 So Jennifer and Marion are the two main characters and their stories are told simultaneously. The book runs through one year of Marion's life and a couple of months of Jennifer's. So I spent my career writing for newspapers, 20 years for the Bangor Daily News in Maine, and another 20 for the Brilliant and Free Press here in Vermont. I also did a little TV. I got the idea I could write a novel for kids when I was reading books to my two sons. With help from a correspondence course, this was all before the internet, I wrote the book. But then it just sat in my computer, actually a whole series of computers as we upgraded, for 25 years. When I retired, I decided I finally wanted to try and publish it. First I had to rewrite Jennifer's story because much had changed in 25 years. Jennifer needed a cell phone. To write the historical part of the book, Marion's story, I relied heavily on stories my grandmother used to tell and finally wrote down. Those remembrances are what provided the window into what it was like to live a century ago. For example, imagine having a couple of classmates bring a bucket of water around your classroom and hand you a dipper that you drink from and then that dipper goes to the next person and the next person and this is a bucket of water. That's the way they had lunch. Or imagine making your own mattress every year out of straw. My grandmother, Marion Mitchell, really lived in Charleston, Maine as a young girl. I found in the 1880 census, so there's a record that it shows. I highlighted here. I'll pass it around. It's pretty hard to read, but it says David Mitchell. That would have been my great-great grandfather and Addie Mitchell, his wife, my great-great grandmother. And then it has his parents and then it has two sisters, two of my grandmother's sisters, Ella and Linda. So this is my grandmother. It's probably about the time the book I set the book. This is my grandmother, my great-great grandfather, my great-great grandmother, and the two sisters. I actually don't know which is which, but one is Ella and one is Linda, but there's nothing marked on them. I don't know which one is which. So if this is a very old record and what's interesting is the 1890 census burned up, so that record isn't available. I don't know where they lived in 1890, but eventually they ended up in in Bangor. So I used their real names when I wrote the book, but I made up their personalities and I made up the problems that they faced. But I did have this whole collection here of things that my grandmother wrote down. My father told her to type up a bunch of stuff, so she did. So these are all little little remembrances. And so I was able to use those. So she talked about peeling apples, and I don't know if you've ever seen those apple peelers. So they would peel lots and lots of apples, and they had a game that they played with it. And I won't give that away, but it had to do with the peel, and you threw it in the air. But they were drying apples, so they would put them on a thread and dry them all. And she wrote about how snow was done, and she wrote about how school worked, and how there weren't grades, and you just progressed through books, either the math book or the reading book, and how the boys, as they got older, didn't stay in school once it became planting season. So they would be there for the winter, so you they would have a man try to teach in the winter, and then they might have a woman come for other parts of the season, when the big boys weren't there, when they were out busy, and they could have it for everyone else. So I also had to create a life for the modern character, Jennifer. And when I wrote the book, I had friends with daughters, and I thought about what interested them and what challenged them. And I think readers like you will recognize that the challenge that girls face, that anyone growing up faces, both now and in the past, such as trying to meet parental expectations that often seem kind of out of reach, doing things with friends that maybe get you in trouble. So Jennifer didn't want to be interested in Marian, she was kind of too cool, but every time this ring sparkled bingo, she was going back there, and the life seemed different, but eventually she got interested in how it was different. And then she also just became attached to this person, who was actually a relative of hers, and she wanted to know what was happening, because things started to get more difficult, and she wanted to know what the outcome was. So that's the story. I can take any questions that you have about how to write a story, or have you ever thought of writing stories? How long did it take you? It took actually quite a while, because I was working, and I had two kids, and I was doing it as a course. So the people who were teaching me, who were both authors of books that were also chapter books like this, so they would say, okay, here's your assignment this time, we want you to think up what your characters will be and describe them. So I would write Marian, she's going to be tennis, she's going to have long hair, she's going to be really like reading. Linda, her sister, Linda's also going to have long hair. Linda is going to be not interested in school, and is going to be interested in always redoing her hair in fashion as much as you can be when you're out on a farm, and she's going to be. So I had to write down something for each character, which helps you remember who you said they were as you start writing about them, and you get them in a scene and you think, oh, is she the one that loses her temper? Is she the one that always wants to do what the parent says? So I had to figure that out, or they would send and then they would send me another assignment, write your first chapter, and then they would say, here's how you write conversation. So I had, so it took probably a couple of years. And then I gave it to people to read, and they had questions, then I would write it again. And then most recently, I gave it to two more people to read. I had to modernize it. I had tape recorders in it, and I replaced that with an iPod, and a cell phone came in. And I tried not to put too many details in the modern part, so that it would age out, you know, that as time passed, it suddenly wouldn't be relevant anymore. So I was trying to balance that, but make it enough so that any of you read it, you say, oh, I see this is kind of this is, I can, I can see myself here with this, you know, enough detail so that you would see yourself not so much that maybe somebody 10 years younger than you in 10 years will also be able to see themselves. Have you written any other books? I haven't. I wrote lots of news stories for many, many, many years. And that's somewhat different writing. But I have an idea for another one. I don't know if I'll get around to it. But, and it's, I think it's going to be another one that's going to be two times, time periods. Well, on that note, that when an author