Sunday, July 30, 2017

Is There a Number Fairy? #OurAuthorGang

The Number Fairy lives in children's imagination, but dream learning is real.
Dreaming about kittens helped me to learn numbers when I was a young child.


According to Dr. Freud, dreams are our brain's attempt to figure out how to achieve our desires or to understand and face our fears.

After I came across this interesting article on The New York Times blog about a research done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, I thought about my struggle with learning the numbers when I was a young child.

In this research, a maze was shown to 99 volunteers. They were asked to find their way through the complicated, three-dimensional puzzle as fast as possible. After an hour, half of the volunteers were allowed to sleep and the other half relaxed staying awake.

Kutay Tanir/Getty Images

The result showed and I quote, "After the resting period, the participants were asked to again tackle the maze. Those who hadn’t napped showed no improvement or did even worse after the break. Nappers who were rested but didn’t report any maze-related dreams did better but showed only marginal improvement.

However, four nappers who reported dreaming about the maze showed a startling improvement, cutting their completion time in half. The difference in scores before and after sleeping was 10 times higher for the maze dreamers than those who hadn’t dreamed about the task."

This article triggered the memory of my struggle with numbers when I was very young. My parents tried to make me understand the numbers by making me count on my fingers, count toys, pebbles, and used every visual aid they could think of but I still couldn't understand the numbers until I had a dream.

I still remember my short dream clearly. In my dream, I kept moving the kittens in and out of their bed and I kept counting: two kittens are out of the bed, five kittens are in the bed. Then one kitten in the bed, six kittens are out of the bed.

From then on, I had no trouble counting anything. This article and remembering my dream inspired this children's book about Terry struggling to learn numbers and the Mary, the Number Fairy, helping her to understand.

When a child is struggling to comprehend the meaning of numbers, they might dream about it after a frustrating day of trying to understand and learn the numbers. 


Recommended for children 2-6

Terry was struggling to learn numbers. “I wish we knew the numbers so we could help,” Pansy, Terry’s dog, said to her best friend, Oliver, the hedgehog. The Number Fairy heard Pansy’s plea, and at night, she flew through the window. With a swish of her wand, the fairy conjured up a dream bubble and showed the numbers to Terry, and to the animals.
From the proceeds, the author donates paperback books to non-profit book charities for children.

Pages from the book









Read more in the book
Available in print and eBook on many sites:

And signed paperback in the author's bookstore:


COMMENTS

Erika M Szabo via Google+

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Is There a Number Fairy? #OurAuthorGang
The Number Fairy lives in children's imagination, but dream learning is real. Dreaming about kittens helped me to learn numbers when I was a young child. by Erika M Szabo Photo credit:  https://animalcenter.org/news/kitten-happy-hourAccording to Dr. Freud,...
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Grace Au

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Beautiful post, Erika!
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Thank you Grace :)

T.C. Rypel

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Charming and delightful reminiscence, Erika, that illustrates how our unconscious is forever at work, trying earnestly to problem-solve on our behalf.

And what a satisfying wonder it must be for you to have turned your epiphany about how to understand something puzzling into a picture book that might both entertain and edify kids who might be struggling with a similar problem! Kudos to you.

Our dream-lives are probably far more important than we think, working things through...providing uncredited inspirations...

I believe I dreamed the framework for my kids' book SCREAMING WILLIE. I woke up whispering the character's name, and then immediately knew the first story. But that's rare for me. At least the cognizance of the phenomenon is rare. That's why I wonder how often it's happened without my being conscious of having had those "shoemaker's elves" concoct the structure of a story I've later written.

My clearest recollection of a dream-based LEARNING situation from youth, such as you describe, involved not numbers but words. I remember being brought to tears, during grade school, over an evening I spent unsuccessfully trying to rote-memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for a class presentation. My dad sagely advised me to give it up for the night, just sleep on it---my hard prep work will cause the speech to assemble itself during the night. Just watch, he urged. And sure enough, he was right. I woke up with a grasp of the piece that astonished me. I never forgot that incident. But I hadn't thought of it for years until now, when your kitty-numbers reminded me.

