Re-Introducing Vree

A year ago this month, I began a blog called Vree Erickson. It was about a recurring main character from my years as an author of Fantasy/Sci-Fi stories. That blog preceded this one by three months. It was short-lived in favor of blogging about more than Vree and my writing endeavors.

In the first post at Vree Erickson.com, I discussed the joy of writing—and one of my favorite fictional characters.

I began writing short stories about fourteen-year-old Vree Erickson in the early 1970s when I was her age. In those days, I typed my tales on a portable Remington typewriter and shared them with my closest friends. All my stories were mixtures of fantasy, mystery, and a touch of horror.

Verawenda is Vree’s proper first name. “Vree” is a nickname of VRE, which are the initials of her full name: Verawenda Renee Erickson. She was named after her paternal great-great-grandmother, Verawenda (Kaufman) Russell. Verawenda is a combination of the names Vera and Wenda, which were common English names in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Vree became a female friend of a teen character named David Evans. I named him after the child character David Collins in the TV series Dark Shadows. Evans is a surname from the show, particularly the character Maggie Evans who began the series as a waitress at the Collinsport Inn coffee shop. She always played with her hair when she was nervous—a trait I gave to Vree.

Vree began as an only child and lived with her parents in the countryside of a small town, Ravenwood, in Pennsylvania. Her home was atop Myers Ridge where many supernatural events happened. Dave was her neighbor; his twin sister Amy was her best friend. Dave’s best friend was Lenny Stevens who lived in town and had to ride his speedy Schwinn bike to visit. Friendship was a common theme in those stories. So were dealing with ghosts and the supernatural—good and bad.

I stopped writing about Vree and her friends after high school and pursued careers in art, teaching art, and photography. Then, twenty years after graduating high school, I found my school notebooks and the stories inside them. I reworked several stories and published them online as Steven Campbell. Some of them became ebooks and paperbacks, and I had a small run of success with them during the 1990s. Later, I renamed Ravenwood to Ridgewood and republished my favorite stories via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords as Steven L. Campbell from 2013 to 2016. I took them off the market and have been slowly rewriting them.

Thank you for joining me for today. I plan to add more info about Vree, her past, her future, and things that make her a “real” fictional character, as well as my plans for upcoming books and dates of publication, and so much more. So, I hope you’ll join me … or should I say us?

Until then, good reading and good life to you.

—Steve, 5/8/2022

This post “Re-Introducing Vree” copyright © 2022/2023 Steven Leo Campbell at stevecampbellcreations.com – All rights reserved.