speaks, thinking of advice for a younger child, when an author sits down to rate a novel, do they have a complete picture of the novel? Did I always know the ending? Do they, I mean, maybe some details come up as the writing occurs, but does an author have a complete picture of the whole novel? I think that's helpful to some extent. I don't know. People have, I listened on the radio some to when authors are interviewed and they, you know, one author, the other day was saying that she knew the whole thing, what was going to happen beginning to end. I know others have said they just dart and let it go somewhere. And I actually, I'm, I probably would be the structured type that would say, all right, where are we going to go here? But I know that, that you've let some things float and you can change some details or you get to something and you started to write it and it doesn't make sense or it doesn't work. And you say, okay, I've got to rethink this. And I actually, I pulled a chapter right at the last minute. And I'll tell you what it was. It was, I had set up a, I lived in Bangor when I wrote this and I had written a fair number of stories about some of the Indian tribes that live in Maine because they had been talking about different rights that they were looking to, and also to purchase a bunch of land with a land settlement money. And I, so I had thought about incorporating a section, a chapter that dealt with an interaction with some, I think I was going to have it be Pasama Quattis, but there were, there were four tribes. And, and then I thought, you know, you do not know enough about this Nancy. And this is not the time, you know, these days, it is not the time for a white woman to be writing something about Native Americans when she doesn't know anything about it. And I just ripped the whole chapter out and said, I can't do this. I'm really scared about this. And I've, in writing over the years, even in journalism, if I feel like, wow, something is really bothering me, I have some question here, then I would pull it from a story. So I pulled that chapter. Well, then I had come up with another chapter. So I jumped into my grandmother's book and I said, what, what did she write? What can I pick up really quick? Because it was a section where the grandmother in the story was telling a story about something. And I, so I needed another kind of her recalling something. So I was able to find something where I felt pretty confident that that would be okay, because it was actually something she was recalling. So anything else? I have a question for the group. Have any of you, folks, have any of you ever started writing a book? Do you have some ideas to write about? Well, I'll share with you, because you all know me because I own a bookstore and sell lots of books. But I've started to try to write a book a couple of different times. And it's a lot of work, but it's kind of fun when you, if you just have like a fun idea. And it'll probably take me a solid 30 years to write my book. But it's kind of fun to have those ideas. And the thing is, when you read lots of books, you say, why didn't I think of that? Or I could even, you know, if you're reading to a young child, you always think, well, there's only 100 words in this book. Of course, some of it is who did the illustrations. But, you know, just a lot of books, because they're well written, they seem like they're really, it would be really easy to do. They seem to be really easy, but it takes a trick to, well, like the ending of each chapter. And if you think of a mystery story in particular, they almost always do this. But the last thing in a chapter is kind of the thing that says, I guess I'm not turning my light out yet. I got to read another read on. And then before you know it, it's 11 o'clock and you should have stopped a long time ago. But that's the author doing that to you, to help you keep going in the book, lead you right on through. So, there's, in this time, there's, I didn't write a tell all political story. You know, those can go to a big publisher and be snapped up and get a big load of play pretty fast. A lot of books now for an author like me, I could have tried to pitch it for some national thing and collected the, you know, the rejections. I think Chris Bujelian, who you all know, you know, had 20, 30, 40 rejections. He pursued it. I didn't. So, I actually have, I live in Virginia now and the library there had an author come in, Megan Price, who writes Vermont Wild Books. She did a little thing about how to get your book published. She also was a reporter. So, she and I got to talking and she self-publishes. She created her own little publishing. So, she self-publishes her books. But she suggested to me that I go through and the Phoenix bookstore now publishes books and I talked with them. But because my book is set in Maine, I chose this organization called, It's a Cooperative of Authors, Maine Authors Publishing. And they put out a catalog of if they, you know, if they accept your book, which means they need to edit it, you know, it's not, there are, you know, you could go on Amazon and pay and just they would print anything you wrote. And, you know, so there are certainly ways to do that. Anybody can write anything and it'll, you want it printed, somebody will print it for you. Mine was edited, you know, they sent it out to editors to read it and then they accepted it. But I paid to print it and but they put it in a catalog that they then shop around to independent bookstores in Maine. So, they've been pitching it over there and then I came here and I went to five bookstores. I haven't gone to anymore at this point. And independent bookstores will take your book on consignment. And then it's up to me to, if I want to push it. And it was very sweet to offer me this opportunity to come. But it is, it's difficult in some ways. I mean, you have to do a fair amount of marketing yourself. Well, I know Nancy has some copies of the book. So, if you think you might want to read more about it, you can definitely talk to Nancy and she can sign copies for you too. And I have a little couple pages. This is what my grandmother wrote down in the beginning of her collection here that kind of explains what she was hoping to do with it. And it talks about a few other things that are different. And she must have been writing this, oh, maybe in the 1970s or something. There's a few typos, but it's pretty easy to see. And she talks a little bit about school and she talks about being in a buggy and she talks about not being able to buy clothes at the store but buying the cloth and and then hand sewing it. They didn't, they didn't machine sew it. They hand, would hand sew the entire dress. And she talks about buying candy, conversation candies. So welcome to look at that. And if you want a magic ring, if you buy the book, you can pick out a ring. Therefore, you can go back in time too, if you want. So thank you very much for coming.