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Been There, Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life
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About Been There, Done That: Writing Stories From Real Life
Product Description Award-winning and bestselling authors turn their own real-life experiences into captivating works of fiction! Where do authors get their ideas? And how do they turn those ideas into stories? This anthology looks at the process of taking real-life experiences and turning them into works of engaging fiction. The collection features award-winning and bestselling middle-grade authors who provide both original fictional short stories as well as the nonfiction accounts that inspired them. The contributing authors include Julia Alvarez, Karen Cushman, Margarita Engle, Dee Garretson, Nathan Hale, Matthew Kirby, Claire Legrand, Grace Lin, Kate Messner, Linda Sue Park, Adam Rex, Gary Schmidt, Alan Sitomer, Caroline Starr Rose, Heidi Stemple, Rita Williams-Garcia, Tracy Edward Wymer, Lisa Yee, and Jane Yolen. About the Author Mike Winchell is the creator & editor of BEEN THERE, DONE THAT (Grosset & Dunlap), a thematic anthology series with a kid-friendly Common Core tie in, in which a who's who of award-winning and bestselling MG/YA authors share a nonfiction narrative, and then write a related short story in order to show the "from-life-to-page" process of taking real-life experiences and transforming them into works of fiction. Mike is also the author of the forthcoming middle grade narrative nonfiction GILDED AGE series (Christy Ottaviano/Macmillan), beginning with SPARKS: THE GILDED AGE BATTLE TO RUN THE WORLD (2017), to be followed by THE ROUGH RODE: THE GILDED AGE RISE OF THE ROUGH RIDERS (2018). A veteran English teacher and a secondary education curriculum specialist, Mike lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children. Eglantine Ceulemans was born in the flemish Belgium and lived there for 10 years. She then moved to France, where she currently resides in Lyon. In 2007, she joined the Emile Cohl School of Art there, transforming her passion for illustration into a vocation. She loves combining humor and sensitivity in a way that touches both children and their parents in her illustrations. Eglantine has been published in France and abroad for both fiction and illustrated books. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED Love, Like Leeches by Gary D. Schmidt Probably the best job I ever had—the best job I ever will have—was a job at a summer camp on the maintenance crew. I had to deal with plugged up toilets and corn dogs and kids who threw up—mostly because of corn dogs—but I also built a new cabin and messed around in boats that needed repair and put in docks and planted gardens and built rock walls and assembled bonfires and did a whole lot of things I could never do in the suburbs of New York City. And when I wasn’t doing any of those things, I’d play baseball near high pines and swim in clear pools that emptied out in small waterfalls and lay down in the middle of a field to watch hawks circle on the thermals above. I lived for those summers in the Catskill Mountains. When high school was what high school often is, filled with jerks and would-be jerks and locker rooms and meaningless homework and drama about not very much and social status crap, I thought of that camp, those mountains, and the friends I had up there who loved what I loved and still love: high grass and hawks on thermals and mountain pools and pines. And camp had one other thing, the most important thing, the really, really most important thing: Mindy White. Mindy White had long dark hair. She had green eyes. When she laughed, her voice was like Poetry. When she smiled, her smile was like Beauty. When she looked at me, I wished more than anything that she loved me like I loved her. But she didn’t. Because Mindy White was actually in love with another guy at the camp, a little older than me, who was an idiot. I tried telling Mindy White that Lee Buttface was an idiot, but she was too much in love. She talked about Lee while I did th
