Been There…

I read the other day on GeekMom that author Peter David had a stroke right before New Year’s. He is in a rehab facility now, after a while in the hospital. I was disturbed by the news, of course, and did what his wife requested – I went out and bought some of his e-books, to help the family with medical expenses. (Even after insurance, medical catastrophes like this are not cheap.) You can do the same. Here is what his website says:

The most direct way is to buy his books from Crazy 8 Press (via ComicMix) or from Amazon or Barnes and Noble websites. These are books that he gets the money from directly and the most per book.

His current Crazy 8 Press books are:

Pulling Up Stakes Part 1
Pulling Up Stakes Part 2 (Brand new)
This is one novel broken into two pieces. This is the cover blurb
Sick of vampire books? Movies? TV shows? Yeah. So are we. Sick of the entire unlife of vampires? Yeah. So is Vince Hammond. Unfortunately, Vince is in it up to his (wait for it) neck. Because Vince is a young vampire hunter who lives with his vampire hunter mother in an entire community of vampire hunters, who in turn are part of a cult of vampire hunters going back all the way to the French Revolution, which many believe to be an uprising of the poor against the rich but was actually a massive purging of vampires from the French nobility (hence the guillotine)

The Camelot Papers
A powerful ruler who’s considered by many to be simple-minded and vacuous and has serious father issues. A no-nonsense, polarizing woman who favors pants suits and pursues dubious agendas involving social needs. A remarkably magnetic leader of men with a reputation as a skirt-chaser. A scheming, manipulative adviser who is constantly trying to control public perceptions. A man seen as the next, great hope for the people, except there are disputes over his background and many contend he’s not what he appears to be.
George W? Hillary and Bill? Karl Rove? Obama?
Try Arthur Pendragon, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and Galahad.
Whatever you think of the state of today’s politics, The Camelot Papers shows you just how little matters have changed in the past thousand years or so. The Camelot Papers presents a fresh perspective on Arthurian legend by using modern day sensibility and combining it with a classic tale to bring a new insight into iconic characters.

The Hidden Earth Saga of which there are two published and the third is in the works.

Darkness of the Light (book 1 of the Hidden Earth saga)
Height of the Depths (Book 2 of the Hidden Earth saga)

These are science fiction mixed with mythological creatures and the fate of the Universe hangs in the balance. Big epic sweeping books with those great characters that Peter is famous for writing.

There are Print on Demand for all these books if you want a paper copy rather than electronic.

They ask that you buy these books specifically because they produce the most revenue for Peter and his family.

I was reading David’s wife, Kathleen’s, updates, and, while concerned, I was doing fine until I read one specific entry. Then I cried. Kathleen asked, “How do you tell a ten-year-old that her father may never be the same?”

I was that child, forty-two years ago. The circumstances were a little different, granted; I was eleven and it was my mother who had the stroke, but I remember the adults in my world struggling with that question even as I asked it. Would my mother be able to do things she used to? Would she once more be the same Mom I had always known? I asked it again and again, and was always told that they didn’t know.

It was a pivotal point in my life.

In our small town, my mother did not benefit from immediate physical therapy, and her stroke, a massive one caused by a blood clot, affected her left side. Eventual physical therapy (begun over a month later) gave her the ability to walk with a brace and cane, though her left hand and arm never regained any use, but she eventually returned to teaching math from a wheelchair. She lived another forty full, busy years, dying two years ago at the age of eighty-nine.

My family found that we have to work with what life hands us, and nothing ever remains the same for any length of time. Some changes are just pressed on us more quickly than others.

When I read of Peter David’s wife struggling with how to tell their youngest child about her father, I could not stop the tears. I wanted to hug them both, and tell them that I understood in a very personal way.

From the blog entries, it sounds as though he is on the road to recovery, with time and physical therapy. I am glad for them from the bottom of my heart. Now, please go and buy a book or two – both to help them out and because the books are good!

