear about ranching is filtered through the environmentalist view that ranching on public lands is evil and that ranchers are rich free-loaders. Many people probably associate cowboys with either the past or with rodeos, not realizing that this lifestyle is still alive and well in the contemporary West.

I was fairly sure that few juvenile publishers were interested in my topic, preferring urban and multi-cultural settings. When I found Raven Publishing's website and read that the publisher was from a ranching background, my hopes rose. Finally I found a publisher who shared my values!