Laurie Winslow Sargent

Tag: Laurie Winslow Sargent

Journo Portfolio for Writers

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!

Write on!

Laurie

July 28, 2020
Adventures in the Attic

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.

To read more fun stories, click HERE or the Jungle Diaries tab!

To not miss future stories from Gladys’s century-old diaries, Subscribe to this blog via email or Follow via WordPress Reader (if you’re logged into WordPress).

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.

I hope you’ll enjoy on this blog my excerpts from some of the 100+ funny, poignant and adventurous stories from the new book by me and Gladys. You can begin with reading One Less Crocodile, 1923: Ken in the Raj, A Naughty Baby Elephant, and 1929: New Motherhood in Ooty.

Laurie

P.S. I hope you’ll join me at my Facebook Page, Laurie Winslow Sargent, Author for Readers, Writers, and the Eternally Curious to share your own thoughts about stories in vintage family memorabilia.

May 14, 2020
Quiz: Your Child’s Got Personality!

Here’s a fun little quiz to help you appreciate your child’s strongest personality traits. (Excerpt from: Delight in Your Child’s Design)

Today, in honor of Mother’s Day, I’m momentarily departing from my current history/writing blogging themes. As a parenting author too, it’s hard to resist sharing this previously published book of mine, with its gorgeous cover created by Kendall Roderick. Because of course, all books are labors of love! They are our other “babies”.

I promise that with my next posts, I’ll get back to Gladys and her 1920s jungle adventures, with more stories like One Less Crocodile, A Naughty Baby Elephant and 1923: Ken in the Raj. But if you are a parent or grandparent, you may find this fun:

Regarding your child’s character traits, do you ever wonder: “Why does my child act this way?”

In some ways, determining your child’s personality is an inexact science. She is likely a blend of more than one personality type, and a child’s relationships and experiences also influence behavior.

This fun little quiz, written by Kim Miller (one of my superb former editors at Tyndale), was originally posted at my Parenting by Faith site. It has nine questions — after question 2, click Read More to see the rest of the quiz.

By answering these questions, can you can discern a pattern in your child’s behavior? That may help you understand and identify some of his or her strongest personality traits:

1. You can truthfully say, “I’d be a millionaire if only I could bottle and sell my child’s . . .”

a. optimism.
b. persistence.
c. kindness.
d. confidence.

2. Your son keeps you up until 2 a.m. the night before his school’s science fair because:

a. though he’s been talking for days about his great plans, he casually mentions over dinner that he hasn’t actually started his project yet.
b. he refuses to go to bed until you help him make sure that each planet in his model of the solar system is exactly to scale.
c. he spent so much time helping his best friend finish his project that he’s starting his own late.
d. he’s willing to sacrifice sleep in order to be sure his complicated and innovative project is better than anyone else’s—and will win the blue ribbon.

3. When you take your daughter to her first overnight camp, you are impressed because she:

a. charms her counselor and makes five new friends before she’s unpacked her bags.
b. completes all five levels of the Red Cross swimming safety course in just one week.
c. is able to restore peace to her cabin after one camper unfairly accuses another of swiping a CD.
d. organizes and emcees the final night’s camper talent show.

4. Your daughter comes home from school crying because:

a. a boy drew laughs after school by mimicking her enthusiastic cheering during the previous day’s football game.
b. despite carefully following all her teacher’s detailed directions, she received a C on her art project.
c. she watched another child being mercilessly teased on the bus ride home and was unable to stop the bullies from picking on that classmate.
d. she lost her class’s election for a seat on the student council.

5. When your child’s teacher tells you how much she enjoys having your son in class, it is most likely because:

a. he’s creative, cheerful, and comes up with great new ideas.
b. he doesn’t quit but keeps working on a project until it’s done right.
c. he listens calmly and intently in class and does everything he can to please his teachers.
d. he catches on to material quickly and enjoys teaching other kids what he knows.

6. At age four, your child likes playing in the big sandbox at the park because:

a. it is the best place to find a new friend to play with or someone else to talk to.
b. he loves to use his forty-eight-piece sand-castle kit to build intricate buildings.
c. he can see you sitting on the nearby bench at all times and knows you’ll step in to help if an older child tries to steal his toys.
d. he has a captive audience and can tell everyone else what to build.

7. Your child’s excuse for not cleaning her room on Saturday morning is that:

a. she wants to tell you all about your neighbor’s new puppy first.
b. there’s nothing to clean. You walk in her room and find out she’s right—everything is already clean and neatly organized.
c. she’s unsure where to start.
d. she shouldn’t have to clean her room until you start cleaning the rest of the house.

8. When you ask your child whether he’d like to return to your family’s favorite vacation spot or take a sightseeing tour to New York City this summer, here is his reaction:

a. New York City! Maybe he’ll actually run into celebrities when your family walks down Broadway. In fact, maybe one of them will even invite him to a casting call!
b. He’d prefer to return to the same resort, where he knows the schedule and what to expect each day of the week.
c. He’d choose your family’s traditional spot; it holds warm memories for him.
d. He would pick New York City. It will be a new adventure, and he can already tell you the four sites your family must not miss.

9. Other people are always remarking on your child’s:

a. energy and enthusiasm.
b. attention to detail.
c. thoughtfulness.
d. leadership ability.

If you circled mostly a’s, your child is likely to be primarily interested in being with other people and having fun.

If you circled mostly b’s, your child is probably tends to focus most on getting things just right.

If you circled mostly c’s, your child most likely cares deeply about others’ feelings.

If you circled mostly d’s, your child probably most values adventure and being the leader.

