I had the best meeting with my business Partner today. Sometimes I get frustrated with myself or discouraged that I don’t seem to be doing what I really have inside me to do and He always tells me to calm down. He’s so encouraging. Sometimes I forget how good He is at helping me do my best. I love working with Him. In our partnership, I do a lot of work, or not, and He does stuff behind the scenes. He knows people I don’t and has access to places and things I don’t even think about. Sometimes He comes up with the strangest ideas, but they always work out. Today He had to make it clear to me that I need to sit down and write and let Him take care of some PR. I forget how good His is at His job, He’s been doing it longer than I have. And one of the benefits in working with Him is that instead of bringing calorie-laden snacks to the meetings, He always brings the best fruit!

Thank you to everyone writing good things about Where the Jewels Are. Here are some of the reviews.

L. Hilton:
 “WHERE THE JEWELS ARE is a cute little book designed for children ages 6 – 11 and is the first book in the Tales from the Throne series.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this excellently written children’s book, and then gave it to my eight year old daughter to read. She couldn’t put it down until she finished reading it.

Not only is this an excellent story, but it also teaches a valuable lesson. If you are looking for a children’s book to help fill some summertime hours, then be sure to pick up WHERE THE JEWELS ARE. Available at www.goldpenpress.com and at www.amazon.com.”

Harrison Whyte:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “`Where the Jewels Are’  is a Page Turner Children’s book. Diana Symons talented ability to keep the story moving to an Exciting Climax left me wanting to know what would happen to the Princess. The servant girl Winifred is a delightful person you will want to meet. The King, who is the princess father, has all the qualities of a King you would want your daughter or son to have. How he is wise will add wisdom to your child’s character and give mom and dad some ideas how to be wise `mom and dads'”

C.Brown:   
“A delightful children’s book that I predict will become a family favorite. The usual tale of a child with everything, but who wants more. The Princess also has a wise-enough father to know how to deal with his child. I loved how Diana brought in the father’s wisdom in sending servants to watch over his daughter: something we don’t realize till the ending.

The servant child is a sweet person willing to do her duty in making the Princess happy. Fortunately, the Princess must inherit some of her father’s wisdom, because she learns a valuable lesson that real jewels–real treasures–are our friends.

I happily recommend this wonderful book to anyone who wants to give their child a good read. Looking forward to your next one, Diana! ”

Suzanne:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        “Where the Jewels Are is book number one in Diana Symons’ Tales From The Throne series for young girls. If you have a little girl in your life, ages 6-11, then you’ll want to share this delightful little book with her. The only thing I didn’t like about this book is that it ended and I don’t have the next volume, I need to know what happens next!”

Available now on Amazon and christianbooks.com.

Holy Moly, what a ride. It’s been so long, and so bumpy. WhenI wrote Where the Jewels Are several years ago, I didn’t actually think about publishing, it was just a story that I gave to a friend. After it was finished and more stories about The Land of Wonderful came pushing out of my head, I started thinking about what to do with them. I shopped them around without any luck so I decided to publish them myself.

Starting your own publishing company, now there’s quaint little project. Can you manage to do everything wrong the way I did? Lessons learned:

1. Work with people who already know how to do layout and design. It’s going to look so much better, unless you’re also a gifted graphic designer.

2. Get feedback on the cover BEFORE you go to print. Save yourself a lot of money and heartache when you have to retool and start over.

3. Stop doubting that you can’t do it. It’s your baby and no one else is going to pick it up and finish it if you don’t.

That being said, I now have the book it was supposed to be. Brianna Scott’s artwork is delightful. Eric and Mary Ann Reinstedt’s interior design is beautiful – not to mention the awesome support and encouragement. I’m so happy with it. Now it’s all about marketing and promotion. If you have read the book, please go to Amazon and post a review. It will help people find it and encourage them to read it.

I’m looking forward to hearing from the kids who do get to read this little book. When a 12 year old boy tells me that it’s his favorite book – a book about a princess! – I’m a happy camper. The next in the series, The Kings’ Guard, is in the works.

Being good at something is a tricky thing. Are you good at something because you have natural talent, or have you worked hard at it? Either way, there is work involved. Tiger Woods is a natural at golf, but he still trains, hard. I think everyone has some degree of natural talent in something. I’m definitely not wired for being good with numbers but working with words comes easily. We all have something that we can do better than other things. But how do you go from good to great? I’m finding out that it’s a lot of work.