My Dream Caught Up with Me

When I was eight or nine, back in the 1960’s, I tried to invent an e-reader.

The one I envisioned was a simple back-lit screen that would allow a reader to view a page on a roll of film, scrolling along to read the book. Nothing fancy, but I was intrigued by the idea. Is it any wonder that I embraced the new technology whole-heartedly when it became reality?

My idea came about like this. My father had a workshop in our garage, and he put together a little workbench for me, at an appropriate height, with smaller versions of real hand tools and lots of wood scraps and other junk that he thought I would like. I spent a large amount of time out there, trying to invent things that I had the imagination, but not the skill, to create. Among the junk Dad had given me were several open-topped metal boxes, about eight inches on a side and four inches deep. (Since Dad was an electrician, I imagine they were some sort of circuit boxes, but they were the source of many hours of entertainment for me and my imagination.)

Even back then I was a voracious reader. Something about the metal box spoke to me, and I could just see a spool of book mounted on the box, scrolled along as one read. And I knew, to my dismay, that I did not have to ability to make what I imagined.

I told my mother what I wished I could make, and she laughed a bit – who would want to buy a book that you had to use something else to read? I still thought it was a good idea.

Perhaps a decade later, I read one of James H. Schmitz’s Telzey Amberdon stories, and in it, I found my reader. Telzey had entire law library on book spools, which she read on her viewer. A whole library in her travel bag! Now that was what I was talking about! But it still did not exist in the real world.

I had to wait another few decades for that.

I felt a very personal sense of triumph when e-readers became available. Two years ago, I got mine. It did not take me long to start stuffing it with books. My only regret is that I don’t have a larger book budget!

Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy my traditional books, and read quite a few, especially from the public library. My house is still filled with books. (I think my family gave me the e-reader to cut down on at least some of the stacks of books in the house.) But now I can carry my library, or at least a portion of it, with me in my purse.

It’s everything I imagined at the age of nine, and more. Never mind that I didn’t end up inventing the thing personally. I still have a personal sense of triumph at the success of e-readers – a dream of mine come true.

A Joint Effort – ‘Dreaming of a Zombie Christmas’

Christmas is a family time. And in our house, we celebrate family times with family activities – like putting out a book of zombie Christmas stories.

My husband Pat has decided to join me in the world of fiction.

Pat isn’t new to writing; he is a journalist – although for the last few years a natural knack with computers and the internet has taken his job in a slightly different direction. But he has kept his hand in, and now he has written some fiction that he is choosing to publish with some of mine. I am delighted.

Pat has been right there all along, encouraging me first to write, and then to publish.

He is also the one who introduced me to the delights of speculative fiction, lo, those many years ago.

It was the spring of 1977. I was a freshman at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I had sipped from the cup of fantasy fiction with Oz, Narnia, fairy tales, Middle Earth and myths, but that was about it. And then I met this guy…

Pat eventually took me with him to the comic book store in Boulder, Mile High, which, at that time, was a storefront that also carried an incredible selection of science fiction and fantasy, both new and used, along with comic books, both mainstream and the underground comics of that era  (like ElfQuest – which I collected – and Mr. Natural and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.)

Speculative fiction was exploding, and it was all there on the shelves waiting for me.

And Pat was more than happy to make suggestions from his favorites.

I was sunk, and never even knew what hit me. Thanks to Pat, I was soon reading Niven and Pournelle and Heinlein. I wandered the back alleys of Lankhmar with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. I found Anne McCaffrey and Patricia McKillip and Katherine Kurtz, and a friend introduced me to Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. I was no longer sipping from that cup of science fiction and fantasy, I was guzzling from it and coming back for refills. I haven’t stopped since. I have veered more into the reading of fantasy, over the years, but other than that, I haven’t slowed down. And what I have chosen to write is primarily fantasy.

