Mechanical Owls and Literary Pursuits

Rewind to the early 1960's to the suburb of Boston where I grew up. The local theater, to which we could walk from home, showed double features about the "East" after school and on weekends - matinees for children. In my memory, they were black and white films. They usually involved choosing three wishes from a genie. They had elaborate, fanciful 1,001 Nights plots, exotic settings, and fabulous costumes. At home afterward, my mother listened patiently as I would try to tell her the entire plot, getting overly enthusiastic about the wonders of the story in the process. In my memory there were a lot of talking animals in these films. One had a fascinating mechanical owl. The term 'mechanical owl' is now a family joke - for when I get excited about a complicated story or plot.

If someone asks me when I first become a writer, what should I say? Should I confess that I was a storyteller at a young age, relating these unlikely plots to my mother at the kitchen table? Or that I loved to listen to ghost stories told around a campfire? I wasn't one to spend afternoons at the library reading. I'd more likely be outside playing in a massive game of Capture the Flag, catching turtles with a net, barefooted, or hosting a dress-up 'tea party' with the neighborhood girls, all of us bedecked in second hand prom dresses mailed from my older cousins in Iowa.

Once my novel finds a life in print, I wonder if I'll need to polish the story of my childhood so it sounds more literary. But how do you trick out a mechanical owl? Any ideas, let me know.