Tag: finding sisters

Autumn has Arrived and with it New Challenges

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment

October 1, 2025


Today I am celebrating my 30th newsletter since I started writing to you in early March 2020, just before the world went on hold for the pandemic! At the time, I didn’t yet know I would soon have to cancel the regional book tour for my first book with Sunbury Press about my dad’s experiences in Europe during WWII (Keeping the Lights on for Ike), nor did I yet have a contract for either of my two subsequent memoirs that Sunbury published, one in fall of 2021 about discovering my genetic family members (Finding Sisters), and then my grief memoir in spring of 2024 (That Day And What Came After).


I have finally finished all the audio files for Finding Sisters. The original submissions were returned last month for some requested editing to meet the Audible technical standards, mostly to take out audible breaths or silences that were a few seconds too long. I don’t yet know exactly when the audiobook version will be available for sure (hopefully very soon), but I can definitely claim that I have now narrated the audiobook versions for all three of my books with Sunbury.


Richard and I continue to pursue production possibilities for Weaving Penelope in 2026 and beyond, and we remain hopeful, though there are no official announcements to be made, though keep your fingers crossed for us for the summer of 2026. We will keep trying to get a full production of our script, but ain’t neither of us gettin’ any younger!


As some of you might have noticed, I updated my author website last spring, and I hope to add more of the essays I’ve been working on before the end of this year. I sent you a sample of an essay about my delightful meadow in the last newsletter. Other topics I’ve been writing about include aging (inevitable when you get to be my age, I suppose), some past memories of experiences and relationships, my mom’s struggle with dementia, and various other topics that pique my interest. The only real through-line is that all of it really has happened in my life, though I don’t expect it will turn into a published book any time soon.


However, most of the rest of my time and energy has been taken up recently with family events (wonderful times at my nephew’s wedding!) and an unexpected new health challenge. In fact, by the time some of you read this newsletter, I will have a brand new heart valve, which I hope will bring back my sense of well being and my energy and stamina, which have been lagging considerably in the last few weeks. As you might imagine, I’ve started writing a bit about that experience as well.


Not much else to add at this point, but I hope that next time you hear from me, I will feel re-energized and have lots more to say. In the meantime, enjoy an image of my late summer meadow this year.

Spring is now officially sprung!

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment


April 2, 2025

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the birdies is.
Anonymous author


Though no one really knows for sure who or where this verse came from, many of us have heard it before, perhaps even know it by heart, though I’ve gotta say, my grass is definitely not looking like it’s gonna “riz” any time soon, though the birdies are definitely here. In fact many of them stick around for the winter, but the birds who went south are slowly coming back to the area, though my favorites, the hummingbirds, probably won’t be back until later this month or early in May. This year, we had a true winter with some serious snow for the first time in several years, and we are now heading into the roller coaster that is spring in New England. March, April, and even sometimes May, can be completely unreliable, weather wise, so there’s no telling what lies ahead of us. But the snow is gone (for now), and the sun seems to have returned every now and then, even if the wind can still be rather bitter.


I’m including a photo of the snow-covered back yard from this past February (it’s thankfully now clear of the white stuff), but I’m also including a hopeful picture of my flowering cherry tree from last April below this, which allows me to dream about how soon the blossoms and leaves might be returning to those currently nearly bare skeletons. There are buds a-plenty but nothing is unfurling just yet. Hopefully soon. Another poet once said “hope springs eternal” (Alexander Pope, 1734), and this rings true for me, especially in the spring months. Though current politics can often feel like hope has gone into hiding, there’s nothing like new leaves and flowers to raise my spirits.

When last I wrote, there were lots of things in process, so here’s the latest report on my author activities. Last week, I finally finished all the audio files for the re-recording of the Finding Sisters audiobook. It’s now being reviewed and (keeping fingers crossed for no unexpected technical glitches) will hopefully be released later this spring. I had several successful in person events about the newest book (That Day And What Came After): talking about my writing process and reading segments from the book at a local senior center, a library, and as a selected author for my regional group, Straw Dog Writers Guild. I also participated last weekend on an author’s panel about our experiences with publishing, also sponsored by Straw Dog.

In February, I was finally able to record the podcast for my latest book, which ironically went live on Valentine’s Day. I guess it was a good thing that I used the phrase “the love of my life” in the subtitle. Here is the link to the recording, for anyone who might be interested. It’s about half an hour long, and you don’t need to open an account to listen. And as long as I’m talking about the love of my life and the coming of spring, below is one of the illustrations of Skip from the book you can enjoy while you listen. He’s mixing fertilizer in our greenhouse for his copious spring veggie plantings.


