I Still Matter, by Harlan A. Rector and Edward F. Mickolus
I Still Matter is a new book that encourages gratefulness. It was compiled by Harlan Rector, movie trailer voice-over artist, and Edward Mickolus, 33 years in the CIA and a prolific author. I’m pleased to have a story of my own, The One, in I Still Matter.
Sometimes we as authors have a story itching to be told. It’s a marvelous thing when, simultaneously, someone compiling a book asks if we happen to have a story to contribute.
When I first met Harlan at church, I was most impressed with his kind manner and the tenderness and care he shows his wife, who he’s been married to for 65 years. He is the epitome of gratefulness.
I had no idea at the time I’d met a famous voice-over artist. You can hear his recognizable voice in trailers for movies including Maleficent and Night at the Museum, and in a video game trailer for Harry Potter, PlayStation 2, Harry Potter. Harlan was the signature voice of The History Channel between 1995 and 1999.
He’s also been a caricature artist, and producer of a radio series and a musical. In movies, he’s the voice of The System in the short sci-fi film, EVT (Winner Best Film, St. Louis 48 Hour Film Project 2014) and narrator for the 1990 TV Movie and documentary, What’s Up, Doc? A Salute to Bugs Bunny (1990). You can hear more voice-overs at his website, HarlanRector.com. I instantly recognized his voice in commercials advertising Quaker Oats, Chevy, etc. His voice-over for Folgers coffee reminds me of “the best part of waking up”. It’s a strange sensation to know someone’s voice before ever meeting them!
Edward worked in the Central Intelligence Agency for 33 years (in analytical, operational, management positions), receiving CIA Career Intelligence and the Clandestine Service Medals. He’s the author of 40 non-fiction books and 100+ articles and reviews, including titles on topics related to international terrorism. Fellow writers will appreciate his title Spycraft for Thriller Writers: How to Write Spy Novels, TV Shows and Movies Accurately and Not Be Laughed at by Real-Life Spies. But he has a funny side too, contributing humor to 14 publications.
I Still Matter (and you do too!)
Their latest book, I Still Matter, is an anthology of stories from 35 authors about how people influence us for good, and how we can make a difference in others’ lives and inspire them.
My own story in it, “The One”, is about a miracle that connected me with a reader of my own parenting books on the other side of the world, in the Philippines. We have mutually encouraged each other for eighteen years since. I’ve had the chance to see–through Facebook–her children grow from preschoolers to college graduates. That story was a good fit for this I Matter book, showing how people can impact our lives in unusual ways. I feel not only gratefulness for the miracle that inspired that story, but also for my opportunity to connect with Harlan and Edward. They enrich my own life as I hear their unusual life stories.
Who has impacted you and how? Tell them, if you can. They may need to hear that today. You can also leave a comment below about someone who has affected you mightily.
Most likely there are many people grateful for you, too.
Little-known History ~ Abolitionist voters in Massachusetts, 17 years before the 13th amendment, proposed a bill: denounce slavery or secede from the Union.
When I found this document accidentally during a family ancestry search, I felt heartened. In these days of racial discord, it’s nice to see evidence of people who always thought slavery a horror and fought hard to destroy it. I’d never heard before of any bills proposing a state secede unless slavery was abolished, have you?
Sadly, the bill did not pass. Yet it inspires me to see seven names connected with my family tree (Nickerson, Doane, and Robbins). Grandpa’s middle name was Robbins; his mother’s parents were Robbins and Nickerson. Perhaps some of your own ancestors are in this list of signers.
I know we can just as easily find dark histories buried in our family trees, but we can at least be proud of these brave people who signed this in 1848. And surely to get to the point of creating a bill, they must have been fighting slavery long before.
Taking a closer look in the document itself, with eight parts, I-VIII, we see slavery declared:
“a covenant with the death, and an agreement with hell”.
The proposed bill decried that as long as the Commonwealth consented to slavery, the government would be “morally and politically responsible for all the cruelties and horrors of the slave system.” The bill also requested, in near-poetic and faith-filled words:
Here’s a Journo Portfolio review for freelance writers who’d like to quickly and easily create an online portfolio:
Authors wanting to create an online portfolio showcasing their writing may find this helpful. In my case, I needed one place to round up posts (from three different blogs), articles archived online at publishers’ websites, and magazine article clips (in PDF) from 32 years of writing! Journo Portfolio seems to do the trick.
You may also find this helpful if as a freelance writer you have written for a variety of publications, and on many topics. It can help literary agents or editors see the full scope of your writing career.
How to upload blog posts or articles archived at publisher websites to your own portfolio:
Since I just started my page at Journo Portfolio yesterday, so far I’ve only had a chance to upload my blog posts and a few magazine articles archived online. It was very fast and easy. I uploaded links to 35 posts in about 3 hours. It would have taken half that time (or less) if I hadn’t opted to tweak the post descriptions.
If you want to create your own, it’s free to start with 10 article links, then $5 for a month for unlimited. For a few other features you can go to the $10 month plan. (And no, I’m not a spokesperson for them, just a random author who found this site helpful so want to pass on a few things I learned so far about using it.)
