Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Writing Update:
Bringing One of the Girls to One of the Schools


This is something I’ve been hoping to do for some time.

Next week, I’ll be speaking at Craig Williams Elementary School in Bellflower, California to all of their fourth, fifth and sixth grade students on reading and writing and sharing One of the Girls. I’m told it’ll be nearly 300 students.

Pretty exciting! I wrote One of the Girls to be a childhood adventure that I would have loved when I was a kid. I embedded in it the superhero elements I loved growing up combined with aspects of Hardy Boys-style mysteries. In short, these kids are who I wrote this book for.

In preparation for the event, I made flyers that each student took home to their parents with instructions on how to get a signed and/or personalized copy of One of the Girls. I’ve discounted the book by about a dollar and am handling the tax myself to keep things priced as low as I can. I also made some small posters for each teacher to hang in their classroom as a reminder. Apparently some of the posters may go in the main office as well. I’m told the flyers went home last week. I’m hoping to use events like these to vastly expand my readership and to duplicate this event at different schools (and likely at different scales) across Southern California. In fact, I recently sent out a packet to do a similar thing at another elementary school in Long Beach. Hopefully I’ll hear back from them soon and I’ll be able to do another event on the heels of this one.

This is a bit larger event than I originally anticipated (I approached them with the idea of speaking to one classroom) but I’m up for it and I’m looking forward to it. Indeed, either extreme suits me fine.

So here we go! The plan is for Lori to go with me, so I've got good support going in. I’m finalizing my outline this week and, after the event, sometime late next week, I’ll post again with news on how the event went.