The Origins of Tea With Whimsy

Every now and again I refer to Tea With Whimsy in my writing.  Whimsy and I go waaaayyyy back.  Today I'd like to talk a little bit about Tea With Whimsy, where the idea came from and how it has evolved.

Once upon a time, way back in 1992, I began writing a story called Tea With Whimsy.  It was a day dream ramble about a very young woman living alone in Seattle, who finds herself in an Alice in Wonderland type adventure, and I think it's safe to say that it was heavily influenced by old movies and TV shows which featured witches.

As circumstances would have it, we ended up moving a couple of times and I lost track of Tea With Whimsy.  Not only that, I mostly stopped writing anything.  But even though I lost the original story, I never forgot the title.

Two decades later, I discovered blogging.  I posted every day for months when I first began, I was that hungry to write.  But even in those days, though I was writing non fiction accounts of my thoughts and experiences, I began to realize they were a bit bizarre for public consumption.  And because I was writing so much, my creative imagination woke up and wanted to express itself.  I decided I needed a separate blog to write fiction.

I remembered Tea With Whimsy, and thought maybe I could rediscover the story if I began blogging it.  So that became the title of my story writing blog.  

To test the waters, I started writing short story posts.  In fact, several of the stories I wrote for Tea With Whimsy,  eventually found their way into Hearth & Heart.

After a year of posting stories in Tea With Whimsy, I began to have trouble sleeping and so I regularly stayed up late and wrote until I fell asleep at my computer.  That's when Tea With Whimsy became a story instead of a blog.  Starting as a serialized story, it grew and took on a life of it's own.  

Eventually, I fell in love with the characters and their world. The story began to tell itself.  I took the posted fragments and began to work on it seriously and discontinued the blog.   

It was thanks to that blog that I began writing stories again.  Tea With Whimsy led me to write other works which later became Winter Tales, and the Hearth & Heart series.  Now I write daily.  When I'm not creating story content for my zines, I am posting stories for my Patrons on Patreon, or I am writing stories here on this blog for my feature the Saturday Breakfast Serial.

This feature Tea for Tue, is a way to turn my thoughts back to Tea With Whimsy.  By writing about Whimsy, I know it will stimulate me to get back to telling that story.  I plan to use this feature to post updates on how the story is coming along, as well as back ground on the characters.

If you're interested in how Tea With Whimsy is progressing, follow me here, or you can get updates on facebook if that's easier for you, by liking and following  https://www.facebook.com/TeaWithWhimsy/  .  I know it would help motivate me to know you were interested and reading.  And I always welcome constructive feedback.  

Momentary Magic - A Hallowe'en Recollection

A Hallowe’en Recollection

As a kid, Hallowe'en was one of my all time favorite holidays. I loved every thing about it. The mystery, the dressing in costume, the being out of doors after dark, and yes -- the CANDY! Candy was SOOO much better when I was a kid, than it is now.
It was also a way to kick off what seemed to my young mind to be the "Holiday Season". The beginning of the much anticipated triumvirate…Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Somehow, I got out of the habit of observing Hallowe'en. It became a night where my husband Mike and I would watch an old classic monster movie and wait for trick or treaters who never came. And then a few years back I happened to be meditating by the fire on Hallowe'en.
       The sun had set, and though it was fairly early in the evening Mike was asleep in his armchair in the library. I had gone into the living room and was sitting by the fire, staring into the flames, allowing myself to soar over the countryside looking down on Hallowe'en celebrations across the land. It was a nice little flight of fancy. After a while, I got up and wandered toward the Kitchen to make dinner.
I felt someone rush up behind me, and I jumped out of the way thinking Mike was playing a joke, trying to scare me. But when I jumped aside, I felt the energy rush on past me. I looked around at a room void of any person but myself.
“Very funny,” I said to the room at large. But then just to make sure, I tiptoed down the hallway to the library to peek at my husband who was sound asleep, as I expected. He wouldn't have been able to get back into his chair so quickly and not without a tremendous amount of racket.
Was I a little spooked? Only a little because my thinking mind jumped in to analyze what had taken place, and declared "that was spooky".  But my initial FEELING was that the energy seemed mischievous, and more like a prank. There was a spirit of fun to it. Like someone rushing up and shouting "Boo!" --then running away and laughing. Only when I thought about being approached by something unknown that felt so tangible, did I experience a spooky feeling. But more in a fun way. You know?
It reminded me of what Hallowe'en was like for me when I was a kid. The thrill of mystery and the unknown. Being outside at night. Feeling a gust of wind and seeing the leaves blowing through the air and tumbling and skipping across the grass. Sometimes there would be a bright moon, sometimes not. And always the first light snow of the year.
The neighborhood looked so different by the light of street lamps which changed perception of color. The air was full of the scent of Autumn leaves and the freshness of night air. The sound of wind rustling through trees added to the mystery.
And the sidewalks were filled with kids scurrying up to houses, knocking on doors, with the harmonic sing song of "trick or treat" floating through the air from multiple sources.
There was a sense of freedom and a sense of adventure. A night given over to make believe and imagination. A night of heightened perception, and expectations.
Having been visited by a "playful spirit" on Hallowe'en night was a gift. It reminded me what is was that made that night special to me as a kid. A mysterious sense of spooky fun!



