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Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Barbara Mariconda, author of the brand new, swashbuckling, spunky and spirited middle grade adventure story THE VOYAGE OF LUCY P. SIMMONS, as well as the co-founder of Empowering Writers, company that trains teachers how to help their students improve their writing skills. Today she’ll be giving you insight into both of her areas of expertise, writer and teacher, and she’s created a free downloadable sample lesson that you can use to teach LUCY (and later, any novel) in the classroom!

From Barbara:

“Lucy P. Simmons – described as an “intrepid heroine with a swashbuckling spirit and a sailor’s heart” and as “a feisty, unforgettable character” – this protagonist of my latest middle grade novel, The Voyage of Lucy P. Simmons has been evolving along with me for over fifteen years. Set on the coast of Maine at the end of the Victorian era, it is the tale of beautiful, red-haired Lucy, how her life changes in an instant, propelling her on an adventure sparked with magic, hardship, courage, and love. It redefines family, celebrating the miracle of people whose lives cross in unexpected ways, weaving rich tapestries of friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, and the kinds of relationships that change lives.

Years of travel to coastal Maine provided the inspiration and sparked the imagination that brought The Voyage of L. P. Simmons to life.  Here, a shoreline mansion, not unlike the Simmons place.

In many ways, Lucy’s journey reflects mine – and surely, yours as well. True, my experiences have not been as colorful as Lucy’s – I didn’t survive the tragic sinking of a ship, or meet a mysterious siren on the beach, nor did I discover a magical flute or have my beloved home surrounded by glittering mist. But, in my own small way, in my own unique life, I’ve had some narrow escapes, met some mystical, mysterious people who’ve brought marvelous unexpected gifts, and thankfully, experienced a sense of mystery and magic in the stuff of everyday living. And that’s what I write – stories that reveal the edges and undercurrents of life that can be sensed and experienced, but never grasped.

As a teacher, I know children need to believe in magic – not so much the magic in the pages of a fantasy novel, but rather, in the miracles and possibilities often disguised in the ordinariness of life. And, a book can open that doorway metaphorically, can help hone the eyes of hope and wonder to see beyond the literal…toward “what if” and “why not.” Especially in this era of high stakes testing, where school can become wrought with stress and pressure, children need the escape that fantasy provides, and the opportunity for them to immerse themselves in the creative, imaginative worlds where the spirit can soar freely. But, given the demands of new national and state standards that increase the breadth and depth of what students must learn, is the luxury of losing oneself in a fantasy story a thing of the past? Is there time enough in the school day to indulge in a book like The Voyage of Lucy P. Simmons?

To succeed as an author and as an educator, I’ve had to wear two hats and find ways to merge both worlds. When I’m not writing for kids, I’m writing for their teachers, through my company, “Empowering Writers” – our mission: to empower the next generation of authors in classrooms today. But, what I won’t ever do is compromise one goal for the other – in other words, I’m committed to find ways for teachers to nurture the imaginations and creativity in the souls of their students, while continuing to challenge them academically and prepare them to excel as the junior test-takers they have to be.

This is artwork that Barbara owns which has inspired her writing.  Can you see the any connections to Lucy’s story?

So, with both my writer and teacher hats squashed on my head, I went through my novel, The Voyage of Lucy P. Simmons, looking for every opportunity within the text that can be used a jumping off point for teaching the Common Core State Standards in writing. You can click on the link below for an entire outline – and, not only that. The basic techniques I’ve applied to “Lucy” as the basis for instruction, can be adapted for all of your favorite pieces of high quality literature. But, of course, I’m hoping you’ll be applying them to mine!

And, lastly…while I’m talking about using literature to teach to the standards, I want to be clear. Reading a fabulous story that transports the reader into realms beyond the ordinary, beyond the classroom, beyond the challenges of life, is really enough! And, I think, if only there was a state standard that read: Standard L.11.1a: Students lose themselves in story, imagining worlds of possibility, embracing hope – Oh, what a world it would be!”

Thanks Barbara! THE VOYAGE OF LUCY P. SIMMONS is available in bookstores now. And don’t miss Barbara’s wonderful, FREE downloadable PDF lesson plan, available here!

