White Feather Tales is the DBA (Doing Business As) of White Feather Interpreting, LLC. My wish is that my books offer hope, discovery, mystery, humor, and solace.
I refuse to have a bucket list because I refuse to think about kicking the bucket. Yes, I know dying is part of life, but I am nonetheless not a fan.
If I did have a bucket list, watching someone pull one of my books off a shelf at Barnes & Noble, flip through the pages, smile, maybe laugh, maybe cry, and carry it to the checkout counter would be on that list.
Since getting a self-published book onto the shelf of a brick-and-mortar bookstore is tantamount to getting it onto a shelf on Uranus, for now I’ll settle for publishing through platforms like Amazon and Apple Books.
Have you even written a single word? you ask.
Yes, a few.
When I was teaching at a school for the Deaf, I realized that even the best children’s picture books (Where the Wild Things Are, Goodnight Moon, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Are You My Mother?, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Corduroy, among many others) were not tailored to the language needs of my little Deaf toddlers. So I made my own picture books using photographs and pictures cut out of magazines and newspapers because even stick figures elude me.
I gave those books to the children in the hope that their parents, more than 90% of whom were hearing and knew little or no sign language, would begin accepting my invitations to learn to communicate and read with their children.
As for published works, aside from wordy, irate, and mainly futile letters to the editor about the many injustices I cannot brush off, my children’s picture books Jacob and the Coronavirus, Jasmine’s Heart, and I Don’t Like That! are available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle format, on Apple Books, through my Online Bookstore, and I am also a Goodreads author.
An additional picture book has been professionally edited and beautifully illustrated.
Nicholas, Book One, the first in a series, follows a little Deaf boy on his first day of school. The character was inspired by a brilliant, independent, loving little thief who stole my heart on her first day at the school for the Deaf where I was teaching many years ago.
The book is complete except for layout, and I look forward to sharing it with readers soon.
My novels are partly in my hands and partly in the hands of the committee in my head that insists they’re terrible. In other words, they’re still in the not quite ready to fly phase. Several other fledglings are in the we don’t even have wings yet phase.
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Fortunately, my family supports my steady descent into the financial abyss known as publishing. I had no idea it would cost this much to write books in order to earn enough profit to buy half a cup of coffee.
That leads me to one shameless, though entirely optional, request. If you’ve enjoyed one of my books, I would be deeply grateful if you would leave an honest review on Amazon. Reviews are one of the few ways readers discover new books, and every thoughtful review, whether glowing or gently critical, helps authors become more visible.
Nonetheless, writing has never been a profit-making venture for me. It’s a dream-making venture.
Now that I’ve started crafting thoughts into words and words into stories, I’m compelled to continue. To read and learn and edit. Then read some more, learn some more, edit some more… until, hopefully, something worthy emerges.
After all,
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
Ernest Hemingway