This essay originally appeared in my blog Tea With Whimsy on October 24, 2012. This current version was published in Hearth & Heart Vol 1 2015 Autumn Edition  Copyright Rita Tortorello  2015  I wanted to share it here in honor of Hallowe'en.

For more information on Hearth & Heart visit Pegana Press.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

One of my nephews has always been a card.  Today I want to share this little story about his sense of humor.

When he was still very young, say about 7 or 8 years old, he and his dad were driving past a dead end road in their town, with a sign.  Ryan immediately piped up with how sad it was that they didn't have any electricity in that neighborhood.  His dad responded by asking him how he knew that.  Ryan's punch line was "No Outlet".

the Saturday Breakfast Serial part 2

Welcome to the Saturday Breakfast Serial, where every week I post another installment of a serialized original story.

Read Part One of The Desk here

Part Two of 

The Desk

It had been way too long since I had done laundry and it had been building up.  I was standing in the laundry room surrounded by my sorted piles of sheets, towels, and clothes cleaning out pockets and pre-treating stains.  I reached into the pocket of a pair of jeans, that I use for gardening.  “What is this?”  I found myself asking when my fingers closed around a metal object.
I pulled out the key that had been found in the garden and I suddenly remembered the desk.  Would the key work?  Would I finally be able to open the desk and start using it?  And what would I find inside?  Why had it been locked?  My imagination became very active as I put the key on the shelf over the washing machine for safe keeping.  “You stay right there until I get a load started and then you and I are going to see if you fit that desk.”  I found myself speaking to the key.  I was pretty sure that if I spoke the words out loud, this time I wouldn’t forget to try it.
I finished sorting the clothes and got some towels loaded into the washer.  Switching on the machine, I reached for the key, and as my fingers closed tightly around it, a call came through.    “Sorry.  Not home,”  I said in response to the insistent ringing as I sashayed down the hall to the desk.
There it stood gleaming before me in the autumn sunlight streaming in through the window and shining like a spotlight upon the desk.  “Ta da!” it seemed to say.  “Here I am, ready to reveal all my secrets.”
Carefully I placed the iron key in the lock.  But it was immediately obvious that the key was too small for the desk lock.  I tried anyway and gave up disappointed.  Such a build up, for nothing.
I examined the key in my hand.  Well, it’s pretty anyway, I thought to myself and went to hunt up a thin ribbon to string it with for a necklace.

Over the next few days I obsessed over the desk.  I couldn’t get over my disappointment and what made it all the more frustrating, was that it had never bothered me before.  I suddenly seemed to be dissatisfied with everything, and impatient.  I simply couldn’t get it off my mind.  I learned first hand, what it means to have a one track mind, as my thoughts spiraled around and around that one subject.  I was definitely in a rut.
One day I’d had enough.  I had tried every second hand store and antique dealer in town to find old keys.  I tried picking the lock.  I even went so far as to jiggle the desk in hopes that the lock would work loose.
Finally, I decided to just get rid of the desk.  It had consumed my thoughts for weeks, and I was ready to be free.  I had been trying to ignore it, and as I contemplated loading it into the car I realized it had gotten quite dusty.  I decided the very least I could do was to give it one last good polishing.
I made a thorough job of it, getting the caked on dust out of the intricate carving.  Making the golden highlights of the grain stand out.  I was polishing the tall curving legs when I noticed a lot of cobwebs underneath.  I cautiously peeked under the desk for spiders before removing the webs.
“No!” I shrieked.



Come back next Saturday for another installment of the Saturday Breakfast Serial.

Throw Back Thursday-Autumn Leaves

(Autumn Leaves originally posted Oct 18, 2015)

Autumn Leaves (revisited) 

I just looked up from my busy life, to catch a glimpse of Autumn racing past on the wind.  I have done almost nothing this year to mingle with Time as it dons its seasonal garment of falling leaves, damp scents, misty mornings, warm sunny afternoons where the light falls upon the earth from a different point on the horizon, early evenings, and chilled air.

How is it possible to miss metabolizing this? Oh yes, I know what it is.  The illusion that I have a To Do list that will actually get done if I just keep at it. Just a distraction to keep me engaged with busy work. Keeping me busy Doing, rather than Being.

My birthright--my one great talent has always been for being present and Noticing.  Somehow, I have slipped into drowsiness, as I keep my nose to the grindstone, literally focusing on the dust particles of life.  The more I focus, the less I see.

