The Girls Heart Books blog tour for Ride of Your Life begins!

The Girls Heart Books blog tour for Ride of Your Life has begun! Even though it's not my most recent book, I decided to do a blog tour now in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Six Flags Great Adventure Haunted Castle Fire, which inspired the novel when I was still a teenager. The book tells the story of Tracy--a seventeen-year-old girl who died in the fire--and Josh--a seventeen-year-old boy who dies in an accident in the same theme park thirty years later.

Ride of Your Life won third prize in SmartWriter's Write It Now contest in the YA category, which was judged by Alex Flinn, the author of Beastly, Cloaked, and more. I hope you'll check it out.

A Passover Miracle

This is my favorite Passover story, one about a real miracle that happened in my mother's family when she was just a girl. I hope you like it, too. 

My mother, Tova Hacohen, was twelve years old in 1948, the year of Israel's War of Independence. 

Before the British even left, Arabic forces surrounded the city of Jerusalem on all sides and laid siege to it. Brave Jewish men lost their lives attempting to bring truckloads of food from the Tel Aviv area to Jerusalem's residents. What little there was had to be rationed, and it wasn't even safe to venture out for the rationed food. Jewish men had to walk with their backs pressed up against the walls of buildings so they would be harder for the snipers to spot, and sometimes fathers lost their lives while trying to bring home something for their hungry children to eat. 

Tova's family--all eight of them, not counting her eldest brother Shmuel who was married and lived near Tel Aviv--got only one loaf of bread a day, a little bit of beans or peas, and a small amount of flour. Because they had small children, they got powdered milk too.

“Drink, drink,” her Imma said.

“I don’t want it, if you can’t have, too,” young Tova replied.

But her Imma would not hear of it. She didn’t care if she didn’t have enough food. The only things that mattered were her children. They always came first.

That year before Passover, the Ashkenazi rabbis permitted Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem to eat Kitniyot, like peas or beans, during the holiday. The rabbis didn’t want anyone to starve because they were trying to keep the Ashkenazi tradition for Passover, which forbids eating legumes. Tova’s family expected to eat only peas, matzo, and a little wine or grape juice over the holiday. It wasn't much, but at least they could try to celebrate the holiday. 

Then they got a surprise. 

Tova’s eldest brother, Shmuel, sent the family a gift.

Shmuel was a member of the Hagannah, which would soon become the army of the new Jewish state. Shmuel found out who was going to attempt to bring food to Jerusalem, and he asked this brave man to help bring something special to his family. Miraculously, that truck made it through. Tova's family received handmade matzos, a few apples and nuts for making Charoset, and--wonders of wonders--a crate with over a hundred eggs!  

Eggs! It was something they hadn't had a chance to eat in a very, very long time. 

A few years before she died, my mother took her grandchildren to the house where she grew up, so they could see it and learn the stories of her childhood. The man she's talking to now lives in the neighborhood. They each know a part of the story, and they are filling each other in. 

Everyone looked forward to it. Family and guests crowded around the dining table on the night of the Seder. Tova's Abba, who was a rabbi, had invited a group of his students, and they were in high spirits. Shmuel’s brother-in-law, Ze’ev, who was also studying in Jerusalem, came too.

There was talking, and learning, and singing. They drank wine and grape juice. They ate matzos, Charoset, eggs, and peas. It wasn’t much, but for them at that time it was a feast. And despite how little they had, the family was more than happy to share it with their guests.  

When the meal was over, Abba’s students sang the rest of the Haggadah. They wanted to do as the rabbis of old did: they wanted to make the Seder last until the sun came up. 

But there was shooting outside.

“Imma!” Tova's sister Yehudit cried.  

“Yes, I heard that too,” Imma said. “We should go down to Savta’s room." Tova's Savta slept in a room on the ground floor. "It’s safer.” 

“No, no!” one of the students shouted. “It’s Passover. We should sing!”

And sing they did. And as their singing grew louder, so did the gunfire outside. And as the gunfire grew louder, so did their singing!

“Abba!” Tova shouted. “Please can we go downstairs?”

Then came a loud “BANG!”

Everyone froze. It sounded like a bullet had entered the room.  

“Enough singing!” Abba cried. “Imma, get the baby.”

Baby Rama had been sleeping soundly when Imma picked her up from her crib. Tova rushed after little sister Sarah to Savta Bat-Sheva’s room on the ground floor. Yehudit followed them. Tova's older brother Menachem went downstairs with the students. Imma carried baby Rama down with Savta Bat-Sheva at her side. Abba came last to make sure everyone was out of harm's way.

The precious crate of eggs was already there. After all, these eggs were a great treasure for them at this time, and Savta Bat-Sheva's room was the safest room in the house.

It wasn’t the first time Tova had heard shooting. But this time was different. It seemed to go on forever. And as time wore on, Tova grew tired. Soon she and her sisters were fast asleep. One at a time, the others joined them in slumber.

In the middle of the night, however, she awoke to a strange sound.

Crack. Plop. Crack. Plop.

Over and over it went.

Crack. Plop. Crack. Plop.

Tova sat up. 

The strange sound was coming from the corner where the crate of eggs sat. In the weak light, she saw her baby sister with a big pot. Little Rama’s hand came down with something in it on the edge of the pot. Crack. Then she put the thing in her hand in the pot. Plop. Rama laughed and clapped. Tova gasped when she realized what the sound was.