You want to train dolphins, teach high school math, or be a five-star chef, you need to work your craft. There’s too much mediocre work being done because it’s easier to just be good. But good next to great become mediocre in a heartbeat. Why settle? Why not be the best at what you do? Don’t think it will be easy. You’ll give up TV time. You’ll give up hanging out at the mall or Starbucks. Find people better than you at what you want. Pick their brain. Get your hands on books. Go back to school. Put in the extra hours. Learn where your weaknesses are and fix them. Just remember to stay humble when all the hard work kicks in.

Good just isn’t good enough when there’s potential for so much more. The next level might push you to a breakthrough you never saw coming. Being excellent is a worthy goal. You can do it if you decide to. And here’s the kicker – give it to God and let Him put the extra glow on your efforts. He’ll give grace to fatigue, time balancing, challenging new ideas. He wants you to shine, but you have to put in the effort. Don’t you want to find out what that looks like?

I think I’m tired of all the rules for spelling. I propose a unilateral change. I suggest that all past tense verbs end in “ed” and all plurals end in “s”. That should make it easier for everyone.

For instance, I could talk about how I goed to the hair dresser and geted my hair cuted today. There ised hairs everywhere. Several peoples comed in and sited to wait. I drived away but forgeted to buy breads and meats at the gorcery store. Then I forgeted to geted gasss for my car. At least I bringed home the mails.

See how much better that is! Next, we’ll tackle those silent letters in words that we don’t knead.

Fiction writing is sort of schizo. You have real conversations with people who don’t exist, physically. Mentally, they’re real, or trying to be. I almost visualize sitting down with my character in a coffee shop and asking him to tell me about himself.

Really, you’re the youngest of three boys? How does that make you feel? What do you want to do when you get out of school? Does your father know that? What will happen if you don’t get to do that? That’s a lot of sugar for your coffee. You must really like it sweet. What’s your favorite food? Wow, that’s spicy. How do you and your brothers get along? OK, but? Do you ever say anything to him about that? Maybe you should think about it. Do you have a girlfriend? No? How come? Don’t be so shy, I won’t tell anyone : ) Yeah, broken hearts are hard to get over. Me? Oh, I just make stuff up.

Sometimes it gets hard. Sometimes that character just doesn’t want to talk about himself. You can poke and  prod and turn him upside down, and he just keeps quiet.  Sometimes I only get to know him when I put him on paper, then I can see him stretch and turn and wink. Now he comes to life and takes me by the hand and says, Let’s go this way. But, but…ok, let’s see where this goes.

Sometimes I wish my characters were real. Why don’t I have a mentor in my life as great as this woman? And this one, I would dearly love to sit and listen to him talk about life. It’s a little odd to have friends in my head, but I really like them. I even like the bad guys. They are fun to write because you can make them just as mean as you want, but you also want them to get over themselves. Sometimes they see the light. Other times, they only see their own misguided ambition. Sorry Dude, you lose.

That’s what makes fiction so fun. It’s my world and my people and I can rewrite it and change it and no one gets hurt. Now, to get it out of my head and into the book!

This was my first time attending the Mt Hermon Christian Writer’s Conference and I’m certain that it won’t be the last. It wasn’t cheap, but what I took away was worth the cost. It was big. Someone told me there may have been 400 attendees, but I never heard an official number. After reading over the roster, it looks like most came from California, Oregon and Washington, but a surprising number came from all over the country. It was an automatic reaction to smile at someone and glance at their name tag to see who they were and where they came from. I’m not sure why we always want to know that. Does that help us understand the person better? We just can’t get away from our sorting boxes.

The next question you were guaranteed to be asked was, “So, what are you writing?” With so many different genres being represented, it was possible to meet dozens of people writing in completely different tracks. As expected though, everyone gravitated to their familiar writing group. We all got to recognize who the agents, editors and writers were in our particular genre. What surprised me was the number of people with books already out. I was under the impression that most people were like me, in need of help getting my book out. The availability of agents and editors makes it a good place to talk about new projects and get new ideas, so I can see going back again and again. I especially liked the ability to sit next to people with multiple books out who were happy to answer all my questions I threw at them. I got their feedback on agents, marketing, and editing.