Eventually, we decided to combine our book collections – and our lives – and proceeded to add to both books and family. Four kids and a basement full of books later…

When I actually decided to start putting my stories down a few years ago, Pat was right there, cheering me on and doing anything he thought would encourage me. He was thinking about a few stories himself, but wasn’t quite ready to jump into writing fiction. We had some really fun brainstorming sessions, and I decided to start encouraging him to write down his ideas, too.

With the collection Dreaming of a Zombie Christmas, we are putting out our first joint effort, with one story by Pat and two by me. We hope to follow this up sometime in the spring with another collection featuring stories about Nicholas Northing, the main character of Plumbing and the Modern Necromancer, with each of us writing several of the stories, from our slightly different viewpoints. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope it is the starting point for a lot more.

For now, enjoy our trio of short stories about Christmas – just a little to the other side of reality.

Dreaming of a Zombie Christmas is Now Up on Amazon!

I have a new short story collection, Dreaming of a Zombie Christmas, up on Amazon. It’s a holiday-themed trio of stories, and my husband Pat has written one of them!

Well, I Did It

I did it. Despite doing some serious cat-vacuuming (no, we don’t really have a cat – it’s just a way of saying I did some heavy-duty procrastinating), I managed to get my 50,000 words done this month for NaNoWriMo, ahead of schedule. My progress chart does not look like a nice, tidy set of steps, with an equal amount added each day, the way it’s supposed to. It look more like a series of cliffs, looming over broad plains. This is because I tend to write in large chunks when I get rolling, and then stew for a day or two, trying to tease out the next bit in my head.

The story is one I’ve had simmering at the back of my mind for a long time (read several years). It needed to come out to play, and making it my NaNoWriMo project just made me fight through the parts that were not clear to me before. The story and I can both breathe better now that it’s out in the open. And the Skink, my main character, who has hung around with me for the last few years, doing battle with my inner critic, is delighted to have his story told. Now I just have to go back, tie up a few loose ends, and clean up/expand on things/cut out the garbage that ends up being included in any rough draft. It’s the writing equivalent of sanding, using wood filler in the cracks, sanding again, and then putting a shiny finish on your project. You just hope you don’t have to do any major reconstruction on it.

It took me a while to remember that I wasn’t writing a short story, and to adjust my writing style accordingly. But once I got going, it was fun – and I love my characters and my storyline. I’ll be excited to work on revising it during the next month(s). Writing a longer work allows you to really get to know your characters, and to make sure you drop them into plenty of hot water which they will need to fight their way out of. It’s interesting to torture your main characters. (Although they may not agree. But even they wouldn’t like a boring story, now would they?)

The novel I wrote needs a lot of work to make it what I want it to be, but that’s okay. I have more than just a framework now; I have a story with a beginning, middle and end and lots of details to flesh it out. Revising is what December (and if necessary, January, March, April, May and so forth) are for. That’s where I’m heading next, along with some short story projects that I put on hold for the month.

Did any of you try out NaNoWriMo this year? If not, there’s always next year. It’s a great way to prove to yourself that you can do it, and to show you what regular writing can do for both you and your writing.

Now, I’m off to write some more…

The Horrible Events of This Night

Here’s a Halloween story I wrote a few years ago – only a few days late!

”I take my pen in hand to record for all Posterity the Horrible Events of this Night, the thirty-first Day of the tenth Month, the Day they call All Hallow’s Eve…” Henry stopped, put his tired head in his hands, and rocked gently from side to side. He took a look at the few words he had scribed and almost balled up the paper to use as fire starter, but stopped himself at the last minute. Quill pens he could make for himself, as he had feathers a-plenty gathered from when the fox had gotten at the fowl, but paper and ink were dear and should not be wasted in a frivolous fit of pique just because he felt his poor words were not adequate for the situation.

