Thanks for your Support ! ! !

As some of you know, our house was destroyed by a fire on May 1st.  We are safe, our boys are safe, we lost everything, but we have gained so much in the past few weeks.

Thanks so much for the outpouring of support. This kind of support has been carrying us through the last couple of weeks, and the reason we feel relief.  We have learned so much about ourselves and our community since this happened.  We have been able to remain positive because while we lost physical things, we've gained so many more emotional bonds to people in our community.  So, we might have lost stuff, but we've gained so much more in terms of friendship and support.

Some of the random acts of kindness that people have done for us are amazing, like :

• I called the pharmacist to renew my medicine, and she sent kids clothes to my house
• We picked up some free kittens from another neighbor, and they gave us bags of food from their pantry
• We went to our insurance company, and they had a birthday party for the boys complete with presents and balloons
• The families at the kids school have all bought presents for both boys, and even did a toy drive for them
• The kids school has sponsored us for the rest of the year for afterschool
• Families everywhere have donated so many clothes to the boys that we have enough for them to wear for the rest of the school year without ever having to wear the same thing twice.
• When we moved into the house our neighbors fixed up for us, it was stocked with groceries, bathroom stuff, cleaning stuff, laundry baskets, everything you would possibly need for a home.
• The hotel we stayed in for the first two days gave us room service and access to the kitchen all day (even though room service wasnt something they normally provided)
• The firemen, after putting out the fire, came back with clothes and toys for the boys

So many people have been so thoughtful to us, that I cannot possibly remember everything.  It is hard to feel down when I have so much support around me. This might sound crazy to say, but I truly feel blessed to have so much support and feel like this happened for a reason.

Thanks for being out there!

ps,  I will be going on a blog-hiatus for a few months while we rebuild our lives

peace out.

kfran

Chromatics Attack Review from my Target Market!

Chromatics Attack
Reviewed by Madeline McElroy (age 9.5) for Reader Views (3/11)


When Emison's mom turns into a shadow and warns her about `The Chromatics' and then disappears, she must get back her mom before it's too late. About one week after her mom was gone, two new people move in next door in her apartment. Emison must be very careful to not saying anything or her mom might be more in danger then before! The next day Emison meets her new neighbors, a boy named Adam and a girl named Missy. They were very nice and fun. She wanted to tell them about her mom becoming a shadow, but she is afraid they can't keep a secret.

After a long day talking with her new friends, everyone goes back home. Emison wanted to find out more about the Chromatics her mom warned her about and looked them up in `Google.' Some results said Color Scientists and some said a paint store. She must find more. She searched shadow people but nothing came up. The next morning Emison shows her new friends around the building and they go to the thrift store to sell some stuff for her mom. When they get there, she asked the store keeper Mr. Lewis if he knew anything about the Chromatics. He said they sounded familiar and would look at it later. After they're done, they walk down the alley back to their apartment. In the lobby, Adam asks if they could go down to the basement and see what is there. Emison thought it might be fun so they went down. The basement had low light, very low light, and there was a big black hole in the middle of it, and a boy inside it. There was also a man talking to the boy; he said, "You can't come into our world, it's too dangerous." What did he mean?

The next day Emison, Adam, and Missy go down to the thrift store again. Emison asks Mr.Lewis if he found anything about the Chromatics, and he did. He found a flyer that read, Chromatics Meeting Today Down at Harper Street at 3:00. This could be a clue to finding her mom! They sneak down to Harper and look through the window of the meeting. Who would never know it, there was that big black hole again and Adam and Missy's babysitter Hannah! Then Emison realized her mom disappeared through a hole like that. Could it be the entrance to the shadow world! Tomorrow they plan to go back down to the basement and travel to the shadow world. When entering the shadow world, it was very dark and not a thing of life. The weird thing was that when Adam looked at the sun, it was not yellow, it was a glowing purple, and instead of burning your eyes, it was a beautiful sight. Emison knew she must stick to the case, to find her mom.

The rest of this book will leave you guessing what will happen, and what will not. "Chromatics Attack" is a great story that will keep you wanting to read more! I like this book because I love fantasy books; I think it's so awesome for this author to make up such a cool world and such a cool book! All kids my age and older would love reading this book. I know I loved it!

