Vacation, Worms, Fairy Tales & Just A Little KISS

When last we met (back in July – six months ago), I was babbling about My UFO Encounter that happened over thirty years ago! Why, oh, why can’t I hunker down and get out a monthly blog post? Maybe because I’ve never been a good one at ‘on-demand’ writing.

August saw Jim and I finally making that long-awaited trip to Boston, Massachusetts and surrounding locations as part of our 5th Wedding Anniversary vacation. This excursion was supposed to happen in 2019. Alas, one motorcycle wreck, surgeries, and that lovely pandemic we’ve all grown to know and hate, put the brakes on that for a while. Then along came Hurricane Henri who was barreling in on the east coast on the same day we’d planned to start the 6-hour drive. We postponed an additional day but were determined to make this trip happen. We’d waited long enough and now, fully-vaxxed, we hit the road! Through wind and rain and ungodly heat & humidity, we arrived and made the best of it. Jim was able to see the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor and Battleship Cove in Fall River. I was thrilled to visit Danvers & the homestead of Rebecca Towne Nurse, my 7x great aunt who was one of the 19 executed under charges of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials followed by the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River a couple days later. There were bonus side trips to Concord and Walden Pond, a nice dinner out with my sister, and even a down day where we went to the movies and did as little travel as possible.

September brought the release of my third Children’s book, Bill, The Worm Who Loved Halloween and my mom’s 78th birthday!

As in previous recent years when October rolled around, my heart wasn’t much into Halloween as it always used to be. It’s just not the same without all the family & friends I used to have to set up an entire yard and porch display for my favorite holiday. Although 2020, oddly enough, gave me renewed hope, with more trick-or-treaters than I’d seen here in years – it wasn’t until the last minute that I put up a few decorations this year, donned a costume, and skulked around on the front porch for what may be the final time at this house. We were out of candy in an hour! I was stunned and totally unprepared for so many visitors.

Along with our Boston vacation, the replacing of our garage doors had also been delayed for two years but at long last – the new doors arrived in November and what a huge difference they make in the curb appeal of the house! Thanksgiving was celebrated here at our place with the usual guests – my parents, kids, and Jim and I. Mind you, nearly two weeks prior both my parents tested positive for Covid and were barely out of quarantine when feasting day arrived. My brother had the sense to avoid the gathering. The County Health Department gave them the ALL CLEAR without retesting to make sure they were actually negative. We’ll never know for sure if it was from them or another source but a week later my daughter tested positive and was sicker than a dog for almost a week. Her dad, whom she’d seen the Sunday after Thanksgiving, ended up in the hospital for a week shortly after with Covid. Jim, myself, and my son all remained healthy with negative test results. Both my daughter and her dad have since recovered from the worst of it and are on the mend. And, believe it or not, Children’s book #4, Bill The Worm Gets A Pet, hit the Amazon store in time for Christmas orders.

Mixed in with all this, I’ve been working on a collection of short stories based off those stories we all grew up with, fairy tales. I’d written my first twisted fairy tale in 2005 called Good Spider, Bad Spider – and was really happy with how it turned out. I’d wanted to write one ever since discovering the works of Tanith Lee and her book Red As Blood while I was still in high school. With the successful writing of Good Spider, Bad Spider, I slowly began adding more fairy tale-inspired short stories all while working on novels! You can read one of them for free over on my website – Cinnamon & Cyanide. Shortly before Christmas I got the idea for the last one and have put a pretty good dent in it with high hopes of completing the first draft within the next week or two. I fully expect to release the six-story collection, Not Your Grandma’s Fairy Tales, in 2022 along with, yep, another Bill The Worm book! You can find the entire collection at Bill The Worm’s Brand New Website!

Christmas Eve was special. For the first time in many, many years both kids were here with Jim and I to spend a few hours together gobbling down nachos and watching The Muppet’s Christmas Carol. I may have teared up a little bit during a private moment because it felt so nice to have them here again like that. Gift giving was minimal this year and everyone seemed just fine with that. I know I sure was. I honestly don’t want stuff. I don’t need stuff – well, other than books, of course, which I got two of for my birthday along with a nice Mexican dinner out! We ended 2021 with a trip to the movie theater to see Nightmare Alley. Can’t say it was anything that either of us expected and it wasn’t a terrible movie at all, but yeah. I was expecting Horror or even a Thriller. I’m not sure what it’s classified as but we had fun getting out of the house for a few hours and coming home to a coffee table full of a variety of cheese, meats, crackers, and pickled veggies. We didn’t make it until midnight.

Tomorrow it’s back to the day job after ten days off. Not looking forward to that at all. When am I going to have time to work on Part 2 of My KISS Kollection video series? Oh, yeah – here’s a link to Part 1. Fun stuff if you’re into KISS.

With that, I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year full of accomplishments and dreams come true. Be well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And A Little Worm Shall Lead Them

It’s taken forty-five years, but it’s finally here, the big news I’ve been waiting to share, the secret that’s taken decades to accomplish and reveal.

