My emotions got away from me....

One of my classes just finished reading Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. What an amazing writer and book. I couldn't even finish reading the last page out loud. One of my students had to read it. I was too busy bawling. Of course, I'd been crying for the last 10 pages, but I just couldn't go on. And some of his passages, just put you there, in that simpler time, where the most important things in life were those dogs. This is another time I could show my kiddos that the movie just doesn't do the book justice.

One of my favorite parts is when Billy had just gotten Old Dan and Little Ann and was walking through town, when a group of kids starts picking on him. One of them had already stomped on his toe and they were singing a song to get him on the defensive, but nothing set him off until they started picking at his dogs. When he finally decides to fight back, Rawls says "I reached way back in Arkansas somewhere. By the time my fist had travelled all the way down to the Cherokee strip, there was a lot of power behind it." Now that's momentum!

I hope I can find ways to describe the scenes in my book that paint a picture and put you in the story! I'm working hard and I hope some day my books will be able to allow readers to become such a part of the story that their emotions get away from them and they can hardly finish reading the book outloud, or they are so scared they can't sleep with the light on, or they laugh outloud!