The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse

The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse

The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse would never have come into being if it were not for the social networking site Facebook. This is proof of its power to bring people from all parts of the country together.

This story was written in the early 1970s to explain the Trinity to my own children, Teresa and Philip. Time passed; the manuscript remained in the box. Ten years later, we were living in a small town in Montana when my first book was published. With that confidence, I considered publishing The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse. Finding an illustrator in an isolated town of 350 seemed impossible, except my daughter, now in middle school, had a classmate who was an excellent artist. Sheree did a number of sketches for me, but the path to publication was blocked and the illustrations and loose pages went back into a box.

Time went by. The pages of the manuscript turned yellow. I changed addresses twelve times, my last name even changed. My son and daughter each had a son and daughter. I went on to publish fifteen other books, but The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse remained in the box.

One bright Texas spring day I was walking around theneighborhood with a friend discussing the local children’s book festival. She asked if I had ever written a children’s book and I told her about Scampy. Her interest was immediately peaked and she asked to see it. We walked back to my house and I pulled the yellow pages and illustrations from the shelf and dusted them off.

With an extensive art background, my neighbor was amazed that such sketches could be done by a middle school student and encouraged me to try to publish the story again now that the technology had changed. One major problem: Twenty-six years later, how could I possibly locate Sheree to obtain her permission to use her sketches in the book? Would she even remember doing them?

Not knowing where else to turn, I turned to Facebook. I only had one Facebook friend from that area of Montana, but she did not remember Sheree. However, there was a Facebook friend of a friend on her page that I remembered. On a long shot, I contacted that friend of a friend through her Inbox. A week went by and I heard nothing so I assumed Sheree could not be located.

About a week later, a message appeared in my Facebook Inbox containing Sheree’s married name, address, and telephone number. Even more amazing, when I contacted Sheree she actually remembered the sketches she had done in middle school.

Six weeks later, The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse wasavailable through amazon.com for others to enjoy how Scampy learned about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.