He sighed, dipped his pen afresh and continued. “Last month, when the ravening Beast burst from the Forest and rent the flesh of my own dear Constance, I was terrified first for her life and then when she rallied and began to improve, that she might have contracted the Rabies, that dread Disease that drives men mad with Thirst though they cannot drink. I had no Clew that she would contract something far worse. Indeed, either instant Death, Death of a gangrenous Fever, or even the Rabies would have been preferable to this. This insufferable possession by a demonic Beast – the Loup-Garou. Yes, when the Moon rose this night, she turned and ran at me, and then burst through the door of our humble abode, tearing her clothing from her Body as she tried to tear away her own skin, writhing in terrible Pain as skin and bone shifted and teeth and hair grew. I watched, frozen in horror, as she finished her Change and turned to me, a fearsome light glowing maniacally in her Eyes. I knew her not, and slammed the door to our cabin in terror as she – or it – lunged at me. I could hear the thuds the Beast’s body made as it tried to reach me, to rend my body as hers very nearly had been rent on that Day one short Month ago.”

Henry stopped again, gazing into the distance as he remembered the events of the day. His hand was shaking slightly as he took up his pen and continued his narrative. He paused, breathed deeply and then began again with a steadier hand.

“It was not long before I could hear the Beast crashing through the underbrush near the cabin, moving farther and farther from my Home. I turned to the cradle by the fire where our infant Patience lay sleeping, still wrapped in her swaddling bands, innocent of her Mother’s terrible Transformation. For the first time, I truly regretted my decision to uproot my small Family and bring them to this New World where there would be no Family to fall back on when Help was needed. The Hunger has been bad since the Crops failed, and I was worried, too, when our goat and pig were taken by wild Animals, and when our nearest Neighbors all died last week of some foul Flux I was starting to doubt my Wisdom. Starvation or Disease seemed unavoidable. But I reasoned, at least we still had one another, and could take our few Possessions and leave, possibly finding a new place to settle before we expired from Hunger. But now, with Constance taken by the Beast of the Night and small Patience with no Mother to nurture or nurse her, I realize that I am lost. Even if I am not taken by the Beast tonight, there will be more Nights and yet more when the Beast will lurk about our small cabin – whenever the Moon shines full and bright in the Sky.”

The ink became slightly smudged as Henry’s head dropped down, as he dozed off briefly. He started awake again when the baby stirred and fussed. Carefully, he changed her and patted her and fed her a bit of the last of the family’s gruel that warmed by the fire. “Ah, child, I know that this is no substitute for thine own mother, but it is the best that I, thy father, can do.”

Eventually the baby settled down and fell back asleep again, and Henry took up his pen again. “The Dawn will break soon, and I must take the Babe and try to make it to a place of safety for the both of us. If things go well, I will find a wet-nurse for the Child and then – then, I will return to do battle with the Beast that has consumed the gentle, loving Constance of my Memories.”

A loud thump sounded at the door and Henry jumped, his pen leaving a streak across the paper. Cautiously, he made his way to the door and looked through the peep-hole he had drilled there.

Dawn had broken, and it was light out now, the morning sun shining on the snow. The blood-stained snow. He flinched back and then looked once more. As he put his eye to the hole, another eye met his. He started back in terror, and then realized that the eye was the same color as that of his beloved Constance.

He carefully looked again, and there was Constance standing there in the snow, the rags of her dress pulled about her, her hair wild and tangled and her face smudged with dirt and God alone knew what else. But the light of reason was in her eyes, and she looked tired and harmless.

As if she knew her mother was nearby, little Patience began to howl with hunger. Constance looked at his eye peering out at her and said plaintively, “Henry, it’s cold out here.”

Steeling himself, Henry opened the door. Constance stepped through, grabbing the leg of a deer as she did and dragging it in with her. “I did a little hunting last night, Henry. I brought home some meat – we’ll not starve now. Wouldst thou like to go and butcher this while I clean up and tend to the baby?”

(c) 2007 Jane W. Wofinbarger

Ghosties for Halloween

These tombstones from the 1700’s are in the graveyard of Prince George Winyah Episcopal Church in Georgetown, S.C., where I grew up.

