A Link to My Newsletter
On the first day of every month, I send out a newsletter to subscribers. Like this blog, it describes my life and writing and books I’ve read for family, friends and readers. Because this post is scheduled on the same day as my newsletter, I am using the opportunity to send out a link to […]
People’s Movement Between Locations in the West
One thing that surprises me as I research the settlement of the American West is how much some pioneers moved around in the new territory. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised because many of these people—particularly the men—were intrepid explorers or filled with wanderlust. Daniel Boone is one famous example. He was born in Pennsylvania, […]
Marketing Tools I Should Use More Often
It is a truth universally acknowledged that writers cannot spend all their time writing. Sometimes, they must market the writing they produce. For many writers, this is an uncomfortable task. They prefer writing to marketing. And there are many people who tell them that their most important task is to produce a good book that […]
National Siblings Day
April 10 is National Siblings Day. Although I have written many posts about siblings—my siblings, my mother and her brother, my father and his sister, and my own children as siblings—I have never posted specifically about National Siblings Day. National Siblings Day is a day to celebrate one’s siblings. It was established in 1995, so […]
Tossing Treasures
I’ve been through a first round of sorting most of my old photographs now, and I’ve thrown out a lot of them. The remainder are mostly grouped by year. I am thankful for my daughter’s efforts in the late 1990s to sort the photos we had then, and I am thankful that at some point […]
The Northern Pacific Railroad
The importance of rail development in the West is one of the plot lines in my current work-in-progress. Recently, I’ve been researching the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was the third transcontinental railroad completed in the U.S.. The Northern Pacific line wasn’t finished until 1883—almost a generation after 1860, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific […]
Seven Years Later: What I Know About Websites
I recently received a notification from somewhere in my social media memories that I launched this website, TheresaHuppAuthor.com, just over seven years ago, in February 2017. I posted in mid-March of that year about what I’d learned as I developed this site. Seven years feels like a generation in the internet world. Maybe two generations. […]
Finding Renewed Energy (and Time) for Writing
I’ve had a really hard time making progress on the first draft of my current work-in-progress, which will likely be the last book in my Oregon historical fiction series. I started it in late May 2023, and I’m not done with the first draft yet, though I’m beginning to see the end. It’s frustrating, because […]
Remembering My Mother as a Grandmother
Now that I’m a grandmother, I find myself thinking of my mother more frequently. Though I know comparisons are irrelevant, I reminisce about what my mother did as a grandmother when my kids were babies. She lived about as far away from us then as I live from my granddaughter now. She, too, had to […]
Local Newspapers, Then and Now
I’ve read several articles and editorials in recent months about the demise of local newspapers. An editorial in The New York Times last November reported that 204 counties in the United States had no local newspaper, and 1,562 counties had only one. The Medill Local News Initiative found that in addition to the 204 counties […]