Yes indeedy, it’s number three in the Deauville Drive Families series

I never thought I’d write a book series.

I’m a standalone book kind of gal.

I invite a bunch of funny / odd / desperate / rebellious / semi-unhinged characters to dance in my head for about a year, write about ‘em, throw the book out to the universe, and hope that a bunch of you wonderful people like it.

Then I invite a whole new group of people to come on in and toss wedding dresses into trees or run naked along rivers, or paint six foot tall dragon chairs, or indulge their premonitions, and I’m off and writing again.

So what happened to make me think about writing a series?
Well, I’d been playing with writing a memoir.

CUE MY LAUGHTER. SEE ME BENT OVER DOUBLE LAUGHING. HEAR ME LAUGH-SNORT.

This is a bit of a lie.

At the very least, an elephant-sized exaggeration.

The thought of writing a memoir about my life lasted about five seconds. Maybe three.

STOP LAUGHING, CATHY. GET CONTROL OF YOURSELF. THIS IS EMBARRASSING. DID YOU SPELL ‘EMBARRASSING’ RIGHT?

The truth is that I will never write a memoir. A memoir means that I will be writing about people that I love dearly. Most are still with us, some are not.

But I just can’t write about my late parents or my brother and sisters. To me, it would be a huge violation of their privacy and of course they would perceive different experiences and relationships in our lives, well, differently.

This could be a very messy literary event for me and I don’t like messy. I prefer nice, neat slices of lemon or chocolate cake.

Plus, and this is a huge deal: I had the best parents on the planet. I loved them dearly. Everyone loved them, especially my mother who was an English teacher to thousands of students and believed in every single one of them. What is there to say?

I’m not being modest when I reveal this next little tidbit, but my life is not interesting enough to write a memoir. That is the truth. I know what makes a gripping memoir and if I wrote mine you’d fall asleep.

I would have to market it as, “I’ve written a memoir that is so tedious and boring it will help all of you with your insomnia. Buy the audio and you’ll be snoring soon!”

My daydreams are pretty entertaining, at least to me, but daydreams do not make a memoir.

So, a memoir was out.

SEMI-HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER AT THE THOUGHT OF WRITING A DREARY MEMOIR NOW QUIETING DOWN.

But I still had a lot of stories from the first ten years of my childhood in Huntington Beach, California zooming around in my head like cats on surfboards that I wanted to write about.

And those memories with neighbors named Wong, Miyashiro, and Ross, a teacher named Miss White, an elementary school named Joseph R. Perry, a sunny street named Deauville Drive and a man down the street who, when I was about eight years old, left his wife and three kids (my friends!) for a girlfriend in his speedy, white Alfa Romeo….well, all that launched the Ten Kids series.

Told through the eyes of 12-year-old Jesse O’Brien, I scooted on my mental skateboard back to my childhood in our mid-century modern home with a magnolia tree in front and jacarandas on the side and wrote “Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid.”

The ten kids in the book are not reflective of my three siblings.

The father of one gang of kids and the mother of another gang who fall head over heels in love (lovebirds) are not my father and mother.

There was no singing mermaid except for me who fervently WANTED to be a mermaid with a shiny green swishy tail and to sing like a mocking bird but, unfortunately, neither came to pass.

But those years on Deauville Drive catching butterflies, playing Kick the Can with other kids, and climbing trees so I could write imaginary stories in my curious and wandering little mind were pivotal to my whole life.

So here we are.

Book number three, “Ten Kids, Two Wishes, and a Christmas Pageant,” is now out. It goes without saying, that I do, truly, forevermore, hope that you like it.

I’ll sum it up right quick: The O’Brien and Rossi families continue to find love and laughter amidst chaos and calamities, a hilarious Christmas pageant, and a pair of unfairly wielded handcuffs.

AMAZON ONLY: https://shorturl.at/OJOhF

SUBSTACK ARTICLE: https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/my-new-book-ten-kids-two-wishes-and?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true