People who know me know that I am a huge fan of ghost-hunting shows. I make no secret of it; in fact, I was openly put out that I had to miss the season premiere of Ghost Hunters a little over a year ago when city workers accidently dug up our power lines. I had been looking forward to that for weeks! I was, frankly, more annoyed about that aspect of losing power than any of the others, at the time. (Well, except the food in the freezer. No one wants to have to replace food.)

I myself have had very few experiences that could be thought of as paranormal, and most of those could probably be debunked quite easily. However, people I have known and trusted not to stretch the truth have had personal experiences, reinforcing my idea that there is a lot more out there than that which we can see and touch.

What ghosts are and how we can experience them is something I do not presume to know. Science tells us that time may not be linear – are ghosts the result of time slippages? Science, string theory in particular, also tells us that there are multiple dimensions – are ghosts echoes from those? The religion that I follow tells us that we have souls – are ghosts souls that have not yet found their way to whatever comes next? Whatever their source, I find the idea of ghosts interesting.

I suppose my interest in ghosts partially a product of where I grew up – the South, where if ghosts were rocks, you’d trip over one every time you turned around. The town I grew up in, Georgetown, South Carolina, was established in the early 1700s, and has many historic buildings, more than a few of them supposedly haunted. (Again, my personal experiences were minimal, and might be explained by faulty wiring and that sort of thing, but it was always fun to thing I might have annoyed one of the ghosts by sitting in the chair he was currently occupying.)

Looking up at the clock tower of Prince George Winyah Episcopal Church. Both church and the surrounding graveyard date back to the 1700’s. History and ghosts are part of my cultural upbringing.

My childhood included the stories of the Grey Man of Pawleys Island, who supposedly warns people of hurricanes, and Alice of the Hermitage, who still searches for the ring her fiancée gave her, among others. Every child in the region knew those stories, and many had walked around the grave of Alice 13 times backwards in hopes of seeing her ghost; ghosts were very much part of our cultural heritage. Then, when I was in high school, I  took part in a project of collecting local ghost stories by interviewing the people whose homes were haunted. The flame of interest was fanned, and I have been interested in ghosts and ghost stories ever since. The advent of ghost-hunting shows on TV has kept me happily occupied for the last few years.

For Halloween this year, I treated myself to a paranormal presentation on campus. I abandoned Pat to the mercies the neighborhood ghosts and goblins, and went on a parking-spot hunt near the Wyoming Union building – no easy task, since there was trick-or-treating for the Laramie kids on campus. But I finally found a space at the far end of the parking lot, and dodged small costumed people all the way up to the Union.

The group presenting was Haunted Explorers, out of Denver. They had a guest speaker/investigator whose name had caught my attention right away when I saw the presentation announced on the University of Wyoming news website – Karl Pfeiffer. I knew who Karl was; I had been quite pleased when he was on the ghost-hunting TV show Ghost Hunters Academy a few years ago – someone from Ft. Collins, Colorado! Someone from my part of the world! Cool!

Karl Pfeiffer, paranormal investigator and author

I watched Karl first on that show and later on Ghost Hunters International, so I was delighted to have a chance to see and hear him in person. (I’m afraid I was a bit of a fan girl; oh, well!) These days, he is guiding ghost tours at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. (This is the hotel that was used as the setting for Stephen King’s The Shining, and it has a reputation for being quite haunted.) Karl also has a new novel out, Hallowtide, which I promptly bought and got signed – I will be reading it over the next week or so.

The presentation was interesting, including some photos and EVP’s (Electronic Voice Phenomenon, for those of you who are uninitiated) from several sites the group had investigated in Colorado. Karl spoke next, and he is a very articulate and interesting speaker, bringing a lot of both practical ghost-hunting experience and theory to the discussion. It was over too soon for my liking, but the investigators had ghost-hunting to do.

