Here is the creation story behind "The Bucknoll Cottage Chronicles."

“Throughout the summer of 2013, I harbored a secret hankering for a country house.” Those were the opening words of my very first “Buck Hill Diary” column, published in The Buck Hill Breeze monthly news magazine back in June 2015. That column was born again in 2021, along with 19 subsequent entries, and featured in a weekly series published on the website mylittlebird.com, which advertises itself as “the grownup girl’s guide to kickass living.”

It was no breeze to republish my columns. I did a hefty amount of rewriting, added goofy links, subheads, and carefully and cleverly de-identified Buck Hill cottagers who deserved to have their innocence protected. And, Buck Hill morphed into “Bucknoll.”

The plain truth is, throughout the winter of 2021, I harbored a secret hankering to be “discovered” by an influential literary agent who would approach me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: to publish my series of columns on Bucknoll life. In a book. A Real Book. Not just on a kickass website.

Never happened.

But the desire to see my collected columns in a Dorothy Parker-esque book –like my desire for a country house ten years earlier—festered.

I arrived in Buck Hill in December 2013 as a professional (employed!) writer, then working for Bloomberg News. A year later, I asked if I might be interested in reading my writings as a featured speaker for the upcoming season of Foxhowe. (Foxhowe is the organization responsible for Buck Hills' prestigious lecture and performance series that entertains cottagers through the summer season.) I was not sure how a chapter or two out of the "The Citi Commonsense Money Guide for Real People," a book I’d ghostwritten for Citibank in 2006, would go over in Buck Hill. Not exactly literary quality, though I’d often wondered about the marketability of a sequel titled "The Citi Uncommonsense Money Guide for Unreal People," to be hyped among fans of The Walking Dead. At Bloomberg, I wrote scintillating articles about gas prices in Norway. That didn’t seem to fit the bill either.

Happily, my contact referred me to Karen Walden, editor of The Breeze, who asked me to rhapsodize about the “newcomer experience” for an all-new, all-improved Buck Hill Breeze. She even suggested I might consider penning a regular column. I thought, perhaps I could Build-a-Book this way. Kind of like Build-a-Bear. And have something to read at Foxhowe in a couple of years. And thus, 29 columns appeared in The Breeze from the June 2015 to Winter 2019/2020 issues.

Fast-forward to January 2023. My hankering to publish a book was rekindled when an Instagram posting lured me into an hour-long seminar (free!) about making money by self-publishing on Amazon. Down the rabbit hole I tumbled. The world of self-publishing is exploding, I learned in the seminar, throughout which five-figure royalty checks were flashed. Soon enough I discovered that self publishing is not for the faint of heart. Indeed, I would liken it to preparing for an AP Physics exam. Coaches necessary!

In late February I threw in the towel and hired a firm to help me get the manuscript into the Amazon system. I should have been suspicious when my Project Manager emailed to ask did I “wanna” jump on a call, and then sent me a bunch of sample sci-fi and bodice-ripper book covers. An apparently teenaged narrator recruited to record the audio book submitted an audition tape reading a line about “Green Witch Village.”

But I persevered. And as of June 1, 2023, The Bucknoll Cottage Chronicles is now available for purchase on Amazon in eBook and paperback formats (and, in mid July, audio.). Which gives me a great excuse to spend lots of time this summer in Buck Hill. As good a place as any to wait, of course, for that follow-up call from Foxhowe.