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Hi Everyone,
Here I go writing this post all over again. I got a really long post finished and I was trying to copy it and couldn't and then the whole darn thing disappeared on me. What a catastrophe! Well here I go again. Lets see if it ends up the same. Probably not. What a crying shame.
Okay, so when I was really little I've always had an interest in art and writing. I think I started out as a little budding artist. I would draw my favorite stuffed animal bunny called BunBun. My mom's cousin gave her to me when i was one. I still have her, but her ears are gone and her stuffing is falling apart. My girls saw once and thought it looked creepy. BunBun is packed away somewhere. I don't even think I can remember where I put her. I have a paperdoll set about her online at Barnes & Noble, etc... It's called BunBun and Olga Paperdolls. They have a page for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Christmas and Art School. Olga is a puppy and her best friend. I have often thought that someday, it would be a neat little tv show for kids. You never know. I have also thought of creating a little children's book about BunBun and her owner, Jenny (me). Cast aside for now, but still in my head. I've been through a lot with BunBun. In the beginning, she had different names. For a spell, she was Wilma, Pebbles, and Laura from the Little House on the Prairie. She and Olga (my other favorite stuffed animal) went to bed with me every night. When I'd feel sad, I would hug them really tight. BunBun seemed to stick. She was a girl bunny, but I had one aunt that would tease me and insist that she was a boy. Her name was Harriet. She was my father's sister. She passed away quiet a few years ago due to a stroke. She had a camp that we loved to visit when we were younger. Every summer, we would go there and want to stay for a week at a time. We had cousins from out west that would stay there too. That was always a special highlight of every summer. As I got older, I had a special friend, Julie that liked to write. We spent lots of time together writing and drawing. And swimming at the lake was an everyday thing. She lived at the last camp at a dead end road and right on the lake. Ellis pond. Silver Lake. Roxbury Pond, near Rumford, Maine. I will remember those times forever. And when I was little, of course BunBun came with me.
BunBun also got tossed up on the Redbank Elementary School by some bullies. My mother had to call the janitor and get her down. Once I left her at a relatives house and we had to turn around and go back to retrieve her. Another time, she got left in a chimney fire. We were being babysat at my second cousins house. There were six cousins we were visiting. Our parents were at a wedding reception. Because of the chimney fire, we all had to go to a neighbors house until our parents came for us and until we could go back to their house. I was so upset that I had left BunBun there. I thought that she was going to be burned and gone. Luckily not. She survived. BunBun also got sewn up several times with new body patterns by my mother. Now she is back to her first pattern.
So that was the first thing I remember writing about. Then I also was interested in making my own cartoon characters and I would come up with funny names for them. One of my biggest things in elementary school was writing my biography. I worked on that for several years and would write it in school. That was in the third grade when i started that. I still brought my dolls to school once in a while. I got picked on for that and a bunch of kids called me BunBun all the way through junior high. I found one of the guys on facebook this year and joked about that. It was a riot to find everyone on facebook.
I think in sixth or seventh grade I started to write my own little magazine. There were lots of jokes and funny stories in it. I think I had some magazine called Bananas or maybe even Mad Magazine as my inspiration. Parts of it were funny little news stories that I would make up and new funny titles for popular movies at the time. During grade school my favorite cousin, Michelle and I would tape our own radio show on a dinky recorder that I had. That was lots of fun. The things we create when we are little are lots of fun. I think I still have my little magazine somewhere. I might also have my autobiography. But some of the mystery stories I wrote in junior high I don't have anymore. I used to put about fifty characters in my stories. At that time, I was also into horses so I incorporated them in one of the mysteries. At the time that I created my cartoon characters, I was also into learning about astronomy and would copy words from the dictionaries. I would cart the dictionaries with me when my family went to visit my great grandmother in her high rise building. Her name was Inez. She was my grandfather's mother on my mothers side of the family. I always would bring things to occupy myself there. There wasn't a lot to do. When we left her apartment, my sister, brother and I would have a grand old time running down all her stairs to see if we would beat our mom and my nana and grampy down. Then, we could hardly wait to go visit other relatives in Litchfield, maine. They lived in the country and they had three older kids. There were dogs, and on the side of their house they had a wood pile that we loved to climb on. We stayed away from their dobeimrmint pincher. my grampy got bit by it once. Ha ha. Sometimes we would bring our other cousins with us. We had a blast. There was a path that went into the woods. The kids in Litchfield had motorcycles and would give our older cousins rides. It was always a great time there when we were growing up. We all kind of went our own ways as we got older and stopped visiting, but that time was special. There was a great grandmother that lived there with our relatives She was my nana's mom. Her dad lived there too, but when we were really little i was afraid of him. he was an old man with a pipe. He came out to visit with us for a little bit. He died before my great grandmother did. I can't remember too much about them.