Note: Many children have several characteristics from several of these types.

For loads of tips and ideas for encouraging a child’s positive personality traits and dealing with parent-child personality conflicts, check out the book Delight in Your Child’s Design.

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to Writing Tips and History Tidbits (subscriber form, top right) if you’re a fan of quirky, fun posts — including those history related — and enjoy creative nonfiction writing tips.

SPECIAL GIFT!

By the way, I’m offering something special to my readers to help celebrate Mother’s Day everyday in May. If you download the Kindle version of this book, I’d be pleased to mail you a signed first edition paperback (published by Tyndale/Focus on the Family) for free. (Free shipping to US addresses only.)
Use my Contact form here at CrossConnectMedia.com to send me your mailing address (or that of a mom friend or teacher) with details about your Kindle purchase. I can even gift wrap the paperback if you like.
Laurie Winslow Sargent

May 8, 2020
May Day! May Day! A Mother’s Goof

A little story about one mother’s wake-up call, when a sweet gift from her child almost went unnoticed.

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova

This story was adapted from a passage in the book The Power of Parent-Child Play. It was also previously published in Facets for Women magazine.

Six-year-old Tyler typically burst in the door after school, proudly exclaiming, “Look at my math paper!” or waving a dinosaur diorama for me to ooh and aah over.

Other days he dragged in, downcast, needing a hug and a neon green Band-Aid after a fall from the monkey bars.

Once he came in quietly, sporting a gorgeous smile with gaps from missing teeth, whispering to me about his girlfriend, while revealing a stick figure drawing of them smooching. (I could smile, but didn’t dare laugh.)

I usually tried to be available to him after school, as that was a good time for us to connect. But I was to learn the hard way how meaningful that was to my son.

One day, my eyes were magnetized to the computer screen, my hands to the keyboard. I’d frantically worked for hours to meet a deadline. Suddenly the slamming of the front door, down the hall, startled me. With shock and disbelief, I checked my watch. Three o’clock already?

Oh, no! I slapped my hand to my forehead. I was supposed to have picked up my toddler Aimee at the sitter’s house at 2:30! I could have kicked myself for not watching the time.

I flew out of the office, tossing papers in my knee-deep TO FILE pile as I went. “Hey, Tyler! We’ve got to run and get your sister.” No answer. Where could that kid be?

I heard footsteps thump-thump up stairs, and called again impatiently. “Come on, honey…I’ve got to get going.”

Slam! There went the front door again. What? I thought he was upstairs! But through our front window, I glimpsed his small figure hiding behind a bush. I lost what was left of my cool, stomped to the door, and opened it. I yelled, “Tyler, you get in here right now! I’m late picking up Aimee!”

He flew into the house at my request. But to my astonishment, he stormed past me to the bottom of our stairs, sat and crumpled into a ball, sobbing hysterically.

I was flabbergasted. “What’s the matter, honey?”

He sat upright and cried out, “Don’t you know it’s May Day?”

Baffled, I said, “What do you mean?”

Tears streamed down his dusty face as he wailed, “How come you didn’t pick it up? You opened the door, and you didn’t even pick it up!”

Confused, I went to the front porch. There lay a droopy dandelion on the mud-caked doormat: minus the petals, but an accusing yellow beacon, nonetheless.

Photo by Markus Spiske

As I picked up his surprise, guilt crashed down on me. My excuses dribbled out weakly: about deadlines, and stress, and promises to sitters, and it was still April not yet May, and I’d never been given a May flower, and …

I then realized how stupid my reasoning must have sounded to a child whose surprise had gone unnoticed. his act of love unappreciated. And he’d gotten yelled at, to boot.

I told him how sorry I was, reaching for him. He pushed me away and continued to cry. I asked his forgiveness, thanked him for his thoughtfulness, told him how much I loved him

Gradually his slender back stopped shaking. His cries dwindled to sniffles. He allowed me to hug him as he fiddled with the untied laces on his GI Joe sneakers. Finally he stood, and as I pulled him toward me, he buried his face in my shirt. I stroked his hair, and he leaned into me limply.

With great ceremony, I placed his dandelion into an empty 7-Up bottle with a little water. I set it on the windowsill. Sunlight glistened through the green container with its yellow-petaled crown. On the way to the sitter’s house I bought him an ice cream bar to show my appreciation in a tangible way.

As we chatted in the car, tension dissipated out the open car windows. He offered me a bite of his treat, and I knew we were okay with each other again. Yet I also knew that at 3:05 the next day I had an appointment to keep with my son.

Even now when I hear the distress cry “May Day! May Day!” in military movies, I recall the moment my distraction and busyness created real distress in my child, and I nearly missed seeing his gift, lovingly chosen for me.

I suspect that I’m not the only one who’s experienced a crash-and-burn moment as a parent. But children do forgive, and they treasure time given them. In your own family, your schedule and your child’s needs will dictate when it’s best for you two to connect. But it’s also a matter of choice. Plan for it. Savor it! And don’t be surprised when in a sudden, tender moment, your child startles you in a special way, bouncing back the affection you’ve tossed his way over and over again.

Here’s an image of my son at that age, when I made him laugh. How could I not make time for that? Thankfully, those are the memories that most stick. Yes, like all moms, I goofed at times. But I can forgive myself and treasure the joyous times! You do the same.

Laurie

Limited, signed copies of the hardcover book The Power of Parent-Child Play are available in new condition from the author for $10, through PayPal: free shipping if mailed within the USA. Book includes 5-Minute-Fun activities for quick spurts of parent-child play. (Original price: $16.97)

May 1, 2020