Oh, no.

“The eggs!” she cried. “Imma! Imma! The eggs!”

“What?” Imma said, still half asleep. “What about the eggs?”

“Rama broke them!”

Tova and Imma looked inside the pot. It was filled with eggs and eggshells. Imma checked the crate. 

Out of more than a hundred eggs, only eight whole eggs were left.

“What are we going to do?” Tova asked. “The eggs will spoil.”  

 Imma shrugged. “So we won’t have eggs for the whole week of Passover.”

“But we can’t cook them today,” Tova said. “It’s Shabbat.”

“So after Shabbat we’ll have eggs,” Imma said. “Lots and lots of eggs.”

After sunrise the family went back upstairs. Imma put Rama in her crib. There she found a surprise.  

“Look, look!” Imma cried. “It’s a miracle!”

Tova looked. 

There--very close to where Rama’s head always rested when she was asleep--was a bullet.

“It’s the bullet we heard last night during the Seder,” Tova's older brother Pinchas said.

“It’s a miracle she wasn’t hurt,” Abba said. “A Passover miracle.”  

The story of what happened quickly spread through the neighborhood. With it spread the invitation to join the family for a breakfast of scrambled eggs on Sunday morning.

There was nothing to light a stove with, so that Sunday morning they made a bonfire. Neighbors brought wooden boards. Some also brought their rationed oil. Everyone brought plates and forks to eat with. They stood in line and waited to get a delicious, warm breakfast of scrambled eggs. Abba took a picture for the newspaper he edited.

People thanked Tova's Imma, but she laughed and pointed at baby Rama. "Don't thank me. Thank the cook!" 

Here's wishing you and your family a safe, happy, and healthy Passover.

Have a character but no plot? Three easy steps you can use to make one

If you have an idea for a character but don't know what to do with it, here are three easy steps that will help you create a great story:

1. find out what your main character wants most and make him/her want it or need it more and more.

2. find something that prevents him/her from getting that thing and make the obstacle bigger and more urgent (it can be internal, another character, or the world your character is in). 

3. bring the conflict to a head until the character resolves it by getting what he/she wants, letting go of what he/she wants (and possibly getting something better in return), or coming to accept being without the thing he/she originally wanted. 

A plot can have several steps, so your main character can start out wanting one thing, get it, and then want something else.  For example, in The Cat in the Hat, the main characters ("me and Sally") want something to relieve their boredom until they get it; then they want to avoid getting in trouble. 

These three steps have infinite possibilities depending on the main character(s), other characters, setting, style, and want/need.

If you have an idea for a plot but not a main character, you can easily turn that plot into a main character, too: whatever the objective of the main character in a plot is supposed to be, create a character who is strongly motivated to achieve that objective. Create other characters who are strongly motivated to stop the main character from achieving that objective. For example, some of the people who are motivated to solve a crime are a detective, a reporter, the accused, the victim, and the likely next target. Notice that the more motivated the character is to achieve the objective, the more compelling the story becomes. 

It will be 30 years this May since the Six Flags Great Adventure Haunted Castle fire that killed eight teenagers. I started writing my YA romantic ghost story, Ride of Your Life, when I was just 19 in an effort to give this tragedy a happy ending. Please join me on my Girls <3 Books Blog Tour to help promote this book, which I will be putting on sale for $0.99 this May. Thank you! 

Two Purim Stories

Purim is my favorite holiday.

I love the costumes, reading the story of how Esther and Mordechai saved the Jewish people, the joy and noise in the synagogue, the festive meal, and giving out baskets of goodies. It’s a chance for me to express my creativity, and it’s just plain fun!

It’s traditional for children to dress up in costumes on Purim, but this tradition takes an odd and humorous twist in the story of my grandparents’ courtship in Jerusalem in the mid-1920s.

My grandmother fell in love with my grandfather when she was just fifteen. They lived on opposite sides of the same apartment complex, and they sent each other love letters that they pinned to a clothesline that stretched from one side of the complex to the other. It was all very romantic and not at all proper for the son and daughter of two distinguished orthodox rabbis.

Of course, if you read my previous post, you already know that when Rivka Schorr wanted something, Rivka Schorr did not let anything get in her way. The fathers sat down, and the marriage was arranged.

The wedding was a few months away, and it was a Jewish Jerusalem tradition for a girl to give her fiancé gifts on each of the holidays that took place between the engagement and the wedding. Young Rivka looked forward to Purim. She was going to give her beloved the perfect Mishlo’ach Manot. She had even hand crocheted the cloth that covered the tray of homemade foods.

One of my homemade Purim baskets with a garden theme. The Megillah printed scroll came with a story I wrote about Queen Esther asking a bee and a butterfly in the king's garden for advice.

It’s traditional to have someone else deliver Mishlo’ach Manot for you, but on this particular Purim something very strange happened in Jerusalem: it snowed. This put young Rivka in a bind. No one would agree to deliver the gift to her fiancé for her. And she couldn’t do it herself, could she? It wouldn’t be proper to visit her fiancé’s house. Oh, no.

But this was Rivka Schorr. And when Rivka Schorr wanted something, Rivka Schorr did not let anything get in her way.

So Rivka decided to deliver the Mishlo’ach Manot herself . . . disguised as an Arabic man!

