Hello, everyone, and welcome to silviaacevedo.com! This is your best place to find my latest news, works, and musings.
Please take a look around the site, and feel free to reply to posts. I love hearing from fellow writers, journalists, and people from all walks of life.
I was shocked to find out that I’d passed — unnoticed — the one-year anniversary of my blog; August 20, 2008. A milestone that slipped by uncelebrated.
Until now. So I’m pleased to give myself a little pat on the back for a fun year of writing stories and blog entries and making strides in my writing career.
And I’d like to thank you readers for riding along. It’s been fun, and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.
Is it wrong to sneak in a line or two — maybe even a whole paragraph — of writing while your kids are in a long line for the roller coaster? I hope not, because that’s exactly what I did. In fact, I’m sure it’s awesome, so I’m blogging on it.
See, every year, my family spends the first day of the Wisconsin State Fair’s 11-day run at the Midway. Riding rides. All day long. Until we drop. Wellllll, let me be more specific so you don’t get the wrong idea. The kids go on the rides. I watch over them and occasionally feed them and regularly take pictures. Then the other days of the fair are devoted to all the other things that make the WSF the great event that it is.
But this year, at the Midway, I snuck in some writing as well. I know, you’re thinking, “How can you write when you’re at such a place and your kids expect to see you waving at them?” Well, there were a few spare moments, when they were in lines or were inside closed-off rides (think Haunted House) where I could sneak in a few minutes of writing. So out came my teeny tiny purse notebook and in went, well, whatever I could spit out in a moment’s notice.
We know some truly great writers suggest using every moment to one’s advantage. I spent 99 percent of my moments that day enjoying a great day with my family, but I also got a few precious moments with pen to paper, and a lot of character study done as well.
Love meeting authors? The Wisconsin Chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators is hosting a book signing party with Wisconsin talents. More than a dozen Wisconsin authors are scheduled to read from their new books, including award-winning picture books, middle grade, and young adult works.
The event is being held June 21, 2008, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Martha Merrell’s Bookstore in downtown Waukesha, Wisconsin. You can find more information there.
Happy reading!
Jeff Miracola’s first picture book is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com! He’s my hubby, and a fabulously talented, successful illustrator. Welcome to Monster Isle is written by Oliver Chin and published by Immedium, Inc. All 36 pages of this fabulous, fantastical romp will be available in stores September 2008.
Story Description:
A family’s vacation goes bananas when a perfect storm tosses their skipper’s tiny boat off course. Now seven castaways are stranded on an uncharted desert island! Finnegan, his sister, parents, and dog Howl venture into the wild and encounter a menagerie of colorful monsters. Can these hardy survivors befriend seven beasts straight from their wildest imaginations?
Whimsical and lushly layered illustrations invigorate a zootopia of mythical creatures like the Yowie, Abominable Snowman, and Ogo Pogo. Adventurous readers will take a trip they’ll never forget, since being lost was never so fantastic!
Once in a while, someone in your sphere offers an interesting glimpse into their or your own psyche through some sort of exercise. Be it Rorschach’s ink blots or some open-ended question, these exercises can sometimes offer you moments to slow down and really ponder an issue.
Such is the case with the 123 Meme exercise that blogger Michele posts at http://writingthecyberhighway.blogspot.com. It’s simple. The rules are:
1) Pick up the book nearest you
2) Open to page 123
3) Find the 5th sentence
4) Post the following 3 sentences
5) Tag five others (I skipped this one. I don’t tag people.)
The book nearest me at the time was The New Nation by Joy Hakim. It’s the fourth book in the series A History of US, which is part of my eldest daughter’s course on American history. It is an excellent series, by the way; thoroughly researched and written just for the child’s ability. Page 123 speaks of Sequoyah’s attempts to understand written language and create just such a working system for the Cherokee nation, in the hopes of preserving their history and knowledge, as well as learn to speak from a distance, through the use of correspondence.
Here are the sentences following the fifth: “A white man would take words, turn them into shapes, and scratch them on a slate or draw them on a piece of paper. Then another man could look at those shapes and say the first man’s words. Was it magic?”
It took Sequoyah more than a decade to succeed in creating a writing system for the Cherokee language. What an incredibly lofty goal, to create “talking leaves,” yet what an amazing success to have a written language, something we perhaps don’t often consider amazing.
May we all cherish the gift — in every language.
