Would you like to hear my latest unschooling book news? As you might know, I finished writing Curious Unschoolers a few weeks ago. Now I’ve finished my second book, Radical Unschool Love! I don’t know if that’s good news for my daughter, Imogen, because I’m about to give her more work to do. Soon she’ll be formatting the manuscript ready for publication!
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I feel like I’ve been writing my unschooling books forever. Many, many times I’ve wanted to walk away from them. The amount of work needed to finish them seemed enormous. I thought of dozens of reasons why I should abandon my books. In the end, I completed them because of the huge support of my friends and family.
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I’ve learnt a lot from this experience:
- Writing is hard work.
- A deadline is a very useful tool.
- We all need a team to encourage and help us.
- We need people who believe in us.
- We can do more than we might think.
- We all have something valuable to say and shouldn’t be afraid of sharing it.
- I have a brilliant family and wonderfully kind friends.
- I am hugely blessed.
Did you hear that we uploaded the manuscript for my first unschooling book Curious Unschoolers to Amazon about a week and a half ago? Now we’re waiting for a proof copy to arrive in the mail. It should be here very soon!
The Kindle version of this book is ready, waiting for me to hit ‘publish’. I want to publish both print and Kindle versions together. I hope they’ll be available by the end of the month.
Now that I’ve finished writing Radical Unschool Love, I’m going to put on my typo-spotting eyes and begin proofreading it. When that stage is completed, I can give the manuscript to Imogen for formatting. My daughter Charlotte will create the book’s cover. We have already designed it.
I’m happy with both my books, but I think Radical Unschool Love is going to be my favourite. I do love LOVE! It’s the foundation of everything, isn’t it?
Photos
Top photo: Sophie is helping Imogen photograph some books for her IG account Write.Rewrite.Read. I love how we love helping each other!
Of course, the second photo is the cover of Curious Unschoolers! (There are a couple of justification errors in the text in this version of the cover, but we fixed them before we uploaded the image to Amazon!)
Your book looks great and I look forward to reading it! We are a Catholic family from Iowa, USA, who started out homeschooling but quickly moved into unschooling after reading works by Gatto. We also love to read, read, read all day long, and we love to travel. In fact, we are making our second trip – the first 13 years ago with our oldest then a year old – to Australia this May/June. My husband’s job, thankfully, allows us time and money to travel a few times a year. Our kids – 6, plus baby born this past October, who has Down Syndrome and is a huge blessing!, – always travel, and the oldest ones help us choose where to go based on what they want to learn. Unschooling is an essential part of our lives. We are traditional Catholics who attend the TLM and we have not found any fellow TLMers who unschool. Perhaps you know of some? We are a rare breed, indeed. I stumbled on your blog in my search for more unschooling information some months ago. Thank you, and keep up the great work!! We are also looking forward to reading Imogen’s book – I ordered a copy.
Staci,
It sounds like you go on a lot of wonderful adventures as a family! I hope you enjoy your trip to Australia next month. I wonder what places you’ll be visiting. We live south of Sydney. The weather here is turning cool. The autumn colours are beautiful!
If you’re in Sydney, you might like to visit the Maternal Heart of Mary Catholic Church at Lewisham. It’s a Traditional Latin Mass parish:
https://maternalheart.org/
Unfortunately, I don’t know any TLM unschoolers. Yes, you are a rare breed! Not many parishes here are TLM parishes. Do you belong to the Catholic Unschooling Yahoo Group? Maybe you’d find some TLM unschoolers there:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/UnschoolingCatholics/
Thank you so much for ordering Imogen’s book and for your interest in mine. We hope you enjoy our books!
It’s been good chatting with you. Thank you for stopping by!
Thank you for letting us know about the church outside Sydney. We will try to go! We are flying into Sydney, but only staying 2 days this time. We will be driving from there to see, among the places along the way: Bateman’s Bay, Eden, Ballarat, Great Ocean Road, Kangaroo Island, Port Augusta, Coober Pedy, Uluru, and lastly Alice Springs, from which we fly home. It is an ambitious adventure, but one I hope will be fruitful in many ways.
Thanks for your recent podcast about sleep, too. I love your comments about attachment parenting!! That is so important and something I did not get until our second child either.
God bless you as we await His resurrection tomorrow!
Staci,
Happy Easter!
It sounds like you are going on a huge adventure. I hope you and your family have a fantastic Australian holiday!
May God bless you too!
Congratulations on your books. I like the way Curious Unschoolers looks a bit like an old Penguin book.
Charlotte,
Thank you!
