Serena

I’m hanging out with one of my Amish friends today–she’s writing some poetry for me to use in my next book–and somehow we get to talking about homemade Amish egg noodles. She tells me she doesn’t know how to make them. To put this in perspective, this is a woman who milks cows, raises chickens, grows a huge vegetable garden, and helps butcher her own pigs. The fact that she’s never made homemade egg noodles astonishes me. It turns out that there is a small local factory that makes Amish egg noodles and all the Amish women simply buy them dried and packaged. Well–thanks to my mom’s old-fashioned cooking, I have made tons of egg noodles! So I volunteer to teach this Amish woman and her five daughters how to make my favorite dish which I always thought was Amish: Egg noodles and cabbage drizzled with butter and sprinkled with crisp bacon. So here I am today, with five lovely Old Order Amish girls ages twenty-one to five, gathered around me while we mix and roll and cut. The mother fries the bacon and cooks the cabbage while watching ad commenting from the stove. The littlest one really wants to […]

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So…I’m in Holmes County, researching my next Amish book, and since I’m going to be here all week and it’s still not tourist season, the owner of Hotel Millersburg gave me a great discount. This historic hotel is lovely and clean–decorated in antiques and authentic Victorian decor. Only one problem-it turns out that this really IS off-season. A three-story hotel–and housekeeping told me this morning that I’m the only one staying here. Seriously. It’s after nine o’clock and I just crept down the stairs to get some ice and a pop. Could hear every creak of the floorboards. Felt like all the old pictures of dead people hanging on the hall way walls were looking at me. You know–moving eyes. Came back to my room. Slammed it shut. Hit the dead bolt immediately wrote down a title for a new Amish book—Murder In the Millersburg Hotel. lol

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I’ve given two talks in the past 48 hours. One to a group of aspiring writers at my local library, another to a book discussion group a couple hours away. Both had dreamers there with stories in their soul who have always wanted to write. Nearly all were people who had put these dreams on hold while they raised families, tended to ill parents,and  worked demanding jobs. Most were at a point in their lives where they finally had the time to write–but assumed they were too old at 40, or 50, or 60 to try for publication. When I began seriously writing and submitting at age 50, I “knew” I was too old–but felt compelled to at least try. At my first writers conference where I shakily pitched my first book to a New York editor, I was astonished to find out that my age didn’t seem to be a consideration. The only thing that mattered to her was whether or not my writing was any good. She accepted a manuscript, read it, and turned it down with suggestions for improvement–not because of my age but because the novel’s structure was dicey. I was sixty years old when my […]

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