KarenTBTEN: a Life Online

I'll like to address, first, the name.  Like a lot of people here, I have a funky name with some extra letters. TBTEN is a combined acronym made from the first letters of two websites/ web personas. One is my teaching site, the other my personal Blogger blog (who is seen there in the picture showing off its rhododendron post).  I didn't have Audio Reflections, an audiopoetry site, up yet when I joined Squidoo.  If I did, I might have been KarenTBTAREN.

Being online has meant a lot to me.  Sometimes, on the Squidoo platform, I am engaged in pragmatic activity; sometimes I am just on my soapbox, and writing for "an audience of one".  (I first heard that term in a C.S. Lewis book and have used it several times since.)  

I intend to be (mostly) pragmatic on the Wizzley site.  I was actually sent over to the platform by several of my Squidoo pages who wanted niche-mates.  At the forefront was a page called "Shabby Chic Studio Apartment" who, after a successful first month, had begun writing business plans for herself and others. Armoires and upwards! she said.

I've been writing for hire for about a year now, so that started after Squidoo.  (At the beginning stages, I used Squidoo pages as my portfolio.)  

I joke about it being a return to my roots.  When my brother was seven or eight, he started a book company.  I was two years younger, but the job pool was limited, so he hired me. I wrote for him part-time for probably a couple of years. He told me what to write: "Write about a little boy who falls out of a tree and breaks his arm... Write about a little boy who loves trucks."  I was good at following directions, as you can see from the scanned story below about a truck-loving boy.

I did like truck drivers -- or one, at least. For a fair chunk of my childhood, I revolved, like a planet in orbit, around a fictitious chimpanzee-toting truck driver known as BJ McKay. I was not interested in trucks per se, though -- that was my brother's forte. The piece below, I feel pretty confident, was a commissioned one.

My father was a restaurant owner, and my brother and I spent most of our time there outside of school, entertaining ourselves in a booth in the reserved section.  The businesses eventually failed, which is how we ended up moving across the country.  

We were still there, though, when the BJ and the Bear show ended.  The famed truck went through our community on its way to be retired and, if I remember correctly, was briefly at my father's restaurant.  My brother was thrilled.  (I lost interest once I realized BJ himself wasn't going to show up with a chimpanzee.)