Chickawaukie, Appleton, The Kennebec River, 911, and Mom
Carleton Bridge John Clark weighing in of turning points from a slightly different perspective. One of my morning swim buddies is reading Hardscrabble Kids my young adult anthology that came out in 2022. She made two comments I’ve heard others make about the stories in it. She really liked Inky Johannsen, a mentally challenged teen who can fix or improve anything mechanical even though he was abandoned by his scatterbrained mother and never attended school. She also said she likes the authenticity of my settings and characters as they relate to Maine. I don’t expect to have what I write (save for stories published in wider ranging anthologies), find a market outside of Maine or New England and I’m fine with that. I’d much rather have readers stop in the middle of a story and wonder, “How the hell did he know Uncle Harold?” My sister Kate just wrote a blog over at Maine Crime Writers on character mining. It’s one of the things I like to do, along with memory excavation. The proc