The book was recently selected as one of the March 2025 winners of the International Impact Book Awards in the Grief category. There appear to have been six winners out of 60 entrants in this category, and monthly winners get to boast with a digital sticker and certificate and compete with other monthly winners for a year-end grand prize. It’s not an important award, but it’s nice to be recognized, even in small ways, now and then.

Recently, I hired a web designer to update my author website for easier navigation. I’m also in the process of having her add photo galleries for all three books and, most importantly, we’re starting to create a system of indexing my past blog entries, so my thoughts can be tracked by themes throughout the years. I hope to have the entire website re-vamp completed this spring.

In terms of theatrical adventures, Richard, my co-playwright, and I continue to pursue possible full productions for Weaving Penelope, one at a university in Georgia, where a group of faculty members is currently reviewing the script with their students in mind, and another, lower tech version in Oregon, with Richard at the helm as director. Continue to keep your fingers crossed for us.

Though there’s no definitive new book project on my publishing horizon, I continue to write, mostly short essays about my life experiences, a project I have referred to before as my Mosaic Memoir, though it will likely not be in book form. If I were a famous writer, publishers might be interested in a collated volume of my random life experiences, but I’m not. Mostly, I’m just having a great time focusing on these memories and trying to get them in shape as essays, which seems to be the non-fiction equivalent of the fiction writer’s short stories.


And, of course, I’m eagerly awaiting the return of my meadow. Who knows what this spring will bring to my little corner of western Massachusetts. Last year, foliage was between mid-shin and knee level by mid-May, with only a few flowers to speak of until later in the season. I expect it to be a bit slower this year because we had a much deeper winter than we’d been having for the few years before that. But who knows? That’s what makes meadow-watching so much fun!

The Turning of the Year; Welcoming 2025

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment


January 7, 2025


When last I wrote, my virtual tour was halfway complete and the holidays were looming. Now, the tour is over, the holiday season is in the rearview mirror, winter is headed our way in earnest, and spring will be arriving before you know it. When I was young, time seemed to pass ever so slowly. Now, it has a tendency to fly by!

Here’s the quick update on my “author business:”

  • The virtual tour finished in mid-October with 10 out of 10 excellent reviews for That Day And What Came After.
  • Unfortunately, the podcast recording of me talking with my publisher about the new book has been postponed yet again—this time until early February.
  • I have booked a couple of solo in-person reading events early this year in my local community (Greenfield Senior Center in January, Greenfield Public Library in March), and I’m one of twelve featured writers for the Straw Dog Writers Guild annual group presentation honoring Pioneer Valley authors whose books came out in 2024.
  • I finished the audio files for the Finding Sisters audiobook since last I wrote. However, once the files were complete, we discovered that my microphone had caused some random drop out in a number of the files, so everything will have to be re-recorded. That was a frustrating discovery, but it will give me something to work in the coming weeks, in addition to more essays for my mosaic memoir project, and will hopefully be done and released before I write again in the spring.

As far as theatre events are concerned, I served as dramaturg for my friend and fellow playwright’s new play, How to Fold a Fitted Sheet & Other Pandemic Pastimes. In December, we held three public readings and got lots of great positive feedback on the script plus some good ideas for the next revision, coming in the new year.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the hoped-for production of Weaving Penelope out in Oregon next year will not be happening after all, though we now have a solid chance for a university production in Atlanta, GA, in late 2025. Please continue to keep your fingers crossed for us. We are really proud of the script and hope to see a full production before too much longer.


On a personal note: the meadow continued to be beautiful this fall, even as it and the season waned. It was trimmed, mulched (the trimmings serve as a self-mulch for the winter months), and put to bed for the season by the end of October. For the first time in several years, we did have a white Christmas in western Massachusetts, but somehow, a couple of inches of snow isn’t quite the romantic thing one envisions in one’s dreams and wasn’t even photo-worthy, though I did have a lovely holiday celebration overall.

The election came and went, and lots will be changing on the national scene in the coming year. Though I don’t write much about politics, and I live in one of the bluest of the blue states, I will say this one thing: the arts are more important now than ever before. Keep creating, and keep the faith!

Best of luck to all in 2025 and beyond!