At first Rivka had thought that she had managed to pull it off, but it turned out that she had pulled it off a little too well.

The Mishlo’ach Manot included a bottle of wine, and kosher wine can only be served by a Jew. If it isn’t, it becomes unkosher. My grandfather’s father became so enraged at the thought that a non-Jew had handled it that he poured the wine out and called the wedding off!

Of course, Rivka wasn’t going to let that get in the way of her marrying her beloved. She spoke to her father, who spoke to my grandfather’s father, and everything was straightened out.

Now, this is a great story, and I hate to piggyback on it, but there is another great Purim story that I want to tell you.

My parents lived in an ultra-orthodox and mostly English-speaking neighborhood in Jerusalem. I didn’t like being there on Purim, because the neighbors would often get very drunk.

There is a Purim tradition of drinking until you don’t know the difference between blessing Mordechai and cursing Haman. The members of my family have never been big on drinking. My dad, for example, has been known to mix sweetener in semi dry wine. We just don’t like the stuff. But my parents’ neighbors on Purim, oh, boy, do they like to drink! Driving becomes scary because of people stumbling in front of your car. And people bang on your door, because they want to sing and dance for you, loudly and badly.

So this is the story that my mother used to love to tell. It would make her laugh so hard that it would bring tears to her eyes.

My parents’ apartment is on the first floor of a very tall building, and it has a huge balcony. Huge! The apartments above theirs have much smaller balconies.

Well, as I said, this is an English speaking neighborhood, so when people get dressed up for Purim, they’re more likely to choose the kinds of costumes you might see people wear in the United States for Halloween. Not revealing or scary costumes, but costumes that relate American culture.

So this one Purim, my family is about to sit down for the festive meal. All of a sudden my mom sees something dark and big zooming past the glass door that leads to the balcony, and everyone hears a loud bang. She rushes to the balcony to find out what it is and slides the door open.

There’s a man on the balcony. He jumps to his feet, and she sees he’s dressed as Batman! BATMAN! An ultra-orthodox Jewish Batman!

And he is drunk. So drunk he has no idea he just fell two stories and is lucky to be standing at all. He sees the open door, rushes past her with his black cape flying behind him, rushes past my dad who cannot believe what he’s seeing, leaves the apartment, and heads back upstairs.

And that is my mom’s funny story about how Batman literally crashed her Purim feast.

Every year I hand out creative Mishlo’ach Manot baskets. One year, I created a booklet about “Winnie the Pooh-rim.” Another year I made bento boxes with a flower and garden design. Yet another year I created an Alice in Wonderland picnic. This year, however, I’m not allowed to give more than one Mishlo’ach Manot, because my mother passed away in December, and my daughter will be handling the Mishlo’ach Manot instead. Still, I hope you have a wonderful Purim. It is my favorite holiday, and that’s something I can’t disguise.

Educating Rivka

If you are one of my siblings or one of my cousins on my mother’s side, and I say that I’m about to tell you the story of Savtah Rivka, the white lace gloves, and the white lace parasol, you’re probably already smiling. It is, after all, a beautiful story that perfectly captures the force of nature that was my grandmother.

Rivka Schorr was born in Jerusalem in the early 1910s, at a time when the Turkish Ottoman Empire stretched over three continents with Jerusalem more or less at the center. World War I raged when she was still a little girl, and when the war was over, and Western Europe had won, the victors broke the Empire apart into numerous new countries. The area of land that the Romans had called Palestine was handed over to the British, and in 1917 the Balfour Declaration vowed that Palestine would become a homeland for the Jews.

Young Rivka Schorr grew up mostly under British rule, and she was still a little girl when the British divided Palestine into two parts. The larger part to the east of the Jordan River was given to a sheikh to create the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. The third to the west of the Jordan River was still promised to the Jews, and she grew up with the hope of seeing that dream become a reality.

Rivka was the daughter of a respected orthodox rabbi, who was also a newspaper editor. She was not my great-grandparents firstborn. She was the youngest. But she was the only one to survive past infancy. Naturally, her parents doted on her.

I don’t know how old she was at the time of this story. My guess is that she was probably twelve or thirteen. Both of my grandmothers grew up in Batei Machaseh, apartments that were built to house Jewish families outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, so this is where the story takes place.  

Photo from VirtualJerusalem.com of Batei Machaseh http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/holidays/JerusalemDay/rothsch.jpg

Young Rivka had the proper upbringing for an Orthodox Rabbi’s daughter at the time, which meant she didn’t go to school. There was, as far as I can tell, only one school in the world for Orthodox Jewish school for girls—Bais Yaaakov—and it was very new and very far away in Poland. Orthodox Jewish boys in Jerusalem went to yeshiva, but orthodox Jewish girls were expected to be educated at home by their mothers, governesses or tutors.

This, however, didn’t suit headstrong Rivka Schorr. 

Rivka was determined to go to a real school, never mind what was expected of a rabbi’s daughter!  

The Evelina de Rothschild school for girls in Jerusalem had a required uniform. Rivka couldn’t ask her parents to buy what she needed. Oh, no. They never would have agreed. So she wrote to a cousin in Austria, and asked him to secretly send her a white lace parasol and a white lace pair of gloves. She took them to a hotel in what today is the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. The hotel belonged to a Jewish woman who later became the grandmother of my writer cousin Emuna Elon’s husband, former Israeli Member of Parliament, Rabbi Binyamin Elon. The hotel’s owner agreed to hold on to the parasol and gloves so that Rivka could pick them up on her way to school.

