I want to be a part of it...

It is good to be back to this blog! I know blogging needs far more consistency than what I have offered. No excuses are better than bad excuses, so I will save you an explanation. I still find immense delight in hearing from children who read Ozzy Ox. That's the greatest reward and I want to thank all who have introduced the lovable Ozzy to their children. He is out there on Amazon and in bookstores. So if you haven't met Ozzy, please do so!

I hope to someday add onto the Ozzy Ox series and have a few more ideas for the rascally lad. For now, though, I have switched lanes and am writing a historical fiction novel. Set in Minnesota and North Dakota, it begins when a train hits a granite-hard snowbank during the first day of the Blizzard of March 1966. The train is stranded with 29 passengers for three days. That really happened and I am humbled to learn that some of the heroes of that saga are parents of folks I have either met or already know! That is only the beginning, though. The book features dual plot lines that qualify it as a historical drama. It goes on to feature settings in a Minnesota unwed mothers' home and the glamorous Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you have never visited Summit Avenue, you may want to check it out, as it is, to this day, the longest preserved stretch of Victorian-era residential architecture in the United States! During the peak of the Gilded Age (1870 to 1900) 440 mansions were built on 4.5 miles of Summit Avenue. Today, 373 of those homes are still standing. My book features both an unwed mothers' home in that neighborhood and a wealthy heiress who lives in the largest turn-of-the-century mansion on that famous street. Every book needs a villain, right? Other settings include Valley City in the blizzard aftermath, a legacy ranch in western North Dakota and a North Dakota Indian reservation. Although my characters are fictional, their experiences are not. I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying the 1966 March Blizzard and its aftermath. I have read more documents, papers, articles and books about unwed mothers' homes and Indian boarding schools than I can count--and feel that what I have learned has greatly enriched my understanding of the injustice, the sheer brutality, heaped on the vulnerable in mid-century America.

I still cannot believe how the timelines of the era took place on not only rich mid-century settings, but unbelievably consequential social policies that almost begged to be correlated. As a North Dakotan, I think we are all aware of Indian boarding schools. But how many of us know what followed them? After learning in-depth about the experiences of generations of Native Americans and the unwed mothers of past decades, I couldn't look away without at least an attempt to shine a light on these travesties. I prefer not to self-publish this book, and in that vein, am traveling later this summer to New York City, where my writing samples and outline has earned me a place at a writer's conference. In order to traditionally publish a novel, an author must find an agent. The chances of that happening (unless you are a celebrity) are .01 percent. Who is dense enough to accept those odds? Only a dreamer like me! Yes, I have to be realistic enough to believe I won't actually secure an agent with this book by simply showing up in New York. But I am confident that I will have learned from this experience about traditional publishing. That is my realistic goal--to learn something I wouldn't have otherwise! I self-published Ozzy Ox with an endless learning curve, and now I find, once again, that I have a lot to learn. To be honest, I will consider the whole thing successful if I avoid falling into a NYC manhole. And if the conference turns out to be a dud, I will still have gotten to visit NYC with dear friends and my lovely granddaughter--who, I expect, will keep me from falling in that manhole. Right, Emersyn? I want all of us to "be a part of it...New York, New York!" Please wish me luck!