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.

On August 18 I wrote some comments about how many Americans don't see the relationship between ranching and our food supply. I recently came across this quote in Range Magazine, from the article "Healing the Land with Livestock":

"About 98.5% of Americans are city or suburban based and have no connection with the production of the food they consume. Only 1.5% of the American population has anything to do with producing food."

This is one of my motivations for writing about ranching and Nevada. Our nation's roots are in agriculture, but in the last several generations, most lifestyles have become distant from farming or ranching. Food comes from the grocery store, not outside the back door.

I grew up in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. When I first met my husband, I remember asking him what was in that little building behind his barn. He said that was his pumphouse. I said, "You have your own WELL?" He laughed and asked where I thought water came from? I said, "From pipes under the street!" That really made him laugh! I had a college education and I knew that water came from underground, but I had never known anyone who actually had a well. Everyone had "city water" and got a water bill from the city. I was surprised to learn that people with wells don't get water bills; electric pumps pump the water to their homes, so instead of a water bill, they just have a bigger electricity bill.

Because few families raise animals for food, few kids see animals killed to provide their meat. At the same time this trend was developing, kids began watching cartoons with cute talking animals. The thought of killing "cute" animals and eating them horrifies many kids. Farm and ranch kids see, accept and understand this fact of life. Many city kids grow up with an unrealistic view of our food supply, then fall prey to the propaganda of the environmentalists who paint ranchers as enemies of the land. I hope that as I show city kids the ranching lifestyle in a fictional setting, they will come to understand not only our American agricultural heritage, but the need for ranching today.

As far as the progress of The Orange Slipknot, I finally finished the curriculum unit. I am so excited about the thought of classrooms full of kids reading this book and learning about Nevada, ranching, and cowboys! The curriculum unit provides teachers with many questions, activities and writing assignments. It was also very exciting to contact all my friends and announce that the book is now on sale! Many people are already placing their orders.

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!