So back to writing. I'm going off on a wild tangent and writing about my childhood too. There are so many things to write about. In high school, I started writing poetry and found out I loved it. I would write poetry every summer at my aunt Harriet's camp. She would read it and think that it's really lovely. She and my grammy on my father's side of the family always used to say, "Jenny always is content to occupy herself and find things to do by herself."
Then, after high school I went to the Maine College of Art. Then it was the Portland School of Art. I wanted to be an artist. I've always loved that too. Two passions in my life. I minored in Photography and majored in Painting. I excelled in drawing. My subject matter has been for years, dolls and children and sometimes flowers. I've done it for years. During college i also took a journal writing class that I really liked. I would there continue to write poetry and prose. I think at the time I started writing really short stories. One was about a girl who was hanging out her fourth story window and her boyfriend was down below. She was challenging him to catch her if she jumped and he was trying to get her not to do it. I don't have that story anymore. Then I wrote a short one about a dream i had about my teeth decaying and maggots coming out of my teeth and my teeth were falling out. I bet I must have had to go to the dentist the next day. That story is gone too. I ripped up lots of things. Same with artwork. Ripped up lots of that too. Then I had another short story about a woman and a man in the Portland Museum of Art. Gone.
I've kept all my poetry. I wrote poetry for a long time. I also had a secret crush on my writing instructor.
Then in 1993 I got married and moved to Vermont. It's a beautiful state. I then had four children. I kept up with the writing and the art. Before my kids were born i did several craft shows and sold some of my photo greeting cards that I made. In 2001 my mother passed away of colon cancer at age 51. She had it for three years and once it went to her liver, that was it. She is missed by everyone. She was a community person. She was also the person that held our close knit family together. Everyone always was down at my nana and grampys (my mom's parents). Relatives from away would stay with them, and we lived a few streets away in a little neighborhood called Redbank Village. We would be there all the time. It was the absolute best. I've got many stories about these times for future writings. My mother was my icon. Besides katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. We grew up on them.
So after my mother died, I wrote a lot of poetry about her and my family. My uncle read it and thought it was very poignant. I have it all tucked away somewhere. I would write when my husband and I travelled to maine with our kids. Any time i got a chance, I was writing. A year after my mother died, I started creating paperdolls. I got inspired after I won a paperdoll contest in Doll Reader magazine. I won on of Helen Kish's little plastic dolls. They're expensive dolls. Then, I started creating my paperdolls. I have been making them for six or seven years. I've got a nice Martha Stewart set. She has her witches costume, statue of liberty and lots of good things. They're very detailed as I'm heavily into the backgrounds too. They're pen and ink and then I use colored pencils. I used to get black and white copies so that my girls can color those. Now, they are 9 and 10 and ask to color some of the originals. I let them do it once in a while.
Then about eight or nine years ago, I started my first novel. I had a neighbor that her son was writing a children's book and wanted me to illustrate it. It never ended up happening, but he inspired me to write a novel. I thought to myself at the time, "Wow. I could write a novel." And I did.
My first novel was a romance story. I wrote it for two years. My girls were little at the time. They were going to preschool. So there were times when they were home. They tag teamed me. One would go to school in the morning and the other would be in the afternoon. They're irish twins, both born in june and 11 months apart. My first daughter was born three days after my mother passed away. So we had a death and then a birth. Overwhelming. I typed it up, edited it some and then I had a local editor edit and evaluate my novel. It needed some work. She pointed out it's good points and the flaws. She really liked my story within the story. I edited it for a while and then at one point I left it for a year. I had a low point and thought to myself, "What if I never publish it?" Probably more than a year or so later, I came back to it. That's one thing about writing. You can leave it, not throw it away and it will always be there waiting for your miraculous return. So last year, I came back to it again and edited most of it in a whole new light. You work on it as a whole. Being an artist and a writer, that term is a constant in our lives. We try to see things as a whole. And being an artist and a writer, we are able to try to change ourselves. Change is a constant. This goes for everyone. Being able to see the flaws and change for the better, isn't always as easy as it seems but if one is able to see it, this is great.