Thank you Madeline
KFran

Mind Mapping Heaven's Fishermen

I use a tool called Freemind to create mind map diagrams about things in my book.  I use it to help me with plot, character, setting, pace, all sorts of things.  I thought it would be fun to share one I did for my work-in-progress called Heaven's Fishermen.  The book is about a boy named Dax who thinks he is a guardian angel, and a girl named Janie whom he is supposed to rescue.  Of course, Dax might really be a guardian angel, or he could be an escaped mental patient.  I'm not quite sure yet.  I've already written a 45k rough draft, and need to add about 20k more.   

Here is a plot outline I did recently to help me work on some issues:

The tool has some great icons, like a lightbulb to symbolize an idea, and a red pencil to symbolize an idea that needs refining, and a key to symbolize something key to the plot.  Here's a closeup of part of the map:

This section of the book needs lots of refining, but I have come up with several ideas that I am going to explore.  Here is a shot of the list of icons Freemind has to offer, so you can see how useful this tool is.

Anyway, I'm off to go refine some of those ideas, or come up with some more.  Actually I think I'm going to start another mind map on guardian angel fashion, because I think fashion is a very important part of any book--especially for young adults.  I think one of the reasons Hunger Games was so successful was because of the glorious costumes they had to wear (argg, getting distracted--must focus!)

ttl
KFran

Publish with Amazon Publishing: Author Central Page Setup

I recently setup my Amazon Author Page, and thought I'd blog about how easy it was to do so.  I first thought it was a mystery, but after a few quick googles, I found this link to the Author Central enrollment page.

As usual, Amazon's instructions are straight forward, easy to follow.  I love Amazon for this, they've made my life simple.  To give you an idea, here are some screen shots of my process.   The first thing you see when you click on the link, is the join now page.  All you do here is click on the Join Now button.



Most of us already have an Amazon account, so we just join with our usual password and email.    After that, you will receive a confirmation email and then you are taken to the main site, which looks something like this:

There are six tabs, including Home, Books, Profile, Sales Info, Customer Reviews, Help.  You can setup your profile to add a picture, a bio, your blog posts, videos and events.  All you have to do is click, add, click, add, click, add.  Your books Sales Info, and Customer Review pages generate automatically.  It's quite nice to see everything in one place. 

This is how my biography turned out:

If you want to see my author page, click here.  I thought there was a way to link the author page to the book in the Amazon store, if anyone knows how to do that, tell me!  It might be a matter of syncing with the servers, so we'll see if it appears soon.

ttl

KFran

Saturn's Titan

Saturn’s largest moon is called Titan. It's huge, larger than the planet Mercury. It has rivers, lakes, dunes and mountains. The rivers and lakes are not water, though. They're methane. The moon Titan has the same weather pattern as earth. It rains, the methane falling into rivers and lakes, and then the methane evaporates into the atmosphere—rinse and repeat.

According to Wikipedia, Methane, a natural gas, is at the highest levels on the planet earth in 400,000 years. It is a gas at normal temperature and pressure. Burning methane in the presence of oxygen produces carbon dioxide and water. It also has a high global warming potential. The earth's crust and core contains huge amounts of methane. Methanogenesis is the formation of methane by microbes. Methane gas is also produced when vegetation decomposes without air. Enough from Wikipedia.

A recent article in Scientific American (what else?) by R. Lorenz and C. Sotin had some other interesting things to say about Titan. The planet is covered by giant sand dunes made from hydrocarbon molecules resembling coffee grinds or coagulated smoke. The sand dunes, higher than any we have here, are punctured by icy hills. If this isn't interesting enough, Titan's seasons last years, only having come out of a 15 year dark winter last August. Far out.

A moon filled with coffee colored sand dunes, can you imagine? These descriptions remind me of Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory where the rivers lakes and streams were made out of chocolate—except I don't think his clouds rained chocolate. What importance this has to me as a writer is knowing that other planets can have a climate where water can be replaced by something else. 

The possibilities are endless. Can you imagine a nitrous oxide based planet—everyone would be laughing all the time. Then there's the apocalyptic version of the story, Earth becomes Titan due to green house gasses—it's raining coffee!

That's enough for now.