I imagine young Rivka was very proud of herself, sneaking out behind her parents’ backs, conspiring with her European cousin and with the owner of the hotel, and attending school where no one knew that her parents would have disapproved if only they had known what she was up to.

Unfortunately, however, she couldn’t fool everyone.

Somehow the Maggid, the old Jewish version of the town crier, found out, and he was determined to make sure that everyone heard about it.

One day the Maggid marched back and forth in front of the family’s house and cried over and over, “What can be said of the shepherd that lets his own sheep wander?”

My great-grandfather poked his head out the window and asked, “What’s this about?”

The Maggid told him. My great-grandfather was so embarrassed. And young Rivka Schorr’s secret was a secret no longer.

I wish I could say the story has a happier ending, that my Savtah’s father hadn’t bowed to the expectations of orthodox Jewish society in Jerusalem at the time. But he did. Rivka wasn’t punished, of course. Her parents doted on her too much for that. Instead her father expressed his disappointment and told her he would find tutors for her in any subject she wished to study. And he kept that promise.

My grandmother was brilliant and well educated. While her mother could only speak Yiddish, my grandmother learned to converse in Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, Ladino, and three other languages. She made friends everywhere she went, and when she got old and it was time for her to move into a nursing home, she was surprised to discover she already knew most of the residents. The women joyfully cried, "Rivka!" and welcomed her with hugs. 

Still, I love to picture my Savtah as a young girl with white lace gloves and a white lace parasol secretly walking to school in Jerusalem, a young girl determined to get an education who would not let society’s expectations stand in her way. 

Blessed by Scandal

Picture a young woman nineteen years old standing on the deck of a ship, sometime about 1900. She is on a journey to a land both strange and familiar, the land of her ancient ancestors. Her black dress stretches down to her black shoes, and the lace apron that clings to the top of her dress is something she crocheted with her own nimble fingers. In one hand, she clutches a prayer book. The other pushes her glasses higher up on the bridge of her nose. She brushes back a wisp of hair pulled loose by the wind. She has a sharp mind, a quick wit, and a surprisingly strong sense of irony for someone so young. She is leaving safety and comfort of the only world she has ever known, and she is heading for a new one fraught with peril. She is on a journey to prove to those she left behind that they are wrong about her. There is a prayer on her lips and hope in her heart.

This is my great-grandmother Bat-Sheva, a rabbi’s daughter and, through no fault of her own, a young divorcee.

She is on a journey from Poland to Jerusalem, the city where one of her ancestors—the woman whose name has been passed down in her family for thousands of years—was once a queen. Now it is under strict Ottoman rule, as it has been for centuries, but that will change in a few years. Soon she will be a witness to history.  But on this day she thinks about her tarnished reputation, and still she holds her head high.

It wasn't her choice to get divorced. It wasn't even her choice to get married, not exactly. She was a rabbi’s daughter from Poland. He was a rabbi’s son from Austria. They were from two of the most respected rabbinical families in Europe. Everyone had agreed that it was a good match.

A year later, however, her groom changed his mind. He demanded a divorce, claiming that she was barren. How could he stay married to this girl, if she couldn't bear him any children? What would become of his illustrious family line with no one to follow him? And so a divorce was granted. And so the rumors began. Bat-Sheva wasn't fit to be a wife. She couldn't have children.

But she knew something others did not, and in her old age she would joke about it with her many friends. “How could I have had children with him?” she asked. “We never shared a bed. It would have been a miracle!”

At nineteen years old, though, my great-grandmother could share her secret with no one. After all, who would believe that a rabbi's son would not sleep with his wife for an entire year? The Torah demands it. Nature, for most men, demands it. So what sort of man would not fulfill this mitzvah? She couldn't simply tell people the truth. No one would believe her. She had to prove she was not the barren girl her husband had claimed.

But she was a rabbi's daughter. She couldn't marry just anyone. And no rabbi wanted his son to marry a barren woman. People talked in two countries and in every country in between. Everyone knew the rumors. But only she knew the truth.

As luck would have it, she wasn't alone.

In another part of Europe, there was a rabbi's son whose reputation had been similarly tarnished.

My great-grandfather's first wife had “decided to become nonreligious,” which was a common euphemism in the orthodox Jewish world to describe a woman who had run off with another man. Of course, you can imagine the gossip. No rabbi wanted his daughter to become this young rabbi's second wife.

My great-grandmother and great-grandfather found out about each other, probably through a matchmaker. It was decided that the best course of action would be for both of them to start over in a place where they had no reputations, a place where they would be wanted, a place like Jerusalem.

 Holocaust survivors attempting to get into British Mandate Palestine with the Exodus in the background on July 18, 1947. (The Palmach Archive vis PikiWiki) My great-grandmother Bat-Sheva arrived when the land of Israel was still under Ottoman rule about fifty years earlier.

People sometimes think I'm brave, because I’m raising autistic son. I think I am about as brave as the great-grandmother I am named after. I am brave through lack of choice. What other choice do I have? What other choice did she have? She could have let the lies and the gossip destroy her, or she could try to fix the situation. And so she uprooted herself and set out on a journey to fix it.

I've learned three lessons from my great-grandmother’s story.