So one of these days, I will go back and finish editing my romance. It evolved from a poem, that I wrote in college.
I left the romance in the fall, and started writing my autobiography. It is about what led to my divorce and my children won't see it until I'm dead. Today, my ex and I are good friends and I see my children all the time. I'm also good friends with his mom. This is really good for our children that we get along. I feel bad for families that are always fighting and the children get caught up in the middle of it. That's got to be hard. I'm now involved with a really nice guy. He likes art and the same things I do. That is rare to find someone who likes the same things. We really enjoy each others company and are getting to know each other.
So I finished my biography mostly. I got to a certain point and forgot what happened, so I stopped it. It's tucked away with a lot of writings from that time. Sometime my children will find it and read it. In some of my writings I have called myself Lucy. Lucy goes through alot in that part of her life. I don't know if it will ever get published, but it's a painful part of my past. It's too bad that it all happened, but life goes on and things happened for a reason. Otherwise, I might never have gone to Los Angeles to pitch my Black Roses to producers. Might have never happened.
So in November, I dropped the biography and started hand writing Black Roses. I wrote constantly, whenever I could. I would bring it to my part time job. Sometimes I would arrive in the break room hours early and just stay there writing. I never got writers block with this one. Wrote fast and didn't stop. In December to January, I typed it up and edited it. That was fun. I changed things around and added scenes and storylines. In February, I got the ball rolling and self published. Now it's available for everyone to read. I recently gave my sons copy to my local library. He has down syndrome so I wasn't sure if he would ever be able to read it. None of them should read it now, as it's a very racy story. If my fifteen year old read it, he would think, "Gee, my mom wrote that!"
So he will have to wait too.
So that is basically how I got started writing. In a nutshell. I've had family that have supported my passions along the way. Nobody ever told me, you can't do it. And I've always been one to follow my passions and went with my instincts. Another aunt who lives out west has told me that I will have this until I die that it will be with me all my life. So do what you love. Follow your dreams.
Jennifer Jo Fay
copyrighted July 30, 2011 Jennifer Jo Fay
Here I go writing this post all over again. I got a really long post finished and I was trying to copy it and couldn't and then the whole darn thing disappeared on me. What a catastrophe! Well here I go again. Lets see if it ends up the same. Probably not. What a crying shame.
Okay, so when I was really little I've always had an interest in art and writing. I think I started out as a little budding artist. I would draw my favorite stuffed animal bunny called BunBun. My mom's cousin gave her to me when i was one. I still have her, but her ears are gone and her stuffing is falling apart. My girls saw once and thought it looked creepy. BunBun is packed away somewhere. I don't even think I can remember where I put her. I have a paperdoll set about her online at Barnes & Noble, etc... It's called BunBun and Olga Paperdolls. They have a page for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Christmas and Art School. Olga is a puppy and her best friend. I have often thought that someday, it would be a neat little tv show for kids. You never know. I have also thought of creating a little children's book about BunBun and her owner, Jenny (me). Cast aside for now, but still in my head. I've been through a lot with BunBun. In the beginning, she had different names. For a spell, she was Wilma, Pebbles, and Laura from the Little House on the Prairie. She and Olga (my other favorite stuffed animal) went to bed with me every night. When I'd feel sad, I would hug them really tight. BunBun seemed to stick. She was a girl bunny, but I had one aunt that would tease me and insist that she was a boy. Her name was Harriet. She was my father's sister. She passed away quiet a few years ago due to a stroke. She had a camp that we loved to visit when we were younger. Every summer, we would go there and want to stay for a week at a time. We had cousins from out west that would stay there too. That was always a special highlight of every summer. As I got older, I had a special friend, Julie that liked to write. We spent lots of time together writing and drawing. And swimming at the lake was an everyday thing. She lived at the last camp at a dead end road and right on the lake. Ellis pond. Silver Lake. Roxbury Pond, near Rumford, Maine. I will remember those times forever. And when I was little, of course BunBun came with me.
