I’m Back (Finally)!
My friends,
I am SO SORRY to have dropped off the face of this earth where this blog is concerned. It’s been on my mind, but over the past several months, I have:
Written one book. It wasn’t great. I ditched it.Written another book, which I’m now editing.Traveled to eleven states for school visits.Written a screenplay, which I’m preparing to pitch.Received a grant for some research travel.And a bunch of other stuff.Including, preparing to release ICEBERG, a story of the Titanic.
Here’s the summary:
The thrilling story of a young girl who stows away onboard the Titanic and as she explores, attempting to find answers to her many questions about the ship, suddenly finds herself caught up in the desperate struggle to survive after it strikes an iceberg.Hazel Rothbury is traveling all alone from her home in England aboard the celebrated ship Titanic. Following the untimely death of her father, Hazel’s mother is sending her to the US to work in a factory, so that she might send money back home to help her family make ends meet.
But Hazel harbors a secret dream: She wants to be a journalist, and she just knows that if she can write and sell a story about the Titanic’s maiden voyage, she could earn enough money to support her family and not have to go to a sweatshop. When Hazel discovers that mother didn’t send her with enough money for a ticket, she decides she must stow away onboard the storied ship.
With the help of a porter named Charlie and a sweet first-class passenger named Sylvia, Hazel explores the opulent ship in secret, but a haunting mystery quickly finds her. The danger only intensifies when calamity strikes, and readers will be caught up in the terror and suspense alongside Hazel as she fights to save her friends and herself.ICEBERG will release on March 7, 2023, but I’m already excited to share it with you. Because it’s the holiday season and because I’ve been so absent, I’m going to do a BIG giveaway, of ten advanced copies of the book!
You can enter only once. In comments, simply give me one cool fact about the Titanic, but make it cool. Ordinary facts that everyone knows are worth one entry. Incredibly cool facts are worth three entries, and the rest are in the middle for two entries.
The decision for how cool each fact is solely mine, and based on nothing other than how interesting it is to me. I won’t share feedback on how many points I gave your entry, because honestly, did you see that list of stuff above? Most of it is still going on so I won’t have that time.
Winners will be announced soon after the end of the contest on December 22nd at 10 pm ET.
(And I promise to try to keep up on the blog a little better! In my next post, I’ll answer a few of the questions that you all are emailing me about.)
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Abby
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Dec 06, 2022 09:08AM
Thomas Schmid is an artist on a quest to give the titanic color, which will allow us to see the monochromatic photos of the titanic in FULL COLOR!!! He is completely honest he doesn't dramatize it and he is doing research not just guessing the color. He is doing both inside and out!
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One of Titanic's musicians, a cello player named Roger Bricoux, wasn't officially declared dead until the year 2000! He was even labelled as a deserter when he didn't call in for duty during World War I.
ahhhhh mrs. nielsen!!!! i’m so happy to see a new post!!!! i am so excited for this to be released.here’s my interesting fact:
the co-owner of macy’s department store, isidor struas and his wife ida were passengers on the titanic and sadly died when it sank.
Short story writer Morgan Roberson published a short novel entitled Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan in 1898. Like the RMS Titanic, it was considered unsinkable but sank in the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg. How ironic!
Hi! I recently started reading your books (due to a great friend) and I LOVE THEM.Here's my interesting fact:
A French cellist on the Titanic, Robert Bricoux, died in the sinking. However, his body was not discovered and the French declared him a deserter of the army in 1913. It wasn't until 2000 (so 88 years after he died) he was officially declared dead in France.
An interesting fact is that people died on the titanic before it even set sail. During the construction of the ship there were almost 300 accidents and around 10 deaths. One man died on the day the Titanic launched. He was crushed by the process of removing the timber stays that held up the ship.
Also, I know this probably doesn't count as an entry, but an interesting fact is that another ship sank in 1945 that most people don't know about. It was the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and it was torpedoed by the Soviets during World War 2. The ship sank and 6,000-9,000 people died for the same reason as the Titanic. There wasn't enough life boats. There is a book about this even by Ruta Sepetys that I recommend, it is called Salt to the Sea
I have two interesting facts: The estimated overall wealth of the passengers in first class was $500 million and the Titanic was officially responsible for delivering mail for the British Postal Service.
Cool but sad fact, due to under sea currents and a new bacteria(that they named after the Titanic) the Titanic is eroding faster than it should and could completely disappear by 2030.Also, in 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a book called The Wreck of the Titan where a 800ft long ship(Titanic was 882ft) called the Titan hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April and over half the passengers died because there weren’t enough life boats/vests.