Still Waiting…And Still Writing, Among Other Things

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment

October 4, 2023

When last I wrote in early summer, I had hoped to be deep in the editing process for the new book by this time, but things have moved more slowly than I might have liked. Unfortunately, that pace is entirely out of my control due to some staffing changes at the publisher. However, I am continuing to creep up the queue toward being assigned an editor (was #6 in early August and #3 by mid-September), so I hope to start the process by the end of this month or early in November. This means that the release of That Day, And What Came After will undoubtedly be in early spring of 2024 instead of fall/winter of 2023. Ironically, we are about to enter what I’ve called “my dark season,” which encompasses a series of sad anniversaries between Skip’s death next week…10/9/2010, hard to believe it’s been 13 years!…and the start of the winter holiday season. In addition to Skip’s death, these anniversaries include Mom’s death on 10/27/2006, and both their birthdays, 11/4 and 11/18—yes, they were both Scorpios. All this in the six weeks before Thanksgiving every year! Seems fitting that I will be revisiting this grief memoir during this period of both literal and metaphoric darkness this year. (The image below is of the crabapple tree I planted in Skip’s memory and the stone underneath it, I thought it might make a nice cover image for the book, but I’ll have to wait to see what the cover designer thinks about that idea.)

Just because I have a dark season each year doesn’t mean that life stops. In fact, as I write this Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I worked on together for many years, and which I wrote about last year when we had a modified staged reading at Keizer Homegrown Theatre, is under active consideration for a full production at Linfield University in Oregon for their 2024-25 season. Send good vibes that our script will rise to the top as they work their way through multiple possibilities available for their active theatre program.

I didn’t do any author talks over the summer about Finding Sisters; the last events happened last spring, one in person and one on Zoom (there’s a link to that talk at the Events drop-down on this website for anyone who might be interested). I wonder if bookstore or library events are perhaps similar to theatres in the summer months, when business can be very slow at times, especially if the weather is beautiful and the event is indoors. But it might also be a reflection of my personal situation, living in a mostly rural area as I do. I suspect that if I lived in an urban area, there might be more opportunities to tell people about my books in person. One bright note on that horizon: there’s a new bookstore opening in my area soon, and I definitely intend to contact them about carrying all of my books and about me doing an event of some kind there in the near future, perhaps to do with the release of the new memoir. And I will definitely book another virtual author tour as soon as the new book is given a release date.

While only one of the women in the cover image below is my genetic sister, they are all female family members I found in my genetic genealogy search. Upper left is my birth mother’s high school photo (about a year before she had me), right is my paternal grandmother, and lower left is a deceased maternal half sister that I never got to meet.

As I wait for an editor to be assigned and creative work on the book design for That Day, And What Came After to begin, I continue to write regularly and share that writing with my wild women writers group, though I have no specific book project in mind at the moment. I’ve been playing around with a few “mosaic memoir” essays about experiences I had in the 1980s and early 1990s, which are challenging my memory for details, but I have no overarching theme or sense of structure to put these essays together in a coherent whole. Not yet. But they sure are fun to write.

So, what do I do when not writing? I read, I take zoom yoga classes and do online strength and mobility workouts with a terrific trainer, and I garden. My meadow had a very different look this year because the perennials started coming into their own, though the evening primrose did dominate quite a bit later in the season and had to be “weeded” out because it was so much taller that it masked everything else for a while. Yes, it’s possible to weed a meadow! (The image below is the meadow in early July dominated by lots and lots of black-eyed susans before the evening primrose–the taller, spikier plants at the left edge and back in this photo–took over.)

And this year, for the first time since 2019, I traveled purely for pleasure, visiting old friends who have moved to Traverse City, MI, for their retirement years. I even got a new cat, an adult male that was needing a new home, which has led to some fun photos and regular posts on Facebook. I call these updates the Feline Follies, and as the two cats get adjusted to each other, things are never boring and often quite funny. (The image below is of Katniss and Smokey, the fluffy new guy, who are enthralled by the bird action in the front yard on “Kitty TV.”)

Life is good!

No fireworks for me this 4th of July; just more waiting

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment

July 4, 2023

When I wrote last, I was eager to start the editing/book design process for my grief memoir that had been scheduled for the second quarter of 2023. I’m still waiting… Turns out that book sales slowed for Sunbury in the fourth quarter of 2022 enough that they decided to slow their new publications process for 2023 in response. This was disappointing, but after a long conference with the publisher (the Sunbury CEO) in May, I got what I felt was encouraging news. In addition to the general slowdown of the schedule, there had also been a clerical error where someone categorized my memoir as fiction, which moved it into a lower place than it belonged on the priority list (Sunbury publishes fewer fiction titles than non-fiction), so that had pushed me even farther back in the queue, but I’ve been assured the error has now been corrected. So, it seems likely that editing/book design might begin for me later this summer, which could still mean a 2023 release for That Day, And What Came After. (Image below is one of the memoir’s illustrations from a trip Skip and I took to Ireland to visit a friend who had rented a cottage near Dingle for a month.)

