I thought my brother should be a self-published author, I ended up making myself into one instead.
It was difficult at first, for me to write. I am by nature a visual person and what helped me to move the project forward was to keep coming back to textile design and other visual ways to tell the story. In the end it’s a novel but ultimately it’s more than that, it’s a story. I believe people need their stories.
A giant suitcase.
Then writing this story became a place to put all the things that were becoming unbearable in reality. I had this mental image of a giant suitcase and day to day I started grabbing hold of difficult things like dysfunction and ancestral memory and shoving it all down in there. With a sense of humor of course. This was all a difficult process and after a certain point I couldn’t stop.
The subconscious mind has a lot to say. Mine becomes difficult to live when it isn’t engaged in creative work.
So the challenge with writing became to, for lack of a better term- cough up, all the curiosities it was hoarding.
Then to let it all spread out in the sunshine and start to sort through it. Look at it closely and feel through it and arrange it into cohesive groupings.
From there the task was to put it all through an imaginative free association kaleidoscope and transmute it into something full of light. I wanted something positive or something that might give one a boost.
After that, came character development and then plot. “The Heartless Ranch Is Haunted” went through 14 overhauls. And that’s the creative process behind This Is Dismal.
Bunny Hammond is a pen name because the narrative voice is part of the story.
The author lives in Nebraska with her family. She was an avid reader growing up, with her favorites including “The Crystal Cave” by Mary Stewart, the Sherlock Holmes stories and Clive Cussler adventure novels. She also believes the Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy she read in high school have been influential. She graduated from Arthur County High School in 2007 and she holds a BA in Economics from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She enjoys fashion photography and interior design and draws inspiration from how western ranching with her husband and two children can get. She loves a good laugh.
Lyrical Connection
The Carr Family Cowboy Band has been making music together for decades. The author appreciates a strong connection between the world of Dismal that she has created and a few songs in particular. She looks forward to exploring Dismal through violin music in the near future.
