Yesterday we drove the two hours to the Elko County Fair to watch the finals of the cowhorse competition and the team branding competition. We have always loved the Elko area, and driving through that country reminded me of the actual incidents that became the seeds of Chapter 1. Maggie Creek Ranch, just outside Carlin, 20 miles west of Elko, was the location of the fence-crashing (which I believe I have on videotape), and is the ranch I saw in my mind as I started writing the story, although I'm sure I've changed it quite a bit.

The ground squirrel escapade is a combination of two events. One was very similar to the scene in the book. Another originated on a family outing to our favorite fishing and canoeing spot, Angel Lake, 12 miles south of Wells, a scenic little pocket at an elevation of 8500 in the Ruby Mountains. Chipmunks abound there and are bold enough to sneak right into your picnic lunch. Our boys would lay down and let the chipmunks scamper over their bodies, trying to not laugh from the tickling, as the chipmunks retrieved strategically placed potato chips.

One day a chipmunk darted right into the potato chip bag, and our son snatched up the bag, holding it tightly closed. My husband grabbed a piece of fishing line, tied a slipknot in the end, and held it over the mouth of the bag while our son slowly opened the bag. When the chipmunk emerged, he found himself caught in the noose, which quickly tightened around his neck and one front leg.

Hitting the ground, he leaped and somersaulted, squeaking indignantly--I could swear he jumped two or three feet in the air. Meanwhile my silly husband carried on like he had a wild horse on the end of a halter rope. "Whoa there, big boy! Easy, fella!" We all laughed so hard we were crying. What I wouldn't give to have THAT on videotape, but wouldn't you know it, that was the ONE day I'd left my camera in the pickup on the other side of the lake.

So you see how a writer can take various unrelated true-life incidents, combine or change them a little or a lot, and create a fictional incident. I'm sure some writers can create characters and incidents completely from their own imaginations, but I am not that imaginative. Most of my characters and incidents originated from real people and events, which helps me to write about them in a detailed and believable way.

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!

Besides the technology challenge, another roadblock to writing is just "life." A couple recent events that have kept me from writing as much as I would like: a six-day wildfire that was almost in our backyard at one point (with the possibility of evacuation), and a three-day horsemanship clinic we put on in Truckee, CA. I tried to post some photos in another blog format but it "ate" several of my fire pictures, so I got discouraged and gave up on that idea.

Today I finished the vocabulary lists and exercises for each chapter. After the frustrations of computer hassles, it was so fun to get back to just playing with words! I have always enjoyed words--writing, crossword puzzles, Scrabble and Boggle. Working crosswords gave me the thesaurus and dictionary habit. I love books that give the history and origin of words and phrases. I have a rudimentary knowledge of German, and even less of Spanish and Italian (musical terms are usually noted in Italian). I find it interesting to see the similarities of those language to English. I enjoy the sounds of interesting words.

Now that the chapter section of the curriculum unit is done, I will organize the many notes and rough drafts I have made on book analysis and cross-curricular activities.

Why a blog?

This blog will be the story of how my middle-grade novel, "The Orange Slipknot," is published, and what I as an author am working on.

I am home for the summer, since I work in a school. My main summer writing project is to finish the Curriculum Unit for the book. But the last few days, I have been spending several hours a day creating my author website and letting people know about it. I have already created two other websites (Jack Young Clinics and Jan's Bible Notes), so this part was not new to me. But I have had to spend alot of time learning my way around my new web hosting service, LunarPages. I even had to call Customer Support a couple of times.

It was VERY exciting when I finally clicked on my website and saw it appear on the Internet, for everyone to see! Every few hours I think of some little thing to add or change, so I fiddle with it and tweak it often. This past year, I have visited many children's author websites to get ideas about what I want on my site.

I can't wait to add more pages, but I must also spend time working on the lit unit. I have been working on a possible sequel to "The Orange Slipknot" this past year, and hope I can fit that back in later this summer. Some authors write all day, every day--I don't. I have a job and many other activities--piano students, housework, yardwork, special summer projects, grandchildren, and horses. I am just as busy now as I was during the school year!

I hope you enjoy reading about the progression of events as a children's book is published, and how one author goes about her writing.