Grace Labatt, Acquisitions Editor, Reference

Everyone has a favorite place in the world. Mine happens to be on that most derided of beaches, the Jersey Shore. (Thanks, Snooki.) I love escaping the gridlock and heat of Manhattan to the peaceful Shore, with its beautiful beaches, tons of activities—biking, crabbing, beach volleyball, fireworks watching, to name a few—and excellent ice cream. It’s just a short trip from New York, but feels like a different world.

Traveling there is easy: just hop on New Jersey Transit from Penn Station. Traveling across the world, though, is never a breeze. Just as everyone has a place they love to escape to, everyone knows what a pain it can be to get there. In anticipation of the quickly approaching summer, below are some tips from Oxford editorial staff and authors on the best ways to get around the world—or, if you’re not sure where you’re headed yet, tips on where to go!

For more travel destinations, check out the New Concise World Atlas Third Edition, which has hundreds of full-scale maps from around the globe.

Amber Fischer, Senior Editor, Oxford Art Online and Oxford Music Online: Pokhara is definitely worth a visit if you’re in Nepal and is a relaxing alternative to Kathmandu….Or try Wolsey Lodges if you’re looking for something different. Mostly in the UK (although there are also some in France and Spain), they are mostly beautiful, grand, historical homes where the owners choose to rent out a room or two to travelers. You get luxury (or at least really cool and historical) accommodations for usually 45-85GBP per night, and you’re almost always invited to dine with the owners, who always seem to be down-to-earth and friendly.

William Beezley, Editor of the Oxford History of Mexico: For absolutely excelente lunches with reasonably priced wine go to the Casino Español in Mexico City. I go at least once on every trip. A delightful museum is the Museo de Arte Popular, a new museum with excellent examples of popular art of all kinds and a good bookstore and coffee shop. The building was once a fire department.

Mary Funchion, Development Editor, Reference: Before I book an airline ticket, I use Kayak.com. It compares all the airlines and lets you know which ticket is the cheapest option. You have to leave the site to actually book the ticket, but it saves having to g

Inspired. It was an easy read, but it was entertaining, if nothing else. I'm not really a dater. If I meet a guy I like and we start going out, great, but I don't actively seek dates in bars or other social venues. But this book was still interesting to me. It provided fun insight into the world of men, which is a bit confusing to more than just a handful of women that I know. We all know that men and women are different; we just don't see things the same way or act the same way about almost everything. The challenge is differentiating between the bad guys and the good guys. He's Just Not That Into You does a great job of slapping you in the face with reality. It really does what has needed to be done for years! It even helped me realize that my most recent relationship wasn't as happy and perfect as I had thought even before he and I realized we weren't meant to be together. I was in it deeper than he was, and I was too blind to see it. I didn't want to see it, which is our biggest problem. We want every guy we are with to be Mr. Right, and it's tough to see that he's not, especially if we've been dating for a length of time longer than a month. We all assume the guy must love us if he's still around after a year of dating, but the truth is, he's probably just afraid to tell you the truth because he doesn't want to hurt your feelings. So, he sticks around and things start to crumble and then you finally decide things aren't where they should be if you're both happy, and you break it off. I recommend this book to men and women alike. For men, it could be a helpful guide to know what women are really thinking, so maybe they should think twice before acting like one of the guys described in the book. And for women, it is a helpful guide to keep you away from the guys who aren't treating you the way you should be treated in a loving relationship. For women, this book is an upper more than anything. It is very reassuring when it comes to complimenting women on their fun, sexy, amazing features that we don't get complimented on nearly enough times throughout the day/week/month/year. Everyone should read this book!