In May 1975, at the tender age of nine, either before or after a visit to the orthodontist, I crawled under a countertop in a library at Cornell University with some pieces of folded paper, a few colored pens, and a story to tell. As my mother worked at her job as a keypunch operator, I began to write and draw. When the workday was over and it was time to head home, I had finished my masterpiece. It was a simple tale with simple illustrations, but it meant the world to me and would, as the years went by, become an inspiration.  

As I grew up, other stories came along. They were longer and more intricate. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Dodd, once gave us a weekend assignment to write a story, any story about anything, at least three pages long. I was thrilled. Oh, how I wish I still had that story. I’ve no idea what it was even about but when I handed in ten pages instead of three, the teacher looked quite surprised. “I just couldn’t stop,” I remember telling her apologetically. “The characters just took over.” I felt bad it was so long, afraid I’d done too much and not kept to the three-page rule. Mrs. Dodd assured me it was fine. The assignment needed to be AT LEAST 3-pages long so ten was perfectly alright.

I continued to write my own short stories, usually about vampires or witches or ghosts. Seldom were any of them shared unless it was for a school assignment. I took a correspondence course in Children’s Literature as well as a college class in Illustration, thinking one day I’d write Children’s books. That was the ORIGINAL plan anyway. I got a little sidetracked, obviously.

I’d go on to write those novels I’d dreamed of writing, and some I’d never imagined! And yet, there remained that one story, the one that had remained forever in my heart and soul, the one I’d written for and given to my dad that day in May 1975. At some point over the years, I found out that my dad had saved that little handwritten and hand drawn booklet all this time. He returned it to me along with several notebooks filled with those simple stories I’d written back in my school days. They made me laugh and cry all at the same time. They were so wonderfully terrible! In 2015 I decided to revise that 1975 story, fill it in a little more and to rework the illustrations, but remain as true as possible to the original. Working full time along with adult life in general provided plenty of distractions and delays. A fortieth anniversary version would be gifted to my dad! Great plans… that time and again got put aside, slightly forgotten, deemed not as important as the next Horror novel. I’d get to it eventually.

Then 2020 and Covid-19 happened. I started working from home full time. With no morning or evening commute, I had a couple more hours a day to work on my own things. It was a glorious summer to work outside on my back deck. I began in earnest to try and finish what I’d started to do in 2015. I rewrote and drew inspiration from the original illustrations done by a nine-year-old me tucked under a counter in her mother’s workplace, but I needed to be able to get these images digitized and had no scanner at home to do so. Maybe a drug store or office supply store would have what I needed. Would the new drawings even look good after they were scanned?

In September, after six months of working from home, I was able to return to campus 3-days a week, what has become the new normal — and a high-quality scanner at my office fingertips. I sent the scanned imaged to myself from work. Once home, they were reformatted and tweaked as quickly as I could. This project needed to be done in time for Christmas, a gift for my dad, a gift he and I had talked about on and off over the years since the day I’d first given it to him. “Someday, maybe, it can be a real book that everyone can read.”

It turned out the hardest part of the whole thing has been keeping it a secret from my parents! No mention could be made on my Facebook pages. No mention of it on my website or in my blog. No talking or telling anyone who might see my parents and accidentally slip on and spill the beans. No sending it to that same local library I spent so many hours in in my youth, no putting any copies in the local bookstore that carries my novels – lest someone who knows me should stumble upon it before I had a chance to give it to my dad. No Christmas sales to be made. A lost opportunity – but it would be worth it!

Christmas Day. Forty-five years of waiting was only moments away! Dad opened present after present and chatted in ignorant bliss. Finally, he picked up flat and slender gift. Mom shouted, “YES! I knew there was a reason I put off buying this one,” as I’d gifted her a copy of my latest novel, “The Inheritance”. Dad paused, looked at the book she’d received, then looked back at the gift he had in hand. I’d put no To – From tag on it. “This mine?”

“Yes… that’s…” I said, forcing myself to not get all weepy, “that’s the big secret you may have heard about…” “Oh,” Dad opened it, saw the back of the book first and said, “Oh, Bill the Worm, yeah… I remember him…” (Or words to that effect.) Mom saw what it was, eyebrows arching as she added, “Oh, wow! When did that get published?” As Dad re-read the story, I explained how I’d only sold about ten copies as I’d been keeping it pretty-hush hush until Dad could get his copy.

Bill The Man meets Bill The Worm all over again!

So, there you have it. The secret it out… the story of Bill, The Worm Who Ran Away is now an honest to goodness published children’s book available to one and all. I’m super excited about this new writing adventure! I’m not going to stop writing Horror, but I did need to take a break from it amidst the madness of 2020. Bill the Worm kept me writing (and drawing) and created a bright spot in a sometimes dark and frustrating world.

I hope you all will find a place for Bill The Worm into your lives and bid him welcome. He’s a hearty little dude and he’s got some fun adventures ahead of him. Stay tuned for more Bill The Worm announcements and updates in 2021.

You can purchase BILL, The Worm Who Ran Away here!