Hi!! I’m so excited for this book!!My interesting fact is: Only three of the four funnels on the Titanic were real. The fourth was installed because it made the ship look better. It was used as a ventilation shaft for the kitchens.
The chief baker onboard the ship, Charles Joughin, was one of the few survivors because, when the ship hit the iceberg, he started drinking all the alcohol he could find!! He then began throwing chairs into the ocean to be used as flotation devices. As the ship went down, he “rode it like an elevator”. Then, because of all the alcohol in his body, he stayed warm in the ice-cold water. He also lived to tell the tale and became one of the most famous survivors aboard the Titanic!!
Ann Elizabeth Isham was a first class passenger on the titanic. It is rumored the when she became aware that she could not take her dog ( a Great Dane) with her she jumped of the lifeboat. Someone supposedly saw a women floating in the water with her arms frozen around a dog a few days later.
It took 73 years to find the Titanic after it sank but the cool fact is how/why it was found.
The finding of the Titanic in 1985 was actually due to a secret military mission.
The man who discovered the Titanic, oceanographer and retired navy admiral, Robert Ballard, met with the Navy to discuss funding for his new technology that would help him search for the Titanic. The Navy was interested in the tech but only to find the wreckage of two lost Cold War era nuclear submarines! The USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion.
The Navy agreed to let Ballard look for the Titanic if “time was left” but didn’t care or think he would actually be able to do it. Ballard only had 12 days left after find BOTH submarines!
The finding of the Titanic in 1985 was actually due to a secret military mission.
The man who discovered the Titanic, oceanographer and retired navy admiral, Robert Ballard, met with the Navy to discuss funding for his new technology that would help him search for the Titanic. The Navy was interested in the tech but only to find the wreckage of two lost Cold War era nuclear submarines! The USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion.
The Navy agreed to let Ballard look for the Titanic if “time was left” but didn’t care or think he would actually be able to do it. Ballard only had 12 days left after find BOTH submarines!
In the 1890's two short novel seemed to foretell the fate of the titanic. And, the author of one of them was a fist-class passenger, named William T. Stead. Sadly, He went down with the ship.
I'm BEYONDDDD excited for this book!Thanks so much Mrs. Nielsen!
I found two facts that were kinda ironic/interesting to me, you probably already know them, but I thought they were cool. First, according to the Oxford Dictionary, the name Titanic translates into "exceptional strength, size, or power.' This was part of the purpose behind building such a massive ship, but sadly, as we all know, the Titanic did not live up to its name. The second thing I found when looking into the Titanic and its sinking was that the musicians hired to play aboard the Titanic were ENTERTAINING the people as they rushed into the lifeboat as the ship sank beneath them. As the ship was sinking, they were sitting there and playing music for the people. I wonder what their motivation was behind that? To entertain the people, doing their job in the last hours of their lives? Or to possibly try and calm the people? I don't really know, but I thought that was really interesting/weird. Your book looks interesting and I can't wait to read it! It was really sad/interesting to read about the Titanic and its horrible sinking.
The Titanic seemed so perfect and beautiful, and that was only because all the funcional elements of the ship were hidden or disguised by docorative items and objects. The Grand Staircase had beautiful solid Irish oak banisters that really contained not-so-beautiful iron grills. There was four funnels on the ship, supposedly to expell has, and yet only three funnels served their purpose-tge forth was for symmetrical pleasant appearance.
Remember the baker who consumed alcohol whilst the Titanic was breaking into two?Well, it’s a true story!
Charles Joughin was the head baker, and the man who got hammered on whiskey on the Titanic.
He was more than somebody who got trashed, though!
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, Charles ordered his fellow bakers to pass out food and supplies to the lifeboats, as well as having to forcibly round up and load the passengers in.
With the passengers secured, Charles returned to his cabin and hit the bottle. An hour later, he emerged to throw chairs into the water, in the hopes that they could be used as floats.
At 2:20 a.m. when the Titanic split in two, Charles held on tight to the topmost part of the ship.
Sinking deeper, he gripped the side of the boat with his legs dangling in the water. Eventually, Charles was hoisted into the lifeboat and managed to survive.
His survival throughout this ordeal confused many. Science tells us that a drunk man would freeze to death faster than a sober man due to the dilation of blood vessels, sending warm blood to the surface of the skin, thus increasing a person's risk of hypothermia.However, the water temperature (-2 degrees) was at the right temperature to allow Charles' blood vessels to constrict. This counterbalanced the effect of the alcohol and kept his core body temperature up.
He was relaxed and feeling no pain, unlike the 1,500 panic-driven passengers who were hyperventilating — speeding up the loss of body temperature and causing them to freeze to death or drown.
Charles was also the last person to enter the water, so he had been exposed to the cold for a shorter period of time.
