Maine Memories
I skipped blogging last week because my best friend was in town, and I’m also considering posting every other week, as every week seems a little ambitious with the other projects I’m working on. I’m also wondering about switching to Substack or Patreon instead of a blog, so that posts would get sent directly to my readers inbox’s. Blogging has always been a bit challenging for me, as I feel like I’m just sending words into a void without the knowledge whether anyone is reading them. But how does one establish an email list without any readers? (except for my dedicated parents, of course). This is the predicament I find myself in.
It has been fun finding illustrators and writers to follow on IG and getting the occasional follow back! I know this is a slow journey, and I will have to practice a lot of patience to build my business with intention.
I am currently preparing to go to Maine to visit my parents with my husband and two year old, so I thought that I would share another excerpt of writing today. One of the projects I have on the back burner currently is a memoir about my childhood, written in the same style as the creative non-fiction piece I wrote about in my last post. One short section I’ve written for the memoir is about my journey to writing and also features Maine, so I thought I would share it below.
I’m continuing to work on my fantasy early YA novel and I’m about halfway through, about to hit a block because I need to do MUCH more research into Celtic and Irish myths about the Otherworld to form the rest of the story. I’m also slowly working away at my picture book about River, and currently reading The City Beyond the Sea (Greenwild 2) by Pari Thomson (excellent middle grade fantasy), and listening on audio book to Blood at the Roots by LaDarrion Williams (YA fantasy, entertaining but not incredible in my opinion).
Those are my updates for today! Without further ado, here is my excerpt:
The weeks before the summer camp I daydreamed about classrooms full of desks, studious other elementary age children hunkered down over their writing, inspiration dripping down the walls, ready to be absorbed by my eager young mind. I excitedly told our neighbor that what I imagined was that it would be “like school!” And our neighbor looked at me with such horror - why would I possibly want to go to something “like school” in the summer? But having never experienced the drudgery of school, there couldn't have been anything more tantalizing to my mind.
The first year, we camped on the outskirts of The University of Maine at Orono, our huge tent made for seven people surrounded by thick woods, swatting mosquitos and dousing ourselves in bug spray, sitting under the tarp my dad rigged up every year in case of the not infrequent Maine summer rain. We cooked spaghetti on the camp stove, played card games and listened to the light Christian rock we were allowed to.
The writing camp exceeded my expectations. Not only desks and studious heads scribbling away furiously but also, field trips, ice cream, and stories dreamed up in my eight-year-old head of a gorilla and deer who were best friends. (At first, they were in love, but then I decided that was too awkward - anatomically speaking). The gorilla and deer went on adventures together and my first story composed at writing camp developed into a series, and I was forever changed. I hadn’t known that I loved writing stories, or that I was good at it, until those long summer days, notebooks full of scribbles and dreams.
Another year only my younger sister Erin, my dad, and me went, and this was special in a whole new way, for we stayed in the dorms that they provided because my father was teaching workshops there. My sister and I bounced from one small twin bed to the other, delighted in the mediocre furnishings, the sticky hallways and bathrooms that had seen a few too many college students.
I remember condensed milk that my dad bought thinking we could eat it with our cereal, although it was too sickly sweet and I couldn't stomach it. Another day breakfast at a coffee shop or Diner - a treat, since we never ate out, not even when we were on vacation. And one night after a long day of writing, my dad couldn’t muster the energy to cook, and he had an enormous affinity for ice cream which he could eat to his hearts content without the eyes of my mother looking on, (he loved to put peanuts on his ice cream). And so that night my sister and I just ate ice cream for dinner, the next day excitedly telling my friend for the week that we had only had ice cream for dinner and her astonished reply “Nothing else? Not even spaghetti?!”
Eventually my dad stopped teaching at those summer camps and started holding versions of his own at our house in the summer, full of our church friends' kids who needed something to do, and the last year he did it I read the story I had written over the week, which I was proud of, although no memory of it exists now, except that it made my mother cry, in a good way. And my mother never cried.