And speaking of being in the waiting mode, there’s been no action yet regarding our submission of Weaving Penelope to a university theatre department in Oregon for inclusion in their 2024-25 production season. However, that’s not a big surprise, since we submitted the script to a theatre professor (a friend of mine from graduate school) who was on sabbatical in the spring, and all the folks involved in the decision-making process are now on summer break. We expect some kind of movement in this situation in the fall semester. It helps that both Richard and I are former professors, so we understand the ups and downs of the academic calendar and know not to take the lack of feedback too seriously at this point. In other words, we’re still hopeful and not too worried. We hope to hear some good news in the fall.

I mentioned in my last newsletter that my 2019 book about my dad’s WWII experiences at AFHQ in Europe had been selected as a finalist for two of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2023 (Legacy Non-Fiction; daVinci Award for Cover Art). In May, I learned that Keeping the Lights on for Ike was the category winner for Legacy Non-Fiction! There’s no cash prize for category winners, but I did get a fancy certificate (below) that I could frame for my office wall…if I still had an office, that is. And for folks who are self-published, there are gold stickers that winners can put on their book covers. My publisher doesn’t do anything about book awards where the author has to pay an entry fee, so any publicity about the award is up to me. I sent out a press release to my local papers, but haven’t seen that any of them ever published info about the win. Still, I feel good about it.

The Hoffer Book Award judges’ had this to say about the Keeping the Lights on for Ike: “It is not your typical book about this era in history. The author gives us an intimate look into the interesting lives of two very private people. The historical documents and photos are a marvelous addition to this book.”

The letters and photos used in the creation of Keeping the Lights on for Ike are now housed in the Library of Congress as part of the Veterans’ History Project. Information can be accessed online here, or viewed in person in the American Folklife Center’s Reading Room located in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. 

This spring, I also gave two author talks about Finding Sisters, my recent book about finding my genetic family using DNA testing combined with traditional genealogy research. The first talk was an in-person event at one of the local libraries here in Montague, and it was a lovely evening: well attended and with a knowledgeable audience who asked a lots of great questions about my experiences. It was a delight to talk with people face to face for the first time in what feels like a very long time. I also gave a Zoom talk for the Tewksbury Library genealogy group. Tewksbury is a suburb of Boston, so I was glad they wanted an online presentation. If you are interested to hear that talk about the research process, with a short reading of a section from the book (about 40 minutes in length), you can do so here.

What else does an author do while she’s waiting for others to respond to her work? This author gardens!

This year was the second year for my side yard meadow project, so I was excited to see how things might be different this year than last. The first year of the planting had been dominated by annuals, added to the seed mix so there would be some visual interest while the perennials, always slower to flower from seed, got established. That first year was visually dominated by a mix of cornflower and poppies (image above), annuals that reappeared in a few places this year but not nearly in the same numbers as the first year. And there was a tough fight against mile-a-minute vine, but I think we (I had several helpers in the struggle) won that fight because there’s no evidence of the blasted plant this year.

This year, there were some other opportunistic weeds, so the challenge was to pull them out before they could get established, and for that I needed to be able to identify the plants when they were in their early stages before they flowered. Thankfully, there are phone apps I could use to help with that, so I did some spot weeding through the spring in hopes I could just let nature take its course once the desired plants matured. Recently, a couple of the perennials have really come into their own, especially this month as the cheery yellow of the lance-leaf coreopsis and black eyed Susans take over (image above), soon to be joined by another paler yellow beauty, evening primrose.

Next time I write, I really do hope to be in the end-stages of the editing/book design process and perhaps even to have a tentative release date for That Day, And What Came After. In the meantime, enjoy your summer!

Finding Sisters Isn’t the Only Thing I’ve Been Focusing On in 2022

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment

(July 4, 2022)

Since I last wrote in early March about the virtual book tour I’d just completed for Finding Sisters, lots has been happening for me on the writing front. The first news is that the audiobook version of Keeping the Lights on for Ike finally came out last month! Though the initial recordings were completed in November of 2020, various complications, including a shift in personnel dealing with the project, a few technical glitches, and some general lack of communication between Amazon and Sunbury during the pandemic slowed things down, but as of June 9th, the Audible version of Keeping the Lights on for Ike, read by yours truly, is now on sale. There will also be an audiobook version of Finding Sisters, but Sunbury has now engaged a new company to coordinate their audiobooks, so it won’t be read by me (in spite of the fact that I did voiceover work back in the day when I was still occasionally working as an actor), but I’ll be sure to let everyone know when that one comes out as well.

