Proper praise and entertainment

I quite honestly am not sure if you are still alive, but I wanted to send this nonetheless. My classmates and I recently read your extraordinary book “Shiloh” and we very much enjoyed reading it. I mean you should’ve heard the applause at the end of the book when we finished! Anyways, let me get to the point. Alive or not you are a very good author and that book brought our class everything we wanted in a book. It brought us excitement, anticipation, a vocabulary boost, the knowledge that our teacher (Mrs. Foster. Truly the best teacher) does a pretty good accent, and an ending that we will never forget. The book was very good. Hats off the illustrator of the cover! They were really good! It was so good some kids had a small debate on if it was a photograph or not, eventually we all made the decision it was an illustration. Funny right? I’ve had a hard time picking this but I want this letter/email to give you proper praise and entertainment. So, after a long time of thinking I’d have to say my favorite part was the end (both chapters 14 and 15). The lesson at the end was just…eye opening. If I were just a tad bit more sensitive to that I’d be bawling, trust me. If you have any suggestions for some students wanting to become authors do tell! You are truly an inspiration! If you want any further information please email me back!

With much appreciation,
A student of many, Granview Elementary School

I appreciate your telling me how the class reacted to my book, Shiloh.  It was hard to keep myself from crying some when I wrote it.  Yes, wasn’t the artist good who illustrated the cover?  Several different covers have been used over time, and I’ve liked them all.  The main advice I can give to young people wanting to become authors is to read, read, read and  write, write, write.  Not because you have to, but because you want to.  Try starting out with some real incident, big or small, that happened in your own life, just for fun.  Now change it just a bit.  Make it happen to someone else instead of you.  Or put a different beginning on it.  A different ending.  Try to feel this new thing happening and have fun with it.  Or try to scare yourself to death by the way the suspense adds up, the story creeps along….Each time you write something new you are practicing at getting better.