Michelle Richmond

Get Amber alerts by text

Please go to wirelessamberalerts.org and sign up for wireless Amber alerts. It takes about five seconds, and it could save a child’s life. The Amber alert is one of the most effective tools law enforcement has to track down children in the hours after abduction.

According to Amberalert.gov, “AMBER Alert programs have helped save the lives of 525children nationwide. Over 90 percent of those recoveries have occurred since October 2002 when President Bush called for the appointment of an AMBER Alert Coordinator at the first-ever White House Conference on Missing, Exploited and Runaway Children. AMBER Alerts serve as deterrents to those who would prey upon our children. AMBER Alert cases have shown that some perpetrators release the abducted child after hearing the AMBER Alert on the radio or seeing it on television.”

To the Students at Bishop McGuinness

A big shout-out to my old friend Kim Shirley’s journalism students at Bishop McGuinness High School in Oklahoma City. I saw your comments and am delighted that you’re checking out my work. Best of luck to all of you with your writing, and say hello to Kim for me. She was my absolute best friend at Murphy High! I just saw her at our high school reunion a couple of years ago, and she looked pretty much exactly the same (while the rest of us, sadly, had aged).

By the way, I just added a new facebook author page. Please hit “like.” Your class will be the first, and I’ll be forever indebted!

I have only one valid piece of advice for aspiring writers: Drink lots of coffee. Coffee is scientifically proven to make you think faster, remember better, and be an all-around smarter person. Please don’t fact-check me on that, as my sources, while enthusiastic, are generally unreliable.

Sleeping in Bookstores

There’s a great piece up on Green Apple Core, the blog of San Francisco’s wonderful Green Apple Books, about book stores, of the real and browsable variety, crotchety proprietors, dusty shelves, and all; and about a certain revered Parisian bookstore where you might find yourself spending the night, in exchange for a few hours shelving books.

In that desolate nether region of the state, cut off from the civilized world by the Pine Barrens and, well, the rest of New Jersey, used bookstores were few and far between, so this particular one – I’ve forgotten the name – was a dusty and cluttered haven. Never during any of my visits did I encounter another browser; I was left to think, a bit wistfully, that I was the only person who shopped here. The owner, a frail old man whose look belied his pugnacity, seemed reluctant to engage with his customer(s) and only did so with a sort of shuffling and begrudging respect.
Read the post here.
Learn how to spend the night in a fine old bookstore here.
Shop Green Apple books here.

Foggy up yonder

I heart the Mounties and their reading cousins. The Year of Fog is the November Book of the Month for Walmart stores across Canada. This brings me back to my (exceedingly brief) Arkansas days, when a good-looking fellow from San Francisco and I taught creative writing to kids in rural schools through a program called Writers in the Schools, which was funded by Walmart. Which sort of means that the Waltons (not the Waltons Mountain Waltons, but the other ones) bankrolled my romantic trysts with the man-who-would-be-my husband.

I remember standing in line with him at a diner somewhere in rural Arkansas, waiting for our burger and shake (he introduced me to the black-and-white), thinking, “I’m going to marry this man, if I can get him to marry me.” Well, I did. He did. About ten years after that day in the diner, we had a baby, and our first trip outside of California after we had said baby just so happened to be to Vancouver. Which isn’t really connected, but sort of is. Everything comes full circle, eh?