'The lake has always been a place where my spirit is nurtured, and my connection to nature renewed. It has also been a place where my creative soul becomes inspired and ignited.'
The lake has always been a place where my spirit is nurtured, and my connection to nature renewed. It has also been a place where my creative soul becomes inspired and ignited. I’ve always been a writer, although I didn’t really recognize or label myself that way. In school I excelled at it, during English writing assignments, and it felt great. However, in the following years I wrote, everything from stories, poetry, and articles, and then became inspired by my lake to write a fictional fantasy for my boys. Part of living, or vacationing, in a place that is remote and off-grid is the fact that you need, and should be, right with your children, to keep them happily occupied, with good quality family time, fully safe and sound out in the bush, with supervision and care, and to teach them everything about their immediate environment, and to ultimately and fully respect it, and so, I started to write a story for my boys. The Magic Stick is a junior novel I wrote at the lake and at home over 20 years ago now. I am currently editing it, and learning to illustrate parts of it. I plan to self-publish this book for my boys, who are now fully grown adults in their 30’s, and to share with other young cottage dwellers who can enjoy it, and learn from it. What this little book turned out to be was to be a delightful way for my children and I to spend quality story time at bedtime at the cabin. I would ask them what part they would like me to read, and they say to me, the ‘Loon part’, or the ‘crayfish part’, or the ‘squirrel part’, or whatever. Then, in the quiet, dimly-lit, one-room cabin, I would read the chapter they chose. In that one chapter, they learned about the particular creature as I read the fictional tale. The nonfictional facts about the animal or creature they chose was my way of teaching them about what there was a living here around them. I had researched and learned about several lake and forest creatures with which to give them the proper facts so they could learn about their surrounding environment. It was a way for me to also teach them to care for, and respect, these creatures. In a synopsis nutshell, the story I wrote was about two young boys who lived at the lake. The eldest boy found an old message in a bottle floating along lake shore. The old message is a riddle, and when the boys solve it they find a mysterious buried puzzle box which, when opened, reveals a treasure map. The map then leads them on a search down the lake to find something. What the boys find (without giving away too much) is a Magic Stick. This stick allows the oldest boy to recite a spell and he then transforms into a lake creature and live as they would for a short time. In the process the boy would learn about the animals and creatures, and, in addition, learn what their animal challenges are as they coexist with humans, and how it can sometimes negatively affect them. My boys loved the stories, and they loved the book. I loved reading to them, and seeing their happy faces as they got ready to fall asleep at our cabin. It was one of the most rewarding things I ever wrote. These days I am learning how to digitally draw and sketch, with an app on my iPad that is really a huge learning curve at my age. I’m fascinated about what I can do with this app for drawing and painting digitally. I will also add photographs to the book, but really it has been so much fun drawing and creating things like the treasure map. The really great thing is that they are based off some real facts, and my drawings are produced from my own photographs. The story is a fictional fantasy, but the animal facts are nonfiction. I hope that you will find your way to my finished book when I release it to the world. I will provide a link when I do. May you find inspiration a awakening when you are out in nature, or at your lake or even out camping somewhere under the moon and stars, and that you can enjoy this story with your youngsters. I know I did.
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