After the presentation was over, Haunted Explorers, along with a group of students, was going to be investigating one of the buildings on campus. (I hope they had fun and found things – I know people who have worked in that building and had experiences there!) This was a student activity, so I took my employee-self home at that point. I’m not sure I could have stayed awake to hunt ghosts on a week night, anyway!

I had a wonderful evening, attending a presentation on a subject that fascinates me, and getting a chance to see someone in person that I have enjoyed seeing on ghost-hunting shows. This was my idea of a fun way to spend Halloween!

Text and photos (c) 2012, Jane W. Wolfinbarger

It’s NaNoWriMo Time!

It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean autumn, although it certainly is (and occasionally winter, here at 7200 feet). And I don’t mean almost Thanksgiving, although that is true, too.

Nope – it’s November, and that means NaNoWriMo.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. A misnomer, that – it’s really international. People from more than just the United States participate. That aside, it means that for the month of November, people sign up –  for free, mind you – and they write. And write. And write. The expected word production for participants is between 1600 and 1700 words per day.

The goal is to end up with a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. Is it possible? Definitely. 50,000 words is actually on the small end for novels – about 150 pages. And some folks end up with a published work, after a bit of revising.

It’s not necessarily about a publishable novel. It’s about the writing and the challenge to oneself to finish something big. It’s proving to yourself that you can stick to a project, work though problems and blocks and come out the other side with a (slightly punchy) smile on your face. It’s realizing that you can work regularly on your writing, and finding the reward in finishing something.

For me, it’s also a way to grease the gears. When I am writing regularly, I write more on everything. I won’t just end up writing on my NaNo piece, I’ll end up writing on lots of things. Productivity leads to more productivity. And that feels good.

I have done NaNoWriMo before. Several years ago, I finished. And the book I wrote – well, let’s just say that I had too many characters for the size of the book. But I got my words done, and I had a plot and everything. That one still exists – it just needs a complete overhaul. But for my first longer effort (short stories being my usual genre), it worked. I realized that I could work out a plot in a longer format, and found that I enjoyed the more leisurely character development.

I began NaNoWriMo last year, but did not finish for various reasons. (And all of them were, in retrospect, pathetic excuses – the sort of excuses that if anyone else had uttered them at me, I would have given them that raised-eyebrow mom-look that always causes a hasty and embarrassed retraction of whatever has been said. Ahem.) But the ideas and the work done still exist, so only harm done was to my pride.

Tonight at midnight, east coast time, people will start to write. They will have tossed around dozens of ideas, or hoarded one idea greedily in anticipation of November. They will have thought about characters and plots and complications. They will have sharpened pencils and charged computers.  Finally, the clock will tick over to November 1, and they will be able to sit down and write.

Over the month, they may closet themselves in a quiet place, hiding from friends and family, snarling at interruptions, or they may meet in coffee shops and write in groups. They might take a pad and pen outside in the fresh air. But no matter where they choose to work, they will write. They will groan when they can’t think of what to do next, but they will still write. They won’t revise, they won’t rewrite – that is for next month. They will just forge on through and get it done.

And at the end of the month, they will have a shiny new novel and a sense of a job completed.

I intend to be one of those finishers this year. It’s fun, it’s productive, and it’s just something that I like to do.

Want to join in the fun? You may have to play catch-up with the word count, but hey, what’re a few more words, right? Come on over to NaNoWriMo and be a part of a very big, very cool thing. And then write.

Memories of Photographs

Creativity takes many forms. In addition to writing, I enjoy photography. I am fortunate enough to be able to use a digital camera, so I can take as many photos as I like without having to pay for processing the ones that don’t come out. My father, from whom I undoubtedly get my love of the hobby, never made it into the digital age. (I think he would have enjoyed using a camera that allowed him to see his pictures as soon as they were taken.) He did, however, have a beloved 35mm Ricoh that he took everywhere. He preferred slides, and I have literally hundreds of slides that he took.

