How We Got Started

As Brett and I begin to look at all the items we need to accomplish to publish Skipping Stones, I must remind myself how far we have come. It has been a long trip in which we learned a lot about ourselves and how to tell this story. But how did this story come about? How did all this start? Crazy enough, one evening years ago, before going to bed I was doing some crossword puzzles. At some point two sentences entered my mind. I had no paper with me at the time and I was very comfortable in bed so did not want to get up. Instead, I wrote the two sentences on the back of the crossword puzzle book. The next night as I went to sleep, doing crosswords again, I decided to review the two sentences that I wrote the night before. A couple pages later of additional writing, I had the initial concepts written down that would eventually become Skipping Stones. I ended up using three pages of the end of the crossword puzzle book, including the cover. Those pages stayed hidden for many years and would only come out here and there. Unfortunately, one of those times, our dogs decided to take the first page out to the back yard. Although my dog did not eat my homework, he did eat part of my manuscript. I was lucky though to have been able to save most of it and piece it back together. Lucky, because now, we have a novel that will soon be published that was created from the musings after doing crossword puzzles and survived the assault of being dog snatched.