First, we shouldn't judge and we shouldn't gossip. No one truly knows what goes on in a marriage, except for the two people involved. Some of my friends have gotten divorced, and I’ve seen their friends take sides and play the blame game. “Whose fault was it?” they say. “I don’t want to take sides, but it was definitely . . .”

I don't want to hear it. They don't know the whole story; and until they do, they have no right to judge. If they are truly my friends, I will support them both.

Second, people who love each other should be together, and people who don't love each other shouldn't. Why is this so difficult for some people to understand? I don’t know why my great-grandmother’s first husband never shared a bed with her, but clearly he didn't love her the way a husband should love his wife. Perhaps he loved someone else, and perhaps societal pressures prevented the two of them from being together. We all deserve love. We all deserve to be happy. And when two people are denied that, the unhappiness it causes ripples out into the world. Love is hard enough to find, and there's nothing we want more. Who are we to deny it to two people who are fortunate enough to have found it in each other?

And finally, I learned that sometimes bad things happen for a reason. Perhaps it was not enough for my great-grandparents to get married, so they could have my grandmother Rivka. Perhaps it was necessary for both of them to suffer from gossip in Europe so that when they married and started a family, it would be in Jerusalem. My great-grandmother saw the Ottoman Empire replaced by the British Empire, and she saw the British Empire give way to the Jewish state. If she had stayed in Poland or Austria . . .

At nineteen, my great-grandmother stood on the deck of a ship, with a prayer book in her hand and something to prove. And soon her prayers were answered. 

How to Advertise on Facebook for $1 a Day: 9 Tips

YouTube science channel Veritasium made a video that shows that buying Facebook ads based on likes doesn't work.  Click farms will like your page without really liking your page, and that means you're paying for likes you don't want. That's true.

But as I explained to my Facebook friends, there’s another way to advertise on Facebook that will let you circumvent click farm tactics, a way that can target thousands of potential customers and that costs less than a dollar a day.

My friends asked, “How?” I made this video to explain.

There are four basic steps:

1. Be human. Have a Facebook profile, and try to develop a good relationship with your customers, your potential customers, and anyone who is likely to like you or whatever it is you do. Granted, this probably isn't going to work for some ginormous company, but some ginormous company probably isn't going to worry about click farms biting into their advertising budget.

2. Don't advertise for likes. Duh! Facebook gives you other options, so choose one of the other options.

3. Limit your reach. I limit advertising so it only goes to the friends of people who like my page. Now you're probably thinking, “But that includes friends of people from click farms.” Yeah… People from click farms don't have friends, so that’s not something I'd worry about. If you like your own page, your ads will go to your Facebook friends. And if they like your page, it will go to their friends. If you have a small business in a small town, you can do something similar by limiting advertising to your small town and its neighbors.

4. Put something in the Interests field. One book reviewer said that anyone who likes The Big Bang Theory is sure to like my funny, geeky sci-fi novel, Why My Love Life Sucks, so I put that in Interests. Even if a click farm guy has a friend, that friend isn’t going to see my ad unless he or she has also liked The Big Bang Theory, and what are the odds of that?

Screen grab from my Facebook page's Ad Manager showing how I've limited the reach of my ads to the people most likely to be interested in them

So that’s it. You've circumvented those click farm tactics.

Now here are five more tips:

1. Base Facebook ads on your "latest post." This keeps things fresh and lets you try out different things.

2. Don't sell. Inform, help, entertain, ask fun or interesting questions, provide worthwhile content, but don't sell. Okay, maybe once every ten posts or so, but 90% of your posts shouldn’t involve selling.

3. Post visual stuff, and post often. people on Facebook love to see videos, photos, drawings, and that sort of thing, particularly if they relate to real people like themselves--and like you! Posting often means you're less likely to bore your friends and your friends’ friends. I try to post at least once a day, but I really should post more often. Eight times a day would be better. Also, when it comes to words, remember brevity is…

 

A few words, a nerdalicious face (Gilbert Garfinkle, the geeky hero of Why My Love Life Sucks), some humor, and good targeting make for a promising ad.

4. Ask your friends for likes. Make friends on Facebook and ask them nicely to like your page. This will expand your reach to your friends’ and your friends’ friends. I'm shy, so it took me a while to get around to doing this. When I finally did, I was surprised to see the likes on my page go up from 305 to almost 500. Yes! They like me, they really like me!

5. Like yourself first. Use your Facebook profile to like, comment, and share the posts on your page. The more people interact with your posts, the more the ad connected with that post will get seen. So be one of the people who interacts with your posts.

As for how to keep your budget under $1 a day, set your ad to “bid for impressions.” 

Click farms can manipulate clicks and likes, but they can’t manipulate impressions. 

Facebook will suggest a bid. Mine are usually around 10 cents for a thousand impressions, so setting my budget for a $1 a day gets me up to 10,000 impressions. And it only costs me $1! 

Even with a limited reach, this ad was clicked on six times--and it only cost $0.89.

If that sounds like a good deal, give it a try. And good luck!

Veritasium's Facebook Fraud video

This video has been making the rounds on Facebook, and what it says is true: most of the likes on Facebook pages are fake.



But this doesn't mean you shouldn't advertise on Facebook. Facebook offers one of the most cost effective methods of advertising online. It's cheap, can be targeted to a specific audience, and it can work. The trick is to use it in a way that doesn't waste your money pursuing likes that aren't going to help you.

