January 12th, 2012, 05:12 AM
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Heather the Mama Duk
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Southern MD
Posts: 28,540
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When I was 9 I read the Anastasia Krupnik series by Lois Lowry (the ones that were already out in 1987 at least). I loved those books and I loved Anastasia's name and the story of how she was named for Anastasia Romanov. And so I decided that my first daughter would be named Anastasia. Fast forward 13 years and I gave birth to my first daughter and did indeed name her Anastasia.
So a couple weeks ago I decided I wanted to reread the Anastasia books and so I bought all of them and all the Sam books for my Kindle. Ani's got a Fire so she had access to them, too, and I told her she should read them since it's where I got her name. She's reading them now and loves them, too (yay! - usually she hates what I like/liked).
I looked up Lois Lowry on-line and found that she is 74 now and has a blog and an e-mail address you can write to. She said she answers all of them unless they are nasty and abusive or written in textspeak or with terrible grammar. Well, that very night Ani e-mailed her! She didn't even tell me! She told her about her name and where I got it from and she asked what her advice is on writer's block.
Would you believe Lois Lowry wrote Ani back about two days later! And Ms. Lowry is even traveling right now and she still took the time to answer. She thought it was neat that Ani is named for Anastasia Krupnik. She also said that in her experience writer's block is an excuse writers use to just not write at all. Her advice is to start working on something else and go back to the problem piece later. It was a truly well thought out and personal response and from a real, famous, published author! Isn't that just so cool?
(BTW, Ani promptly took Ms. Lowry's advice and switched to a different story and wrote a bunch more poems and is happily writing like crazy again.)
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