Hey there,
Me then…
During the summers of 1965 and 1966 I spent several months camping with my grandparents at a lake in northern California. As much as I liked fishing and camping my heart was back home with a girl that I was crazy about at school. I recall that one lunch period I saw this petite young woman talking with her friends. Another group of kids, nursing students, sat at a nearby table. One the nursing students was an overweight girl who seemed to me to be surviving the ordeal of being a heavy person in school with a great deal of dignity. It was the difference in these two women that caught my attention and I wondered how their lives would turn out. I wondered if circumstances brought them together, could they be friends? It was just that, a few idle thoughts before the bell rang for the next class and I forgot about it for the time being.
Well, the school year ended and I went to camp. In between early morning and late afternoon fishing sessions I had a lot of time to spend. I hiked and swam, horsed around with other kids and had a great time. There were science fiction and adventure books to read. Even with all that to do there was still time to pine over the girl I would never get.
One day I was sitting in my grandparent’s car vainly searching for a radio station when I remembered seeing the two girls together and that sparked an idea. I had read all the books I brought with me so I asked my grandmother to give me her letter pad and started writing Return of the Wicca where I paired up these unlikely companions. I quickly used up the note paper and then every other scrap of paper I could lay my hands on. There were brown paper bags from the grocery store that I carefully tore open and wrote on both sides. When I had no more space I wrote around the edges of the pages that I had already filled. Eventually we went to town for supplies and I bought more paper.
…me now. What happened?!!
When I got home I continued to write for the rest of the summer then packed the awkward bundle up and put it in the closet. When the next summer rolled around I took plenty of paper to camp with me. I decided to continue my story in a second book and named the series: Tales from the River House. I plopped down on my sleeping bag and penned The Ghosts of Terrawic (now called Witchland) that summer, much of it by the light of a Coleman lantern. When I got home it went into the closet with Return of the Wicca. I worked briefly on a third book but never finished it. Sadly, I never camped with my grandparents again, turns of poor health kept them from traveling and my writings sat in closets wherever I lived over the next forty-five years.
In 2007, while searching through my closet I came across my books and began to go over them. I decided to type them into my computer. OCR (optical character recognition) proved impossible due to the chaotic nature of the pages and my atrocious handwriting. I was forced to type in each page manually, the hardest part was deciphering my writing and figuring out which fragment went where. It was tough but I finally got it done, then in relief, tossed away the original papers, an act I now regret. Since then I’ve cleaned the stories up here and there and changed some things to make them more topical, but hope I have not lost the character of the original manuscripts.
With the help of my dear friend Sherri Mines who edited Return of the Wicca, I finally published it on both Amazon and Createspace. Keeping the momentum going I published Witchland just a few months later. It has been a rewarding experience, one that keeps me busy pursuing my goal to finish the series and see them all in print. I am currently working on the third book, tentatively titled Seryl. I hope I will be able to make it mesh with the words and spirit of the teenage boy who wrote the first two. Time will tell.