KFran

Top Ten List of Favorite Scientific American Email Subjects

I receive emails from Scientific American on all sorts of subjects.  They send me on average about three emails a day, and sometimes even six.  It's hard to keep up with all the science reading, so sometimes I just look at the headlines.  Here are my favorites from this year:

1. Biomechanics of the Flea Leap
2. Tiny Satellites Make Orbit Affordable
3. Physics: Beer Batter Is Better
4. Even Lab Animals Are Too Fat
5. Genetic Weapons to Combat Argentine Ant
6. African Farmers Beat Drought with Trees
7. Kepler Spacecraft Finds 6 New Exoplanets
8. The Fish Farm Revolution
9. The Most Distant Object Ever Seen
10. The Slimming Effect of Being Neurotic

From fleas, to beer, to trees to fish -- Scientific American really does seem to cover it all.  To find out more information on any subject, just google it.  My favorite has to be number ten, because this suits me very well.  Oh, and number nine is interesting too because they think they've found a galaxy from the infant universe.  I also love the sense of humor in some of these headlines.  I think it's important to have a sense of humor if you want to reach more people in your writing, especially if you write about sciencey stuff.

Anyone else have any clever, funny, or particularly interesting email subject headers they want to share?  It doesn't have to be about science...


ttl.
Kfran

When anonymous bloggers return. . .

I follow three terrific blog with two  things in common.  The first is that they are written anonymously, the second is that the authors of the blogs all took an extended hiatus and CAME BACK around the same time.  The only obvious conclusion is that they are the SAME PERSON! 

How else would they coordinate disappearing and reappearing at the same time?  The only other solution is that they come from an anonymous office pool that had trouble in the economy, so they had to let some folks go.  Maybe they recently hired some new folks to blog on these blogs. 

Here is the list of blogs:

The Intern
In her words: "THE INTERN was the unpaid toiler on the publishing house floor, licking stamps, reading slush, and copy-editing your train-wreck of a manuscript (for free) because the "real" copyeditor is down with the genital crabs."

Editorial Ass
In her words: "I'm a recovering editorial assistant. I'm like most of my kind: impoverished coffee-and-gin survivalists, underpaid but ambitious, bitter but hopeful."

Editorial Anonymous
In her words: "Editorial Anonymous' anecdotes are mostly true. Names of authors, illustrators, editors, agents, publishers, manuscripts, and a few random nouns have been changed to protect her ass"

You tell me you don't see the commonalities between these three blogs?  Am I right, are these written by the same person?  Maybe by her past, present, and future self?  Or were they written by Romanian techies hired through ODesk? 

I'm sure there's a conspiracy theory here, will you help me figure it out?

ttl

Internet Trouble? Try a MiFi.

This is what I say to people with bad internet connections.  Get a MiFi.  We used to have satellite, the small business package.  It sucked.  Now we have MiFi and are able to function as regular internetees again.

So, if you live out in the sticks, consider switching over.  Our satelellite ran us $200 a month.  MiFi is only $40.  MiFi is cute!  MiFi can fit in the palm of your hand.

tt.

Chromatics Attack Review on Amazon

My first review for Chromatics Attack is posted on Amazon -- here's a link to it.  My favorite part of the review is this quote:

"Anyone who recalls a childhood with the freedom to investigate the streets in search of everything unknown will love this story."

And for the science minded:

"This is the first adventure with refracting lights testing Isaac Newton's theories."

Oh, and this is clever too:

"Emison teams with fraternal twins who actually didn't even come from the same womb."

Why can't I come up with a summary like this?  Anyway, thanks for the review Janie, you are super duper awesome!

..ttl

Tourmaline is very pretty

Tourlamine is a crystal-like gem that's composed of a bunch of different materials, such as Iron, Aluminum, Magnesium, Lithium, etc.  It's very cool because it's found in a wide variety of colors, including pink and purple and green.  Here's two from the Wikipedia article (both public domain pics)

The one looks like a pink exclamation mark.  I'd use it in my writing if I could. 

This one looks like a colorful town after an earth quake. 

For more pictures of Tourmaline, google it.  This is also an interesting substance, because it's one of the things that doesn't absorb light in the shadow world.  There are caves full of the stuff there, and some, that no one knows about, even lead here.

I love rocks!