Well, it’s been one week for The Red Velvet Box project on Kickstarter and we’re on our way! I just talked with Aaron, the artist doing the illustrations (and my son), and he said he’d have something to show us this week. I’m excited to see what he comes up with! We had to go through the whole story before we set up this project in order to decide on what we were going to illustrate. Now I’m working on some pictorial research from Aaron and he’s flushing out the characters. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with. We’ve got eight sponsors so far and Kickstarter says we’re 4% funded and we’ve got 22 days to go. (eek!) I sent a press release to the local paper – no bite, and I contacted the local Isthmas newspaper book reviewer – no reply, so I’m going to try another angle with the papers. If you can keep sharing with folks you know, that would be wonderful. I have to keep reminding myself, either this flies or it doesn’t, so me stewing does nothing. I’m trying not to stew. I’ll keep you posted and share Aaron’s first sketches when he shares them.
This is the beginning of the story to give you a taste for how it goes.
Chapter 1
“Katherine Rosemary Gale, if you don’t get down her this instant…”
My mother’s voice was serious now. If the tone hadn’t convinced me that I couldn’t stall any longer then the use of my proper name did. “At least she didn’t call me Katie,” I said to myself. “Katie is so childish.”
I rolled my eyes, closed my newest issue of Seventeen Magazine, and stuffed it in my pink vinyl, overnight bag, the one with the picture of the white poodle on one side being lead by the bottom half of a very fashionable girl in a dark pink skirt.
I wished with all my might that this was just an overnight trip, but it wasn’t; it was four whole days. Father had already taken my suitcase down to the car. It was an ugly, old brown cardboard thing that didn’t match anything I owned. Mother didn’t seem to realize the importance of matching accessories; they really made the woman. It is one of the first things I had promised myself I would get once I was on my own.
This trip was a Thanksgiving vacation ritual. When Dad made his annual fishing trip to the great north woods, mother and us kids went south to visit my mother’s mother, Grandma Blanch, in Galena, Illinois. It wasn’t until two years ago when Ronnie turned six and John was eight that the boys got out of going with us to Grandma’s and started going fishing with Dad. Lucky ducks!
I had even tried to convince my parents that I needed to go with Dad this year to keep the boys from fighting. They were always fighting, and since I was the oldest and had just turned thirteen, I was the official babysitter. Unfortunately, neither of them had gone for it.
My Father is smiling as me from the great beyond. I am listeding to my first western novel. My parents basement is full of paperback westerns that he had read. Even someone like me, who’s never read a western before has heard of Zane Grey, so when I saw this on the library shelf, I thought I’d give it a try. I was particularly draw to this book because the back cover explains how in the early 1900s, when Zane took the manuscript of this story to publishers, they wouldn’t print it for fear of offending reader with it’s talk of Mormon polygamy. When someone did end up printing it, they changed the story to make it more palatable.
