In mid-2016, my adult daughter and her best friend (you two know who you are) came to me and asked me to put together some of the stories of my life and our family life in Oregon. I did so and gathered maybe 15-20 incidents that I knew she would want to remember and I forwarded the micro stories to them. They loved hearing the stories – but they wanted a book. The gist of the story is that in daughter-speak, they really wanted me to write the book so they could add the pictures. I immediately extrapolated that to they wanted me to write my memoirs so they could learn more about themselves. Well, it just wasn’t happening. At the time I had buried myself in writing my first novel and with work and outdoor time a necessity I put the project aside for a while.
Soon after I found myself working for a large ski resort and one day, when walking past a very large snow drift, created by an even larger snow plow, an idea came to me. About a week later I wrote down the idea and created a story from it. The Legends of the Snow Dwarves became real that day and soon I jotted down ideas for new stories almost every day. Some might say Leila, Peter, and Daphne and their friends became stand-ins for how my life should have unfolded. I still insist they were there helping all along. Either way, many of the settings and the story lines are based on actual incidents from my life. My friends the Snow Dwarves supply all the material I need to write my most heartwarming stories. The anthology of Snow Dwarves is not finished yet and none of it is published. Enjoy and please stay tuned.
PS. Now that I am deeply involved with the Snow Dwarves, my daughter won’t read the stories. She says they are too much like me. Go figure.