Ducks in a row?  What is that nonsense?  Let them wander.  Let them fly.

Tea With Whimsy

One of the reasons I joined Patreon was to help inspire me and keep me disciplined to carry on with my writing.  I had allowed myself to relegate story telling to my lowest priority.  

Tea With Whimsy was a story I began writing on September 15, 2013 because I couldn't sleep at night.  It was a way to lose myself in a story.  To sooth my mind, and keep it from cycling through a to do list which was keeping me awake.

I stopped writing for nearly two years, and decided Patreon would help get me back on track.  And while it did get me writing and creating constantly since joining in mid August, I still have not gotten back to work on Tea With Whimsy, which is the story I love to write above all others.

So now I'd like to share the very first lines of Tea With Whimsy, which began with a post I titled...

A Bedtime Story I Tell Myself

It's after Midnight, and I find that I can not sleep.  So I slip out my front door and into the night.  My feet find the way for me...They read the ground...They know it even through my shoes.  And my spine stretches up and up into the night air.  I grow taller as I walk.

My feet take me off the paved road and onto the road not paved.  The road that has grass growing between the tire tracks, and around me in the darkness I get glimpses of four legged folk.  Some are wild and some live with people.

On I walk.  The night air tickles my nostrils with scent of green and earth and water...some fragrances come stronger in certain places, like the spot along the road where the fragrance of cedar stands out stronger than it had been, or where the road comes close to a small stream and the smell of the water comes to you even before the song of the water reaches your ears.

I look back, and I see Coyote following behind me.

I laugh at him and he laughs back.

And Owl laughs too, because he gets the joke.

And a little rustle of laughter rises up from the land around me in the stones and the plants and the water and the wind.  And the frogs decide this would be a good time to resume their song.

Ahead in the darkness, I can see the dim moonlight glow off a white picket fence.  My hand finds the latch and as I step through the gate, the clouds part to reveal the face of the waxing moon nearly full, lighting the grounds of the cottage which is Whimsy's house.

And at that, I practically trip over her bent over there in the path gathering herbs in the moonlight.



I'm tired -- more later...

Do frogs sing after midnight?  You bet they do.


And that was the beginning of Tea With Whimsy.  I hope you enjoyed that little tiny bit of it.  I enjoyed writing it.  Night after night, I would post a little bit more whenever I couldn't sleep.  And always it would relax me and help to heal me of insomnia as I would write.

Later, as it became a growing story, I stopped blogging it and began to write it in earnest as a full length book.  Then for some reason, I no longer remember, I stopped and just never got back to it.

But I'm ready to pick up the threads again and hopefully see it through to the end.

Momentary Magic

I'm considering changing the title of my zine from Hearth & Heart to Momentary Magic.

This is an example of the type of story that appears in Hearth & Heart.  I would appreciate some honest feed back to the following questions.

1.  What are your favorite genres?  (for example:  weird, fantasy, mystery, horror, suspense, etc.)
2.  Who are your favorite authors?
3.  In which genre would you place Stories To Be Carried?
4.  Would you read more stories like Stories To Be Carried?

Please feel free to respond in the comments below.

Stories To Be Carried

528 words

I saw a woman on a dusty road one day. The sun shone hot, and there was the smell of berries and pine trees in the air and the drone of insects, and no other sound was there but for my own breathing as I labored to climb the steep hill we were both on. She was walking down the hill, and she had strapped to her back an enormous basket. And as I approached her, I could see the basket was hanging with the open end downward.
She greeted me, and I her, and then I asked her about the basket.
"It was for the stories I gathered," was her answer.
"But it's upside down. You've lost your stories, " I said with deep concern.
"Well, they weren't really mine, you know," she said leaning in and placing a hand upon my arm as if to reassure me that it was quite alright.
And then her eyes left my face and looked off into a distance which I could not perceive, and she spoke.
"There was a time gone by, when I would collect all the stories I would come across. And whether they spoke of beauty and joy, or they spoke of tragedy and pain, it was all one and the same to me, for each story would wring my heart until it felt like it would burst within my breast.
"And because I gave them my attention, and allowed them to touch my heart, they would cling to me, until I had to find a basket large enough to hold them all.
"And still I went my way in the world, gathering more stories, until my basket became heavy with them."
She paused and looked at me. She made a deep satisfied sigh, and her face resembled that of a child, though she seemed ancient.
I looked back at her eagerly, and I waited for her to continue.
"One day, they just became too heavy to carry. So I simply turned the basket over, and allowed them to escape."
"But didn't they want to stay with you?" I questioned.
"They were old stories. They had grown sleepy. I don't know if they even noticed being loosed."
I pondered this a moment and she continued.
"Now when I meet a story, I can look it in the face, acknowledge it, get to know it even, before I continue on my journey. It's nice to be able to say to a story, "I see you" and then be able to part ways rather than picking it up and carrying it with me."
After a moment of silence, she sighed happily and spoke again.
"I've enjoyed our talk, but I must be on my way," she said gesturing to her path which led down the hill.
I turned to watch her go, and could see other women in the distance making their way up the hill, and all were carrying baskets of varying shapes and sizes.
I knew what I must do. I reached behind me and removed my own basket. Then turning it over, I watched the stories tumble out like colored marbles.

