Facts of Fame- 10 things you never knew about your favorite authors ;)

I am sorry I haven't posted for awhile...the growing season is creeping up on us, and with it less time for writing and blogging! :) But since I just discovered that it has been two weeks since I have posted anything on here, I feel rightfully ashamed of myself, and I mean to reform. I thank every one of you who hasn't forsaken this blog, even though it has dabbled too much in inactivity!
If you are anything like me, you love random facts about people, places, anything! And that's a key to writing: finding out the things that others pass over, and twining them into your stories somehow. :)
So here are 10 facts that I hope you won't already have heard about famous authors. ;) Enjoy them! :)

1. C. S. Lewis's gardener, Fred Paxford, was the model for Puddleglum in The Silver Chair. Upon finding out that he only inherited 100 pounds after Lewis's death he remarked: "Werl, it won't take me far, wull it?"

2. Dickens was obsessive-compulsive over his hair- he looked in the mirror and combed it hundreds of times a day!

3. Mark Twain considered Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Anne Shirley" to be the best girl in literature since Lewis Carroll's "Alice"

4. Jane Austen first tried to publish Pride and Prejudice with the title: First Impressions

5. Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote over 5,000 poems in her lifetime

6. The famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, took his name from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake

7. Poet Walter de la mare, for the last 17 years of his life, lived in the same street that Alfred Lord Tennyson had lived in

8. Laura Ingalls Wilder, although falling into ill health in her early eighties, told everyone that she wanted to live to be 90 "because Almanzo had". She achieved the goal, dying 3 days after her 90th birthday

9. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, believed in fairies, partly convinced by some photos of fairies, taken by two young cousins. The cousins, though they admitted the pictures were a hoax, were too embarrassed to admit it publicly, after fooling such a man as Sir Arthur

10. Thornton W. Burgess wrote at least 169 story books about woodland animals for children :)

"Lovelocks"

"Lovelocks"

Walter de la Mare

I watched the Lady Caroline

Bind up her dark and beauteous har;

Her face was rosy in the glass,

And 'twixt the coils her hands would pass,

White in the candleshine.

Her bottles on the table lay,

Stoppered, yet sweet of violet;

Her image in the mirror stooped

To view those locks as lightly looped

As cherry-boughs in May.

The snowy night lay dim without,

I heard the Waits their sweet song sing;

The windows smouldered keen with frost;

Yet still she twisted, sleeked and tossed

Her beauteous hair about.

I have been reading a collection of de la Mare's poetry, and this one caught my fancy. Isn't it sweet? My absolute favorite part is: "To view those locks as lightly looped

As cherry-boughs in May."

I Won?!?

I won a writing contest! I had even forgotten that I entered! :P :D But you can click HERE to read my entry! :)

(I just fixed the link for those of you who tried and found it didn't work! :)