This is the original video by Veritasium. Right now I'm working on my next post, which will explain how you can make Facebook ads work for you for no more than a dollar a day. It's a method I figured out through trial and error, a method that shows my ads to a very specific audience of up to 33,000 people, for one dollar or less per day. It works for me as a writer and indie publisher, and it can be adapted to work for any indie author, published author, and just about any small business. 

What's wrong with this screen grab shot?

Here's a screen grab from my Verizon account. Notice something a little...odd? 

Bathsheba’s Daughters: Our Story Begins With an Open Window and a Fall

There’s an odd similarity between the earliest story told about the great-grandmother I’m named after and the earliest story my parents used to tell about me: both involve an open window and a fall.

I’ve already told you about my mother’s earliest memory, how her grandmother held her hand and ran home with her from a pogrom in Jerusalem. I don’t know what my grandmother’s earliest memory or story was, although I do know several fascinating tales from her childhood and teen years that I plan to tell you in another post. The earliest story told about my great-grandmother, however, is so remarkable that it became a part of our family’s legacy.

My great-grandmother was named Bat-Sheva, a name that has been passed down in our family going all the way back to the biblical Queen Bat-Sheva, my royal ancestor and original namesake, the wife of King David and the mother of King Solomon.

My great-grandmother was born in Poland sometime in the 1870s. At the time of this story she was still a toddler, only two or three years old. Her father was a rabbi who also edited a newspaper, making him the first newspaper writer of five generations of newspaper writers in my family, ending with me (unless, somehow, my daughter carries on that legacy or marries a journalist).

I don’t know much about where they specifically lived, although I do know it was in a building that was at least three-stories high, so I have to guess it was a city. I know it was three-stories high, because that’s an important part of the story.

One day when my great-grandmother was just two or three years old, she climbed up to an open window on the third floor and fell out.

Her father saw her.

He saw his precious little daughter fall out of that third-story window, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Naturally, he was terrified.

She was just a baby, and it was such a great fall. How could she possibly survive? He had to get down to her as quickly as possible, and he couldn’t waste a second running to the window. Instead, he ran out of the room and raced down the stairs.

He could hear his feet pounding with each step he took. He could hear his heart beating hard and fast with fear in his chest. But he couldn’t hear his daughter. She wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying.

He called out her name, “Shevaleh! Shevaleh!”

But there was no response.

His precious little girl had fallen out of a third-story window, and she hadn’t made a sound. Why hadn’t she cried out? Why wasn’t she crying now? Why didn’t she answer him?

His mind, of course, came to the only logical conclusion. She wasn’t crying because the fall had knocked her unconscious. Or worse. It had killed her. He prayed to God that he was wrong.

He raced as quickly as he could to the ground beneath the open window.

And he could not believe his eyes.

There was his precious little girl, standing up, not a hair out of place, looking as if nothing at all had happened to her.

He scooped her up in his shaking hands.

“Shevaleh,” he asked, “what happened?”

“Zayde carried me down the stairs,” she replied, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

But it was out of the ordinary.  In fact, it was impossible. Not only were there no stairs out of the window, but his daughter’s Zayde, her grandfather, had died two weeks earlier.

Her father was so astounded by this miracle, he had the story printed up in Yiddish, and he posted notices about it everywhere he could. I once saw a photo of that notice, and I would publish it here if I could find a copy of that photo.

You might wonder if I believe this story.

I can’t say that I do, but I do believe that my great-great-grandfather believed it with all his heart, so I don’t disbelieve it either. Like with most things that can’t be proven, I try to keep an open mind.

When I wrote Rideof Your Life—a novel about teenage ghosts falling in love in an amusement park—I treated it as a fantasy. However, as I do with all my novels, I still wanted it to make the most sense that it possibly could.  It seems to me that if ghosts do exist, they must be like the people they were when they were still alive. My great-grandmother’s Zayde was a good man who would have saved his granddaughter if he could. Perhaps he did. I don’t know. I suppose it’s comforting to think he did, and that comforting feeling is something I tried to convey in Ride of Your Life. The afterlife is unknown, but that doesn’t mean it’s scary.

As I said, the earliest story my mother used to tell about me also involves a fall and an open window. Unlike my great-grandmother Bat-Sheva’s tale, however, there’s nothing even remotely miraculous or other-worldly about it. In fact, it’s kind of funny, which I guess is fitting. It is, after all, about me.

A few weeks before I was born, my parents flew to Israel with my sister, Eliedaat. My mother lied to get on the plane, because it was against the rules for a woman to fly in the ninth month of pregnancy. They went to visit my extended family, particularly my mother’s parents and siblings.

At some time during the trip, my grandfather commented about my sister:  “You could draw a little circle around that baby, walk away, come back an hour later, and still find her in that circle.”

My parents agreed. My sister, who was eleven months old, was a natural born sitter. A natural born stay-in-placer. If you wanted to find a baby to pose for an oil painting, this was your girl! She could sit for hours and hours and not move.

Understandably, this led to a false sense of security.   

Enter me.

