Well, the book is finally underway — it has taken me forever to figure out how to format it and put it together — and I am really loving doing it. Perhaps I should explain what I mean by true story. This page will be in the front of the book…

I have written a great many books, published quarterly journals, zines, and more dealing with all of the “facts” of my life, and some of them, especially in my childhood, were not pretty. I didn’t want to write about sexual abuse any more. It happened, it was a lifetime ago, as the crow flies, and I don’t want to give any more of my energy or the precious time I have left on this earth stuck in the past. It was easier for me just to handle it in this way…

Well, you see I always did have a dog, and I loved to roller skate, and there were dark and scary times, but that’s as much as I need to say. I had to say something because Maisie’s life, like mine, is more than a tad unusual, having started in a way that kind of made her cattywompus with some mental health challenges to boot, but my point, you see, is that now, at nearly 67, what is more important to me is not to focus on what happened in the past, but what, with every single thing I have been through in my life, I have become, despite, and perhaps because, of it all.

I am cattywompus, a bit lopsidedish, wabi sabi to the max, and perhaps not entirely unlike James Thurber’s Walter Mitty or like the character in the wonderful old movie “Harvey” with James Stewart who saw a giant rabbit! The fact that Maisie and I are both agoraphobic puts us in yet another category but not in a bad or sad way, the point is that despite seeming limitations because of it we, both Maisie and I, have created colorful, creative worlds that make us happy right where we are. We live BIG in our little cottages, she and I, and, well, I guess she is I, in a sort of way. She is certainly my alter ego, maybe the best parts of me, or the parts I wish I was or could be, or a vehicle for me to live out my fantasies, dreams, and abilities, i.e. I don’t know how to knit socks, but Maisie does! I get to have the fun of living vicariously through her. And then I had another thought.

I hypothesize, in perhaps not the most scientific way, that everything we believe and dream is true for us hence a very real part of us so to that end it is all true. At least that’s the basis upon which I am creating this book and it makes perfect sense to me.

And just because, for example, Wanda, the Rainbow Ex-Showgirl, Transgender Snail doesn’t exist in the “real world” (whatever the heck that really is anyway) doesn’t mean that she is not real to Maisie and I. Or Cornelius the house mouse, or Petunia the mentally challenged flamingo, and we know Daisy, Maisie’s little one-eyed Chihuahua mix, is real because she is just my Molly in disguise! So what is real? What is fantasy? What is fiction? It’s all real to me!

So on I go with pens and paint and paintbrushes and the keyboard as Maisie and I consort in the creation of this book and we are just having a ball and I challenge anyone to prove that our story is not true. It is true to us, and that’s all that counts!

See, it all just makes sense, the absolute truth, Maisie’s Way!