“Oh, that skirt would look so good on me! It wouldn’t be loose like it is on you,” Krista spun around posing in front of me. I had just gotten my latest shipment from the States and I loved my new skirt – until now. Suddenly I was aware of just how skinny I was, how un-filled-out I was. Krista continued to preen and it didn’t matter that she wore thick glasses that magnified her blue eyes ten times, because she had this insanely full and wavy head of blond hair and she had boobs. She, like all the cool crowd, was developing at a rate that I could only dream of, and wouldn’t reach until my late twenties, if that….

From my latest book, The Mumachen.

…The very first day I realized that this horseback riding camp was not for me. The two old German ladies who ran the camp would shout at all of us in German while we were riding the horses. I was kind of a sensitive type who didn’t like being yelled at. Call me prissy too, because I was horrified when each morning one of the German women who ran the camp would scrape all of our leftovers from our plates onto hers and eat them. Cold, chewed up fried eggs, scraped off the plate and eaten. Yuck.

After a couple of days there I had lost so much weight, and I didn’t have much to lose. My parents decided to take me home with them, as they had been there to see how it went the first couple of days. I felt like I was escaping a prison camp…

From my latest book, The Mumachen.

…Each year it would flood and all the khlongs, which were decidedly very filthy, would overflow, bringing not only the inevitable sewage, but strange looking fish, unidentifiable dead animals, and other interesting artifacts. One time I found a dead shrew, and as gross as that sounds, it was so little and cute. Another time I found what appeared to be a huge snail shell. This thing was bigger than my head. But the weirdest part wasn’t the size of the shell – inside it was the petrified mollusk body. I was sure that it had come from prehistoric times.  I would play for hours in the flood waters, which were often up to my knees. I drifted off to sleep dreaming of three-eyed fish and giant snails in the brown flood waters….

An excerpt from my latest book, The Mumachen.

…She explained that early that morning, as the sun was just beginning to rise, she heard something strange near the pond. The flood waters had retreated, so most of the yard was back to normal, including the pond.

My mom listened politely to Thongsuk’s explanation of this strange fish that she had seen walking along the side of the pond on the pavement. I didn’t give it much thought, but I had a feeling it was a creature that had made its way to the pond from the flood waters. I went out to check on the pond and saw a couple of the large orange fish back in the water. There had been many more of them, but now I could only see two. There was no sign of the walking fish, but there was a suspicious trail of water leading out of the pond and down the patio…

An excerpt from my latest book, The Mumachen.

…I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day. Mr. Fischer’s geography class, which I usually loved, just passed by me like a fog. Even classmate Brandon’s daily event of picking his nose and eating it, unaware that we were all watching him in disgust, couldn’t break me out of my thoughts.

I needed to find the Mumachen and help him somehow…

An excerpt from my latest book, The Mumachen.

…I was reaching up for one of the flowers when I noticed that something was very wrong. I was covered in red ants and they were all biting me. These weren’t the kind of red ants you find in the States, these were the bright orange kind that I would find in the yard and if you held your hand over them, they would spray acid up at you. They were incredibly aggressive, and I was standing on a hill of them!

An excerpt from my latest book, The Mumachen.

We spun around and around repeating, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary…”

We all stopped.

“You’re supposed to say it three times!” I shrieked, disappointed in my fearful friends. I looked in the mirror. Nothing. Secretly I was relieved; I was scared too…

An excerpt from my latest book, The Mumachen.

My ghost story series, beginning with The Mumachen, has apparently captured my daughter’s imagination. Not unlike me at her age, she is now telling ghost stories to anyone who will listen. Granted, the first novel I read, in the third grade, was Amityville Horror. Not your typical third grade reading, but from there I moved on to all of the Stephen King novels.

She has also been drawing pictures of the Mumachen since I started writing it. So, as I post my weekly blog posts to promote the new book, I am going to use her images, and not my own. You can see why – this is a scribble I did to try to portray Shelly in the Spooky Shelly Tales series. You will see that her images are much, much better than mine!

An excerpt from my latest book, The Mumachen, Book One of the Spooky Shelly Tales series:

…I would stay there for hours, just behind our maid’s quarters, building little houses and bridges. If a rock looked like an animal to me, I was fascinated. One time I had been drawn to the pepper plants that our maid was growing because the buds looked like little doves. I had broken some off for one of my village creations and then with one rub of the eye, I was in serious pain. My eyes were on fire! That’s what happens when you get Thai hot peppers in your eyes…