The link in this screenshot image is not live, but you can check out a sample of the audiobook here:

In May and June, I spent most of my time focusing on a playwriting project that has been on my radar for many years. Weaving Penelope, written with my old friend and theatre colleague, Richard Carp, is a play exploring the mostly untold story about the wife of Odysseus, who ruled her husband’s kingdom while he was away fighting the Trojan War—and having other adventures—for 20 years. It imagines Penelope’s experiences and expands on scenes from Homer’s Odyssey. The play nods to some Greek theatre conventions, including the use of a chorus of players who narrate the story and out of which all characters—except Penelope—emerge. Richard and I had been working on the play for well over a decade, only completing it once we had both retired from teaching and academic administration. We had a very successful Zoom reading in the spring of 2021 with participants in four states, and in 2022, thanks to the sponsorship of Keizer Homegrown Theatre (KHT) who gave us a fiscal umbrella and an Oregon theatre facility to use, and the generous patronage of Ronni Lacroute (supporter of the arts extraordinaire), we scheduled two in-person workshops with directors and actors to further explore the play on its feet: one outdoors at a private residence in western Massachusetts in June and another at the KHT courtyard performance space in September. Unfortunately, in spite of all our careful rehearsal protocols and regular testing, Covid—plus a death in the family of another cast member—cancelled our showcase performance in Massachusetts. Though we weren’t able to get audience reaction to a performance, we were able to get some very valuable feedback about working with the script from the actors in the ensemble, and we are doing some minor adjustments to the script this summer, before rehearsals begin for the coming Oregon showcase.

This is the image we used on our audition announcements for the Massachusetts workshop.

In the middle of all this other excitement, I have been working slowly but surely on my grief memoir. I started writing it in 2017 (seven years after my husband’s sudden death but the first time I could articulate coherent thoughts about what I wanted/needed to say about that event and the effect it has had on my life), and the manuscript, called That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years, is almost ready to propose to my publisher. The narrative starts with the day Skip died, takes the reader through the first month of my widowhood, including his funeral, burial, a memorial event at our house, and my struggle to find a new path for my life, and then jumps back to the beginning of our relationship and details the life we were building together after our late-in-life marriage. In addition to the more traditional relationship narrative, I had also written several short essays about particular challenges I encountered “Along the Grieving Road” and curated some of the entries in my grief journal to share with readers. Every word of this memoir has been shared over the past several years with my wonderful women writers’ group, and they have given me some terrific advice on the text, which has now been revised several times. This spring, the big challenge for me was to find a structure for the memoir that would allow me to include all these disparate parts in a single, coherent whole. Thanks to my former employer, St. Lawrence University, and their generous research support for emeritus faculty, I was able to hire the professional editor who facilitates the writing group and already knew the work to work with me directly on structural issues. Now I’m in the process of reworking some of the shorter pieces and the journal selections and hope to finish the final manuscript before summer is over.

This is one of my favorite photos of Skip (aka the geezer model), taken about sixteen months before he died.

Though Sunbury Press has already published two of my books, they do not automatically accept new work from their authors without vetting each manuscript, so I will be going through an application process, just as I did with Keeping the Lights on for Ike and Finding Sisters. I hope to be ready to start that process in August. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Finding Sisters has been on a virtual tour in January-February; a Goodreads Giveaway happens in March 2022

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment

(March 1, 2022)

It’s been five months since I last wrote, and a lot has happened in that time. Here’s the quick rundown. Finding Sisters was released by Sunbury Press on September 14, 2021. I participated in an in-person multiple local author event at the Greenfield YMCA on October 2nd to promote the new book (even though I didn’t actually have any copies on hand yet) and gave a radio interview to North Country Public Radio in Canton, NY (where the journey started) on October 27th. Then the holidays rolled in, and the holidays rolled out again while not much else happened on the book front. Just two days before Christmas, while taking out my paper recycling, I took a dramatic fall on icy stairs which resulted in bruises, muscle pulls, and 18 stitches in my leg. Blessedly, there were no broken bones, but it did create a big slowdown where my plans for late December and early January were concerned. I’m much better now.

Shortly after the start of 2022, I began a virtual tour (20 “stops” with various book bloggers featuring my new book between January 3 and February 25), experienced my first Facebook Live interview on January 16th with a book blogger in India, and had my first masked in-person author talk/reading/book sale on January 26th at the Greenfield Senior Center.

