Novel #2!!!!!

Ok, my secret project can't be a secret any longer! As a bit of background, my goal for the end of high school is to have published at least three books. I am pleased to announce that I am officially two-thirds of the way there! Introducing To Be Free!
  My newest novel is a Young Adult fiction set mostly in Saudi Arabia. It features two characters, Nillah Clark and Leila Nejem. While Nillah is your average, well-off American teenager, Leila is a refugee stuck in poverty. When Leila's cousin gets kidnapped by a terrorist group, she discovers chilling secrets about her past and family. Nillah, who's vacation plane crash-lands in Saudia Arabia, bumps into Leila a few more times than she is comfortable with, which causes her to begin to wrestle with her normal American lifestyle … and God.
Sound like it was worth waiting for? I hope so! You can buy To Be Free from the link below (and, yes, that was a shameless advertising plug. Sorry, but I'm doing you a favor!).

It will be available on Amazon.com soon!


  To Be Free - Naomi Jewell

Back to Blogging!

Hello again! I'm so happy that summer is finally here! Now I actually have time to catch up on blog posts! Here is a "memoir" (ok, it's not really my experience) that I did for school earlier this year. Hope you like it!

Out of Tragedy

     It was just like any other day. As usual, mother had breakfast made before I got up. As usual, my little sister Rebecca had to drag me out of bed, still half-asleep. As usual, I kissed father, told him to get better soon, and headed out the door to work. It was just a normal day in the life of a normal girl in 1911. At the beginning, at least.

     I met my friends at the end of the street. We always walked to work together, just as we had walked to school together barely a year before. Those had been good days. But now, none of our families could afford to let us go to school any longer.

     Annette leaned close to me as we walked, whispering in my ear, “They say that Katherine Spencer got out of jail last night.”

     “Really?” Kathy had been one of the younger girls on my floor of the factory, just thirteen. The owners had had her arrested for stealing fabric. That had been a hot topic on lunch break for the last few days. Some of the girls said that no matter what, stealing was wrong. Others thought that since the company was giving us such low wages and long work hours, they owed it to us. I couldn't decide. All I was sure of was that the incident had not been good for me. In order to stop further thefts, my supervisors had begun locking all exits except the front doors; even those were barred so only one person at a time could go through, after being searched by a guard. It now took me thirty minutes to get home, instead of five.

     “Will Kathy get her job back?” I asked as we neared the factory.

     “Are you kidding?” Annette shrieked, “If the factory had its way, she would be kicked out of town completely! But I hear she wouldn't go back even if they begged her to,” she slowed her pace and leaned nearer to me, “I hear she's trying to start labor protests.”

     “We could use it.” I said. Annette shrugged and winked as we went into the factory.

     For the next several hours, the clamor of machines filled my ears. Click, clang, crash, bang. Click, clang, crash, bang.

     The steady rhythm almost lulled me to sleep. I kept my arms moving in their mechanical, efficient fashion. Finally, the lunch bell rang, and hoards of us girls streamed past the guard's posts and into the bright New York City sunshine. Or, rather, what sunshine was able to filter through the smog.            Some of the girls were talking about things they had read in the newspaper that day, but I ignored them and read the penny novel Annette had loaned to me. The day Congress would finally start talking about labor laws would be the day I read the newspapers. I didn't expect that to be anytime soon.

     The whistle blew. Reluctantly, I slipped into the line filing back into the factory. Past the guards. Up the elevators. Then, I hoped that, someday, my life would break out of this monotony. But looking back at what happened later, I wish I had been more content.

The newspapers said the cause of the fire was unknown. They supposed it must have been a spark from the machines. Everyone on my floor believed them, because they hadn't seen. But...I saw.

      Click, clang, crash, bang. Click, clang, crash, bang.

      Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The fabric moved through my hands as usual. The other girls were silent in concentration, as usual. A girl came in to empty the wastebaskets...as usual? The custodians never started until five o'clock; it was only four-thirty. I glanced away from the whirring needles just long enough to see her face.

      Katherine Spencer.

      Her eyes locked with mine. My machine got clogged and stopped, but I didn't care. My gaze traveled down from her angry eyes to the match in her hand. She wouldn't...would she? I searched Kathy's face once more for what seemed like hours, though it was only seconds.

     I stopped breathing when the match fell into the wastebasket.

     I had thought there would be some kind of explosion. In those first few seconds, I fully expected to suddenly die. But at first...nothing happened.

     The machines kept whirring.

     The fabric in my hands kept jerking.

     Time failed to stop.

     But the smoke began to rise out of the can. Katherine had disappeared into the elevator. Quickly, I scanned the room for a cup or bucket of water...but of course, there was none. I raised my hand to signal our supervisor.

     “What's the matter?” he grumbled.

     “The wastebasket...” I pointed, but as I did, the flames leapt from the can and clung to the wall.

     It was then that time froze.

     A wave of people swept up behind me and carried me into the elevator. I was pushed against the back wall; my ribs must have cracked, but I hardly noticed. Everything was a blur, except that constant, loyal sound.

     Click, clang, crash, bang. Click, clang, crash, bang.

     My stomach flew into my throat as the elevator soared downward. The wave of girls surged out as soon as we hit the bottom. I followed them in a daze. The sun still wormed its way through the clouds. Pedestrians strolled nonchalantly past. It seemed as if the past minute had been a dream.

