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.