One year ago last spring, I discovered a place where time was entirely suspended. There was no beginning to anything. There was no ending to anything. I could not feel the breeze on my skin. I could not taste the food I tried to eat. Simply attempting to drink a glass of water usually resulted in feeling like I would lose my stomach. The hour, the day, the week, all were lost into a category of being so unimportant they began to lack all substance. Entire days could arrive and disappear, without ever being noticed by me. Several times I crossed railroad tracks in front of trains. Not because I intended to do such a dangerous thing, but because I never saw the trains. And you would have to agree, trains are very large and loud and hard not to see. But when you are suffering major depression, you seldom see anything, regardless how immense in size, regardless how solid it surrounds you. There were multiple events, each filled with its own enormity of sorrow, which resulted in my arriving at such a state of non-being. The vacancy in my mind and soul was so real, I cannot even remember when, why or how I decided to set first one foot and then the other on the path toward recovery. I do recall taking an evaluation to determine degree of depression. On a scale where any score above 25 indicated I needed to be hospitalized, I scored 41. Being a therapist, I already understood that "therapist heal thyself" is not good advice. Yet because I am a therapist, I also knew I had the tools. I had the skills. I could navigate the darkest night of my soul, if I could grab a good rope and haul myself into even a small patch of light, and if I could find a competent guide to walk with me, give me discipline, keep me heading in the correct direction. I did heal myself. I did have an excellent guide. And I also forged several genuinely therapeutic friendships along the journey. Depression therapy and group participants are very confidential things, and I would never say more about my experience than this: I will forever be grateful to my guide, to the friends who worked with me and helped me. I hope I helped them a little bit, as well. I hope a few of them will read this and know how valuable they were in helping me find the light out of that dark night of my soul. It can be done.

People like to ask me why they should bother with paper maps in our digital information age. I suppose that’s fair, reference information has been moving online with increasing rapidity. Well, call me old-fashioned, but my initial response is usually to point out that some basic map-reading skills can be quite handy, whether you’re a bibliophile or a tech junkie.  As we’ve learned, implicitly trusting GPS technology can lead to some rather unfortunate consequences. The other question I get now and again is a little easier to answer: What makes an atlas worth owning in the first place? For the benefit of anyone who might be wondering about this, I thought I’d compile some simple guidelines.

• Two can be better than one
  Know what you plan to use the atlas for—most of them are designed to deliver different types of geographical information. A US road atlas is essential if you’re on your way to the in-law’s for the first time, but less helpful if you’re trying to locate the principal wine-growing areas of the Eastern Mediterranean. That said, if you’re planning to drive around the Commandaria region on Cyprus, you might want to consult two atlases before booking a flight to Nicosia. In other words, consider using more than one atlas. If you’re currently atlas-less however, I’d start with a volume that maps all seven continents.

• Currency is key
  You don’t have to be a demographer or an urban planner to know that the world changes every day. But with that attitude in mind, I recommend flipping to the copyright page right off the bat. Make sure the book you buy was published in the last five years. You should also read the fine print to find out when any statistical data in the atlas was last updated. Then leaf through it to see if recent major geo-political events are represented. Kosovo for example, declared its independence from Serbia this year, thus becoming the most recent nation to emerge from Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Oh, and if you find a page spread for South Asia with labels like “Hindoostan” and “Siam” on it, congratulations, you’re holding a rare book. However, unless you’re a collector, I’d say keep shopping.

• Count the maps (and pay attention to scale)
  With all of the powerful online resources like Google Earth, a reference book is only as good as the sum of its parts—the more maps a book includes, the more useful it will be when you’re wondering how many autonomous republics Georgia has (it’s two). So take a minute and get a rough sense of the total number of maps. Is it 50 or 150? And don’t settle for a bunch of large-scale maps covering giant swathes of territory-be sure there is plenty of detailed cartography showing countries and cities too.  By choosing carefully, you’ll end up with an atlas that isn’t just heavier and more expensive, but also more likely to have what you’re looking for. Really, if you’re going to fork over the money for a hefty new contribution to your library, you should get the most maps for your buck.

• Legibility counts
  Good cartographers don’t try to cram every page with place names, relief contours, and dozens of tiny symbols. Maps are necessarily selective and a reader needs to be able to make sense of what they’re looking at. Color is important too. As Mark Monmonier writes in his excellent work How to Lie with Maps, “Persons unaware of the appropriate use of color in cartography are easily impressed and might accept as useful a poor map that merely looks pretty.”  A few years ago a friend gave me a historical atlas that could have been great. Instead, upon browsing its contents I was confronted with one disappointing page after another: shading so bold it obscured the map features, clashing fonts, place names lost in gutters, and so on. Make sure your atlas isn’t just pretty.

