After I retired, I occasionally visited the library where I had worked and while there saw one of the mentally challenged boys who often came to our library.
He almost cried when he saw me and told me that I was the only person there who had treated him like a real person. (He was afraid that I had died , because he didn't see me there anymore.)
Another example of how librarians get the right books to the right person.
People were talking about making their Thanksgiving mashed potatoes mixed with horseradish. Which reminded me of my adventures with gardening.
When I had a garden, I grew horseradish. OMG - that's a big plant. Ground it up to season things.
Another year I planted white radishes because I liked to buy white French radishes at the farmer's market. Well. The seeds they sell you for white radishes make huge things. about a foot long and three inches in diameter at the top. It turns out they were oriental radishes, so I gave them to some asian friends who knew exactly how to prepare them.
And - a Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
C.W. Bowie is the pen name of three writers. (no room on a book spine for all of our names, therefore we created C.W. Bowie. )
C is Claudine Wirths. W is me.
And the third part - Bowie- is a shortened version of Mary Bowman-Kruhm's name.
Together we wrote the picture books - Busy Toes and the companion book - Busy Fingers.
We had a lot of fun creating those books. It was in the mid- 1990s and the internet was in its infancy, but we kept sending the manuscripts back and forth by this new thing called email.
I had met one of them on a computer bulletin board that was using GE's computers at night, because at that point, businesses stopped using their computers when everyone went home, so someone got permission to use it and called the internet bulletin Board - GEnie - and off we went. Many, many different subject areas. My husband was in an antique auto group and discovered there was a writer's group there (several of them) and he got me into that group and I met so many other writers, famous and not. I met Claudine there and she introduced me to AOL and the writer's boards there so I could meet her writing partner, Mary, and off we three went, writing together.
Other people can type with long fingernails. not me.
I grew up in the era of short fingernails, well kept, was what you did. Also I grew up with typewriters.
So when fingernails get annoying, I crop them short again.
My husband gently complained when his life bumped up with my writer life.
-- When I got up in the middle of the night to write down a thought and the light woke him up. (Go back to sleep!)
-- later on when I got up in the middle of the night to type a thought/ scene into my computer, which was 10 feet from where we were sleeping. (Go back to sleep!)
-- when he ran upstairs to tell me something / disaster had happened and I stopped him and refused to listen until I completed the story that had just come to me. (you can't microwave eggs because they burst) (That PB story, much revised, sold a few years later.)
Mental math. I just realized it's been about 20 years since my last book was published.
What else happened about 20 years ago? Publishers closed their doors to submissions from writers and decided to only consider submissions from agents. Since there are not enough agents for all the writers out there, many writers no longer can get published. Even those who have won awards and had excellent reviews.
Lucky for me, many of my books are still in print, but over 20 years is a long time for books to be in print and more and more of them go out of print each year.
Beware of parking in the shade. two examples:
1- I went to a writer's retreat on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Decided to park in the shade of a tree. Looking forward to lots of walks by the water which were cancelled because it rained all weekend. Not to worry. Rain will wash my car. Well, maybe it did, and the sun came out the morning we were leaving. So I packed up and went to my car to discover it covered -- really covered -- with bird droppings. Guess who took shelter from the rain in that tree? I managed to scrape some of it off my windows so that I could drive to a gas station and wash my windows so that I could drive the 3 hours home.