My dad had all the gear, and he knew how to use it well. He juggled the camera, a separate light meter, and a separate flash. I loved that flash. It had a reflector that spread out like a fan behind it, and closed up when you weren’t using it. It had to removed from small, curious hands more than once during my childhood. He had a big leather case he kept all of it in, too, along with spare metal canisters of film (plastic canisters in later years), cleaning tissues, and anything else he thought he might need. Dad’s camera bag was always fun to rummage through. (I’m not sure he felt the same as I did about having me go through it.)

Dad would shoot a roll of film and then take it in to the store, which in turn would send it away to get it developed. (You could send them in the mail to be developed, too. I sent rolls from my little Brownie camera to Jackrabbit for developing. It was always exciting to get them back!) Then, when the developed slides came back, out would come the projector and silvery screen, the curtains would be drawn, and we would look at slides. Usually, older slides would come out, too, and memories would flow. Slide viewing was a family event. For all of the convenience of digital photos, viewing them is a solitary thing. I miss the discussions and memories that went along with looking at slides as a family.

There were favorite slides, of course. My favorites were the oldest ones, especially from before I was born, probably because it made a time when I did not yet exist more real. There was one slide that always gave me a delicious shiver, because my parents said it had a ghost in it. There was, indeed, a large white shape on the river bank in photo – a white shape that my parents swore hadn’t been there when they took the picture. Frankly, it looks like a sheet blowing in the wind, except that there were no houses or clotheslines in the area of the photo. I guess we’ll never know for sure, but that photo always gave me chills when I saw it. (Of course, I often asked for that one and then hid my face when I saw it!)

Many of the slides are landscapes, particularly the autumn scenery along the South’s big, slow tidal rivers. After I came along, Dad added me to his subjects. And every year, he took a special photo to be made into a Christmas card. I was invariably dressed in something red – in one case, even a red bathing suit. Some of those photo sessions were candid, but others were not, and I recall wondering why I was standing in front of the pyracantha bush, with its bright red berries, and why I was supposed to look like I was doing anything but posing for my father and his camera, and thinking how much I hated the pants I had on because they had stirrups that went under my feet. (I was about three at the time.)

From one of the Christmas cards. Probably the summer of 1963, when I was 4. I was jumping into the Black River in the Low Country of South Carolina. Note the red swimsuit – red was the color for the Christmas photo, no matter what time of year it was taken! (And yes, I swam like a little fish.)

A few years ago, a cousin of mine was going through some old photos and came across several of those Christmas cards. She posted them to Facebook, to my delight. Treasured memories came back to me, and I started wondering where I had put those slides. I finally found them recently. I transferred the boxes of slide carousels and plastic boxes of loose slides from the disintegrating cardboard box they were in to a plastic tub, wondering how I was going to look at them properly, since the projector no longer worked and the screen was long gone.

A borrowed projector solved part of the problem, but the long-term problem – what to do with hundreds of slides that you’d like to see more frequently – remained. Budget constraints keep me from sending them (there really are a LOT of them) to one of those handy places that scan them for you; I suppose I’ll have to bite the bullet and get a scanner that can handle the slides, along with a case or so of canned air to clean them. In the meantime, I have the few that were made into Christmas cards to spark old memories – memories that have made it into some of my stories.

My own photos are digital these days, but I have many pre-digital prints from when my kids were small crammed into a plastic tub, waiting to be put into albums. (My span is the opposite of my dad’s – I started taking photos of my kids when they were small, and now that they are grown, I have progressed to taking landscapes, although mine are mostly of the arid and dramatic West rather than the lush South.)

I hope that someday my photos can bring back the memories for my kids that my dad’s do for me. And I will continue to enjoy this form of creative expression that often adds inspiration to my writing.

New Trailer for My Book!

This fun video was created by my good friend and fellow writer, S.M.R. Cooper, with the help of our friend Douglas Lee. Wow!