As for starting your own: first create a login, choose a banner, upload your photo, and name your portfolio (you can start with the free version). Then you’ll see a giant plus sign, at the bottom left of your page. (See example below.)
Click that, and at the home button (picture of a house) you can see your dashboard.
When you click Articles + it’s simple: just copy and paste the link from the website and it will import the link with a photo and some text from the article. It will automatically import to your Home page unless you have already set up other pages.
NOTE: if you want to start out simple, you can just skip creating other pages for now, and all articles will automatically upload to your Home page. The upload will already include the article photo and the first few paragraphs in the description. Bam! Done!
But I do think it prettier to make link descriptions shorter, sort a lot of articles by tabs/pages, and add tags for Google to find your portfolio more easily. So here’s how to do that if you want to go deeper:
How to add pages to your portfolio to sort articles by topics or magazines:
If you want to create tabs (other pages) on your site for different article topics or names of publications you’ve written for, create a new Page. The tab is automatically auto-created. This bumped me at first because I expected it to be more difficult!
You can see in my first image the tabs are Home, 1920s Historical Memoir, Writing Tips, Parenting, and Books. I may change that as time goes along. I found it easiest to first upload links to my Home page, as that has links to all articles in chronological order.
After importing my history-related posts, then creating a new tab for those, I did have to designate they show on both the Home and 1920s History Memoir pages. (See below, “Blocks to display on”).
Note in the image below, where it says “Search blocks” it’s simply searching for the pages/tabs you created. (“Blocks” means pages in this case.) If you don’t indicate a page, it won’t show on any, so at least choose one block for your link to show in. (But as I said, if Home is your only page, you don’t have to mess with this.)
Note above the Text Excerpt field. Journo Portfolio with automatically grab the first few paragraphs, but I chose to shorten those, usually to the subheading in my original article. (The example above is from my post A Sure-footed Dhurzee & a Sly Cook.)
By the way, you can also set Journo Portfolio up to continuously import a feed or all articles from your own blog site. I can’t decide if this is a good option. When I elected that option after I uploaded some links, a few were duplicated.
Also, since a portfolio seems to be public from the time it’s created, I didn’t want a bunch of links posting without my handcrafting the descriptions first and checking the photos. Some photos at my old sites are not so great and I’d like to update those and possibly even the articles themselves before adding them to my new portfolio. (Some old articles contain now-irrelevant links.)
Also, a feed to automatically import new articles is not necessary; it’s a cinch to add the links yourself, and update the descriptions to be sure they looks good.
Also, in the settings area you can add tags. That will be a little additional work, but wise so that Google grabs the new portfolio when people do relevant searches.
By the way: to find website links to your old material, insert your author name in quotes in Google Search. (It’s quite revealing what Google does find. Do you know it shows your last three tweets, if you are on Twitter? Tweet conscientiously!) Google Search is how I found a few of my old archived articles.
Check, too, for alternate spellings of your name. Some sites may have listed your byline without your middle name, or with your middle initial, or using your maiden name (if that was formerly your author name).
Uploading scanned magazine article clips in PDF to your author portfolio:
Next up for me will be a bigger project: scanning my old articles (tearsheets from print magazines) into PDF. If you already have yours scanned, kudos to you! You can get rolling with that right away!
Some of the print magazines are still going strong, for example Writer’s Digest, but don’t have all articles digitally archived (that I could find yet). Other magazines I wrote for have gone entirely out of print or may have articles archived under a new company name with a digital website.
For example, I was formerly was a contributing editor (continuous writer) for Christian Parenting Today (CPT) print magazine (1989-2005), which had about 300,000 readers at its peak. CPT was a sister publication to Virtue and Today’s Christian Woman magazines. All were stellar print publications taken over by Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham). A few of my parenting articles with them are archived now at the Christianity Today site.
Most of my CPT articles I’ll have to take a day to scan and upload. But I do want to include them in my portfolio, as it shows the range of topics I’ve written about, and most of the parenting articles offer perennial advice.
I didn’t thoroughly explore any other portfolio creation sites, so have none to compare them to. I saw Journo Portfolio recommended by The Write Life blog, so I simply dived in I’m pleased so far.
Do feel free to comment if you have any questions or thoughts about this!
How a vintage suitcase, overflowing with 1920s-1930s jungle honeymoon adventures, birthed a book.
This photo includes invitations from the Maharaja of Jaipur and The Governor & Viscountess Goschen; a love letter from Ken; and letters home to Walla Walla from Gladys in Port Blair, Andaman Islands.
UPDATE! This blog post led to a Mid Day News story on May 31, 2020, by Prutha Bhosle:American Author Traces Her Ancestors Love Story Through Letters ~ A North Carolina-based author relies on a trunk full of letters from 1920s India and Google Earth to reconstruct a love story of her ancestors for an upcoming book~ Mid Day is called “India’s most engaging newspaper” with a reported 25 million page views per month. How exciting is that?!