The oldest of my four younger brothers, me, and my sister. I have a dead tooth in this photo. If you guessed I got it from a fall, you'd be right. We were playing a "let's see how far we can jump" game (my sister's idea), and it turns out it wasn't quite as far as the top of the shelves  after my sister had moved them the second time. The dead tooth eventually fell out, but I still have the huge scar on my right arm from when my sister decided we should play milkman with glass milk bottles. (She says we were bowling, but I'm pretty sure we were playing milkman.) It was also her idea to play doctor with cold medicine that she spooned out to us. There is a slight possibility she wanted to be an only child. 

I was born days after my parents and sister returned from Israel, two weeks and two days before my sister’s first birthday. On the day I was brought home from the hospital, my father took me upstairs to the only bedroom in the house they were renting and laid me down on a bed. It was a hot summer day, and the window was open.

He thought, “This is safe. She’s a newborn baby, so she couldn’t possibly move.”

Yeah, right.

I was not my sister.

He left the room, I’m guessing to check on my mom and my sister. And when he came back, I was nowhere to be seen.

And the window was open.

Now, I know this doesn’t make any sense. I can’t even imagine a scenario where this might make sense. But for some reason the way my father tells this story is that he thought I had fallen out of the window.

I guess when you’re confronted with the realization that your assumption about your newborn being unable to move turns out to be false, you start to question the exact degree to which it is false. If your newborn can, in fact, move, who’s to say she can’t also climb windowsills? Or jump out of windowsills? Or fly? Or perhaps he knew the story about my namesake falling out of a window, and his mind played the most bizarre version of “connect the dots” anyone’s mind has ever played.

Of course, I hadn’t fallen out the window.

There was no miracle, ghost, or magic involved. I hadn’t disappeared. A short while later, my loud screams made it clear that I had merely fallen off the bed and had jammed between the bed and the wall.

To my father, though, this was almost as astounding as it would have been if I had disappeared.

Here was a newborn who could move a heck of a lot more than his almost one-year-old daughter. I couldn’t just move a little. I could move a couple feet right off of a bed. And I was only a few days old.

Over the coming months, my ability to move astounded both my parents over and over. You would think they’d have learned their lesson after that first time, but no. They didn’t.

One of the funniest stories my mother used to tell about me is how when I was a few months old, she put me in one of those baby carrier seats on a counter in a store. She left me alone for a second, just a second. Next thing she knew, I was crying, because I had flipped the seat over and was crawling around on the counter with the seat strapped to my back, like I was a turtle and the seat was a turtle shell I didn’t really like.

Through the years, I’ve tried to find similarities between myself and the great-grandmother I’m named after, and there are a few. I found out during my mother’s Shiva, for example, that my great-grandmother loved games. Someone told me she kept a chess set in a green plastic basket under her bed and would take it out to play chess with him when he was a little boy. But although I love games in general, I don’t like chess. I’ve also heard she loved to read and was usually found with a book in her hand. But she read mostly religious books, and I read mostly nonfiction, humor, fantasy, and science fiction. And several people have told me I’ve inherited her artistic and creative side. But I write and draw, and she expressed her artistic and creative side by sewing and crocheting, which are two things I can’t do at all.

But we do share a name and stories that start with an open window and a fall.

Bathsheba's Daughters: Memory Dominos

Memories are like dominoes, all in a line. One thing in the now pushes a single memory and sets it into action. That memory pushes another, which pushes another, and so on.

Last Sunday, my mother’s headstone was revealed, a Jewish ceremony that in Israel usually takes place 30 days after the funeral. I wasn’t there to see it, but my niece, Rinat, posted this photo on Facebook. 

My mother's gravestone. (Photo by Rinat Adler Horesh, 2014)

Rinat wrote, “"I don't believe 30 days have passed. It's hard to describe in a few words such an amazing person—a true woman of valor, full of life's joy, a saint by her own deeds and her ancestors', and simply a mother and grandmother to everyone! We so very love and miss our darling grandmother.”

The photo was a little push in the now. It set off a memory domino, which set off another memory domino, which reminded me of the reason why I decided I needed to write Bathsheba’s Daughters so many years ago.

My mother was buried on the Mount of Olives, as were her parents. My grandmother Rivka’s father and her grandparents were also buried there, but her mother—my great-grandmother Bat-Sheva, whom I’m named after—died in 1964, when the Mount of Olives was in Jordanian hands, so she was buried somewhere else in Jerusalem.

The photo set the memory of my mother’s funeral, a little over 30 days ago, into action, which set off the memory of my grandmother’s funeral, about 14 years ago.  

I remember sitting in the backseat of a car driving up to the Mount of Olives. 

My grandmother had died in her sleep in a senior home. Her health had been deteriorating, and while none of us knew that she would soon leave us, she seemed to know. She seemed to be telling us goodbye in her own subtle way. Although her body gave out, her mind remained sharp until the end, just like my mom's.

After the funeral, one of my cousins, Bat-Sheva Peli Seri, told me that Savtah (grandmother in Hebrew) had asked her, “What do I call you?”

My cousin had shrugged.

And Savtah had replied, “I call you Mamaleh (little mother), because you were named after my mother.”

It was true. Four of us are named after my great-grandmother Bat-Sheva, and my Savtah used to call all four of us Mamaleh. Telling my cousin the reason why was her little way of telling the four of us that no one we love ever leaves us, that the great-grandmother she loved stayed with her through us, and that she would stay with us, too, in our memories and our hearts.

But the final domino in that line of memories was set into action by something else.