I was surprised at the general reaction to my genre, what’s come to be known as Speculative Fiction, a term that confuses me because, isn’t all fiction speculative? But by that, the distinction is made that these books cannot be placed either in contemporary cultures or timelines, or have some supernatural element to them. It became the joke of the conference for agents and editors to say pointedly that they DO NOT carry speculative fiction, or Jeff’s books. Jeff Gerke ran the SF track and was happy to take in all the wayward writers venturing into the great unknown in Christian publishing. Some were writing SciFi, a lot had female heroines with supernatural powers, and then there was me. My book is fantasy because I could not tell the story in any known culture or place in history, so I made one up. All of them, however, have a Christian theme and moral. What surprised everyone was that two major awards given by the conference for promising writers were given to two women in this track. I hope the other publishers took notice.

Jeff’s class was awesome. Not only was he hilarious, he was a dynamic writing teacher. He made us nail down the Meyers Briggs personality for our characters, strengths and weaknesses. In a conversation with him after class, he talked me into changing the age of my main character. Making him older fixed a few issues that were problems with the story and allowed him to have deeper insight into what was happening in the story, something I never would have thought to do on my own.

I knew that my book had problems before I went. The conference snuck up on me before my book was anywhere near being ready, but I wanted to at least gage the interest. I was bolstering myself to go home with the knowledge that I learned good ways to be a better writer, and I did, but I was also happy to get positive feedback. An editor is interested and wants me to send in a proposal. An agent is interested and wants me to send in some sample pages. Neither would make the offer if they weren’t genuinely interested, despite the amount of work I have to do.

That being said, I have a lot of work to do. I can’t send in anything until I finish the book, and based on the feedback I got, I have to start over. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a fresh thing. I recently join the American Christian Fiction Writers organization (ACFW) and so am looking forward to the critique group help. I was happy to learn that agents are pleased to hear a writer is involved with ACFW because of the great writing help they offer. I also recently joined a local writer’s group in San Jose and am looking forward to getting feedback and encouragement from them.

There’s work, but it’s good work and I’m looking forward to it. I have to get this story out of my head and onto paper.

I went back to my little hometown over the weekend – Corning, CA, population 7000. Nothing’s changed and everything’s changed. We drove past my grandparents’ old house. It was a great house with a porch in the front and a well-tended yard. I remember Grandma’s violets and azaleas because I got paid a dollar to water the yard when they went on vacation. It was horrifying to see that wonderful house now  – barely any white paint left on it, the yard overgrown and spooky looking. But a woman looked up from the back yard and a child came out from inside. In front, a man was building a huge pile of cut branches where he was pruning. A young family lives there now. The house will be saved and new life brought back to it. It made me happy.

We drove past my old house. As a child it was a huge two-story house with a massive backyard. Something happened to it, something terrible happened to it. It’s been unoccupied and vandalized for so many years, that now it’s fenced off and condemned. That was sad to see, but what made it shrink? How did the huge backyard become such a small backyard? And where are all the wonderful trees? No more apricot, peach, cherry or pear. Only the big walnut trees and the lemon tree survived to force out life, unaware that no one was home to appreciate them any more. No more iris or rose bushes. No more games out back or climbing the fig tree or looking out the window from the bedroom window and dreaming of when we got big.

We drove past the park filled with olive trees where Danette and I would walk and unpack our tiny picnic lunches. Oddly, it looks exactly the way it should look.

When we decided at the last minute to take this trip, Rich asked if I wanted to go to the hakachi. I’d heard the word before when we visit his mother’s site after she was cremated. I said no. Just thinking about it brought tears to my eyes. But after a day of thinking about it, I knew I could do it. I bought artificial flowers and made an arrangement. Ironically, it was Mom who taught me how to do that. We found her grave faster than I expected to. Even after forty years, I stood before her marker and was overwhelmed with emotion. It took three times to get the flowers to sit right and look nice. She would like that. Grandma and Grandpa next to her, watching out after their wayward daughter for eternity, should never have seen her go so young. It was good be there. The things she taught me from such a young age stay with me still and I miss her.

It took a while for emotion to settle down after we left. Then I could look forward to seeing my old friend Vicky again. By quirky coincidence, she was in town visiting family as well. What a joy to see her and try to remember all our old friends.  We said hi to the man who delivered my mail when I was young. He remembered me and my Grandfather, but I was sorry to not remember him at all.

Corning goes on as if I’d never lived there. New people move in, young people move out. It’s the heart and soul of my childhood yet nothing remains to tell the tale. Even the boarding house where I lived in college burned down. I miss the small town freedom to walk everywhere and be stopped by people who knew my Mom or Grandfather. I miss the parades and the fireworks. Seems like a “B” movie, but it was real. Even with all the heartache and pain, I still miss it.