Category Archives: The Cracked Slipper

Today I like: elementary school bingo night
Not so much: sprained ankle…grrr….

The last person to read The Cracked Slipper asked me this question: “Why unicorns?”

It caught me a bit off guard. “Uh, well…”

“You just like them?”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “I’ve always been a sort of…horsey person.”

So this got me thinking about my long love affair with all things neighing. It started between three and four, when I convinced my mother I was crazy. I would gallop around our townhouse on my hands and knees, from the kitchen to the dining room to the living room. Back down the hall and into the kitchen again. I wore out the knees in my ribbed tights and my Osh Kosh B’gosh overalls. I neighed when my mother introduced me to people.

She took me to the doctor. “There is something wrong with her,” she said.

“Hello, Stephanie,” said Dr. Ortega.

“Neeee! Snort, snort.”

“See?” said my mother. “She’s had a break with reality.”

Dr. Ortega shook his head. “She just has a wild imagination. She’ll grow out of it.”

Thankfully I learned to shake hands, not hooves, before entering kindergarten. I also learned to put my imagination on paper. I started drawing horses. All the time, horses, horses, horses. All the stories I’d been telling on my gallops through the townhouse came to life on the pages in front of me. I’m sure they weren’t very coherent to the casual observer at the time, but it was all crystal clear to me.

Around this time my mother took me to see The Last Unicorn in the movie theater. The Red Bull scared the pants off her, but I was hooked. I can still sing all those America songs by heart. Japanamation dominated by artistic endeavors for the next few years. Horses, horses, horses grew horns and feathered hooves, tasseled tails and big blue eyes. Now my stories could go anywhere. Girl meets unicorn = magic.

Around age ten I started writing stories to go with my pictures. I published these fabulous tales under the sadly defunct imprint of Steph Books, Incorporated (I always included a copyright date, savvy author that I was). A few of of these rare works survive. Unfortunately, the unicorn ones have long disintegrated, but you can still see my girl-loves-horse theme in the non-magical ones. Here’s the opening of one such classic: Ocean: The Story of a Steeplechaser (copyright 1988).

“Stacy sighed. It wasn’t fair. Today, all the horses, except Ocean, had been shipped to the horse show. (She worked for Mr. Kranford, who owned the farm, in exchange for lessons). She had wanted badly to go but Mr. Kranford wanted her to babysit. BABYSIT! On horse show day. She watched Ocean trot around the corral. She wished she had a horse like Ocean. She thought Ocean was the most Beautiful horse in the world.”

Guess who really wanted a horse and hated babysitting?

Here’s a picture from Sea Gull (circa 1987)…where Carrie and her horse brave a rockslide and make it home in time for pizza. (By the way, I was plotting even then. You can see where I erased my little notes to myself at the bottom of the page. This one says Rocks.)

I moved on…but you might notice the trend…sometime in high school…

and then here’s one from right after college…

and how about this one I drew a few years back while my girls were coloring….probably a year before I came up with the idea for The Cracked Slipper.

So, it seems I was destined to write about a girl and her unicorn. Some loves follow you. The little girl is still in there, I guess. She doesn’t neigh at the neighbors (although she does play a mean game of Mommy-is-the-horsie), but she still has a wild imagination.

Today I like: Running
Not so much: Chocolate addiction

I think it goes without saying that most writers are a little eccentric. Who hasn’t read a Stephen King novel and thought, What kind of guy comes up with this stuff? And so MUCH of it. READ: If ever the amazing and much-longed-for day arrives when I meet Mr. King, the man who has been making my imagination run wild since I picked up IT at age nine or so (WHAT was my mother thinking??), I will write a lengthy blog post on his weirdness (or lack thereof). Anyway, as I was saying, I would argue writers run the gamut from quirky to flat-out weird. Maybe our eccentricities are directly correlated to the kind of stories we produce. For example, writers of chick-lit and spy thrillers are a teensy bit weird, while writers of fantasy (like myself!) are way more whacked out.

That’s not to say we can’t fake it! Writers aren’t all reclusive geeks who spend so much time hunched over their keyboards and notebooks that their skin becomes translucent and they develop osteoporosis from lack of sunlight/Vitamin D. We do crave human companionship (I mean real humans, not just our characters). Lots of my readers have said they never would have guessed I had such a “wild imagination.” I take it as a compliment! I am passing as a normal, hip, thirty-something minivan drivin’ mom, when I am a closet believer in unicorns, dragons, and magic in general.

So I decided to reveal some of my particular writing habits, so you can see how weird I really am. This will be mildly embarrassing.

I’ve been telling myself “stories” for as long as I can remember. In my head. All the time. It began around age five as a way to help my little self fall asleep. I never grew out of it. Unicorns and fairies eventually morphed into high school crushes and imagined professional  and academic glory. I wrote scores of these stories down as a kid (with fabulous, true-to-life illustrations!) and wrote two novels between the ages of twelve and fourteen. I STILL tell myself stories all the time. My life is a running novella in my own head. Unbeknownst to my younger self, my personal melodrama came in very handy when the time came to sit down and start writing a real book. After all, I’d been crafting scenes and dialogue in my own head for twenty-plus years.

Moving on to my Ipod. It’s chock-full of playlists related to The Cracked Slipper. Action playlists. Romantic playlists. Thoughtful, introspective playlists. I have literally teared up imagining how my characters would feel about a certain song. I spend tons of time in the car, and it helps me stay connected to the writing process. Any song I hear on the radio, I think, How would Eleanor feel about this song? What about Dorian? Gregory? I’ve learned a lot about my characters this way. So if you pass me on the road and I look elated/depressed/angry, it’s probably not a lotto win/death in the family/road rage. I’m just having fun in an imaginary friend’s head.

So there they are! Two of my weirder writing habits. There are lots more (plotting during spinning classes! writing enough pages of world description to fill several longish Wikipedia entries!) but I’ll stop for for now. I write about asexual magicians plotting to take over the world, dragons who dominate international economic systems, and gossipy parrots. Weirdness inspired by weirdness. I’ll ask any of my writing buddies to be brave and reveal their OWN writing eccentricities.