Over the next few months, I’m going to release a collection of stories I wrote for my kids a long time ago. The collection is called DREAMERS OF RAINBOW TERRACE. More about that in a minute.

First up is “The Day of the Floating Fathers,” about a whole neighborhood of fathers who drift up into the sky one morning, pushed by a rare wind called the Zappopi. Their families, worried the fathers are going to fall, chase them around with parachutes and trampolines. And meanwhile the fathers drift from town to town, blown by other winds like the Blewablew and the Aboofy. This is one of those stories I like to write in which nature disrupts our daily lives and creates a bit of magic. Sometimes that magic takes the form of fear, but in either case, it makes us pay attention. Paying attention is good.

Here’s a link if you’d like to purchase the story on Amazon Kindle for 99 cents:

I’m proud to say I designed the cover myself. I’m no Photoshop expert, but I can figure things out when I need to, using Google searches and YouTube videos.

About DREAMERS OF RAINBOW TERRACE: I wrote this collection of children’s stories for my kids almost 20 years ago. When my daughter was in second grade, I visited her class to read some of these stories and had the students help me with illustrations. Then I put together the text and illustrations and made a bound book that I presented to the class. That’s the only way they’ve been published until I recently rediscovered them.

By the way, the stories in DREAMERS OF RAINBOW TERRACE were influenced by Carl Sandburg’s ROOTABAGA STORIES, published in 1922. Sandburg was a famous and highly decorated Chicago poet (he won the Pulitzer Prize three times!). With ROOTABAGA STORIES, he sought to create an American counterpart to European fairy tales. The stories are wild and whimsical and written with great verve and a poet’s ear for language. I highly recommend them. And guess what? You can read them for free through Project Gutenberg right here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27085/27085-h/27085-h.htm

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