JanDunlap.com » Jan’s Blog

What goes around…can be surprising

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:58:49 +0000

In the online business and professional writing class that I teach for NMSU, I always remind my students that business writing can have a very long shelf-life, and consequently, you don’t always know who will see it over time. It’s a cautionary guideline to be very conscious of what you’re writing – sort of like those emails or twitters that get seen by the wrong person. You just never know where your words are going to wind up.

Yesterday I got to experience that personally, but thankfully, in a very good way. I got an email from a woman blogger who asked my permission to include a poem I wrote in 1995 in an online book she’s working on. Her book will be inspirational quotes and poems for mothers, and the poem she wanted to include is titled “A Mother’s Midnight Prayer.” The only place the poem was published was in a 1998 St. Anthony Messenger magazine, so it wasn’t even published electronically originally. Imagine my surprise to get this email about a poem I wrote 17 years ago and assumed had disappeared into magazine oblivion!

Even weirder was realizing that my poem had been lifted into the blogosphere and has been circulating ever since, unbeknownst to me. The woman who’s compiling the book didn’t know where my poem first appeared – I guess she’d gotten it from someone else. So I googled my poem and there it was on a bunch of sites – many of them baby or nursing-related. Wow. I had no idea. No one had ever contacted me before about it, which was a little weird, too, to think my work could be showing up places I hadn’t approved (and even with a few word changes I noted). But it made me feel good to read others’ online reactions to the poem and know that I had touched the hearts of other mothers through the years.

And that really is the best part of this experience for me, since the reason I write is to connect with others! I am blessed.

Surprised, but blessed.

(And for those who are curious, I’m posting the poem on my Trust Me page – with the original words intact!)

Holiday cheer!

admin — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:35:30 +0000

I’ll be signing my Birder Murder books at Jim Gilbert’s Wild Bird Store in Waconia, MN, this Thursday night from 5 to 8 pm. Pat Anderson has decked the store out with beautiful holiday gift ideas and decor, and we’ll have treats and specials on hand for all those attending. I just discovered the store this summer and it’s become one of my favorite spots to browse, since Pat has a fabulous inventory of home gift items, baby gifts, tea, books, locally produced ceramic dishware and birdseed. It’s not just for birdwatchers anymore! Hope you can join us for some early holiday cheer!

And my books continue to find new readers…I just read a lovely review of the newest book, Falcon Finale, on the Birding Is Fun website. Thanks to all of you for spreading the word about the series – Bob White’s world just keeps getting bigger!

Life imitates art…again

admin — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:38:15 +0000

I can’t believe it. It looks like a Scott’s Oriole has been sighted in Duluth, MN, just three hours from my home. What’s unusual about that is that a Scott’s Oriole is a bird native to the southwest. What’s even odder (is that an oxymoron?) is that my Bob White characters see a Scott’s Oriole in my most recent release, Falcon Finale, when they go to Arizona. And now they could have stayed home and seen one right here in Minnesota!

This has happened to me before with these books: bird events that echo my book events. For the first book, it was an influx of Boreal Owls (normally very hard to find) in northern Minnesota the winter after the book The Boreal Owl Murder debuted in September 2008. Then, the spring after Murder on Warbler Weekend came out, we had larger-than-normal waves of warblers that practically blanketed the area. As far as I know, nothing weird happened after the third book came out, so I figured it was just coincidence with the first two. But now this…am I an unwitting bird psychic?

Or am I just unwitting…..maybe we should take a vote….