Somehow another month has passed...

You people make such fine correspondents!

It was really nice to hear from so many of you after last month's email. Some of you are health care workers and I worry about you every day. Some of you are librarians trying to figure out how to serve your patrons from home. Many of you are looking at uncertain futures. All of you are trying to stay sane while living through historically difficult times.

One of you was the recipient of a little gift box my publisher sent out to a few lucky people last year, and the box included a bandana in a drab green color that matched the KOPP SISTERS ON THE MARCH cover.

This particular recipient wrote to me to say that she found the bandana just as she needed to start wearing a face mask! Who knew that we were shipping out such useful supplies? (the box included chocolates as well, but I'm sure those are long gone.) Anyway, I shared that with my publisher and they were thrilled.

So thanks for taking the time to write to me. It means a lot. 

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things
(yes, they are all TV shows, and yes, one of them is about butter)

If you haven't already seen it, a lovely escapist treat would be The Durrells in Corfu, available on PBS (and if you donate to public television, you may have a subscription you don't know about!) and on Amazon.

It's charming and funny and offbeat, and contains one of the most hilarious portrayals of a writer I've ever seen on TV. Also, it's based on a true story--the adorable animal-loving little boy grew up to be quite a prolific author. My Family and Other Animals is the first of three books he wrote about his family's time in the Greek community of Corfu.

I've also been watching hours and hours and hours of This Farming Life on Britbox. (It's also on Amazon.) If you love the Great British Baking Show for its mild British humor, and its easygoing, low-stakes plotline...but you also love cows and sheep and chickens? This Farming Life is for you. The most suspenseful thing that ever happens--and it is suspenseful--is whether a ewe will have a difficult birth or an easy birth. Actually, I would say that This Farming Life is like Great British Baking Show meets James Herriot (and by the way, those books hold up wonderfully well if you're looking for a lovely escapist read right now.)

Finally, this video about butter was just delightful beyond words. They just posted a whole series filmed in Europe about traditional food-making. so there's more where this came from. It's entertaining, it's food-driven, it's travel-driven, and you get a nice little language lesson as the subtitles float by.

I'm offering paintings for sale as part of the Artists Support Pledge

A British artist had the idea to post small, affordable works of art with the pledge that he would pay it forward by buying art himself from a portion of the proceeds. Here's how it works: Artists post work priced at under $200 (or pounds or euros, we're not bothering with currency conversions here), and for every $1000 worth of art sold, they pledge to spend $200 on art from another artist.

It's artists supporting artists, basically. Anyone can offer art for sale. Anyone can make a purchase. It's happening on Instagram under the #artistsupportpledge hashtag and there are artists participating from all over the world. I hope you'll take a look--there's plenty of work available for well under $200, and you'd be supporting an artist who has pledged to support another artist.

My fledging new online art shop is taking part in this challenge, and I'll be adding more original art as I go, so feel free to keep an eye on it and on my Instagram for new art. (and do email me if you have trouble placing an order! This is brand new and I'm still getting used to it myself.)

Also--I will be doing some art auctions for charity again soon!  I have a new idea about how to go about it. You will be the first to know.

At the risk of looking productive during the shutdown...

I weirdly feel like I should apologize for appearing to be too busy during the shutdown. But I'm the kind of person who needs to stay busy in a crisis...so maybe this just shows the magnitude of the crisis! Since we last spoke, I've created four new classes on Skillshare, pictured above.

This link gets you 2 months free to check out everything Skillshare has to offer. (It's a Netflix-style subscription where you pay a flat monthly fee and can watch unlimited classes.)

There is a lot to explore besides my classes. I'm particularly enjoying James Richards' new sketching class (hello, Italy!) and I just started this really interesting class from Dylan Mierzwinski on drawing with ink and painting with ink washes.

BUT--ALSO--if you are interested in the "how to make a book video" class but you don't want to join Skillshare, I posted it on YouTube for FREE to help authors who want to do a project like this during the shutdown. I then answered questions about the class on a webinar with the Authors Guild that you can also watch on YouTube for free.

My class on making videos might also be useful to you if you run any kind of very small business or offer any type of service, whether you're a florist or an accountant or whatever. If you think a talking head-style video, interspersed with photos or video clips, would be of use to you in whatever you do, maybe take a look at this and see if it would be a good shutdown project for you right now.

Even the Kopp sisters are impacted by coronavirus.

I'm sorry to report that the publication date for Dear Miss Kopp has been pushed back to January 2021. It was scheduled for September, but publishers are scrambling like mad right now to rearrange an entire year's schedule. As your consolation prize, here's a video I made about the book. You can of course pre-order everywhere books are sold, and the entire publishing and bookselling community would love you for doing that.

Asked and Answered...

Ask me a question and win the book of your choice! This month's winner is Sharon from Milwaukie, OR

Sharon asks: What is your organizational method of doing research? How do keep all the ideas in an order where you can find them, follow a trail and only use what you need in the story?

I'm very glad you asked this, because I'm actually working on teaching a class on this very subject. I'm quite proud of all the organizational tricks I've worked out for the Kopp novels.

First, I use Evernote to keep all my research in one place. It's an app on my phone, it lives on my computer, and it's in the cloud. It's endlessly useful. For instance, when I went to the cemetery to find the Kopp family graves, I took a photo within the Evernote app. Next year, when I went back to visit them again, (I visit them a lot) I had forgotten where the grave was. But wait! Evernote remembers everything! I pulled up the photo and Evernote navigated me to the very location where I took it.

So I have literally thousands of records in Evernote--newspaper articles, pages I've photographed out of books (Evernote converts those pages to text so it's fully searchable), photos, interview transcripts, random ideas--it's all there.

And I have a way of building a timeline of events that is linked to the source (like, the newspaper article or whatever) that tells me when that thing happens. So that's hugely helpful for putting events in order.

I even use it to keep track of random historical tidbits--for instance, I have a pigeon folder, as you can well imagine--and I keep a list of interesting words and phrases that were used back then but are no longer used. I love to go through that list and find ways to drop those words in. Keeps my copyeditor busy.

Ask a Question & Win a Book!

 Please go here to ask me a question and pick your prize. Even if you've entered before, please feel free to enter again and ask the same question or a different one. Only 19 people entered last month. You have a very good chance of winning! 

No tour dates at the moment, but I'm always up for a Skype or Facebook Live or whatever.

Right now all my events are on hold. But please know that if you'd like to do an online chat, we can make that happen! You don't have to be part of an official book club--just get a group of friends together.  Just hit reply to this email if you want to set something up.

 

What Are You Reading?

Some of you have told me that you are having a hard time concentrating on any book at all. Well, ME TOO. 

I decided to read all of Charles Portis' novels (he wrote the amazing TRUE GRIT, also a wonderful Coen Brothers film), so now I'm on MASTERS OF ATLANTIS. Believe it or not, this novel begins in WWI, in a little town in France just down the road from the town where Norma goes in Dear Miss Kopp. 

It's a dry and witty novel about a man who forms a sort of secret society along the lines of the Freemasons. I love the book, I really do, but it is taking me forever to read anything at all right now.

Also, I've already recommended this novel to you, but Elly Griffith's STRANGER DIARIES just won an Edgar Award, so go read that if you love a good British gothic whodunit. 

And if you can't buy books from your local indie, order them from Bookshop.org. Here's a list on Bookshop of many of the books I've recommended here. The proceeds benefit independent bookstores, and they do sell audio and ebooks! It's a great alternative to you-know-who.