There are lots of mysteries in the world. Why do weeds grow faster than flowers? Why do hangers multiply in dark closets? Why isn’t chocolate a health food? Do mysteries and magic have much in common?
These mysteries and more plague Teresa Fannin.
How did she end up with six letters in her first name and last name? Will her children, Meghan and Bayley, with six letters each, end up like her? Will that be so bad?
Born in Baltimore Maryland to Jim and Lucyle, Teresa’s parents decamped for a wondrous land on the other side of the country where the sun shined, snow did not fall, fog lifted and eventually, surfers reigned. Teresa was 13 months old at the time of decampment.
Some of the best years of her life were spent in this magical land despite the fact that she was a middle child, Belinda being two years older and Ann seven years younger.
Mysteriously yanked out of this magical land by the wizard Tom, who used the device of marriage, Teresa was moved to New Jersey and worked in New York for a time before being transported to a northern city in the same magical land where she grew up, but this city was on a bay. The children, with the six letter names, were born in Walnut Creek California.
Another bay city beckoned and with it another mystery. Why did this family always live in a state that abutted an ocean?
The wizard Tom moved the family to Boston where the girls faced the mysteries of being educated while Teresa worked at understanding the mysterious absence of r’s in statements, i.e., ‘pak the ca’.
In Boston Teresa yearned for a way to solve all the mysteries in her life. Her mother had once told her that being a wordsmith might be a way to hammer out all the twists and turns of mysteries. And it wasn’t a crime if you were a wordsmith.
One day a listing in the local community education pamphlet entitled So You Want to Write for Children caught Teresa’s attention. She attended the class taught by a master teacher at Framingham State College who also introduced her to the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The magic of her early years began to return.
Teresa thought that if she could write down the mysteries she could solve them. So she started to write, and write, and write.
The wizard business took Tom to North Carolina and the family followed. In the heat and humidity of the south Teresa saw the northern cities quite clearly in her computer and it began to hum with contentment as it helped her write.
One sweltering summer at a writers’ conference in the university town of Athens where a bulldog resides, Teresa met a few Sisters in Crime with mysteries of their own. She now visits them once a month in a High Point, talking about murder, mayhem and malicious intent.
Teresa meets every two weeks with four good writers who have magic of their own to discuss books, critique writing and help each other with magic spells designed to create the best stories ever.
And she works at solving the mysteries of her life.