VS Grenier ~ Award-Winning Author, Speaker & Podcaster

Today, Kid Lit Reviews has me as their award-winning author to discuss my book Babysitting SugarPaw .   This book won the pretigious Mom’s Choice Silver Honoree for Excellence and the 2011 League of Utah Writers Silver Quill Award.  The blog host Sue Morris is a delight to work with and she really gets to know you and your book before sending interview questions. She asked a few tough questions I had to really think about before answering. A nice change for the wrote answers I am so used to repeating time and time again. I invite you to go read the interview and Sue's review of my book today. The review will be posted a bit later so you may have to revisit the site for that post. I truly thank Sue for taking the time to read my book Babysitting SugarPaw and for interviewing me as well. If you would like to follow Kid Lit Reviews, there will be lots of new reviews and maybe an interview or two. If you are an author and would like to be interviewed, let KLR know. You

Join the hosts of the Families Matter Show on September 26, 2012 at 6pm EST, 5pm CDT, 4pm MST and 3pm PST.   This show only airs live once a month on the 4th Wed. of the month. The idea of this show is to have the hosts, guests and listeners (adults or kids) share information to help empower children and their families. Our September show topic is Formal Dances for Teens. What parents and teens need to know, watch out for and understand from dressing for these events to activities before and after the dance. Host Kecia Burcham works as a middle school counselor and holds a masters degree in education/school counseling as well as being a certified trainer in the "7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens" curriculum. Host VS Grenier is a mom of three beautiful children ranging in age from Teenager to a toddler. She writes in the children's genre and has been doing so for over 6 years. She is also a retired Fashion Buyer and Marketing Specialist. Host Irene

Facebook, Twitter, text messages, emails… all of these different communication forums have greatly increased our ability to connect and communicate with others, but they’ve also done our kids a huge disservice. Instead of focusing on well-written sentences and utilizing strong vocabulary, they’ve downplayed the necessity of writing and writing well, encouraging shorthand and poor sentence structure to get a message across to others in as few characters as possible. It’s no surprise that this type of poor writing has translated into how kids approach writing at school, and it’s up to us, as parents, teachers and caregivers, to encourage children to write and write well. We can do so by: 1.        Encouraging them to keep a journal. Starting at a very young age, encourage kids to keep a journal or diary that details their daily happenings. Getting into the habit of putting pen to paper every day can help foster a love of writing and translate into writing much more than just the

Maggie Lyons was born in Wales and brought up in England before gravitating west to Virginia’s coast. She zigzagged her way through a motley variety of careers from orchestral management to law-firm media relations to academic editing. Writing and editing nonfiction for adults brought plenty of satisfaction but nothing like the magic she discovered in writing fiction and nonfiction for children. Several of her articles, poetry, and a chapter book have been published in the children’s magazines Stories for Children Magazine and knowonder! VS: I want to thank you for being my guest here on The Writing Mama today, Maggie. To get things started can you share what you do to help balance your writing life with your family life? Maggie: Very fortunately for me, I’m retired and my son left the nest some time ago. That doesn’t mean I have no other commitments, of course. In fact, I’m very busy as a freelance editor, but I do have the privilege of being able to control m