On the way up to my Savtah's funeral, I looked at the houses on the side of the road, and I saw something shocking: some of the stones in the walls of the houses had Hebrew letters chiseled into them. 

They were gravestones. 

Someone had stolen gravestones from the Mount of Olives and had used them to build a house. And this wasn’t just one house. House after house in this little Arabic village in East Jerusalem had Jewish gravestones in their walls, each gravestone carrying the name of someone who was buried on the Mount of Olives, someone who had been loved and cared for, someone who now had an unmarked grave, because someone else wanted to erase the fact that they had ever lived at all.

Many of my ancestors are buried on the Mount of Olives, but their story is different, and it’s because of my Savtah Rivka and a kind soul who never forgot a kindness done to him.

I’ve already told you the story of my mother’s first memory, how she was just a toddler on a bus in British Mandate Palestine when she heard Arabic cries of “Slaughter the Jews!”  

The Arab riots continued until Jewish night squads, led by a British Christian officer by the name of Wingate, put a stop to them. But before they ended, some Jews who couldn't take it anymore eventually formed angry mobs determined to return blows for blows. Just like the Arabic rioters didn’t care who they attacked so long as the person was Jewish, the Jewish mobs didn’t care who they attacked so long as they were Muslim men.

My grandfather was a respected rabbi who had a good relationship with his Arabic neighbors. 

Before every Passover, he would sell his community’s chametz (bread, crackers, and other things that aren’t kosher for Passover) to a nearby sheik; and after Passover, when he bought the chametz back, the sheik would send my mother's family a silver tray piled high with bread and rolls. 

My grandfather also had an Arabic man who worked for him, taking care of things that Jews aren’t allowed to do on the Sabbath. I asked my mother what this man’s name was, but she didn’t remember, understandably, considering he had worked for her father when she was very little. She said it might have been Ahmad, so I’ll call him that for storytelling purposes. It’s shorter than saying, “the man who worked for my grandfather.”

 One day, the Jews in the streets were in a panic. There had been another riot in Jerusalem’s Old City. Arabic cries of “Slaughter the Jews!” were being met with Hebrew cries of “Death to the Arabs!” It was a very dangerous time.

Ahmad had been working that day at my grandfather’s synagogue, and he was terrified. How could he return home? The angry Jews in the streets would kill him!

“Don’t worry,” my grandfather said. “You can borrow my clothes and hat. They won’t kill a rabbi.”

Ahmad seemed apprehensive. While it was true the disguise could save him from the angry Jews, what would happen once he reached his own neighborhood? How would they react to this rabbi in their midst? 

“No,” my Savtah said. “Ahmad, you can take my clothes.”

She went to her closet and pulled out a dress, a coat, and a woman’s head scarf. Ahmad put the clothes on and wrapped the scarf around his head and face. Disguised as a woman, he headed out into the dangerous streets, never to return.

My grandparents worried about Ahmed, of course. He had worked for my grandfather for years, and they didn’t know what had happened to him. Had he made it safely home? They wanted to believe that he had, but there was no way to be certain.

Several years later, the British left Palestine. The Arabic countries in the region and beyond united to drive the Jews out, but the Jews fought back. When it was over, Jerusalem was divided. My parents’ families were on the western side of the city, which was in the hands of the newly formed state of Israel, while Ahmed and the Mount of Olives were on the eastern side, which was in Jordanian hands. Between 1948-1967, robbers stole Jewish gravestones from the Mount of Olives. They used them to build houses, like the ones I had seen from the backseat of a car heading up to my grandmother’s funeral.

My grandmother, Rivka Hacohen, probably in the 1960s

Following the Six Day War in 1967, Jerusalem was reunited once more, and Jews could once again visit the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. So my grandmother went to visit her father and her grandparents’ graves, something she couldn't do for close to 20 years.

I imagine her journey was much like mine. I imagine she, too, was horrified to see those desecrated gravestones in the walls of the houses she passed on her way up. She must have wondered what she wouldn’t find once she reached the Mount of Olives. Would she be able to locate the places where her grandparents and father were buried? Or would she never know because of the workings of some heartless thief?

She reached the Mount of Olives, and who should meet her there but Ahmed! 

They both cried tears of joy, so happy they were to find each other alive after all they had been through. 

But that wasn’t all . . .

“Come, Miss Rivka, come!” he said in Arabic. My Savtah was multi-lingual, so there was no need for him to struggle in another language.  He ran up the hill and directed her to follow him.

And amazingly he led her to her father’s gravestone. It was still there!

“I’ve taken care of all of them,” he said, pointing to her grandparents’ gravestones. “I made sure no one would disturb them.”

They say the greatest mitzvah (good deed) is one performed for someone who cannot repay you. If that is true, Ahmed’s act was possibly one of the greatest mitzvahs anyone has ever performed. 

How could he possibly know that he would ever see my Savtah—the woman whose generosity had helped me return safely home—again? How could he possibly know that she would ever be able to visit her father and her grandparents’ gravesites again? 

Here he had performed this selfless act for almost 20 years with no way of knowing that anyone alive would ever benefit from it.

And that is the final memory domino in that line of memory dominos: the reason why it’s still possible to find my great-great-grandparents’ and my great-grandfather’s graves on the Mount of Olives. 

Perhaps it shows no good deed is ever wasted. Or perhaps it shows that even if we think it will be wasted, we have to try anyway, because you never know.