Other Things I’ve Written

My Writing Life

Like every writer you’ll ever meet, I’ve got several works in progress, including a historical fiction novel set in 1880s Boston and a chapter book series about a rabbit who hunts dragons.

I’ve been working on both for years. Funny thing about writing. Sometimes the book you’ve worked the longest on isn’t actually the book you end up writing.

I like to say that my first published book was something of an accident. But it’s not really true. It’s the natural extension of all the writing I’ve been doing here on Caterpickles about fostering curiosity in children. Published in September 2017, What’s That, Mom?, describes how even non-artistic parents can use public art to engage their children ages 3-10 with the world around them.

The next installment in the Caterpickles Parenting Series, Did Dinosaurs Have Belly Buttons?, is expected in 2018. That one will focus on science, and how parents without a science degree can handle their child’s curious questions without enrolling in a college-level refresher course.

My Blogging Life

I have three blogs, because of course I do (they are all on different topics so it must be ok).  The first is this one, Caterpickles, where I explore the 21st century with my daughter. The second is BostonWriters, where I chat about books and the writing life.

For a brief, but happy year while we still lived in Massachusetts, I was privileged to be allowed to scour the archives at my local church. You can find a few of the interesting tidbits I dug up at Once Upon a Time in Needham.

My Past as a Freelancer

As a freelancer, I’ve written several location-specific articles on traveling with kids for the vacation rental site Dwellable. Select Caterpickles posts from our time in Massachusetts have also appeared on the Norwood Patch, a hyper local news site based in Norwood, Massachusetts. I’ve also written on environmental and sustainability issues for Together Yes, a Massachusetts-based environmental group.

Most of my work on optical networking and such is unsigned (ah the travails of life as a technical writer), but if you are really motivated, you can use the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine to find some old articles I wrote for Group Computing Magazine (groupcomputing.com) back in 1998-1999 under the name Shala Phillips.