I hope this book brings you back the wealth of satisfactions it deserves.
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Thank you Ted :) Our mind is still uncharted territory. We know a lot about how it works but most is just educated guess. I think we could compare our knowledge about the function of the brain to how much we know about ocean life. We know a lot about what's going on in the top layer but almost nothing about the deep waters.
It is also amazing how we try to grasp our dreams when we're just about waking up. We remember bits and pieces and then we rationalize the fleeting thoughts and feelings by filling the gaps to create a story.
Dreaming is definitely important, there are a lot of studies that prove it. Without dreams our brain can't sort events, memories and feelings and store them in the right memory cells to be recalled easily and make the connection between memories.
The human brain is truly amazing!
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Joe Bonadonna

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Wow, Erika! I love how you used your wonderful illustrations and their accompanying text as an excerpt from Terry and the Number Fairy. This is a cool article. When I'm struggling with a story, I try to go to bed each night thinking about the story, hoping to dream about it and find some answers. When I was a kid, I struggled with fractions and percentages. My Dad taught me in one evening by using pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. I passed my arithmetic text the next day without any problem. I guess he was my Number Fairy!
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I guess Fairies come in all shapes and genders :)
 
Indeed they do, just like Angels.

Rick Haynes

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Lovely post Erika. Pictures do help, no matter your age. I wish that I was taught my numbers, with fairies.
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Mary Anne Yarde

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Great post!
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Mackenzie Flohr shared this via Google+

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Mackenzie Flohr

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
That's really fascinating about dreams, and I definitely believe it's true. Love the sample you provided above of your book.
 
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Joe Bonadonna via Google+

1 year ago  -  Shared publicly
 
Today on A Small Gang of Authors, Erika M Szabo tells us how dreaming about kittens when she was a kid helped her learn her "numbers." She also gives us some of her excellent illustrations and their accompanying text as an excerpt for her wonderful children's book, "Terry and the Number Fairy."
https://asmallgangofauthors.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-there-number-fairy-ourauthorgang.html

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Guest Author Stephanie Churchill #OurAuthorGang

Our Guest today is Stephanie Churchill 



About the Author
Stephanie Churchill grew up in the American Midwest, and after school moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a paralegal, moving to the Minneapolis metro area when she married.  She says, 'One day while on my lunch break from work, I visited a nearby bookstore and happened upon a book by author Sharon Kay Penman.  I’d never heard of her before, but the book looked interesting, so I bought it.  Immediately I become a rabid fan of her work. I discovered that Ms. Penman had fan club and that she happened to interact there frequently.  As a result of a casual comment she made about how writers generally don’t get detailed feedback from readers, I wrote her an embarrassingly long review of her latest book, Lionheart.  As a result of that review, she asked me what would become the most life-changing question: “Have you ever thought about writing?”  And The Scribe’s Daughter was born.

Find out more at Stephanie's website www.stephaniechurchillauthor.com and find her on Facebook and Twitter @WriterChurchill.  Her books can be found on Amazon and other online retailers.

"What inspired you to start writing this particular book? What is the genre of this book?"

Becoming an author wasn’t anything I’d ever imagined doing throughout most of my life.  In fact, the very idea of it, when it came, found me like a deer caught in the headlights.  The more common tale for the authors I know is that they had dreamed of writing books ever since they were children.  That wasn’t the case for me.  If the idea had been suggested any earlier in my life, I would have found the notion utterly laughable.  It wasn’t until a New York Times best-selling author nudged me that I caught on.  The resulting experiment led to the inspiration for my first book.  Let me explain.

