Read "Starlight, Starbright... " Reviews
INSPIRATION FOR STARLIGHT, STARBRIGHT
Starlight, Starbright... began with a story about Mrs. Murphy, an old woman who terrified the neighborhood children with rakes, shovels, hoes, brooms, anything with a long handle to insure that not one of their feet touched the grass in her yard. It was a simple childhood memory of the town where I had lived when I was young. That led to another memory vignette about Julie Kitchen, the woman who pushed a huge wooden cart all over town. And then another and another and another.
I wrote one a week, as an assignment for the writer's roundtable, of which I was a part for fifteen years. After a few weeks, someone stated that I "had a book" with my stories. I decided that he was right, so I set about creating more stories until I finally had a completed novel. I based Sissy Bannister's family upon my own, giving her a younger brother and a sister. I patterned her parents upon mine, often making Sissy's life what I wished mine had been.
Many of the characters in the book are based upon real people, but names have been changed and most incidents fictionalized. Someone asked me if "Victor" were real and if that experience had been my own. My answer is: "No! Darn it!" The same is true of "Frank."
After nearing the completion of Starlight, Starbright... , I realized that Sissy's story was nowhere near finished. I felt that it would take another book to accomplish that, so I wrote Wish I May, Wish I Might... As that one neared what I thought was completion, the book grew and grew and grew. Finally, my editor suggested that I end the book and write a third one to tie up all the loose ends that were left hanging in the first two novels....such as: What happened to the Amish girl's baby? What did Lucinda Barnes do with her life? What about Joe Bob Brady? Who really killed Lucinda's mother and that creepy Al Pitts? All will be revealed in the last book of the series, The Wish I Wish Tonight.
A BIT ABOUT ME
Writing has been a source of pleasure and gratification for me since I was nine years old. That's when I began to make up stories with my girlfriends as heroines. I think that there are probably some of those girls in Sissy Bannister.
I have many interests: reading, painting with oils and acrylics, quilting, flower gardening, spending time with my two children and four grandchildren. My oldest granddaughter, Jessica, is seventeen and the only one of the four to read my books. She is the only one who enjoys reading as much as her mother and I do. I knew that I had something when Jessica read the first draft of Starlight, Starbright...and laughed and cried in the right places.
My husband, Glenn, and I celebrated our forty-sixth anniversary on June 6, 2005. We recently built a new house beside a small lake in our woods, and I have a tendency to hibernate there. My office looks onto a neck of the lake, about thirty feet from the window. It's a great place wherein to sit, ponder, dream and create. I love my life and my family, one of the greatest blessings that God can bestow upon mere humans.