BunBun also got tossed up on the Redbank Elementary School by some bullies. My mother had to call the janitor and get her down. Once I left her at a relatives house and we had to turn around and go back to retrieve her. Another time, she got left in a chimney fire. We were being babysat at my second cousins house. There were six cousins we were visiting. Our parents were at a wedding reception. Because of the chimney fire, we all had to go to a neighbors house until our parents came for us and until we could go back to their house. I was so upset that I had left BunBun there. I thought that she was going to be burned and gone. Luckily not. She survived. BunBun also got sewn up several times with new body patterns by my mother. Now she is back to her first pattern.
So that was the first thing I remember writing about. Then I also was interested in making my own cartoon characters and I would come up with funny names for them. One of my biggest things in elementary school was writing my biography. I worked on that for several years and would write it in school. That was in the third grade when i started that. I still brought my dolls to school once in a while. I got picked on for that and a bunch of kids called me BunBun all the way through junior high. I found one of the guys on facebook this year and joked about that. It was a riot to find everyone on facebook.
I think in sixth or seventh grade I started to write my own little magazine. There were lots of jokes and funny stories in it. I think I had some magazine called Bananas or maybe even Mad Magazine as my inspiration. Parts of it were funny little news stories that I would make up and new funny titles for popular movies at the time. During grade school my favorite cousin, Michelle and I would tape our own radio show on a dinky recorder that I had. That was lots of fun. The things we create when we are little are lots of fun. I think I still have my little magazine somewhere. I might also have my autobiography. But some of the mystery stories I wrote in junior high I don't have anymore. I used to put about fifty characters in my stories. At that time, I was also into horses so I incorporated them in one of the mysteries. At the time that I created my cartoon characters, I was also into learning about astronomy and would copy words from the dictionaries. I would cart the dictionaries with me when my family went to visit my great grandmother in her high rise building. Her name was Inez. She was my grandfather's mother on my mothers side of the family. I always would bring things to occupy myself there. There wasn't a lot to do. When we left her apartment, my sister, brother and I would have a grand old time running down all her stairs to see if we would beat our mom and my nana and grampy down. Then, we could hardly wait to go visit other relatives in Litchfield, maine. They lived in the country and they had three older kids. There were dogs, and on the side of their house they had a wood pile that we loved to climb on. We stayed away from their dobeimrmint pincher. my grampy got bit by it once. Ha ha. Sometimes we would bring our other cousins with us. We had a blast. There was a path that went into the woods. The kids in Litchfield had motorcycles and would give our older cousins rides. It was always a great time there when we were growing up. We all kind of went our own ways as we got older and stopped visiting, but that time was special. There was a great grandmother that lived there with our relatives She was my nana's mom. Her dad lived there too, but when we were really little i was afraid of him. he was an old man with a pipe. He came out to visit with us for a little bit. He died before my great grandmother did. I can't remember too much about them.
So back to writing. I'm going off on a wild tangent and writing about my childhood too. There are so many things to write about. In high school, I started writing poetry and found out I loved it. I would write poetry every summer at my aunt Harriet's camp. She would read it and think that it's really lovely. She and my grammy on my father's side of the family always used to say, "Jenny always is content to occupy herself and find things to do by herself."
Then, after high school I went to the Maine College of Art. Then it was the Portland School of Art. I wanted to be an artist. I've always loved that too. Two passions in my life. I minored in Photography and majored in Painting. I excelled in drawing. My subject matter has been for years, dolls and children and sometimes flowers. I've done it for years. During college i also took a journal writing class that I really liked. I would there continue to write poetry and prose. I think at the time I started writing really short stories. One was about a girl who was hanging out her fourth story window and her boyfriend was down below. She was challenging him to catch her if she jumped and he was trying to get her not to do it. I don't have that story anymore. Then I wrote a short one about a dream i had about my teeth decaying and maggots coming out of my teeth and my teeth were falling out. I bet I must have had to go to the dentist the next day. That story is gone too. I ripped up lots of things. Same with artwork. Ripped up lots of that too. Then I had another short story about a woman and a man in the Portland Museum of Art. Gone.
I've kept all my poetry. I wrote poetry for a long time. I also had a secret crush on my writing instructor.
Then in 1993 I got married and moved to Vermont. It's a beautiful state. I then had four children. I kept up with the writing and the art. Before my kids were born i did several craft shows and sold some of my photo greeting cards that I made. In 2001 my mother passed away of colon cancer at age 51. She had it for three years and once it went to her liver, that was it. She is missed by everyone. She was a community person. She was also the person that held our close knit family together. Everyone always was down at my nana and grampys (my mom's parents). Relatives from away would stay with them, and we lived a few streets away in a little neighborhood called Redbank Village. We would be there all the time. It was the absolute best. I've got many stories about these times for future writings. My mother was my icon. Besides katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. We grew up on them.