Copyright Rita Tortorello 2014 May 30
This story appeared in Hearth & Heart Volume 1 2015 Summer Edition

Thank you for reading and for your feedback.

SundayFunnies: When a Cat ...

New Feature:  Sunday Funnies.

The neighbor's cat loves to jump from a tree to our roof in order to get past the tall wobbly wire fence.  He then likes to jump off the roof, usually onto a large bush to get into our back yard.  Today he decided this looked like a better option.  Apparently it wasn't what he was expecting.

Don't worry, when I came outside to see what the commotion was, I saw him beating a hasty retreat from our roof top to his jumping off tree, and back to the safety of his own yard.

**No tabbies were harmed in the making of this Sunday Funny.**

All day long I've been trying to think up a funny doodle to post, and this happens.

the Saturday Breakfast Serial

What is the Saturday Breakfast Serial?

Welcome to the Saturday Breakfast Serial!  I'm trying an experiment here to breath new life into my neglected blog.  So I thought it would be fun to work on a story in weekly installments.   It's an experiment, so I guess I will just have to see how it goes.  I'll do my best.  After all this is how I started writing Tea With Whimsy.

This first one will probably be a short story, possibly told in only two installments.  I don't have a title, so I'll just call it...

 

The Desk

       In my house is an old desk.  The kind that people used to call a secretary.  A beautiful piece of oak furniture with intricate carving on the front.  It was here when I moved in, apparently left behind by the previous owners.  When I first saw it, I tried to open it, but it was locked.  I tried to contact the previous owners, but they wouldn’t return my calls.  I guess they didn’t want the desk.  I was only mildly annoyed that I couldn’t make full use of it, but it was beautiful and didn’t take up much room, and it did seem to belong just in that spot in the house.  I decided to keep my eye out for any keys I might come across at yard sales or second hand stores.  And maybe if I was lucky, it would turn up somewhere in the house.  Eventually, I forgot my mission to find a key for it.



I had been living in the house several years now, and one day I was raking the leaves in my front yard.  It was a beautiful Autumn afternoon, late in October, and the sun was shining brightly upon leaves of red and gold.  Occasionally the wind would blow through sending more leaves cascading down from oak and maple branches.  In those moments I would stop and simply watch the leaves falling, delighting in the way the wind would toss them once more into the air, and how the leaves would skip away turning cartwheels before it.
I had just turned back to my rake and was vigorously using it to toss leaves into the flower beds that lined the path to my front door, when I happened to trip over a fairly large round stone, one of many that lined the gently curving bed.  Having knocked it out of place, I bent down to replace it and saw an object which caught my attention.  It was encrusted with soil, but even so, I could see it was a very old, very rusty iron key.  And I suddenly thought of the desk.  Leaving my rake leaning against the front porch, I rushed indoors to scrub clean the key.  I couldn’t wait to try it.
After rinsing layers of caked on dirt from the key and scrubbing the rust off with emery cloth, it seemed ready to try and I headed for the desk.
Just as I approached the desk, there was a knock at the door.  I hesitated longing to ignore the interruption, but the struggle was only a brief one and my own good manners won out over my desire to satisfy my curiosity.  I slipped the key into my trouser pocket and went to answer the front door.
I opened the door to find one of the neighbor kids standing on the front porch holding my rake.  He wanted to know if I needed help with the leaves.  I knew this boy.  He was a good worker and so I told him to go ahead with the raking, and to come see me after.
It seemed that I was not destined to try the key anytime soon, as next I was interrupted by a phone call, which led me to my lap top and from there I was kept busy with some work online for the next hour.  I looked up and realized that my helper outside would probably be finishing up and since I had some cookie dough chilling in the fridge, decided to bake a batch of cookies to further reward him after his long hard work.  After all, I reflected, money isn't everything.
It didn’t take long for the scent of fresh baked cookies to make its impression.  And I found myself faced with not one hungry 9 year old, but three.  That’s some powerful magic I thought to myself, putting the plate of snicker doodles on a table on the front porch.
I paid off my young crew of workers and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to neighbors drawn by the social atmosphere seeming to emanate from my front yard.
Naturally I forgot all about the key until days later when I was doing laundry and came across the key while going through my pockets.

Come back next Saturday for another installment of the Saturday Breakfast Serial.