Recently I told my son about an exceptional experience that I had when I was about thirty eight. I pondered it for years, talking about it occasionally with trusted friends and strangers, but never really connecting with anyone about it. Many people scoffed, saying it was paint fumes, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I told my trusted friend, JF Lewis, about it and finally I’ve had a break through and am anxious to share this with my community. It really was a special and powerful experience which changed the direction of my life. Please read “Accidental Shock Therapy.”
When I was twenty one, I moved to south Florida. Every day was an adventure there: scuba diving, snorkeling, tramping around in the Big Cypress Swamp with my first husband Bish, I learned so much and had so many wonderful experiences. I wrote the Florida and the Ohio stories when my kids were small, but knew they would require rewriting at some point in the future. That time is now. More soon and thanks for all your support.
Today I finished a new adventure starring Susan Lulu and her friend Marty, entitled “Susan and Marty Find a Fort in the Woods and Marty Runs Away.” So wonderful to remember the pristine Cascade woods where we spent hours playing. I am channeling my childhood, recalling the death defying feats we used to carry off without a thought, climbing impossible trees, teetering across the creek on logs, swinging on a dangerous rope swing. The sad thing is that all these places bright with trilliums and yellow violets, or Johnny Jump Ups, became the first Microsoft campus.
Have been apathetic for a while, mostly because of idiotic technical difficulties, like a beloved laptop giving up the ghost. So sad, plus the headache of getting external devices to cooperate, but hooray! it looks like I am back. Uploaded a bunch of illustrations last time. Today I am inputting some corrections, courtesy of my dear friend JF Lewis, who is chief nit picker, which I really appreciate. Let’s hear it for JF, and the eternally excellent jam session he hosts each Thursday in deepest darkest Ballard.
After Susan Lulu’s first four catastrophic experiences, she had to learn. It would be impossible for any father to take a defiant and willfully ignorant child to a dangerous place. So she wised up, allowing me to retell some of the delightful adventures I had with my first husband Bish when we lived in Naples on the Gulf for five years. Each of these encounters is true, except the frog across the face incident actually happened while we were careening around a dangerous corner at a major intersection in downtown Naples. The frog splatted directly across Bish’s face. It was huge, and obscured one of his eyes. He said he thought it was the hand of Satan. I crawled around on the floor of the Landcruiser I was laughing so hard.
I have a really good friend who helps me edit my stories. He is always right, so I overcome any immediate resistance to his suggestions. I make the change: kill the hyphen, add a semicolon, so that he will keep reading my stuff. Occasionally, he asks for a change I cannot make, without explaining that I already used that device twelve stories down, which is why I want it this way. Maybe on the second rewrite, I promise, but eternal gratitude for caring enough to read with such care.
When my sons were young, I spent a ton of time writing some stories based on a character my father invented. Susan Lulu was a curious, intelligent, mischievous girl who seldom listens to her dad’s sage advice, and winds up in bad situations. Luckily, her diligent parent is able to rescue her again and again. I drew the illustrations for the first story, and a few others, but writing is much faster than drawing, so I have a lot more stories than illustrations. This one is Susan in her tree house with some friendly raccoons.
Tris Hussey, author of the text we are using in this class “Create Your Own Blog” says that your first few posts will suck, and he is right. I have been learning so much that I dropped the ball on explaining my material to a new audience. When I lived in Florida during the early Seventies, there was a column in the newspaper called “Nature Notes,” just observations of a resident, which I really enjoyed. So I started writing them, too, but I never had an easy way to share them, until now.
Stories based on a character invented by my father, Robert E. Jensen of Seattle, WA. He wanted to help us learn to be safe by listening to his instructions, so he invented Susan, who never listened to her dad. These stories highlight old Bellevue sites and flora, and were a joy to write.
The Adventures of Susan Lulu 