• Don’t be sold on “fluffy features” alone
  Oftentimes, atlases that have less in the way of comprehensive coverage mask this fact with an abundance of stock photography, geographic trivia, and slick design elements. Now personally, I appreciate a volume that can tell me Suriname’s GDP while also plotting the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but let’s not forget that what we are after is quality cartography. Many atlas publishers now include fact books or gazetteers offering short summaries of countries and territories, but these features shouldn’t be the main attraction. And remember, a page cluttered with images leaves less space for the maps themselves.

• Consult the index
  Last but not least, turn to the index. In essence, this element is basically the search engine for any work of reference. The more entries your atlas’s index has, the more layers of geographic information you’ll find on each page. And (bearing in mind my earlier point about legibility) that’s a good thing. Start by checking for a place that’s been in the news or has left you stumped lately. Is it there? How about historical names? If you didn’t know that—popular brands of gin aside—we’re calling Bombay Mumbai these days, would you still be able to find it in the index? And for those of you who want to use your new atlas in tandem with your favorite web mapping application, think about purchasing a book that lists latitude and longitude along with letter figure grid references in its index.

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I'm trying really hard to buckle down on the business plan this morning, so here are some quickie links.

* HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman is optimistic about the future of publishing. Here's a sample of her interview in Forbes:
I think the book business is the healthiest I have seen it in a very long time. We are seeing a breadth of titles selling in many different channels of distribution. We are no longer publishing for the independents only, the chains only, the big box merchandisers only, the online sellers only. We are selling across the board. The health is the breadth, diversity and range. That's good for business, and more importantly, it's good for society.

*I so totally want to go the New York Public Library and print a free instant book on the Espresso Book Machine -- especially after the great stories about indie bookstores doing great business with Print on Demand I heard at the Digital Task Force.

*A victory for shopping local: thanks largely to the efforts of booksellers, Arizona has passed legislation which will penalize townships that give outlandish tax breaks and subsidies to massive retailers and big box stores. We could use a little of that playing-field-leveling around here.

*Independent booksellers are having a polite disagreement with National Public Radio over their Amazon affiliate program, which doesn't point NPR website-goers to Booksense despite indies strong support of NPR. Read a letter from ABA President (and Montana bookseller) Russ Lawrence about the issue here in Bookselling This Week.

* Huffington Post blogger Lissa Warren has a great piece on "voting independent" by supporting local bookstores (and she mentions McNally Robinson -- cool!)

* And the wonderful Maud Newton (who I get to meet next Friday!) is running a series of guest posts on favorite independent bookstores (you can read all the ones so far in the Bookstore archives). Great to read about beloved places -- consider contacting Maud to write up your own.

* Speaking of beloved local places, the ALP and I spent Sunday with some friends at Coney Island. With imminent development by Thor Equities (which sounds like a supervillain corporation from the Justice League cartoon), there's a sense that this may be the last summer to experience Coney as the slightly seedy, small-town boardwalk and midway of the big city that it's been for so long. The ALP took a lot of pictures yesterday and there are some great ones of the Wonder Wheel and other Coney classics, but it's this little picture (of a coin-op panorama of the park in the olden days) that serves as a charmingly poignant reminder of what stands to be lost. For a little while longer, it doesn't cost much to have a good time.

Back in blogland again, after a great weekend of eating, drinking and dancing, like you oughta. Still recovering a bit, but I've managed to pull together a link or two. But not many, because I'm sleepy.

Michelle of The Inkwell Bookstore in Falmouth, Mass, suggests that indie booksellers tend to be obsessed with bookcovers -- she sites her store's link to Book By Its Cover, a blog by a designer here in Brooklyn whose posts are mostly just pictures of beautiful book images. Beware -- it's strangely addicting... Thanks, Michelle!

The discussion of Alan De Niro's Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead at the Litblog Co-Op has spilled over into this week -- there's a lot going on in those stories, so you've got time to read more.

Speaking of the LBC, I want to send a signed book and publicity poster for Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! to contest winner Ed Vick, but I can't seem to get ahold of him by email. Anyone know him, tell him to email me with his mailing address so he can get his swag.

Even though (or because) I live here, I want to be first on the list to sign up for the Brooklyn Walking Tours by great Brooklyn authors sponsored by the ABA on the Wednesday before BEA. Only trouble is they're all at once so I can't go to them all! If anyone else is going, let me know so we can compare notes after.