Newsletter #103 — Gift of Fire Published!
April 1, 2025
Newsletter #103 — Gift of Fire Published!
Book and Front Cover — Many, many thanks to friend Robin Koontz for designing the front and back covers of my new book, The Gift of Fire: Justice Matters.
Because of the importance of fighting for social justice, and its high relevance for us today, I shoved aside all my other work in order to publish it.
Preparing a manuscript for publication is very tedious and time-consuming. It took me six days to get the paperback formatting just right, and another five or six days to get the ebook formatting just right. This time I had big problems with inserting page break instructions. Inserting them was easy: getting the digital book to not throw in blank pages after each page break was not easy.
However, I finally succeeded and the ebook was published on March 24, 2025, the paperback later the same evening. You can buy a copy here. And if you know any high school or middle-grade English teachers, please let them know about this book.
Back Cover Copy — Here's what's on the back cover of The Gift of Fire: Justice Matters.
In real life justice matters tremendously. And sometimes — particularly in novels such as The F Words — justice matters in literature, too. The essays in this book examine justice in many different ways. Among them: political protest, the right to remain silent, censorship, public schools, the right to bilingualism.
The commentary also explores literary devices that enhance the structure and substance of The F Words. Examples include the inciting incident, conflict, the circular ending, foreshadowing, symbols, and framing devices.
Special thanks to friend and fellow author Carol Saller, who insisted I remove my original semicolons in those lists above and change them to commas. She was right! (I have no idea what came over me that I used clunky semicolons . . . fatigue from formatting, I think.)
CONvergence 2025— I've received confirmation that I'll have a one-hour reading slot at CONvergence. My intro and reading takes 28-29 minutes, so that leaves 30 minutes for Q&A or, as CONvergence phrases it, AMA. I always have to look that anagram up: Ask Me Anything.
Serendipity — My April 1 blog is the same topic, in almost the same words as my previous newsletter item on "Serendipity." If you want to read the same thing twice, here's the link. I sometimes write about the same topic in both my newsletter and my blog, because the subscribers are not the same people. My blog has subscribers from all over the world, my newsletter from US and Canada only.