Anyone who is not one of my Facebook friends and has not already seen each stop on the virtual tour as they unfolded over time can binge the tour stops here.

The page starts by sharing my interview with the tour host and other details about me and the book. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the tour schedule with related links. There is one link (January 20th) that didn’t feature me or my book because of an unexpected medical crisis for the blogger (not COVID); otherwise each stop on the tour has a link to that blogger’s review of Finding Sisters (all of them excellent) and sometimes additional info requested by the hosts (guest posts, interviews, excerpts from the book).

I’ve also taken time to update my website, so if you’re not interested in bingeing the tour stop by stop, you can get most of the same information about the new book on my website, especially at the links for “Reviews” and “Interviews about Finding Sisters.”

If you haven’t already purchased a copy of Finding Sisters, you can enter a giveaway that will be running on Goodreads during the month of March. I’ll be giving away eight inscribed copies of the book to eight lucky winners, and it all starts today, March 1, 2022! To enter, you must have a Goodreads account, but they are free and easy to set up. The easiest way to enter the giveaway is to go to the Finding Sisters page on Goodreads and use the “Enter Giveaway” button.

This is a screenshot, not a live link. On the Finding Sisters page on Goodreads, you need to scroll down a bit to find this image about the giveaway

Be sure to scroll down the page a bit for the giveaway link. You must give your address if your entry is for a print book (mine is), so the author or publisher can send you the book if you are one of the winners. Then you agree to their terms (no purchase necessary) and say you’re not a robot. You will be notified by email if you are one of the winning entries (most authors usually give away multiple copies; I’m giving away eight signed copies)). If you are interested in other Goodreads Giveaways, go to the Goodreads homepage and click on the “Browse” dropdown. From there, click on “Giveaways” and “Recent” to scroll through all current giveaways.

If you want to guarantee getting an inscribed copy of the print book, you will need to order that from me directly (or contact me about how to mail me the copy you have already received from Sunbury, Amazon, or your local bookstore, which I will inscribe with a personal message, sign, and send back to you). And if you’ve already read the book and enjoyed it, I’d love to get a few more reviews on Goodreads and/or Amazon.

The last early spring update to share with you is that the letters Dad wrote home during WWII, letters and images that became the core of Keeping the Lights on for Ike, have now started the process of becoming part of the archives of the Veteran’s History Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The archivist who received them last week said, “it’s just as rich a correspondence collection as I’d hoped.” This means that others who want to know more about veterans’ experiences during WWII will have access to the primary documents, and the archive will also steer researchers perusing the letters to my book, if they are interested.

Finding Sisters will be out the end of September: pre-ordering is now available!

danielsrebecca2 Comments

(September 12, 2021)

When I wrote my last blog in June, I really thought that after teasing you with covers I had rejected in the cover design process, I’d be able to send you an update and final cover preview in early August, but here we are in September instead. The delays have been for good reasons—Sunbury is working on many new releases for the fall and the book designer had lots of manuscripts to lay out—but also because of a change I instigated regarding my book. I had a meeting in late July with the marketing consultant from Sunbury to make some plans for pre- and early release marketing strategies, and he convinced me that I needed a more exciting and engaging subtitle for Finding Sisters, a subtitle that highlighted the story more immediately and used more descriptive catchphrases that might attract possible readers.  So, instead of the relatively dry and academic, “My Journey to Find Genealogical Relations Through DNA Testing,” after a few days of back-and-forth conversations, we settled on the much more active and engaging, “How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find her Birth Family.”

So, with a new subtitle there had to be a revision in the design before the front cover art could be revealed. A couple of miscommunications later, the new front cover design is finally ready to be revealed, though the back cover is still in the final stages of the design process. I’m excited by the quality of the artwork, and a number of folks who have previewed the design have said it would make them interested in checking out the inner contents of the book itself, so between the image and the new subtitle, I’m hoping lots of folks will be interested enough to pick up a copy and browse once it hits bookstore shelves.

The image, created by artist Alyssa Roth using mostly photos I provided, includes faces from several places in my genetic family tree superimposed over the silhouette of a large and striking tree on a hillside (a photo of her own Alyssa had). Of the photos I provided, one is a picture of my birth mother from her high school yearbook; another is a photo of my paternal grandmother provided by one of my new cousins, and another is an image of a maternal half-sister (now deceased) that I never got to meet because she died before I ever embarked on my genealogical journey, provided by my other maternal half-sister. I love how the cover image engages the viewer and hints at mystery but is actually based in real family relationships I was able to discover during my genetic genealogy journey.

