Hi, Dana! It’s a privilege to visit
here with you and your readers today! We have several things in
common: we’re both Christians, pianists, authors, teachers, and
devoted pet owners.
After college, I taught elementary
school for eight years. I totally loved teaching, but after having my
own kids, I just didn’t feel right devoting most of my days to
someone else’s children. So, I stayed home with my kids. For
several years, taking care of them was a full-time proposition. But
as the kids started school, I had more free time. I have always loved
to write. After dinner each evening, I read an entry for that date
from one of the many diaries I kept when I was younger. About a week
ago, I read an entry for that same day in 1978. I’d written: “I
wrote a few pages on my book. Being an author is hard work!”
So you can see that writing was natural for me to pursue. I had some devotionals published, as well
as several tips and ideas in teaching magazines. On my blog, Girls
in White Dresses, I began writing about a childhood
memory each Friday. Eventually, I wanted to write up many of these in
book form, and I did that with my first book, “I Love to Tell the
Story.”
I attended a Christian writer’s
conference and was excited to meet with agents and editors. But the
real world set in as I was told there was not a sufficient audience
for my memoir, since I wasn’t a celebrity. I brought a children’s
chapter book along as well, and although an editor expressed
interest, she failed to respond to my emails in subsequent months.
Based on those experiences, I would say
that my biggest frustration with writing has been the obstacles
agents and editors seem to put up to prevent authors from actually
making it to press. But I feel extremely blessed to live in this era,
when the advent of Amazon and e-readers have made it possible for
more authors to be published, without spending their own money to do
so.
My latest venture is called “Not
So Happily Ever After: The Tale of King Ludwig II.”
In high school German class, I was introduced to “Mad King Ludwig.”
He’s one of those historical characters who is just too eccentric
and bigger-than-life to be real – and yet he was. He designed
what’s probably the world’s most famous castle, Neuschwanstein.
Yet it was never finished and he was only able to spend about 170
days there. Government officials ragged him unmercifully about the
money he spent on his castles, even though today they’re one of
Germany’s biggest money-making attractions.
Ludwig wasn’t overtly Christian (to
be fair, there weren’t many evangelicals in mid-1800s Bavaria), but
his Catholic faith was important to him throughout his life. He
planned a huge chapel inside the courtyard at Neuschwanstein,
although it was never actually built (along with many other planned
portions of the castle). On the day he died, Ludwig requested
permission to attend mass, but his keepers denied him the freedom to
do this. Disillusioned with life and with most of the people he
encountered, Ludwig once said, "I must bear being laughed at,
scorned, and slandered. I am called a fool. Will God call me a fool
when I am summoned before him?"
I read many books about Ludwig, but
they were all geared towards adults, and many were quite scholarly. I
saw a need for a book that teens and tweens would enjoy. They would
love his character, even if they didn’t want to read a 300-page
book on him! That’s the niche this book fills.
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