That’s my story… and I’m sticking to it.
Stories come to me in various ways; something I see in the world that looks interesting, conversations I have with others, places I have visited.
There are different ways to write a story. The two ways to start are what is commonly known as Plotters and Pantsers. Plotters outline a complete story, work out all the details, then write the story. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. They sit down, start with a blank page and an idea, and create the story from beginning to end, not knowing any of the details until they get there.
I’m a Pantser. I allow my stories to unfold in my imagination as I go. If I were an artist, I imagine it’s the same as not doing any sketch work before painting.
This was my first novel. I wrote it for fun.
It came out of a casual conversation with friends about how to physically downsize - all being people of a certain age - by having a yard sale. It devolved into a joke about how to downsize emotionally by getting rid of all the old emotional baggage the same way.
Shortly after that conversation, a story started writing itself in my head. I would send it, a piece at at time, to friends and family, who all seemed to be enjoying it, so a few years later, i published it.
Shortly after The Last Yard Sale was published, I started getting the question, “When’s the next book coming out?” So, I figured, what the heck’, and started wondering what it might be about. At the time I was spending a lot of time with my aging mother who was active in the Veterans of Foreign Wars, VFW, assisting with some of the Auxiliary business.
I had a conversation with a Vietnam Vet during a Memorial Day event that got me thinking. I asked if the VFW had picked up any vets from the more recent conflicts of Iraq and Iran. He said, no, saddly. A lot of the younger vets felt the the old guys couldn’t relate to the new wars. They were struggling alone or finding help elsewhere. And so, this story was born. BTW - I’m a veteran of the USAF.
For a few years, I traveled around the country (and beyond) for work as a mental health counselor with the Department of Defense. In my off-time, I began a practice of finding any botanical gardens near where I was staying. As it happens, 30 miles north of Missoula, Montana, there is a garden complex like no other, The Garden of a Thousand Buddhas. I went. I saw. I wrote a story.
This story started out as part of a larger project put together by Ed Greenwood, a very well-known author in the fantasy and roleplaying arena. His desire was to help new authors get started by providing percreated worlds to write in. The project never got very far, but I managed to get a story out of the process. The world I chose to write in is a little more toward Urban Fantasy than I usually write in. With some changes, and with Ed’s blessing, I published it independently. Here it is.
This story came about during the pandemic. There was a trend (and still is) on Facebook to do Crochet-Alongs. Lots of people crocheting the same thing at the same time. Designers were, and still are, very generous with free patterns for these events. Being a crochet fan, I wondered what it would be like to have a story that goes along with the pattern. I contacted a designer and The Old Wool Factory was born. We has over 2,500 people on our facebook page from ten countries for the Crochet-Along, giving the story and the pattern out for free for the eight weeks of the project. My story, as you might have guessed, is about crocheting - specifically about a young woman who learns to crochet from her grandmother.
After doing a few writing exercises with authors from my writing group, To Tell a Tale, I thought it might be fun to put together something more formal. And it was. The team, who write in all different genres, would all write using the same prompt.
The rules were:
We had to use the prompt verbatum in our stories (so readers could find it if they were paying attention)
We each wrote four stories of various lengeths: one each of 1,000 words or less, one of 2,000, one of 3,000 and one of more than 3,000
In addition to a day job and writing my own stories, I edit for MetaStellar: Speculative Fiction and Beyond, a free online magazine. There are now three anthologies, collections of the best stories we published in each of the three years we have been online. Number Four will be out soon and the planning for Number Five is already in the works. We celebrated 1 million views in July of 2025. Our youtube videos are also popular, including our weekly review of the Amazon’s free spec. fic. books. It’s called Free Fridays.