I have always enjoyed reading.  And while I enjoy many different genres, historical fiction is what I return to over and over again more often than not.  It was mid-2011 when I heard that my favorite author of the time, Sharon Kay Penman, was about to release a new book.  I had long been a member of her Facebook fan club, but it had been a while since I’d last visited.  News of her new book sent me to the group more frequently, and to my great surprise and delight, I discovered that Ms. Penman frequented the group, interacting often with her fans.  It was in one such interaction that Ms. Penman commented that authors rarely receive detailed feedback from readers about why they love the books they do.  Immediately I decided that I would do something about that.

In a way that only rabid fans, groupies, and a small number of book nerds can do, I began work on what turned into an embarrassingly long review of her book, Lionheart.  That a fan would do something so fanatical understandably caught her attention, and we struck up an email friendship, the result of which led her to ask me, “Have you ever thought about writing?”  Had she been anyone but a career author, and one with several titles to hit New York Times best-seller status, I would not have paid any attention.  But she was who she was, and the authority behind that assurance gave me the confidence I needed to take up the proverbial pen and write, with none other than my favorite author as mentor.

Four years after the nudge, I published my first book, The Scribe’s Daughter, but it was really an accident.  I had every intention of publishing a different manuscript, but when the voice of my prose just didn’t seem right, I set it aside.  Just for fun, I wondered what it would be like to write in first person, so remembering a certain market chase scene from the 1992 Disney film Aladdin, I replaced the character of Aladdin with my own street urchin, a girl named Kassia.  As Kassia took shape on the page, I found her to be quick-witted and sarcastic, and incredibly fun to write.  I fell in love with her character and couldn’t stop until I had a book, The Scribe’s Daughter.

At the beginning of the novel, we meet Kassia, a seventeen year-old orphan who is faced with a tough decision in her daily quest for survival.  She is a younger sister but finds herself in the position of providing for both herself and her older sister, Irisa.  The sisters cannot afford to pay rent, and when their landlord gives them an ultimatum -- pay up or become whores -- Kassia must make a difficult decision.  Events become complicated when very soon after, a stranger shows up at her doorstep to hire her for a job that is ridiculously outside her skill set.  Not seeing any other choice, she takes him on.  Before long, Kassia finds herself swept away on a sometimes treacherous journey where she must use her resourcefulness and every measure of witty bravado to survive.  Along the way, mysteries of her family history, a history she never knew existed, are realized and revealed.  By the end of the book, Kassia is transformed from naive and reckless girl, to confident, strong young woman.

The book reads like historical fiction, yet there is no doubt that it is fantasy, even if not traditional fantasy.  There is no magic, no dragons or other fantastical beasts.  Everything is based in reality.  Readers of historical fiction should feel right at home while reading it however, because I tried to inject my love of history and historical fiction into the feel of the prose.  I often tell people that my books echo historical fiction even if they don’t contain any history.  More than that though, if you love deep characters, evocative settings, and a good plot, it doesn’t matter what genre you read.  You’ll enjoy the book!



The Scribe’s Daughter
Kassia is a thief and a soon-to-be oath breaker. Armed with only a reckless wit and sheer bravado, seventeen-year-old Kassia barely scrapes out a life with her older sister in a back-alley of the market district of the Imperial city of Corium. When a stranger shows up at her market stall, offering her work for which she is utterly unqualified, Kassia cautiously takes him on. Very soon however, she finds herself embroiled in a mystery involving a usurped foreign throne and a vengeful nobleman. Most intriguing of all, she discovers clues to the disappearance of her father three years prior.

When Kassia is forced to flee her home, suffering extreme hardship, danger and personal trauma along the way, she feels powerless to control what happens around her. Rewarding revelations concerning the mysteries of her family’s past are tempered by the reality of a future she doesn’t want. In the end, Kassia discovers an unyielding inner strength, and that contrary to her prior beliefs, she is not defined by external things -- she discovers that she is worthy to be loved.


Buy Links
The Scribe’s Daughter  myBook.to/thescribesdaughter
The King’s Daughter  myBook.to/TheKingsDaughter


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