Former U.S. Senator John Edwards has written a new book that we confess, we haven't read yet, but it sounds
fascinating.  In an excerpt of the WHAT HOME MEANS TO ME that was in LIFE magazine this week, best-selling
author, Isabel Allende, writes about how her childhood home became the resource for her novels.

Allende says, "I think that most of my writing is nurtured  by memories of my early childhood, especially my
grandparents.  My family was weird, so life in that house seemed interesting and a little crazy.  My most striking
memory of the house was of something that never existed: spirits.  I could see them everywhere, and they made their way into my first novel, THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS.

"One of my uncles collected books, and I imagined that at night the characters escaped from the pages and roamed
the house.  I also thought the spirits summoned by my psychic grandmother still lived there."

How has your childhood home influenced your writing? Are there rich resources from the past that will enable
you to be writing on the run today?

We did a television interview this weekend at the local CBS affiliate, WCCO-TV.  Our interviewer was lovely.  It was clear that she wouldn't be on camera because she wasn't all made up, and the interview was being taped.  We talked with her for about twenty minutes, giving her lots of what we thought was valuable, live-saving information from our book, RESCUED.

To our surprise, the interview material was edited down to 59 seconds.  Although it showed a demonstration we did of how to assemble a Pet Emergency Kit to keep animals safe in a disaster, the one verbal statement the editors kept had to do with Allen's expression of heartfelt emotion.  This was a valuable lesson for us about what people remember when we talk about our books.  They remember the feelings.

How will you talk about your book or writing?  What will you say that touches peoples' hearts?

Remember, life is your page.