The book is not quite ready for prime time yet since there are a few last editing and design tasks to complete before the official release, but it’s due out before the end of this month (pre-order info at the end of this post). Once it’s in print, shipping and delivery from the publisher typically takes about two weeks. It will eventually be available on Amazon as well, but I don’t have a date for that just yet. There will also be a Kindle edition soon, and eventually, an audiobook read by yours truly, hopefully before the end of the year. If you want a signed copy of the print book, you will need to order that from me directly (or mail me the copy you receive from Sunbury, Amazon, or your local bookstore, which I will sign and send back to you), but I won’t have my copies any sooner than anyone else…though I have just seen and approved the pdf file for the final print book design (everything between the covers), and it looks great!

Here’s the description of the book from the Sunbury Press pre-order site:

Where does she come from?

Who are her genetic parents?

Who is she?

Does she even want to know?

With almost no information of her genetic heritage, adoptee Rebecca Daniels follows limited clues and uses DNA testing, genealogical research, thoughtful letter writing, and a willingness to make awkward phone calls with strangers to finally find her birth parents.

But along the way, she finds much more.

Two half-sisters.

A slew of cousins on both sides.

A family waiting to be discovered.

With the assistance of a distant cousin in Sweden and several other DNA angels on the internet, Daniels finally comes face to face with her birth mother just months before her passing. Join in on this author’s discovery of family and self in Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find her Birth Family

“Finding Sisters is an excellent example of what it takes to solve a family mystery. Yet it’s also a captivating story of human relationships in the age of secrecy-revealing DNA databases…. Refreshingly honest and personal. Like no other DNA success story, Finding Sisters uses footnotes and family tree diagrams to show exactly how the search unfolds. This makes the book a clever hybrid of a memoir and a case study” – Richard Hill, author of Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

The book is now available for pre-order here.

Formatting the Book and Designing the Cover for Finding Sisters

danielsrebecca1 Comment

(June 3, 2021)

Two months ago, when I last wrote, the editing process for Finding Sisters had just begun with the assignment of the publishing company CEO as my editor. He sent me the first two chapters right away, followed by an alarming silence for several weeks. It turned out that he had been hospitalized with Covid, but he didn’t make that reality public, even for his authors, until he was well on the road to recovery. We’ve now finished the editing of the main manuscript which, lucky for me, didn’t involve much serious rewriting of any of the chapters, and the book has now moved on to the formatting stage.

The formatting stage is where the book designer takes the edited manuscript and the proposed illustrations and puts them together in what will eventually become the printing format for the physical book. That process began just about a week ago, so I have nothing to report about what’s happening there, but I’ve worked with this book designer before and she does excellent work. There were lots of illustrations for Keeping the Lights on for Ike, and she did a terrific job of placing them within the chapters. There are fewer illustration for Finding Sisters, so I’m not stressed at all about what she will come up with. Eventually, the appendix of resources and other items—like the dedication, acknowledgements, and table of contents—will get added to the format as well.

Along with the formatting of the book comes the cover design process. I’ve been assigned a designer, someone I’ve not worked with before but who is excited about the creative possibilities for this cover. She has already presented me with three interesting options to choose from, based on my early suggestions for possible cover artwork themes. The first, and favorite of all who have seen the options, is a tree image with faces from my illustrations superimposed inside the tree branches. It’s a really fascinating and creative take on a “family tree” and is very engaging for all who view it. She’s now in the process of playing with color variations and adjusting some of the photo images so we should be moving to finalize the design soon. The other two options presented below (designs by Alyssa Roth) included a playful wallpaper of a repeated double helix image (the structure of a DNA molecule) with lettering spread across it, and a closer view of a double helix with photo images inside the rounded, crossing strands and interspersed with lettering. Such wonderful and creative options for this author to choose from, and if these are the ones we’re not going to use, imagine how amazing the final cover will be! I look forward to unveiling the final cover design soon.

One of the cover options designed by Alyssa Roth
Another cover option designed by Alyssa Roth

The marketing planning process for the book launch has also begun with me submitting all the requested info (about my in-person networks, social media handles, search keywords, comparable books by others, pitch ideas, blurbs, Amazon categories, etc.) to the marketing advisor. We’ll start that part of the process very soon. And you thought all you had to do to get a book published was to write it!

We are still very much on target for an early fall release, though it seems late summer could also be possible if all the details fall into place in a timely fashion. I’ll definitely keep everyone posted on that date as soon as it’s formally announced.

