The Polar Vortex and The Persnickety Witch and Me

 I've had a lot of time on my hands since I lost my job last July. And with the onset of the Polar Vortex and more snow than I've seen in 30-ish years, I've been home a lot. There  are mountains of snow on both sides of my driveway. So, I've rehashed both books (Tears On A Sand Rose and The Persnickety Witch). I've considered changing the book name from Persnickety Witch of Fiddyment Creek to something else. Any ideas? If that happens, the book cover that was designed for me won't work. I've considered using kickstarter.com to receive donated money so I can pay for self-publishing. I've met with a gal who carves time out of her busy schedule to help me get a FB page up and running devoted to the book. She's really good and much more tech-savvy than I am. I stare at her like one of those deer caught in the headlights -- with no expression on my face and blank eyes. We've talked about just who my reading audience is. Yes, I agree that it is for Young Adults, but not them alone. I think women and women in book clubs would find PWOFC a definite page-turner.

Now I'm going to digress for a paragraph or two. For the past couple of years I've met with a 50-something year old woman who had a cluster of strokes which left her speech severely damaged. When I began to see Sandi, she wore a notepad around her neck and would write messages. She knew the words, but they wouldn't travel from her brain to her mouth. My task was to introduce her visually to words. Enter flashcards. You know the kind. Word on one side, picture on the other. When we got to words she didn't recognize or couldn't say, I would sing a familiar tune (If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning OR Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear OR I'm Chiquita banana and I'm here to say) and she was able to fill in the blank and sing with me. I guess we did music therapy as well as speech therapy. By last fall, she was reading 3rd grade level children's books and comprehending them. Guess what? Now we are reading PWOFC and she loves it AND she gets it!!!! I'm so proud of her, the way she advances daily, and am happy to have her as a dynamite friend in my life.