I wanted to have a strong eye-catching colour for my book cover. I chose orange and then I started to wonder if it was too bright. Then I remembered Penguin’s books and thought that if orange is a good colour for them, it might be good for me too!
I’m going to use the same colours for the second book, but I shall reverse the orange and the pink. Hopefully, my books will look like a set!
The design is simple because I can’t draw!
So exciting Sue! Congratulations on your wonderful accomplishment. We (your lucky readers) will benefit tremendously from having read your finished product. Thank you Sue for pouring your heart into these books and for sharing all of your valuable insights. I can’t wait to read them. I’m going over to Amazon right after this to see if I can order a copy now. Please give a big thanks to your lovely girls who are so helpful to assist you with getting all of the work done to get the book to print. Love and God bless to all of you.
Deb ???
Deb,
I can’t wait until YOUR book is available on Amazon! I hope you like it. Thank you for always encouraging us. I couldn’t have done this without your love and support. Sending love. May God bless you too!
Just ordered Imogen’s book The Crystal Tree on Kindle. The first chapter is very exciting. Looking forward to reading it. ? Such a talented family, well done Imogen.
Deb,
Imogen was so pleased to hear you have ordered her book. Thank you! At the moment, Imogen is working on the sequel. She hopes you enjoy The Crystal Tree!
Hi Sue! I’m excited to read your books. Congratulations- you must feel very good about finishing them. I’m a bit of a writer myself, so I know how much work and thought goes into a book! It’s a very big project to take on.
And, change of subject… I was wondering if you have any podcasts or blog posts about sleep and bedtimes. I’ve found I don’t really feel comfortable with trying to make my children go to bed at a certain time each night, as I really don’t have a solid reason to do so – we don’t usually have to go anywhere in the mornings, or do much of anything at any specific time, really. So I just let them go to bed when they choose to. However, they’re turning into extreme night owls (and I mean extreme), and occasionally I wonder if I should try a different approach. Is it okay that my children are staying up super late and then sleeping half the day? Does it matter? Should I worry about it? I usually tend to think “It’s okay – they will learn to go to sleep earlier if and when they actually have a need to do so.” But sometimes I do get a little stressed about their sleep habits, I think mostly because they are so unusual, and if other people find out how they sleep, it can lead to some uncomfortable conversations.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. How did you handle sleep and bedtimes with your children when they were younger?
Also, what are your thoughts on unusually busy seasons of life? I’ve had an awful lot to do lately and I feel I should be spending a bit more time with my kids – but I’ve just been so busy it’s been hard to find time to do much with them. I’m struggling with that whole balancing life thing, like what Sophie and you discussed in that one podcast – episode 133. Do you have any advice for a mom struggling to find a good balance?
Stephanie,
Thank you for your congratulations! I’d love to hear more about your writing. Have you any links to your work?
I have mentioned sleep and bedtimes in various podcasts and posts, but I hadn’t done a proper podcast on this topic until today. I used your comment as inspiration for episode 150 which I’ve just published. I hope it answers your questions!
Maybe achieving a good balance is all about priorities. Reassessing what we’re doing and then choosing to do only the most important things. But, of course, there are times in our lives when we can’t do what we’d like. Perhaps we just have to go with the flow. There have been times in our life when I’ve wanted to do more with my kids, but I’ve had other unavoidable things to deal with. When our situation isn’t ideal, we might worry because we feel we ought to be doing certain things with our kids. But they learn from everything that happens. We have busy seasons and quiet seasons. It all evens out.
Thank you for stopping by!
So excited for the new books Sue! You are amazing!
Venisa,
Thank you for your kind words and for your help forwarding on the proof copy of Curious Unschoolers!
Congratulations, Sue! I am excited to read both of your books! You have so many pearls of wisdom for those of us who are nearer to the beginning of our unschooling journey. I find that your blog posts and podcasts (I’m not much of a social media person) bring me a lot of peace when I begin to worry about whether I’m doing the right thing by unschooling. Thank you! 🙂
Jan,
Thank you for your congratulations. I appreciate your kind feedback and I’m so glad you’d like to read my books! I hope you enjoy them!
Wow that is incredible! so fast after the first book!!
Erin,
It sounds like I worked incredibly quickly, doesn’t it?!
I had most of the second book written before I published the first one. In the beginning, I only planned to write one book. Then after working on it for years, I ended up with too many words for one book. So I divided the manuscript into two and ended up with one book about educational unschooling and another about the parenting side of unschooling. Two books instead of one. It’s all worked out well!