What to Do With a Mosaic Memoir?

danielsrebeccaLeave a comment

(January 19, 2021)

Last month, I promised to write a bit more about my “mosaic memoir” process, but first a quick update about editorial work on Finding Sisters. I’m still inching up the queue, and I’ve learned a lot about the process for the editorial staff at Sunbury Press. The “waiting to be assigned” queue isn’t necessarily a linear progression, as I had first imagined. Each editor works on multiple manuscripts of different lengths at any given time (some being assigned more projects than others, depending on their status as full or part time editors), and while Sunbury has a wide variety of imprints (from young adult fiction to literary and historical fiction to fantasy/horror to self-help books and more) as well as their primary focus on non-fiction manuscripts of all kinds, their editors do not seem to specialize in one genre of book over another. This means that the time needed to edit each manuscript can vary wildly. It’s also possible that occasionally the head of the company might pull a manuscript on a particularly “hot topic” (such as books related to the pandemic) out of the queue and advance it to the head of the line. Though there are still only a handful of books ahead of mine in the “to be assigned” queue, there’s really no way of telling when the editing process might start for me.

I’ll share that process with you when it happens, but it’s hard to know for sure when that might occur. So, in the meantime, I’ll explain more about the essays that make up what I was calling a “mosaic memoir” in my post last month. Due to a really interesting exercise suggested by the facilitator of my writing group, I discovered something surprising about those essays. The directive was to give a working title and subtitle to the projects (mostly memoirs) we were each working on, with the goal of telegraphing to our reading audience the main topic or theme of our manuscript in progress. In other words, “what’s my story about?” Members of the writing group shared our titles at our last Zoom meeting before our holiday hiatus.

The first step for me in preparing for the exercise was to list and characterize each of the 14 essays I’d drafted so far for the mosaic memoir project, and in doing so, I discovered that the essays were evenly split in type and that there was no way to give the current collection of essays a single title. There were actually two books in progress! Not only that, I was able to list several new essays/chapters that I want to write for each project. Exciting stuff.

The first thing I realized was that I had written more than I had realized about my late-in-life second marriage, including my husband’s unexpected death from sudden cardiac arrest just months after being pronounced totally healthy by his doctors. That has now become a different project for me. It will become a much more traditional memoir and, like the story in Finding Sisters, will cover a specific time in my life (2004-present). It will have anecdotal information that anyone on a similar grief journey might find useful, but it will not be a self-help book. Instead, it will be the story of those years in my life, my interactions with my husband, and the people and actions that helped me to survive and eventually even thrive again after his death. I’ve given it a working title of Adventures with the Bartender: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. For those who don’t know, my husband owned and ran a small Adirondack hotel for seven years and loved to serve drinks to guests in our house, especially when we had parties, thus earning himself the nickname “The Bartender” among our friends. He earned another nickname, “The Geezer Model,” because of his good-natured indulgence of me and my camera when I wanted to take his picture, which was often, especially when we were traveling.

The Geezer Model on a hillside above the beach in northern California (July 2009)

For those who let me know after last month’s blog about their interest in the concept of the mosaic memoir, I want to reassure you that project is still very much a reality, though likely a lower priority at the moment than the new memoir about my widow journey. One close friend wrote me a note after learning about my mosaic memoir idea telling me she heartily approved and sharing information about an early 20th century Italian poet, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), who famously said, “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” A former student who now teaches and performs internationally loved the idea of a mosaic memoir, and he explained to me, “Mosaic is my favorite content-process metaphor. In all my classrooms and performances, I always tell students/audiences: ‘Don’t look for a thread, we’re not following anything, keep your eyes in soft focus, the picture will begin to emerge eventually.’” And that’s exactly the point of this second project with the current working title, Mosaic Memoir: Snapshots of My Life. Though I have seven essays already written about various threads or snapshots that are important in my life, and at least four more I want to write, there’s no obvious narrative through-line. At least, not yet. These essays cover various times and experiences in my life and have current working titles like “Tomboy,” “Like Mother Like Daughter,” “Losing my Voice,” and “Brothers of the Heart” (with “Sisters of the Heart” soon to come), among others.

There’s certainly no lack of writing topics for me, and I’m sure these projects will keep me busy for many months to come. For anyone who worries that they might not have enough to say to write a memoir, I suggest you might try the mosaic approach. It’s amazing what comes up in one’s memory to write about when there’s no pressure to have a specific structural plan for a book!

For my next entry, I hope to be able to report on the start of my editing process for Finding Sisters, but I’m not holding my breath. In any case, I’m sure I’ll find something interesting to share with all of you about my two newest projects.