A Discovery of near-100-year-old Letters
My eyes adjusted to the dim walk-up attic, sun spilling through cracks between beams. I was surrounded by yet more to purge or make agonizing decisions about. But this time I was on a hunt for one battered, square, beige suitcase — about 1930s vintage. I spied it and dragged it into better light. Heavy.
I smiled at the name Winslow, scrawled in fancy letters in black marker. I’d written that myself, back when as a teen in the 70’s I thought that old suitcase “cool”. I’d claimed it to store my stuff, including an old peace-sign necklace and a mood ring. It had since been emptied, then refilled, several times.
A stuck-on yellow note had Pearce Papers scribbled on it. I knew the suitcase was stuffed to the gills with musty documents given to Mom when her parents (Gladys Gose Pearce and J. Kenneth Pearce) passed away. However, I’d never looked at the papers closely.
A belt was wrapped tightly around the suitcase, which was fit to burst with a weak old lock. Sure enough, when I pulled hard to uncinch the belt, the lid popped open.
Poof. Dust flew out; I sneezed. My curiosity would have to duke it out with my allergies.
I pulled out handfuls of sepia-toned photos, faded newspaper articles, and certificates. I sneezed again.
Then I found a bundle of letters, tied with a string. The top one was postmarked 1926, from India. My heart beat a little faster.
It was addressed to Thomas and Mrs. Gose, Walla Walla, Wash, USA. It struck me that that letter had traveled across the world to a small town where everyone seemed to know Thomas – no street address was needed, and no zip code.
It’s a little miraculous that the letters are in my attic. They had been moved from at least five different homes in three states before finally landing in my house, nearly a hundred years later. It’s a testament to the Pearce hoarding instincts, often criticized but in this moment appreciated.
I gently untied the string and pulled out that first letter. “Dear Mother and Father….” And after reading a few paragraphs, I shouted, “There you are!”
By “you” I meant Gladys — her zip, her personality, her wit and humor. Although she had graduated from high school way back in 1915, then college in 1919, I was instantly whisked back in time as I read her words.
I could now see her, hear her, as a young woman.
Jungle Honeymoon
Prior to finding the letters, I’d wrestled with something our family called ‘the book’: typed pages bound together with a black cover, which Gladys had titled Jungle Honeymoon. Gladys, an aspiring writer, had written it in midlife in the 1960s among other stories and poems. (In the 1990s she’d asked me to help her get published and be her co-author, but at that time I was still a budding writer myself.)
The settings in Jungle Honeymoon were fascinating. Gladys described the aristocracy of the British Raj era in the 1920s and 1930s, elephant-powered logging camps, and the convict colony in the Andaman Islands.
And oh, the stories! One described how local villagers begged Grandpa Ken to shoot a tiger that had eaten their family members. I also read about that and other exciting tales in newspaper articles about the couple after they returned to America. (There are also archived documents at the University of Washington about Grandpa’s work in India.)
While growing up, I recall Grandma Gladys telling me stories over English Breakfast tea, poured from a flowered turquoise Chinese tea set, served British-style with sugar and cream. She and the teenage me wore silk Japanese kimonos she’d bought during her steamship travels. I remember trying to avoid dipping the giant square sleeves in my tea.
Later in life, armed with an enormous VHS camera, I videotaped Grandpa Ken describing how that tiger could have done him in: he’d only had one shot in his rifle. I’m glad he won — not the tiger, or I wouldn’t be here, nor my kids nor grand-babies.
Missing Pieces
One problem I found with Jungle Honeymoon is that the funny Gladys I knew was missing. In her attempt to write as she thought an author should, her words hadn’t revealed her personality adequately. Or perhaps her words were a bit stiff because too much time had passed since her immersion in her experiences. (She came home from India in 1933 and worked on Jungle Honeymoon in the 1960s.) Since her essays needed heavy editing, I considered turning them into a work of fiction based on real life, to get more personal voice back into the stories.
Hence, my discovery of her letters was monumental. There she was: real, raw, right in the midst of those experiences! Conversational, using contractions the way people actually talk. And not wasting an ounce of precious paper space on letters that would take weeks by steamship to get home to Mother. And I found more than just letters: wedding invitations from royalty and photos that now make the words in Gladys’ letters truly come alive.
The Birth of a New Book
At long last, I found a way for Gladys and me to coauthor a book about her her experiences. In our final book (to be published soon) you will travel vicariously along with us, alternating between her perspective in the 1920s and ’30s and my own in 2020. Now nearly a century has passed since Gladys was a young woman in India, and in the meantime new technology allows us to dig deep and richly see what she experienced in a far more advanced way than we could have, had she and I partnered in this in the 1990s.
For example, with tools like Google Earth and YouTube, together we can all pretend we are in 1920s India. Research is literally at my fingertips. While reading about a royal wedding Gladys and Ken attended, within seconds I pulled up photos from that wedding via Google. I could visualize my grandparents there, in that very room in the photos. On YouTube I can listen to music they listened to, or watch a silent film seconds after reading a 1930s letter about a “new film” Gladys recommended her mother see.
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ALSO, feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts these posts provoke, and I’ll try to respond. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Let me know what country you are from, and if you also have a blog.
