About Suburban Tails
How this series came to be
Got a call from my mother years ago. “I'm on my way! Can't wait to see you and my grand-babes. This is going to be a wonderful Mother's Day," she exclaimed. "Hope you didn't forget."
I had completely forgotten.
After a frantic clean-up and a trip to the store, I gave her a stuffed giraffe, a packet of forget-me-not seeds and the promise of a story to follow.
The story bloomed into “The Forgetful Giraffe” and I couldn’t help but notice that it was just a bit autobiographical. I wrote another story for my husband and then kept chugging along, writing for my children and for anyone else I could think of. I called the stories Suburban Tails. Though most stories were told or stayed in my head, fragmented, some made it to paper. And that's where they stayed.
Bounce forward a decade. My nephew Jon Bidwell got ahold of a story and brought it into another dimension. It is Jon, along with Jasmyn Oliver and Kristy Visser, and their hours and hours and more hours of editing, sketching and colorizing, that made The Forgetful Giraffe and The Industrious Giraffe ready for the public.
When Covid hit, I decided to make a coloring book with my giraffe characters; I needed cheering up and this seemed to be the project for it. Well, one thing led to another, and we decided to redo the series! Jon took over the colorizing, and we recreated The Forgetful Giraffe. We have given new life to this series, and it’s finally ready to come out. I hope you enjoy this second edition of The Forgetful Giraffe.
Grammar is the MATHEMATICS of language. R.L.S.
My stories end with RL Sosa's Spectacular Vocabulary and Grammar. I like this page as much as the story. I still make mistakes, but I surround myself with dictionaries and style manuals. And I hire a copy editor!
RL Sosa and nephew Jon Bidwell by his mural in Asheville, N.C. It's a beautiful and dangerous circumstance for an author to have an artist in the family. (Photo by Oscar Sosa)