So after my mother died, I wrote a lot of poetry about her and my family. My uncle read it and thought it was very poignant. I have it all tucked away somewhere. I would write when my husband and I travelled to maine with our kids. Any time i got a chance, I was writing. A year after my mother died, I started creating paperdolls. I got inspired after I won a paperdoll contest in Doll Reader magazine. I won on of Helen Kish's little plastic dolls. They're expensive dolls. Then, I started creating my paperdolls. I have been making them for six or seven years. I've got a nice Martha Stewart set. She has her witches costume, statue of liberty and lots of good things. They're very detailed as I'm heavily into the backgrounds too. They're pen and ink and then I use colored pencils. I used to get black and white copies so that my girls can color those. Now, they are 9 and 10 and ask to color some of the originals. I let them do it once in a while.
Then about eight or nine years ago, I started my first novel. I had a neighbor that her son was writing a children's book and wanted me to illustrate it. It never ended up happening, but he inspired me to write a novel. I thought to myself at the time, "Wow. I could write a novel." And I did.
My first novel was a romance story. I wrote it for two years. My girls were little at the time. They were going to preschool. So there were times when they were home. They tag teamed me. One would go to school in the morning and the other would be in the afternoon. They're irish twins, both born in june and 11 months apart. My first daughter was born three days after my mother passed away. So we had a death and then a birth. Overwhelming. I typed it up, edited it some and then I had a local editor edit and evaluate my novel. It needed some work. She pointed out it's good points and the flaws. She really liked my story within the story. I edited it for a while and then at one point I left it for a year. I had a low point and thought to myself, "What if I never publish it?" Probably more than a year or so later, I came back to it. That's one thing about writing. You can leave it, not throw it away and it will always be there waiting for your miraculous return. So last year, I came back to it again and edited most of it in a whole new light. You work on it as a whole. Being an artist and a writer, that term is a constant in our lives. We try to see things as a whole. And being an artist and a writer, we are able to try to change ourselves. Change is a constant. This goes for everyone. Being able to see the flaws and change for the better, isn't always as easy as it seems but if one is able to see it, this is great.
So one of these days, I will go back and finish editing my romance. It evolved from a poem, that I wrote in college.
I left the romance in the fall, and started writing my autobiography. It is about what led to my divorce and my children won't see it until I'm dead. Today, my ex and I are good friends and I see my children all the time. I'm also good friends with his mom. This is really good for our children that we get along. I feel bad for families that are always fighting and the children get caught up in the middle of it. That's got to be hard. I'm now involved with a really nice guy. He likes art and the same things I do. That is rare to find someone who likes the same things. We really enjoy each others company and are getting to know each other.
So I finished my biography mostly. I got to a certain point and forgot what happened, so I stopped it. It's tucked away with a lot of writings from that time. Sometime my children will find it and read it. In some of my writings I have called myself Lucy. Lucy goes through alot in that part of her life. I don't know if it will ever get published, but it's a painful part of my past. It's too bad that it all happened, but life goes on and things happened for a reason. Otherwise, I might never have gone to Los Angeles to pitch my Black Roses to producers. Might have never happened.
So in November, I dropped the biography and started hand writing Black Roses. I wrote constantly, whenever I could. I would bring it to my part time job. Sometimes I would arrive in the break room hours early and just stay there writing. I never got writers block with this one. Wrote fast and didn't stop. In December to January, I typed it up and edited it. That was fun. I changed things around and added scenes and storylines. In February, I got the ball rolling and self published. Now it's available for everyone to read. I recently gave my sons copy to my local library. He has down syndrome so I wasn't sure if he would ever be able to read it. None of them should read it now, as it's a very racy story. If my fifteen year old read it, he would think, "Gee, my mom wrote that!"
So he will have to wait too.
So that is basically how I got started writing. In a nutshell. I've had family that have supported my passions along the way. Nobody ever told me, you can't do it. And I've always been one to follow my passions and went with my instincts. Another aunt who lives out west has told me that I will have this until I die that it will be with me all my life. So do what you love. Follow your dreams.
Jennifer Jo Fay
copyrighted July 30, 2011 Jennifer Jo Fay
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