Craig Havens

During the summers of 1965 and 1966 I spent several months camping

with my grandparents at a lake in northern California. As much as I

liked fishing and camping my heart was back home with a girl that I

was crazy about at school. I recall that one lunch period I saw

this rather petite young woman talking with her friends. A group of nursing

students sat at a nearby table. One the nursing students was an overweight

girl who seemed to me to be surviving the ordeal of being a heavy

person in school with a great deal of dignity. It was the difference in these

two women that caught my attention. I wondered how their lives would turn

out. I wondered if circumstances brought them together, could they be

friends? It was just that, a few idle thoughts before the bell to the next

class rang and I forgot about it for the time being.

Well, the school year ended and I went to camp. In between early

morning and late afternoon fishing sessions I had a lot of time to

spend. I hiked and swam, horsed around with other kids and had a

great time. There were science fiction and adventure books to read.

Even with all that to do there was still time to pine over the girl I would

never get.

One day I was sitting in my grandparent's car vainly searching for a

radio station when I remembered seeing the two girls together and that

sparked an idea. I borrowed my grandmother's letter pad and started

writing Return of the Wicca where I paired up these unlikely companions.

I quickly used up the note paper and then every other scrap of paper I

could lay my hands on. There were brown paper bags from the grocery

store that I carefully tore open and wrote on both sides. When I had no

more space I wrote around the edges of the pages that I had already

filled. Eventually we went to town for supplies and I bought more paper.

When I got home I continued to write for the rest of the summer then

packed the awkward bundle up and put it in the closet. When the next

summer rolled around I took plenty of paper to camp with me. I

decided to continue my story in a second book and called the series:

Tales from the River House. I plopped down on my sleeping bag and

penned Terrawic (now called Witchland) that summer, much of it by

the light of a Coleman lantern. When I got home it went into the closet

with Return of the Wicca. I briefly worked on a third book but never

finished it. I didn't camp with my grandparents again, a turn of poor

health kept them from traveling and my writing sat in closets wherever

I lived for the next 45 years.

A few years ago while searching my cluttered closet for some odds or

ends I came across my books and began to go over them. I decided to

type them into my computer. OCR proved impossible due to the chaotic

nature of pages and my atrocious handwriting. It was tough but I finally

got it done. I've cleaned the stories up here and there, changed some

things to make them more topical, but hope I have not lost the character

of the original manuscripts.

I am currently working on the untitled third book. Will I be able to

make it make it mesh with the words of a teenage boy? Time will tell.