I looked up. The flames were licking their way out the eighth floor windows and on to the factory's sign. Someone yelled across the street for a merchant to call the fire department.

     “Tell them the Triangle Shirt-Waist factory is on fire! Tell them to bring the ladders!”

     Some people on the top floor had climbed onto the roof and were jumping to the roof of the next door building. Wave after wave of panicked girls pushed their way out of the elevator. Colors and smoke swirled around me until I could no longer distinguish them. I dropped to my knees, my lungs burning.

     Sometime later, I woke up in my own bed, safe at last.

     It only took thirty minutes for the New York Fire Department to extinguish the fire that day. But nothing could extinguish the memory from my mind, or the minds of the families of the one-hundred forty-six girls who died. I never told anyone about what I saw, mostly because, for some reason, one of those deceased girls was Katherine Spencer.

     They say that good grows out of tragedy. I suppose it did in this case. At least, I finally ended up sitting down to read a newspaper, and the labor laws that Congress passed changed the world for immigrant families like mine. But I can't help but feel that, even in the struggle for our rights as workers, the cost of making a point may have been to high.

  Note to the Reader: While the Triangle Shirt-Waist Factory fire is a real historical event, all characters in this story, including Katherine Spencer, are fictitious. As far as historians can tell, the fire was accidental, though no one can know for sure. I changed it to be an arson merely for interest. (And wasn't it great?!?)  =)

More Than Meets the Eye - The History and Making of Pointe Shoes

Here is a research paper I recently did for school. Enjoy!


The Royal Ballet in Britain uses nearly eleven thousand pointe shoes in a year. Depending on the degree of difficulty of the choreography, a pair of pointe shoes could last a dancer anywhere from two to twelve hours. Most professional ballerinas need a new pair of shoes for every performance. Obviously, the pointe shoe is not made to last an eternity. But without it, ballet as we know it would not exist. The development and manufacturing process of these amazing shoes proves to be an interesting study.
The first ballet performances were done in the 1680's, and the ballerinas wore heeled shoes. But soon, these shoes proved to be impractical, as they did not allow the dancer to do a variety of jumps and turns. Before long, the heeled ballet shoe disappeared, giving way to a simple, flat slipper much like the training ballet shoes we see today.
In the 1830's, Marie Taglioni, an Italian dancer, began to revolutionize ballet. Audiences who came to watch her perform La Sylphide were shocked and awed at how weightless and airy Marie's dancing seemed to be; mainly because, for the first time in history, Marie was dancing on the tips of her toes! What was even more amazing was the fact that her shoes were the same flat slippers that all dancers wore. The one improvement was that to help the shoes hold their shape, Marie had darned the sides. For years, ballerinas all over the world copied this idea, mostly dancing in the same soft shoes. Gradually, dancers began to add hard strips of leather to the toes of their shoes to make it easier on their feet.
Until Anna Pavlova came along in the early 1900's , all pointe shoes were tapered to a sharp point at the toe, making it extremely difficult to balance on them. Along with several other modifications, Anna flattened the toes of her shoes to form a box shape, which made balancing much easier. It is likely that in photos of her, which still show a sharply pointed shoe, Anna edited
the picture so as not to give away her secret.
Once ballerinas found out and also began flattening the toes of their shoes, the evolution of the pointe

shoe seemed complete. It has changed very little since. 
 Today, pointe shoes are still made almost entirely by hand. The complicated and involved process begins with a seamstress cutting out and sewing together three different pieces of satin, along with a cotton lining.

These will become the inside and outside of the shoe. Once it is sewn together, the fabric is sent to the shoemaker, who puts it over a shoe form and makes sure it is the right size. If the fabric is even an eighth of an inch off of the measurements for the size, the shoe will give the dancer blisters. After
measuring, the shoemaker glues the fabric to a sole made of stiff cardboard, for strength, and
plastic, for flexibility.
Then the toe of the shoe is coated with a paste made of flour, water, and a rubber based resin. The shoemaker also lays a piece of resin-saturated cotton, along with two burlap pieces, over the toe to begin creating the toe box. These are then covered with another layer of cotton.
As Anna Pavlova demonstrated, pointe shoes work best when the toe is flattened. To do this, the shoemaker first hammers down the toe, then presses it against a flat piece of marble. The toe box is then measured with a square to make sure it is completely flat.
After drying for twenty-four hours, the layer of pink satin that the seamstress cut earlier is finally glued onto the outside of the shoe. A piece of foam filler is then attached with vinyl glue to the sole of the shoe, and then the shoe is again left to dry for twenty-four hours.
The next day, the shoemaker puts the pointe shoe over a two-hundred degree heater to reactivate the glue on the bottom of the shoe. After pressing a suede sole on and inserting a sock liner inside, the pointe shoe is finally ready to be sold!
Still, even after a dancer purchases the shoes, there is more work to do. She must sew on ribbons and elastic to keep the shoes on her feet, as well as bang them against the floor to soften them enough to dance on. Yet, after all the hard work that went into the making of these amazing shoes, they often last only for two rehearsals and a performance.
It has taken over three-hundred years for the pointe shoe to develop. Though it is very delicate, this shoe also presents amazing strength and support. And even though the process to make them is difficult and long, ballerinas and audiences all over the world heartily agree that it is worth it.